James Baldwin once said "not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced" — and this is the conversation most families avoid until it's too late

Baldwin's words have haunted me ever since I first encountered them in a dusty anthology during my teaching years. They capture something essential about the human condition: our simultaneous desire to change and our resistance to looking directly at what needs changing.

But nowhere is this paradox more pronounced than in our families, where the stakes are highest and the conversations most difficult.

Last week, I ran into an old colleague at the grocery store. Between the frozen foods and dairy aisle, she confided that her adult children hadn't spoken to each other in three years. "I keep hoping it'll just work itself out," she said, adjusting her mask to hide what looked like tears.

I thought about my own sisters then, about the five years we lost to silence and stubbornness, and how differently things might have gone if we'd faced our truths sooner.

The weight of unspoken truths

Every family carries its collection of unspoken truths. They sit at holiday dinners like uninvited guests, making everyone uncomfortable but never acknowledged. Maybe it's the favoritism that everyone sees but no one mentions. Perhaps it's the addiction that gets explained away with euphemisms. Or it could be the old hurt that calcified into permanent distance between siblings.

During my mother's decline with Alzheimer's, I watched my sisters and I dance around decades of unresolved dynamics. We'd perfected the art of surface-level harmony while resentments simmered beneath.

One sister felt she'd always been overlooked, another believed she carried more than her share of caregiving burden, and I wrestled with guilt about living farther away. We smiled through family gatherings, but the tension was palpable.

What strikes me now is how much energy we spent maintaining these facades. The careful choreography of avoidance takes tremendous effort. We become so skilled at navigating around the difficult topics that we forget there might be another way. We tell ourselves we're keeping the peace, but what we're really doing is keeping the problem.

Why we choose silence over truth

Have you ever noticed how we'll discuss politics with strangers on the internet but can't tell our own mother how her comments hurt us? There's something uniquely terrifying about vulnerability with the people who matter most.

Fear drives much of this avoidance. We're afraid of conflict, of hurting feelings, of being rejected or misunderstood. We worry that bringing up old wounds will make things worse, not better.

Sometimes we're afraid of what we might discover about ourselves in the process. When my first husband resurfaced after years of absence, I realized I'd been avoiding not just him but my own complicated feelings about our failed marriage and what it revealed about my younger self.

There's also the weight of family mythology to consider. Every family has its official story, the version of events everyone has silently agreed to accept. Challenging that narrative feels like betrayal. It threatens the very foundation of family identity. Who are we if not the close-knit family we've always claimed to be?

The cost of waiting too long

The cruelest part about avoiding difficult family conversations is that time doesn't wait for our courage to catch up. Parents age, siblings drift apart, and opportunities for reconciliation slip away like water through cupped hands.

After our parents passed, my sisters and I found ourselves thrust into the logistics of estate management without having addressed the emotional undercurrents that had defined our relationships for decades.

Suddenly, every decision about possessions became weighted with unspoken grievances. A simple question about who would take Mom's china set could spiral into accusations about who had been the better daughter.

The mediation sessions that followed were painful revelations of how much we'd lost by not talking sooner. Years of assumptions had hardened into perceived truths. Small slights had grown into defining wounds. We were strangers wearing the masks of sisters, trying to navigate grief while learning to see each other clearly for the first time.

I think about all the conversations with my mother that I postponed, thinking there would be more time. By the time Alzheimer's claimed her ability to engage meaningfully, the window had closed. Those unasked questions, those unshared feelings, they remain with me now as permanent wondering.

Finding the courage to face what needs facing

So how do we begin? How do we move from avoidance to acknowledgment, from silence to speech?

Start small. You don't have to address every family issue in one dramatic confrontation. Sometimes the path forward begins with acknowledging just one truth, however minor it might seem. "I felt hurt when..." or "I've been struggling with..." can open doors you didn't know existed.

Choose your moment thoughtfully. Not every time is the right time, but waiting for the perfect moment often means waiting forever. I've found that casual settings often work better than formal family meetings. A walk, a car ride, or working on a project together can provide the right mixture of intimacy and distraction.

Remember that facing something doesn't mean fixing it immediately. Baldwin's wisdom acknowledges this: not everything that is faced can be changed. Some family dynamics are too entrenched, some wounds too deep. But there's liberation in acknowledgment itself, in saying "this is what is" rather than pretending otherwise.

When my sister and I finally broke our five-year silence, the conversation was messy and imperfect. We cried, we disagreed, we left some things unresolved. But we also discovered that the anticipation had been worse than the reality. The monster we'd been avoiding had grown larger in our imagination than it was in actual fact.

Final thoughts

Recently, I've been thinking about legacy differently. It's not just what we leave behind materially, but the emotional inheritance we pass on.

Do we leave our children with the burden of our unfinished business, our unspoken truths, our avoided conversations? Or do we model the courage to face difficult things, to speak honestly even when our voices shake?

Baldwin understood that transformation requires recognition first. We cannot change what we refuse to see. And while facing our family truths doesn't guarantee resolution, avoiding them guarantees stagnation.

The conversation you're avoiding with your family might not fix everything, but I can promise you this: the relief of finally having it, of releasing those words into the space between you, is its own form of freedom.