Cracking the Codes That Can Heal Old Family Wounds

Ricia Quintana couldn’t forgive and forget the stern actions of her mother during her teenage years. Her mother wouldn’t hear of Quintana using makeup and hair spray. She couldn’t go to school dances until she was 16. Dating? Don’t even ask.

“My mother was very strict about me growing up and trying to become a woman,” recalls Quintana, 47, adding that years of therapy failed to heal the emotional wounds. “I experienced her as very mean. I had a hard time changing that perception as an adult.”

But lately, Quintana has embraced a kinder interpretation. She credits a self-transformation process called “Codes of Love” with helping her to see her mother as the young and stressed parent she actually was, with her own history, motivations and problems--a mother who never meant to hurt her.

In fact, Quintana now understands her mother’s strict discipline was driven by love and a fierce concern that her oldest daughter not repeat her own mistakes.

“My mother married my father very young. It was a very passionate attachment, but my mother felt she grew up too fast. In retrospect, she and my father weren’t very well-suited for marriage,” says Quintana, now a Los Angeles therapist. That big-picture objectivity helped free Quintana from an overly subjective and childish perceptual rut.

“In the ‘Codes’ workshop, it became clear to me how much she suffered with that--and how she translated it to her kids, especially to me, trying to protect me from growing up too quickly like she did. The idea of the codes is that people have different ways of expressing love, and those ways may not always feel like love to a child.”

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Personal revisionism? Psychological gobbledygook? Or an effective method to disarm still-potent misperceptions from childhood? If we accept that communications between men and women at times require interpretation, is it much of a leap to think that family members express some of their most heartfelt messages to each other in coded words, actions and behaviors that are misunderstood?

Mark Bryan, an educator specializing in human development and psychology, thinks not.

“I used to hate my family” is the first line in Bryan’s “Codes of Love: How to Rethink Your Family and Remake Your Life” (Pocket Books).

How he transforms familial hate into reconciliation and love is the story of his life. It’s also the basis of his emotion-reversing, family-reviving work with adults who aren’t able to reconcile bad childhood memories with adult family relationships.

“The past we think we know isn’t the past,” says Bryan, director of the Father Project in Los Angeles, a foundation dedicated to reconnecting fathers with their estranged children. “It is the past framed in the limited abstract-thinking skills of a 10- or 11-year-old child who can’t make sense of it. Those struggles go on to become themes that continue into our adulthood.”

For Bryan, those struggles and themes began with his working-class family in Appalachia. A quiet child, he fled his parents’ constant fighting by retreating into books. He married his pregnant girlfriend instead of graduating from high school. His family moved often because his father was in the Navy. Bitter arguments about Vietnam and his impending divorce set him at odds with family members. He saw his family as brawling hicks; they saw him as judgmental and condescending. He bolted to Florida, where he struggled to get on with his life.

Later, Bryan attended Harvard and since has worked at reconnecting people like himself with their families by deciphering misunderstood expressions of love, or codes, to change the narrative of their childhoods for the better.

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“This goes back to my story. I’m not just the son of ‘dysfunction junction,’ of poor West Virginia hillbillies,” Bryan says. “In fact, I’m the son of a very strong-willed, psychologically stern, Scotch-Irish-English heritage that valued community and each other and was able to survive very difficult economical and environmental struggles.”

His parents? “Most of us don’t think of our parents as having been 19 or 20 and married,” he explains. “They had children then, and that’s very hard. So when I understand that, and that their conflict played out in a screaming, hollering marriage, it all makes a little more sense in the bigger context of things. I now have reframed my parents’ fighting as part of their passion. I understand my mother as 19-year-old Dorothy, and I love my mom again.”

Bryan made a breakthrough about six years ago, when one of his students said he was agonizing over attending his father’s 80th birthday party because he hadn’t had a good relationship with his father.

“It just struck me that he and I should stop worrying about how good a dad we had and start worrying about how good a son we are,” says Bryan.

“I realized I’d never sent my dad a Father’s Day gift in my life. So I made that effort, went out and bought a nice shirt for him. Two months later, I got the first note I ever got in my life that said, ‘I love you, Dad.’ Cmdr. Bryan didn’t say things like that.”

As a youngster, Bryan loved sitting near his father while watching football games on television. But as he got older and tensions grew, watching sports with the old man seemed boring and emotionally empty. What went unsaid in those hours seemed to suffocate emotions.

“Watching sports together was a code,” Bryan says. “Sitting on that couch with my father watching sports, I realized, was a way for him to connect with us emotionally.”

While codes of love differ from one person to another, one family to another, they aren’t so different as to defy themes such as security versus creativity, or individuality versus following in the footsteps, Bryan says. Many young men mistake watching sports with emotionally unexpressive fathers as just watching sports together, and many young women see a mother nagging about settling down and getting married, rather than being concerned for her daughter’s happiness and security.

“There are often very tough dads whose code is ‘Life is hard.’ They grew up in the ‘30s and ‘40s and believe you’ve got to toughen the kids up for their own good,” Bryan says. “My mother pushes my sister to get a man. They battle over it. But it’s really a code, her wanting my sister to be taken care of. My mother, who has been divorced from my dad for 20 years, struggling on her pension, money is always an issue, is saying, ‘Don’t end up like me.’

“If I can reframe every family member and their actions as somehow loving and contributing to the family, no matter how erroneous their actions are, that is a real positive step toward change,” Bryan says. “If I’m looking at my family as dysfunctional and wounded, then I’ll tend to feel I have problems and issues, and hold on to negative behavior patterns.

“The payoff is that I’ve changed my narrative--which means I changed my past, present and future. Most importantly, I am not who I thought I was.”