LETTING GO OF OUR ADULT CHILDREN
Chapter 4: Letting Go: Easier Said Than Done
Page 9
BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT
Chapter 4 of Letting Go of Our Adult Children explores the difficulty of simply letting go without effort.
"Letting go" is a process in which we change our relationship to our children and transfer responsibility for decisions concerning their lives from us to them. If we successfully complete this transition, we will accept our children as independent individuals just as they are — including imperfections and conflicting values — and they will accept us in return. We will communicate openly and share our values and experiences with one another, without believing we have the right, or the power, to change the other person.
On the other hand, when disagreements between the generations cause conflict or when a major rift tears straight down the middle of our family, letting go with love is a thorny process indeed.
But there is good news for disappointed parents. Even in the most difficult of circumstances many parents have made the journey from disappointment to true acceptance. Encounters with their children are no longer reminders of how things should have been but aren't. Many enjoy genuine adult-to-adult relationships; others have experienced closure and peace when contact with their adult child is not possible.
The Path of Healing for Parents
Coming to terms with family conflict we had not expected requires courage, determination, and time. We need these qualities if we are to move through a process I call "The Path of Healing for Parents." Along the path are five stages, each of which involves certain tasks for the parent to master before he or she can move on to the next stage.
Stage 1: My child fails to meet my expectations
Stage 2: Trying to change my child
Stage 3: The Velcro syndrome
Stage 4: Releasing the past
Stage 5: Letting go and resolution
There is no direct, linear progression through these stages, but much overlapping, backsliding and stalling. A parent may skip quickly through one stage and then spend long months, even years, in the next. You will only give yourself more grief if you assume there is a "right" way to heal. Nevertheless, you can use the experience of others as an encouragement to take the steps needed toward finally letting go with love.
Stage 1: My child fails to meet my expectations
Task: Honestly acknowledging my disappointment
This first stage begins when parents realize that their child has not met their expectations. They feel disappointed. What they do with that disappointment, as pointed out in the second chapter, will depend on many factors.
Forming an adult-to-adult relationship
After observing that things haven't turned out the way they expected them to, some parents will move almost immediately to the fifth stage and let go with love. The situation in which these parents find themselves, plus their personalities and attitudes, create a climate in which an adult-to-adult relationship can grow.
Being disappointed does not mean you will necessarily feel guilty, have issues that keep you stuck in your disappointment, feel a need for forgiveness, or want to grieve what hasn't happened. You may accomplish the task of this stage — honestly acknowledging that you are disappointed — and then be able to let go. If you can do this, I suspect that your response is rare (and you probably don't need this book), but I do know parents for whom this has been possible.
Pretending everything is okay
Other parents may deny their disappointment and try to convince themselves that they have already let go, as did the mother in the television play discussed in chapter 2. But these parents are disappointed. They are just afraid to acknowledge it. They hide behind a not-very-concealing-veneer that implies parents must unconditionally accept their adult child's lifestyle and values, even if that lifestyle seems bizarre and the values expressed are contrary to their own.
We often take our cues for responding to a situation from others. Consequently, we may hesitate to voice a negative opinion if we think our spouse will disapprove of our position. For example, perhaps a mother believes her daughter deserves a partner with "refinement." She finds the brashness and unpolished manners of her daughter's husband very hard to accept, but her husband admires his opennessand lack of hypocrisy. Afraid of being labeled a critical, interfering mother-in-law, she may say nothing. Over time she might even come to like her son-in-law and be able to let go of her disappointment that her daughter hadn't married someone else. In the meantime, her silence prevents her from getting the help she could use in resolving her discomfort more easily and directly.
Responding defensively or openly to accusations
Many parents think everything is perfectly fine between them and their child — until the day their child accuses them of being "dysfunctional" or "abusive" or otherwise claims their childhood was not the idyllic, or at least satisfying, experience the parents assumed it had been. Suddenly they are thrown into a state of pain and upheaval; their illusion of a contented family is shattered.
If this has been your experience, your child's comments cannot be ignored, unless you are willing to settle for a merely superficial relationship. Your son wants you to address old wounds that he believes have been swept under the rug. The wounds may be genuine scars from abuse you were unaware of causing, or they may result from the normal working-things-out process when adult children separate themselves from their parents. Whether the reality of your child's complaints are serious or relatively minor, the situation must be dealt with, or the opening rift in your family might tear everyone apart permanently.
Letting-go conditionally
Many parents do not realize they have placed conditions on letting go of their adult children. As far as they are concerned they have let go. In one way they have. However, when serious disagreements arrive on the scene, these parents often "take back" the letting go they had done earlier. Suddenly they are disappointed in something their child has chosen to do and may even feel betrayed, as though in accepting the parents' statement of freedom the child had agreed not to disappoint his parents.
It isn't surprising that such parents wonder what happened, how their child could end up so far from where they thought she was heading. Yet it often takes a long while for parents to realize that their children are not always going to please them. Different kinds of seedlings can look very similar when they first come out of the ground. It is not often possible to foresee the consequences of our children's decisions the first time they take a particular action or experiment with a philosophy. Just as we did, they find their way into adulthood with tentative steps and missteps. Parental sanity requires a wait-and-see attitude; otherwise, we might well fear that our children are never going, to make it through adulthood.
When a short hiatus from college turns into a permanent break for our gifted child, we will be very disappointed. In the meantime, we keep expecting her to return, the sooner the better. Or consider the matter of deciding at what point the social drinking of our child has become a problem. It is often difficult to tell the difference between social drinking and addiction. Several years down the road, when we have had the benefit of hindsight, we may look back and recognize the beginning signs of our child's addiction. At the time, however, they are not so obvious.
Once parents realize they are disappointed, they usually do what I did — try to coerce their child into becoming the person they want him to be.
Stage 2: Trying to change my child
Task: Recognizing that my guilt, anger, and blame keep me engaged in unproductive efforts to change a child no longer under my control
We all know parents who attempt to mold their child's values and behavior long after the child has left home — often into middle-age and beyond. Maybe you, yourself, have parents like this and understand, all too painfully, the pressure of parents who won't give up. In such families there is no letting go, only hanging on.
If parents fear judgment because the "product" they have created is flawed, they may hope to avoid criticism by finding some way to correct those flaws. Evidence that their previous efforts were not successful only encourages their search for a better method.
Elinor Lenz, in her book Once My Child, Now My Friend, provides the following list of manipulative strategies parents use in their effort to "prop up the crumbling edifice of parenthood":
Bribery: "I might be able to manage that ski outfit you've been hankering for if you —"
Appeal to guilt: "And the doctor said it's all this stress I've been under ever since you —"
Threat: "As long as you' re living under my roof, you'll—"
Shaming: "I should think you'd be more considerate —"
Power play: "You'll not see another cent from me as long as you —"
Appeal from authority: "I've lived longer than you. I know better, take it from me —"
Unfavorable comparison: "I don't understand why you can't hold on to a job and the Elmans' son, who doesn't even have a college degree, is a sales manager, and last year, his mother tells me, he made, with salary and bonus —"
Dire prediction: "If you go on this way, you know how you're going to end up? Well, let me tell you —"
Invoking the dead: "It's a good thing your father/mother is no longer alive, because if he/she knew that you —"
What is familiar is hard to change. And guilt is a very familiar feeling for most of us. In fact, it is the primary glue that keeps us stuck in this stage. Continuing our attempts to change our child is much easier than stopping our subtle, and not so subtle, manipulations. If we stop, we will forfeit our chance of ever getting a good parent badge. Continuing is easier than taking a hard, objective look at our situation, an analysis that might uncover how much we exacerbate and perpetuate the problem through our attitude and actions. Continuing is easier than moving on to the painful process of grieving for our lost expectations or forgiving ourselves and our child.
If our child preys on our sense of guilt to get what he wants, it is even harder to move out of this stage. The story of Barbara, a parent I interviewed, is a good illustration of this dynamic.
When Barbara's only child, Tom, was four and wouldn't share a toy with a neighbor boy, her husband, Frank, got violently angry and beat him so badly that he had welts on the area of his kidney. This very much frightened both Frank and Barbara. However, rather than getting help to learn better parenting skills, Frank withdrew from all parenting that involved discipline. Later, when Tom would complain about his upbringing, Barbara was the parent he blamed because she had become the sole disciplinarian, a role she was forced to take in the face of Frank's abdication of responsibility.
When Tom was eighteen, his father wanted a divorce so he could marry a younger woman. Angrily Tom told his father, "You will never see me again if you don't give the house to my mother." When Frank decided to give Barbara the house so she could sell it (which his father might have intended to do even without Tom's threat), Tom pressured her for some of the money. He saw his share as a retainer's fee, claiming "you wouldn't have gotten the house without my help." Although Barbara didn't agree with Tom's reasoning, she gave him $10,000, feeling responsible for not preventing the breakup of her marriage.
Today Tom, twenty-three, is much like his father, quick to get angry and lose his temper. Recently he had an argument with his girlfriend, broke up with her, drank some beers, and rolled his truck in an accident. Barbara gave him $2,000 to pay for damages, even though she needed the money herself. Why? Tom did not need to say, "Mother, if it weren't for you, I wouldn't have had that accident." All he needed to do was to claim that he drank because he didn't know how to resolve an argument with his girlfriend: he knew his mother felt guilty because she was unable to resolve marital conflicts with his father. He simply implied that his mother hadn't taught him that couples can argue and still remain together.
Fortunately or unfortunately for Tom, Barbara's new husband, Walt, can objectively observe Tom's appeal to his mother's guilt. Last year Tom wanted money to go into the construction business. At first Barbara was tempted, even though, again, she couldn't afford it. If she had been a "better" mother, she told her husband, Tom might have been more successful in school and today wouldn't have to struggle so hard to make a living. Walt helped Barbara resist Tom's efforts to play on her "failure" as a mother.
In the last chapter in the section on psychobabble, I talked about a parent who allowed a daughter to move back home, pointing out that he wasn't being "co-dependent" or "enabling," since she only planned on staying three months and since he could afford to help her. In the case just cited, however, when Barbara paid for Tom's accident, she prevented him from facing his responsibility in driving recklessly after drinking (even though he was not legally drunk). Furthermore, although his mother could not afford to give him money, she did so under the pressure of guilt. Money given out of guilt and/or the hope we can thus manipulate our child to become more responsible, more thoughtful, more respectful, is not money well spent.
Some parents keep trying to change their child not because of guilt but because, as discussed in the second chapter, they blame the child for causing pain in the family. Their anger prevents them from acknowledging how they, as parents, may have contributed to the disrupted relationship. Their angry pull on the rope across the rift is intended to demonstrate how much the family suffers from the child's intransigence. Unfortunately, such efforts almost never force the child to change, any more than do the efforts of parents who are motivated by guilt.
I spent a long time in this stage, probably half a dozen years, trying to get Matthew to see things my way. Giving up guilt clearly did not happen overnight! However, when I finally acknowledged that the only thing I got from guilt was tension, some of the weight on my shoulders began to lift. The next stages required a lot of my time and effort, but as I approached those tasks on the road of healing, I could sense that I was moving closer to genuine peace of mind.
Stage 3: The Velcro syndrome
Task: Recognizing and dealing with those aspects in my own personality and outlook on life that keep me focused on my child, rather than on myself and my need to change
Through unrelenting effort a few parents are eventually able to get their "problem" child to behave and think in ways that reflect the parents' values. Or a child may change in spite of her parents' pressure. She may conclude that her previous lifestyle or choices were at the root of her problems, and her new decisions may just happen to be more closely aligned to those her parents find acceptable. In either of these cases the parents need not bother learning to let go. They've got what they wanted.
Most children who have not met our expectations, however, continue living as they wish, ignoring our good advice. This leaves us in a tough place. Rarely can parents sustain the effort to change a wayward child forever. Eventually we get rope burns from pulling that rope and we decide to stop.
Stopping, however, is seldom accomplished by moving directly from manipulation to letting go. Most of us have to first deal with the dynamic forces that have, until now, prevented us from letting go, forces that are more complicated than simple guilt and blame.
I call these forces "The Velcro Syndrome." As I see it, woven into the fabric of our lives are issues that we often ignore until they get caught (like one side of a piece of Velcro) with an adult child's similar issue (his piece of Velcro). If we learn to understand how we get enmeshed, there is a good chance we can avoid becoming caught in the future, or can extricate ourselves more easily when we periodically get entangled. More important, if we resolve our own issues, our unfinished business, we might more easily help our child resolve his issues when he asks for our help.
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© Copyright 1994, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Reprinted with permission
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