07/22/2026
Dr Gary Sweeten and Relational Peace and their amazing training courses can change your life generationally. It has ours.
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My dad was brilliant, and mean.
He worked in aerospace—one of those quiet geniuses who could reverse-engineer a jet propulsion system but couldn’t say “I love you” if his life depended on it.
Growing up, I felt like I lived in a “house of ice.” He was walled off, angry, and subject to frightening melt-downs. We shared a last name and a front door, but not much else. When I was 4 yrs old, I drew this - my mom saved it.
By the time I was an adult, I carried a hard, silent ache.I didn’t just feel disconnected—I believed I was incapable of true connection. I went to counseling for dissociation and trauma… but nothing seemed to touch the deep parts.
Then I found myself in a relational skills class, an earlier version of Communicate for a Change — just one session in, something started to unlock. It was like someone had handed me a mirror and said, “Here. This is what’s been happening. And here’s what you can do about it.”
Initially it was the modeling of the relational skills that helped me - but then getting to try the skills via practice really got me engaged.
I started learning how to connect—to actually hear people. To risk letting them hear me. I practiced with others in my class (cause that was safe), and eventually with friends and coworkers outside my class, and slowly… also… with my dad.
I started to notice something that had never happened before.
The “house of ice” I’d been trapped in… began to melt.Not literally, but in me…in my relationships. I showed up for myself. I loved my dad.
Conversations felt less like landmines and more like bridges. Of course there were still plenty of hard conversations. One of his favorite past-times for many years was to argue with me that my loving Jesus was ridiculous and the teachings of Christianity were absurd. In his engineering and mathematical lingo he would say “Christianity can’t be true. It’s not the perfect triangle.”
Frequently he struggled to put his thoughts into words. Through the class, I was learning to be curious, to listen and invite him to tell me more, and that helped him. We didn’t have to agree. We didn’t always have to understand each other, but we were there for each other.
In his final years, he was in his 90s, I saw him grow in increasingly authentic relationships with me and my brother and his grandkids. He could see us. We could see him.
Then—just before he passed—We heard words we never thought we’d hear. He had been asleep, but he sat up in his bed and called out“Billy Graham was right, it’s the perfect triangle.”
That was my dad’s way of saying he believed in Jesus.
After a lifetime of anger, skepticism and distance, something had melted. In the midst of dying, dad embraced life and love. God blessed me and let me experience it too. I saw God's incredible grace to me and to my dad.
Here's a watercolor of a photo my sister-in-law took of my dad just before he passed. I can see the peace in his eyes.
Credit: Janet's Dad Story
