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Introduction
Loved, liked or despised, everybody has relatives and everybody has to deal with them. You may not choose them, but you never really lose them, because family is family for life. The label of ‘relative’ covers a wide range of relationships, from parents, siblings and offspring, to aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins and in-laws. Whether they are melded, welded, or only marginally attached to your family, they are your relatives nonetheless.

As a result, behavior in a family can be incredibly diverse. Some of your relatives may be cautious, where others are carefree. Some are only there when you want them, while others are never there when you need them. Some may be offensive, while others are easily offended. Some may take great pains to make sure you know they are suffering on your behalf, while others may come and go like the wind and never notice the mess they leave behind. How do you sort it out and make sense of it all? What can be done when relatives behave badly?

In writing this book, we were faced with a humbling fact. Family is a subject of great scope and complexity! In order to be successful in having worthwhile and fulfilling relationships with your relatives, you need insights and skills that work reliably through time, and a way to organize them so that you can learn them, refer to them, and use them when something more is required. Since the best advice needs a consistent organizing framework, we strove to design a simple model with simple steps that can explain why people act the way they do and what you can do about it.

Such was our task and our intention. To accomplish it, we followed a similar organizational model to the one in our book, ‘Dealing With People You Can’t Stand.’ We encourage you to consider that book as a companion volume to this one, a useful supplement with even more choices for influencing relationships.

This book has four parts. In Part One, we introduce the ‘Eight by Fate,’ the eight behaviors that make for great relatives or difficult ones, and provide a ‘Lens of Understanding’ to help you make sense out of why your relatives act the way they do (and why you act the way you do too!) In Part Two, you’re invited to 'Family Camp', a learning environment for the basic set of communication skills you'll need to interact with your family members in a constructive and creative way. In Part Three, we provide you with material that relates specifically to the special case of family gatherings. We call it ‘Showdown at the Not-OK Corral.’ This section can serve you as a useful reference in preparing for holidays and reunions. Part Four returns to the ‘Eight by Fate’ behaviors, and provides you with a set of options for dealing with each of them, based on the skills you acquired in Part Two. We conclude the book with "The Dimension of Greatness: The Ten Qualities of an Ideal Relative". If you’ve ever wanted to let your relatives know what you want from them, or you have ever aspired to be a great relative yourself, these are the most desirable characteristics of great relatives according to the people we interviewed for this book.

You may be wondering who we are and how we came to write this book. You can find an extensive bio in our first book, or on our website www.TheRicks.com. Suffice it to say that we are Rick and Rick, twin sons of different mothers. We met while students at a naturopathic medical school, and our friendship and partnership has endured for well over two decades. We live parallel lives in many ways. We are both married to women whose names start with the letter ‘L.’ We each have one child, a daughter. Our daughters are the same age apart as we are. We once unknowingly bought the same Armani suit fifteen hundred miles apart on the same day, and discovered the fact when we showed up for a video taping wearing an identical suit. We are both physicians, we both live in Oregon, and we both speak to audiences all over the world. Together, we have studied health from the point of view that thoughts and emotions play a significant role in well-being. We are both students of human nature, and have arrived individually at the shared point of view that working things out works better than getting worked up, and that it is possible to work things out even when one party doesn’t necessarily want to! We are convinced that relationships improve when people know what to do and then do it. And we both agree that you always have a choice about what you do with the circumstances of your life. You can suffer and complain about what is wrong and who is wrong and what can’t be done and why it can’t be done, or you can apply your time and energy to making things better for others in their dealings with you and for yourself in your dealings with others.

This book is not intended as a reference text for dealing with mental illness and serious family pathology. Such work is best handled with appropriate support and services (see appendix.) But it is designed to help you improve the quality of your family relationships when your approach has been clouded with stress, anger, fear and frustration. In preparing to write this book, we conducted hundreds of interviews with people from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds. The stories in this book, including the fables and fairy tales, are about real people. The names and circumstances have been changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty. The people with whom we spoke were open and honest about the difficulties they faced with their relatives and the solutions they developed to overcome those difficulties. With their help and insight, we were able to find out the best of what works to bring out the best in relatives at their worst. We've written this book to pass this information on to you.

Without further ado, it’s time for you to meet the relatives!