Good Values Are Often Lost IN The Bad Ways They Were Transmitted

​I recently listened to Dan Rather interview Billy Bob Thornton. Thornton described his father as abusive, but still expressed appreciation for him - not because the harm didn’t matter, but because he could see the values his father was trying to instill, even if he had no idea how to instill them.

I found it compelling that the weakness Thornton identified most in his dad's inability to transmit these values was his dad's inability to communicate.

It's true. When we don’t know how to communicate our values, we often resort to enforcing them. What could have been a conversation becomes control.

As a tangent I won't follow but don't want forgotten in my reflecting: are there broader implications here culturally? Have we become prone to looking for ways to enforce our values upon one another because we can't talk to one another about the values we hold within us?

But back to Thornton: I related a lot to his conversation with Rather.

I have personally wrestled with this most of my adult life. Trying to see through the destructive ways good values were transmitted into my life by good people who used a lot of bad ways to transmit them. And in most cases, because their lives were groomed by bad transmitters.

Should understanding and grace be strong enough to allow one to see through the bad to get to the good? Is it wrong that one appreciates in hindsight what one struggles to love in the here and now?

And me, even as I have gone out of my way not to transmit my own good values in bad ways, have my own ways been any better even if vastly different? Will I too have people in my life wrestling with the things with which I wrestle?

It does make me wonder, when I am questioning the value systems of people around me - because I do question - what is it actually that I am questioning?

Their values, or the systems in which they received them?

Because I have lived a life, and heard hundreds of stories of lives beyond mine, that often look like stronger reflections of the WAY values were instilled in them more than the nature of the values themselves.

I don't offer that as excuse - not for me and not for others - but I offer it as understanding.

Appreciation.

While acknowledging that appreciation doesn't often heal the wounds incurred at the hands of bad transmitters.