This week, family office consultant Joe Reilly interviews Matthew Wesley, a former estate attorney with a master of divinity and head of The Wesley Group, an advisor to families of substantial wealth. The interview touches on silver spoons vs. silver daggers, and the great potential of “reconciliation work.”

Joe Reilly:  You mentioned in an article that most of the work with families is focused on values, yet all the challenges are from the vices.  How do you identify and engage a family on the subject of their vices?

Matthew Wesley:  The notion of vices has to do with the issues that families are unwilling to work with because they seem too difficult or problematic – everyone is happy to talk about the good stuff – the bad stuff, not so much.  The comment you refer to had to do with values cards exercises where families tend to focus on the noble values they share but do not even mention the vices, which are at least as important in driving behavior as the family virtues.  I would like to take this a bit deeper.

One of the simple truths beyond the complexity of family dynamics is that many of the problems that arise in families are connected with anxiety.  People in family systems are anxious about all sorts of things.  If that anxiety continues long enough, it will harden into cynicism, anger and resentment – but underneath all of that is the soft tissue of un-addressed and unresolved anxieties.  Our human responses to anxiety are universal – we fight, we flee (avoidance or denial), we freeze, we flock (talk about and process issues with sympathetic people) and we fix (come in with knee-jerk “solutions” to make the pain go away).

These anxieties – and the typical responses - can be seen as issues of power and love.  By “power” I mean the need to be an autonomous and respected individual, and, by “love,” I mean the ability to engage in and sustain meaningful relationships.  These two fundamental drives often appear to be at odds – it can feel to us that to be fully ourselves and to be fully connected are quite incompatible.  To be fully ourselves seems to require that we pull away and assert our autonomy – in this sense we define our sense of self by being different from others.  This move can threaten the felt sense of connection. Conversely, to be connected means that we feel we need to curb and contain our natural responses for the sake of the relationship – we fall into defining our connection by deference to the needs of the group.

Joe Reilly:  You are a proponent of using “reconciliation work,” which has its roots in the reconciliation that occurs after civil violence.  How is this technique used with families?

Matthew Wesley:  This is some of the deepest work that can be done short of therapeutic intervention.  Typically this is called for after the family has begun to have some success and has done preliminary work together.  Some families hit a wall after they begin where the old patterns are too stubborn and the family needs to shock themselves out of the trances they have all been living within.  The sleepwalking of many families – in their rote responses - often does a great deal of damage.  

Reconciliation is largely about a process of waking up – of realization.  What is required for this work to succeed, in my experience, is the creation of what I would call sacred space – an environment in which hard emotions can show up and where they can be hosted by the facilitator (and eventually the family) in a way that envelops this time of observation with quiet but profound acceptance.  This is quite different – though premised on – notions of safe space. Safe space often feels comfortable – sacred space feels quite the opposite – it most often feels tense and threatening.  In the ancient stories, whenever the divine appears, there is fear.  Of course, the space itself is imbued with quiet and calm – but what occurs within that space promises to be quite edgy and dangerous.  To create this sort of space and to take the edge off of the anticipation, I will often “ritualize” these experiences by using talking sticks, asking people to pick from a deck of evocative images an image that expresses something profound about their experience and so on.  I may also use particular forms of highly scripted dialog to create self-awareness and insight.  We will often also have prepared for this experience through some communication skills building work using concepts such as active-listening, non-violent communication, straight-talk and so on.

As the reconciliation experience unfolds over a weekend, there is usually a great deal of emotion at the beginning and the family simply exhausts itself in the tension between the control of ritual and catharsis of self-disclosure – this almost always comes to a point of silence and stillness where there is really nothing more to be said – the family is emotionally spent. Most often the family emerges on the other side of that silence quite different in some very important ways.  Sometimes they are no closer and there may not even be forgiveness, but there is a certain kind of peace and equanimity that wasn’t there before and there is a possibility of forging new agreements or even covenants with one another.  In other cases, there is a much deeper sense of closeness and affection.

Joe Reilly: What are the challenges of reconciliation work for the facilitators themselves?

Matthew Wesley:  Very interesting question.  First and foremost, to be effective, any facilitator must be a non-anxious presence in an otherwise anxious system.  In situations fraught with tension, this requires deep equanimity within the facilitator.  They must be remarkably self-aware of their own reactions to things and to manage those reactions well.  Therapists often speak of transference or projection and my Buddhist friends will talk about “working with poison.”  Skilled facilitators see and alchemically integrate these reactions.

Beyond that, the facilitator is hosting an experience.  I find that this hosting requires that the facilitator be in touch with profound silence in him or herself and in touch with the silent spaces of the group and its group process.  This silence actually holds a substantial amount of tension and activity within the room and how that silence is understood and shaped by the facilitator often determines outcomes.  In these kinds of situations I personally find myself paying substantially more attention to the space around things (the ground) than I do in the content of what is happening (the figure).

Another aspect of this work with families has to do with the role of the facilitator as a metabolizer.  When I come into a family I hear a multitude of stories, all of which are illustrative of something.  I take those stories in and, without any conscious work on my part, the stories begin to weave themselves together in me – they connect and integrate in a subterranean process.  The weaving is subconscious, visceral and, to some extent, emotional.  This “web work” is incredibly subtle and even more fragile – but the very way I hold these stories and how they do their work in me often seems to constitute a foreshadowing of a growing process of outward reconciliation that happens in the family. I have talked to many very good facilitators about this and they have all acknowledged this sense of what is happening in their own experiences. They don’t talk about it openly because it seems so strange, but it is a very real thing.

Finally, I have found for myself that there is a need for the facilitator to hold what is happening in the room in radical state of grace – to see every moment, no matter how painful, as an expression of absolute and unabated beauty, goodness and truth.  Even ugly things – what might cause people to recoil - come to be seen as inherently true and even exquisitely beautiful in their own way.  This unconditional acceptance without a need to change or alter or progress or return or explain or minimize – to hold whatever is said and whatever is happening, in a kind of radical non-reactivity and still presence that allows the naked and unelaborated moment to be as is - without a need for any internal or external commentary – requires a kind of mental and emotional stillness in facilitator.  This is akin to the silence and stillness I spoke of at the beginning, but it is a slightly different facet of the phenomena.  This is ultimately a form of compassion uncontaminated with empathy.