Spiritual Survival Guide
5: Complicated Stuff
What you might want to go further into is when a girlfriend or wife leaves. That happens all the time. Maybe abandonment or loneliness issues. All too often families pull away once the person has been sentenced. When we shared an outline of this book with a group of inmates, their attention was immediately drawn to hearing what family members actually think and feel about maintaining a relationship with a family member who’s in prison. “That’s deep, ” they kept saying. They were right. It is deep. And it’s deeply personal. When it comes to family relationships, there’s no one-size-fits-all description. There are all sorts of complicating factors. How good was the relationship before you got locked up? Has there been a long history of problems? How much damage has been inflicted on it recently? How good are you at sharing your thoughts and feelings with one another? How often do you see one another? How honest is everyone being with each other? Every guy who’s locked up has a different story to tell. There are those who have kept—and believe it or not, even improved—their relation- ships while in prison.
Other guys have managed to keep (or in some cases, regain) a healthy relationship with their family, but they talk about struggling with loneliness.
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