When Your Relatives Are Kryptonite

Damage limitation beyond the lead box

Both images by MJ Jin from Pixabay; combined by the author.

Stories persist when we find truth in them, and Jerry Siegel embodied a deep human truth when he invented Kryptonite.

You’re a superhero, incredibly strong and capable, holding down a day job in disguise while you protect the citizens of your city from scheming criminals. You have X-ray vision, the hearing of a Labrador who can detect someone three floors down opening a packet of cheese, and you can, as if it were a tray of drinks and you the most skilled of waitstaff, hold up a hundred cars on a collapsing bridge. You even have a successful love life. But there’s one substance that can reduce you, in an instant, to a weakling.

It's a little piece of home.

Yes, naturally it’s a piece of your old home planet, the place you were small and powerless, that saps every ounce of who you’ve become. That yanks you, like a crook around the throat, from superhero of your own life to the equivalent of a child who can’t open (or even reach) the cookie jar. If any members of your family-of-origin are your Kryptonite, this post is for you.

These are the people you needed to love you unconditionally when you were small. These are the people who probably (sorry, mum) didn’t. What’s worse, they’ve witnessed your whole litany of failures and fuck-ups and they don’t, let’s be honest now, believe in you. They expect you to fail. Or, cloaking their doubts in caring concern, are afraid you will fail. The outcome is the same: you feel the weight of your own history. Sure, the rest of the world can think you’re marvellous, but these people know you.

Yes and no. The version of you they carry is forever coloured (and sometimes dominated) by you-as-a-child, you-as-a-teen, you as a young adult who messed up again and again. The confused, work-in-progress version of you. It’s like everyone else (including you, generally) sees a pretty fine jug. But these people remember the messy lump of clay. And you remember it too. Their fingers pressing into you. This is why they are your Kryptonite.

Jug and flowers image by author, clay image by iwanna from Pixabay

You are never safe from Kryptonite. You can’t change its nature. You can put it in a lead box (because its radiation can’t get through that), but you will always be vulnerable. You can go no-contact, but you’re still carrying a wound you haven’t healed. Anyone can bring a touch of Kryptonite into your life, hidden in some pocket of their personality. Like Lex Luthor, stuff you don’t deal with will simply reappear in a new guise. So how do you deal with it? Unlike Superman, who was conceived in 1938, part of a generation who didn’t have the tools, you can heal your vulnerabilities. You can’t change the nature of your home planet, but you can change your own. Do the work (or even The Work), and Kryptonite no longer emits its radiation on your wavelength.

The method is up to you. In the year 2000, I didn’t know about tapping (which I have used for the last 17 years), but I knew a brilliant hypnotherapist, who’d helped me give up smoking in a single session. Shortly after, I visited my childhood home. I had recently started dating the man who is still my husband; after a rough few years I was feeling happy, hopeful and strong. But within half an hour of arriving at my mother’s house, I became a petulant, unloved, nine-year-old. I spotted this shift like a cheetah spots she has run off a cliff and is falling through the air into the Great Rift Valley. Emotional triggers are near-impossible to arrest in the moment. But I knew I never wanted to go home and Be Nine again.

So when I got back to my (actual) home, I went to see the hypnotherapist. Every superhero needs a special power, and she gave me “hibiscus power.” I know, this sounds like a rubbish superpower, and sure, it’s not as cool as flying or invisibility, but it was perfect for my particular Supervillain (which to be clear was not my mother, but my Inner Voice). The hypnotherapist had reprogrammed my subconscious with a strong vision of myself as a sensitive-yet-astonishing tropical flower which would calmly and instantly bloom in my mother’s presence. With my hibiscus power at the ready, I revisited my childhood home once more. The Kryptonite didn’t work. My mother exploded into 28 trillion pieces.

This is the comic-book version. In real life, Mum and I had one grown-up, unemotional, in-depth conversation and the next day she flew out to Thailand and got hit by a truck. I have some thoughts about the timing of that, but the painful feelings that went with those thoughts, I neutralised with tapping. No need to give anyone Kryptonite power from the grave.

There’s one more thing to consider. Sometimes, you are the Kryptonite.

Most likely, you don’t mean to be. Pain is brilliant at self-replication; a successful meme in the Dawkins sense. The younger generations are ever more sensitive (which is, I would argue, an important aspect of humanity’s evolution). There is a strong wave of family estrangement rippling through Western society. Adult children are more likely than ever to cut off from the source of their pain. And that might be you. It is, unfortunately, me. I have three close offspring and, recently, one estranged.

The solution is the same. You are the only one who can do anything about your experience. You can’t stop the other person from being hurt by your radiation, but you can take steps to change the wavelength of your emission (even if they are nowhere near it). It’s a challenge to accept, especially as a parent, that you are not in a state of unconditional love. Sometimes, as a parent or sibling, our naturally loving condition got wrecked pretty early. Perhaps there’s a long history of feeling hurt on both sides. But ask yourself: do you want to be happy? If so, good news. Pick your tool and start healing the only thing within your remit: your side of the hurt.

Yes, you have no power to change your Kryptonite relatives. But you do have the power to change how you feel. And this is how you change the world.

It’s okay to work on yourself, and yourself alone. The Happiness-for-humanity project begins with you.

Until next week, Hibiscus Power!

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Image by Josch13 from Pixabay