LETTING GO OF OUR ADULT CHILDREN
Chapter 8: Letting Go With Love
Page 24
BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT
Continuation of Chapter 8 of Letting Go of Our Adult Children, in which you learn how to truly let go with love.
Reaching this final stage on the path to healing is like discovering, after a strenuous hike, that the path near the top of the mountain is gentler than we had expected. The tasks we need to accomplish here, while still challenging, are so much easier now that we have moved through the other stages. We are finally prepared to let go with love. An adult-to-adult relationship — ;and peace of mind — ; is right around the comer.
As pointed out earlier, letting go involves the process of transferring responsibility for our child's life from us to them. We move our focus from that of being parents to that of being peers. In letting go we de-emphasize the parent-child aspect of our relationship, although our family connection will always be part of the equation.
This process of letting go involves learning to treat our children as adults, just as we treat our friends as adults. In fact, an ideal adult- to-adult relationship with our children can be modeled on the ideals of friendship.
While our friends probably share most of our values and lifestyles, many of us have at least a few friends whose views on life are quite different from ours. We may not see these people on a daily basis, but when we are together we enjoy their company and don't try to talk them into being other than who they are, or require them to live out our dreams or fulfill an arbitrary set of expectations. We can have equally satisfying relationships with adult children who are also out of sync with us in some way.
If we've known a friend since childhood, we will, of course, share more memories with that person, but part of what makes friendships work is the attention that is given to the present rather than the past or future. Realizing this can encourage us to work toward keeping our interactions with our children more centered in the here and now. And by focusing on what is happening today, we allow both ourselves and our child to evolve into the people we want to be tomorrow, rather than constricting our perceptions by how we viewed one another in the past.
A bit of practice will be needed before these new behaviors become second nature. It will take time, just as it has taken time to work our way through the other stages. Yet our efforts will be rewarded when we accept our child just as he is, in the same way we accept our friends just as they are.
Incidentally, all of the suggestions for letting go with love apply not only to those children in whom we are disappointed in some way but to all our other children as well.
Being a Friend to Our Child
What we expect from our friends we should be able to expect from our adult children — ; and what our friends expect from us, our children should be able to expect from us. It's a two-way street.
If it is impossible, however, for you to have any real connection with your child no matter how hard you try, or if your child has died, your letting go with love will need to involve the process of closure, which is discussed in the next chapter. Nevertheless, understanding the principles that guide friendships can provide the underpinning for that kind of healing as well.
The following are seven expectations we have of our friends. Notice "friends" can refer to adult children and "they" and "them" can refer to either friends or adult children.
We expect our friends to be there when we need them, if possible.
If our daughter needs to borrow our car because hers is in the shop, it's not unreasonable for us to loan her ours - if we can afford to spare it. If we need a bedroom painted and our son knows how to paint, it is not unreasonable to ask whether he would be willing to help us out - provided he can spare the time and wants to help in that particular project. We often have a quid pro quo with our friends, helping each other in times of need, and we can work toward that arrangement with our children.
Our reciprocity with friends recognizes their right to decide what they will do with their time, money, and energy. And they respect our right to make decisions concerning what we will do. With our children, however, a major stumbling block to letting go can be our assumption that we are somehow required to respond to our child's every request if we are going to be loving parents. Likewise, we can assume our children will always be there for us. Then when they don't respond as we would like (in everything from the number of phone calls to the gifts they give), our hurt response can leave them feeling guilty. And when we don't respond as they would like, we feel guilty. Yet nowhere is it written that parents must loan their child a car just because she asks for it. Nowhere is it written that children must jump whenever their parents need help or feel a bit lonely.
We do not have the right to demand anything from our children, not even love. We can ask. We cannot demand. When we demand that our child act in a certain way or have a particular value (a demand we may express outwardly or simply feel inside), we attempt to deny them their right to decide how they will spend their time, money, or energy. We deny them their right to think for themselves.
One way you can avoid feeling upset and hurt when your child has not responded to your wishes is to notice what it is that you wanted him to say or do. Then make a statement to yourself of what you would have preferred him to say or do. The operative word is "prefer." Take my case as an example.
I would like Matthew to keep us informed of what he is doing and not wait for us to drive seven hundred miles to see him. If I consider my desire for closer contact as an expectation that he must or should think of us more often, I will experience a deep sense of disappointment. If he almost never gets in touch with us except when he wants something from us, it can seem almost as though he has disobeyed a law from the center of the universe, or wherever the source of "musts" and "shoulds" is located. If, however, I say that, "I prefer that Matthew give our family more consideration and wish he would stay in touch more often," I do not have nearly as strong of a reaction. The operative word here is "prefer." Unlike "should," "must," and "ought to," which are words of demand, prefer implies that the other person has the right - and responsibility - to decide what he will do.
We expect our friends to respect our privacy, just as we respect theirs.
A parent I interviewed told me that she has certain rules for herself about how she will relate to her four grown children. For instance, she said, "We always call before going to our children's houses. To do otherwise would be to treat them as though we had a right, just because we are their parents, to expect them to be there for us." Perhaps you feel perfectly content having friends drop in to visit, whether or not your house is a disaster zone. Your children may share your philosophy. But if you wouldn't want your friends (and especially not your own parents or in-laws) to drop in unannounced, don't expect your children to be thrilled when you do it.
The same goes for asking our children how much they are making or how much they have spent on some item we are sure is beyond the range of their budget. Curiosity can kill a cat, and if we aren't careful, it can also screw up perfectly good relationships.
We expect our friends to accept us as we are, including our imperfections, and we accept them as they are. We take pleasure in sharing the victories and defeats that are an inevitable part of every person's life.
A major advantage of letting go is the relief of no longer needing to pretend that we are perfect parents, or perfect people. We no longer have to work so hard to demonstrate that we love our child unconditionally, as many parents assume they must. On second thought, perhaps parents are asked to love their children unconditionally, but they certainly aren't required to like them unconditionally.
Our children aren't required to like us, either. They don't need to enjoy our music or friends or opinions. We need not be offended if they are bored at our parties, or if we are bored at theirs and find the background music much too loud for our taste. Having a comfortable relationship doesn't mean we abandon our values and personal tastes or suspend our judgment. We only need to be willing to view each other with compassion, without illusions or expectations.
Once we're willing to accept each other just as we are, we can stop being defensive. Our children can stop being defensive as well. We can learn to be satisfied with a brief visit from our children during which we are genuinely comfortable in each other's presence, rather than insist on doing things together because that is what we believe good parents and their good adult children are supposed to do.
Remember that we can be "right" or we can have a relationship of respect and trust. We can't have both.
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© Copyright 1994, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Reprinted with permission
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