Adjusting with a loved one in prison

It’s just after 11am here as I sit here blogging…

Oh by the way, I feel much better, thanks for the emails. For those that read a couple of my past blogs, you know I was feeling pretty beat-up a few days ago, with a neck ache, headache and kinda down on my faith.

Today is a new day, so let’s try to move forward with positive energy and faith, ok?

“Easy for you to say, my boyfriend is in jail!”

“Easy for you to say, my husband is locked up!”

“Easy for you to say, my son is doing 30 years!”

Yeah, I guess you have a point, and I know where you’re coming from. Sometimes when somebody tries to make a positive statement in the midst of your very trying tribulations, you feel like you wanna slap that person with a wet rag.

(picture that….)

It’s almost like somebody is mocking you that everything is nice and rosey, while you are living in the midst of a storm. But the funny thing about that is the natural tendency for people IS to give up and look at the problem…the spiritual thing is to look at the chance that it can change for the better.

But it’s hard to see that when all you see is negativity, stress and frustration. When you have a loved one in prison, it can often be very tough to see anything positive. Let’s talk a little about that, and how you, on the outside, can adjust to life while having a loved one living in prison.

I submit to you the initial stages are not easy, because the shock of incarceration not only affects the person going to prison, it affects those he or she knows. Family, friends, loved ones, everybody that knows that inmate can be affected, some much harder than others.

How can you adjust with a loved one in prison? I suppose to get some ideas, we must define “adjust”:

To adjust: to adapt one’s self to new circumstances (Oxford American Dictionary)

So what we are talking about here is the necessity to adapt to a new circumstance, which in this case is having a loved one in prison. And this goes either way, both positive or negative. You would need to adjust your life if you hit the jackpot for $10,000,000, you would have to adjust your life if in the first week of college, you would have to adjust your life if you moved from sunny Florida to snowy Minnesota in January, you would have to adjust your life if you were diagnosed with diabetes, you would have to adjust your life if your dad was diagnosed with cancer, and any other situation.

But in each situation, the adjustment would be different. How do you adjust to life if you have a loved one in prison? Or even jail?

I recently had a few people email me because I actually wrote a blog titled, “My boyfriend is in prison”. I intentionally titled it that way because I know many times people will google what they are thinking. The idea was to try to get them to find my blogs faster so maybe I can be of some help. It apparently worked, but now it is my responsibility to continue to help them if I can.

Those people are looking for answers because their circumstances were adversely changed. But they are doing more than just looking for answers, they are looking to adjust, to be able to adapt to the situation. And the reason for adaptation is that they may well expect this to be a long situation.

I mean, if your boyfriend was arrested, and you KNEW he’d be out in a few days, then there is no need for adjustment, right? There would technically be a temporary adjustment, but not a long-term one. Kinda like if you catch a cold, you don’t prepare for the next 10 years, or 5 years, or even 1 year based on a cold, you temporarily adjust your life until the situation passes.

But in many cases like this, talking about prison issues, the situation can last a long time…some longer than I dare say.

In thinking over this blog, I had to pause and write some things down, because the more I think on it, the more expansive we can get on the topic of adjusting to a loved one in prison.

“What do you mean?”

Folks, there is actually more than one way to adjust, based on mentality. I can think of three main modes of thought when it comes to adjusting to a loved one in prison:

Positive Adjustment

Neutral Adjustment

Negative Adjustment

Again, we are talking about prison issues, so don’t confuse this with any other subject. When your boyfriend, or husband or son gets sent to prison, there is an immediate need to find answers, to be able to cope with the negative situation. Lots of people go online looking for answers, some fall on their knees to pray, some fall apart and cry…

Some do all three, and many more.

But if I am going to try to share with you what I can, I have to be able to break down the modes of thought, which will determine how you might end up adjusting.

Positive Adjustment is the best way to adjust to a negative situation, and in fact is a LOT more powerful than you can imagine. When I talk about positive adjustment, I am talking about taking actions in your adjustment to change the situation to a favorable one. This is a more aggressive form of adjustment, where you are adapting yourself to try to counter the negative action with more positive ones, in an effort to ultimately defeat the negative circumstance.

This folks…takes faith and a strong sense of determination.

These are the people that believe that you CAN change a negative situation to a positive one. Sure your son might be in prison for 30 years, but can you adapt your life to believe he can get out sooner? Sure your boyfriend got arrested and is looking at doing time, can you believe he can get a shorter sentence, or even be cleared? Sure YOU got charged with a crime and looking at doing time, can you have faith that you can get a favorable outcome?

Having a positive adjustment does not mean being “wishful”, it means accepting what is in the now, but believing with faith that it can change for the better. A lot of people will get that confused because they just want things to get better. Every mom would love to wish that their son or daughter in jail will be able to come home, but not every mom has adjusted their life to stand on that belief. This is a much stronger form of adjustment that takes an effort to do. If you have a loved one in jail or prison, there are indeed things you have to do to adjust your life in this manner. But it is strongly based on faith.

Neutral Adjustment is based more on endurance, the necessity to just make it through. Thousands of people run the Boston Marathon, but only a very, very small fraction believe they can win. Most just want to get through, to endure the challenge. That is great when in a sporting event, but when it comes to having a loved one in prison, there is no real expectation for seeing a favorable outcome.

This is where most of us are when it comes to having a loved one in prison. Our boyfriend, husband or son is in prison, and we are trying to adjust ONLY to the circumstance. Notice that the difference between the positive adjustment and the neutral one is that the adjustment does not require faith. Now I didn’t say it required NO faith, just not much.

The neutral adjustment takes into account that you have to adjust your life based on the fact that your loved one is in prison, and there isn’t much you can do about it. I mean, you can’t change what has been done with his sentence any more than you can change his charge, right?

(that isn’t true, but we usually believe that)

Neutral adjustments are based on the idea that we would love to see things change for the better, but we just aren’t in the position to believe that it will. Sure, it CAN, but we often just don’t believe that it will for us. I think we all are in this category many times, because let’s face it, not everybody can have the faith to change a situation at the moment your life changes for the worse. I say to you though, even though you might start in the neutral adjustment, it is critical that you try to move into the positive adjustment, because if you don’t, you could slip into the third category…

Negative Adjustment, which basically is preparing for the worst.

I will describe what that means on this blog, but I am NOT going to share with you how to prepare for the worst…I will not do that because it adds no value to me trying to help you. I can identify it, and tell you generally what it is, but do not look for me to blog about how to prepare for the worst in adjustments.

The reason for this is because negative adjustments are based on adapting your life based on fear. Fear that your loved one will never come home, fear that you will never see him again, fear that he will be beat up in prison, fear that he will be raped, fear that he will be killed, fear that even if he does his time, he will not change.

And many people adapt their lives, adjusting to the fear of what can happen. This can even be applied before one even goes to prison. I sat in a jail cell for almost 17 months trying to figure out what my future holds, sometimes I found myself trying to prepare for the worst…I think my lawyer told me to do it once or twice. But each time I wanted to “embrace” that fear, something deep inside of me said not to give up.

You can tell if you have a shred of faith in you by how you respond to a negative situation. Even if you feel like the world is crumbling around you, and nothing looks good, faith dares to say, “come on, hang in there, something good can come out of this”. But the natural mind can’t SEE faith, so it does not give place to it. Fear is based on the conditions around us, the things we can see, hear, and touch. When you hear about your son or boyfriend or husband going to prison, the natural mind wants to fall apart and force you to adjust to the lifestyle of fear and defeat.

Many do that. And initially, MOST do that, because we’re all human. It’s the reason I attempted suicide, I was preparing for the worst. And the worst was not worth living for. And even though negative adjustment does not always end up like a bad ending to a movie, it is certainly not the mode of thought I would encourage anybody to do. So again, I will not cover that in this discussion.

So I will (hopefully) cover the topics of Positive Adjustment and Neutral Adjustment, and what you can do to get through this in upcoming blogs. Email me if you have any questions.

See, I had not intended to write this much on it, but as I was blogging there were a lot of thoughts that I needed to add. This could turn out to be about 15 pages, so it may have been a good thing for me to create a starting point, and then cover it in blogs to come.

Anyway, we’ll see where we go from here…hope you’ll check it out.