LETTING GO OF OUR ADULT CHILDREN
Chapter 4: Letting Go: Easier Said Than Done
Page 11
BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT
Continuation of Chapter 4 of Letting Go of Our Adult Children, which explores the difficulty of simply letting go without effort.
Stage 5: Letting go and resolution
Task: Learning to develop an adult-to-adult relationship with our child, or bring closure to our relationship if reconciliation is not possible
Once we have uncovered our Velcro issues, accepted the reality of our loss of expectations, and forgiven those we hold responsible, we can really and truly let go with love. The letting-go behaviors we practice in this stage will no longer be a burden, something we do with gritted teeth because "good" parents are supposed to do those kinds of things. We can now experiment with different ways of letting go without the fear that unexamined habits and our heart's unresolved pain will unconsciously sabotage our good intentions.
Little needs to be said about this stage right now except that you, too, can let go with love. When you do, differences of values and lifestyles are no longer experienced as a "rift" but as the reality that parent and child do not need to agree in order to have a satisfying relationship. You can have peace within yourself and with your child.
Chapter 8 offers many practical ideas for making an adult-to-adult relationship really work. Chapter 9 deals with closure and healing when reconnection with your child is not possible.
Some Parents Let Go More Easily than Others
Many factors determine how easily disappointed parents move toward letting go, and how long they will stay in each particular stage.
A Premium Placed on Independence
Some parents actively encourage their children to be autonomous, to express their own points of view. These parents might still be very disappointed if a child makes what the parents consider to be serious errors in judgment or chooses an extremely different lifestyle. However, a more open attitude helps accelerate the process of full acceptance.
The Child's Situation Is Not Viewed as Serious
When a child's lifestyle is potentially life-threatening, as in alcoholism and drug abuse or in some cases of mental illness, it is far more difficult to disengage from Stage 2 than when differences between generations involve less serious problems. Nevertheless, even in those situations in which the possibility of permanent harm is not probable, some parents fear catastrophe looms around the corner. They will insist on staying in Stage 2 so they can rescue their child at the first sign of danger. Other parents, in an identical situation, would be able to move on more easily to letting go.
A Support System Outside the Family
Parents, especially mothers, who have jobs, activities, and good support systems outside the home generally do not expend all their attention and energy in the raising of children. Contacts beyond the boundaries of the family expose parents to a broader perspective of life, including suggestions for solutions that might not occur to those who are more isolated. Mothers without that support tend to focus on solving the problems of their adult children. Since they have few other opportunities for their worth to be validated, they may hang on because they want proof of success in at least one area of life — parenting.
Success of Previous Life-cycle Changes
Life presents us with a series of opportunities, or life-cycle changes, when we must adjust to new realities: the birth of our first child, the entrance of that child into school, the day the child goes off to college or leaves home. How successfully we have negotiated earlier life-cycle changes is an indication of how easily we will move through the stages of letting go.
More than One Child in the Family
When parents are disappointed in the decisions and values of an only child, the struggle to let go is much, much harder. There aren't other children to whom the parents can point with pride and say, "Since they turned out well, perhaps I'm not such a bad parent after all." Parents with several children, of course, can also resist letting go of the one with whom they have conflicts. But their pain is generally softened somewhat by knowing their other children are doing okay.
A Solid Marital or Love Relationship
Paying attention to what an adult child is doing "wrong" offers an excellent distraction for spouses who have unresolved problems in their relationship. Because married couples are involved for many years in the raising of children, making a shift from parents to just-the-two-of-us takes adjustment in the best of families. Letting go of a child can be scary indeed if there is conflict in the relationship between mother and father (or between the unmarried parent and a significant other). This is especially true if the children were the only interest the parents had in common.
Willingness of Child to Disengage from Conflict with Parents
While parents need to stop trying to manipulate their child by pulling on their end of the rope, their children become responsible adults only when they, too, stop playing the game and get on with their lives. Adult children can make the letting-go process more difficult than it needs to be.
For example, Allison, thirty-two, wants to return home — for the fourth time. She claims it is just until she gets her feet on the ground again. Her parents don't have the courage to say no. Although Allison knows her parents wish she wouldn't keep coming back home, she plays a role in the family dissension when she fails to recognize that her inability to resist gratification is the primary reason for her frequent shortfalls when rent time rolls around.
Or consider the case of Philip, twenty-one, who knows he works below his potential in college. This is a constant source of conflict between him and his parents. When grades are discussed, his excuse is that he could do better if only he had not been forced to go to public schools, which he claims "stink." He thinks his mother should have taken a job to pay for private schooling when he was young. Although his parents thought it was more important to have his mother stay home, his harping on how they didn't care about a good education pulls them into a defense of their position.
When parents and adult children play the blame game, no one wins. And while it may seem to the participants that progress can be made through defenses and counter charges, the energy expended is wasted. Perhaps, if parents could purchase a two-way ticket that would allow them to return to any time in the past, they might choose to do things differently the second time around. Maybe not. But we can't go back in time. Blaming parents for making mistakes doesn't help parents understand how their mistakes were perceived by their children; blaming our children for the choices they are making as adults is equally fruitless.
The Path to Healing for Adult Children
"The Path of Healing for Parents" corresponds to another journey we might call "The Path of Healing for Adult Children." This is the process of healing broken parent/child relationships from the perspective of a grown child. This journey also has five stages.
Stage 1: Realizing my parents were far from perfect
Stage 2: Trying to get my parents to give me what I needed
Stage 3: Discovering how I get stuck in conflicts with my parents
Stage 4: Releasing the pain of childhood disappointments
Stage 5: Acceptance and resolution
Since this book does not deal with the adult child's perspective of family rifts, I won't discuss these stages in detail. However, they are presented here in a brief form because it is valuable for parents to realize that their children need to go through a healing process of their own; it helps to have some understanding of what that process involves.
Although the journey to healing for an adult child can be observed in individuals who have never been in therapy, the process is most easily seen in the therapeutic setting.
Many people enter therapy because they want to work specifically on conflicts with their parents. They know their parents weren't perfect and may clearly remember being abused. Often, however, clients come to therapy because their relationship is breaking up, they can't keep a job, or their children are having trouble at home or in school. They may hope to find relief from their problems if they could only get their partner to change, if their boss would just understand them, if their child would do his homework. As therapy progresses, however, they become aware that some of their attitudes and styles of relating contribute to their trouble with relationships, jobs, and children. These attitudes and styles of relating frequently developed out of their reaction to dynamics within families in which they grew up.
When these clients first began therapy, they might have portrayed their parents as wonderful, loving, kind, even perfect. Yet in the process of exploring connections between their childhood and their adulthood, they discover their parents' influence was not all positive but a combination of "good" and "bad,"" the result of uneven parenting. And if serious abuse was blocked from memory, it may slowly emerge into consciousness and must be addressed. So an evaluation of their childhood constitutes the first stage in healing.
Once the client focuses on his parent's imperfections, whether many or a few, he often gets in touch with some of his pain as a child. If there was serious abuse, the pain is multiplied many times. During this second stage, the client often tries to get his parents to apologize for the ways in which they failed to meet his needs, perhaps to make up for what he didn't get in childhood. Often, during this period, the attitude of children toward their parents is more negative than positive. This is when parents are frequently accused of being "dysfunctional," whether or not that term is used appropriately. The parents may wonder what happened to the compliant, apparently happy child they used to know. Yet the parents' willingness to recognize they were not perfect, to apologize if it is warranted, and to agree to work toward an adult-to-adult relationship will go a long way in helping their child.
Whether or not parents are willing to do these things, the task for the adult child in the third stage is to understand his own contribution to family conflicts. Disagreements are two-way streets. Just as he can see how his parents played a role in who he is, the client now begins to recognize the ways in which his behavior and his attitude toward his parents may not be the most healthy or effective if he wants a good relationship with them. Perhaps he plays on their guilt, expects them to rescue him from difficulties of his own making, or uses his imperfect childhood as an excuse for all his failings as an adult.
In the fourth stage, the client learns to let go of the unrealistic expectation that his parents should have been, or should be, perfect. He often needs to forgive his parents for what they were unable to give him. Surprisingly, this can even be possible in cases of severe abuse, although it takes a great deal of effort and time. In this stage therapy also involves letting go of the past by grieving for those times when his parents failed to meet important needs.
In the last stage, clients learn how to relate to their parents in more healthy ways than they have in the past. This can mean setting boundaries if their parents insist on running their lives or if they continue to be abusive. When clients move toward completion of the part of therapy that focuses on their relationship with their parents, they can learn to claim their rights and responsibilities as adults. They can learn how to make their relationship with their parents a more equitable one. If their parents are unable to have a healthy relationship or if there is no possibility for reconciliation, it may be necessary for the adult child to bring closure to the relationship.
Recognizing that our children need to go through their own stages of healing can help us in three important ways.
First, disappointed parents can gain a better understanding of their child by understanding themselves. We are all children of imperfect parents. While we have undoubtedly resolved some of the issues between us and our own parents, others may still need to be worked out. Nevertheless, noticing that we have made progress in healing with our own parents helps us view the relationship with our child in a different, often more compassionate, light. Our children need to come to terms with us and our imperfections, just as we have done and continue to do with our parents' imperfections.
Second, we can recognize that the process of healing for adult children can take a long time, just as it can take a long time to come to terms with our disappointment in the choices they make. Insights and steps forward are frequently followed by long periods spent digesting what is learned and trying on new behaviors. This shouldn't be surprising, since few significant changes in life are quick and easy.
Finally, awareness of this "Path of Healing for Adult Children" helps parents understand how their children may be working on one issue of the relationship while the parent is working on another. If our child has only recently begun seeing connections between his present behavior and his childhood, he may require time to sort out his role, and ours, in the family dynamics. Just because we have forgiven ourselves for not being perfect doesn't mean our child is ready to forgive us. We may need to let go with love long before our child finds his own peace concerning us, his parents.
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© Copyright 1994, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Reprinted with permission
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