Did I ever tell you about the time my brother gave his car away? I mean, technically someone stole it, but honestly, he might as well have given it away. Wait till you hear this…
For more than thirty years, that was the opener to my best party story. I pulled out The Story judiciously, saving it for times I really needed to make a splash or when the conversation lent itself to the topic. Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t tell everyone, but every couple of years this tarnished gem would work its way into the world at large.
Always at my brother’s expense.
But he could take it right? Isn’t that what siblings do–tease each other? The Story always got lots of laughs, especially as I learned to embellish it in all the right places. Besides, we all told The Story; I wasn’t the only one. And anyway, it was all in good fun.
But not for my brother.
He absolutely hates that story, not for what happened, but for how we make him feel. He’s the butt of the joke, never the victim of a crime. And by telling it over and over and over and over, he can never escape the humiliation it brings. Worse, my fifty-something brother remains trapped at eighteen; we’ve never allowed him to grow up.
We’ve all been there. The minute we walk into our childhood home or meet with a group of friends from a different part of life, our learned behaviors come screaming back. And it’s not just how people react to us; it’s also how we react to them.
Even roles that seem positive can have unintended consequences. Growing up, I was always labeled a Smart Kid. I was placed in advanced classes or given harder work and I earned good grades without a lot of extra effort. Other kids assigned me a persona and I leaned into it. My parents did, too–especially my dad. The better I did, the more they expected. The more they expected, the higher the stakes became for failure. If I messed up, would I still be the Smart Kid?
Fast forward thirty some years. The Smart Kid label has (thankfully) disappeared; I’m just a normal person with strengths and weaknesses. I know and like myself better as a fallible human being. I say “I’m sorry” a lot because I screw up a lot. When I’m around my dad, though, failure is not an option. I pull on the mantle of old expectations and perform again. I know my lines well.
It’s so hard to break free of old behaviors. Not only have we often practiced them for years, especially in the case of family dynamics, but also because every person in those kinds of interactions is fighting (or embracing) the same triggers. Each of us is, in some way, contributing to the very persona we want to shed.
The day my brother told me how much he hates The Story and how humiliated it makes him feel, I was crushed. He related how he had been at a dinner that included someone new to the family–someone who had already accomplished a good deal of professional success and was highly regarded by others in the conversation–and another family member brought up The Story. There had been no mention of my brother’s own professional successes and no regard for the fact that his fifty-year-old self hardly resembled his eighteen-year-old self. No, The Story was used only as a mechanism to get a laugh–at my brother’s expense.
Finally I saw the situation through my brother’s lens. No matter what he did, he couldn’t change The Story. What he could do and had done, however, was grow past it. The problem was that we hadn’t.
I vowed immediately to remove The Story from my stockpile of party tricks. At the same time, I decided I would no longer remain silent when anyone else offered up The Story. If nudging the storyteller to move on doesn’t do the trick, at least my brother will know he has an ally.
As the social psychology experiments conducted by Dr. Solomon Asch in the 1950s demonstrated, the impulse to conform to a group’s desires can be very powerful, even when an individual knows it is wrong. The greater the number of people in the majority, the more powerful the effect of peer pressure. By breaking away from the group, I can make that majority that much smaller, as well as help keep my brother from falling into his old roles.
So if you’re dying to know what happened to that car, guess what.
I’m not going to tell you.