5 Tips You Can Use to Improve Your Relationship with your Parents
Adults often struggle with their relationship with their parents. It’s painful.
Often hurts and wounds from childhood are in need of healing. Parents may not be aware of the hurts or come from a family where you just “suck it up”. You desire to have a relationship with your parents but you have been hurt by them. Parents aren’t perfect. Parents have their own wounds and generational baggage, too.
Establishing one’s individuality as an adult can also be challenging for both parents and children. Parents may have difficulty seeing their child as an adult, and the adult child wants to be their own person.
There is hope for adult children and their parents to have a healthy relationship.
In our last blog, we had tips for parents to improve communication with their kids. Today, we have tips for the adult children to help heal the relationship with their parents.
What the adult child can do:
Talk more
As counselors, we usually encourage people to listen more and talk less. If the parents are willing to listen, the child needs to be willing to talk more and express what they are thinking and feeling.
The extreme of talking less is the silent treatment. Silent treatments are often used for power and control. It does not help the relationship.
Sometimes, though, a break is necessary. If so, provide clear communication on what needs to be done during the time of silence to help heal the relationship for when communication starts again.
Talk face to face or by phone
Often, the adult child texts their complaints to the parents. Text and email can easily cause misunderstandings.
The best communication is face to face. If that is impossible, a phone call will help clearer communication.
Please know that if speaking directly with your parents is too overwhelming, it’s okay to bring a neutral, safe person to help with communication. If speaking with your parents is dangerous, do not meet face to face.
Boundaries are good
Boundaries are good. Walls are not. Walls keep everything out, even the good.
Healthy boundaries allow for give and take, allowing for good to flow and keeping out the bad. The flow goes both ways.
Boundaries work best when each person knows their job is to control themselves, not anyone else. Know how to allow people to be responsible for their stuff. But that means you have to be responsible for your stuff, too.
Use “I” statements
When we start sentences with, “You made me…” we almost guarantee the response we will get will be defensiveness. We want the goal to be healing of the relationship so your parent and you can have a good relationship. This is not the way to achieve the goal.
Start with, “I feel or I think…” It allows your parent to hear you. In relationships we want to be heard and understood. When we use “I” statements and active listening we can move to a deeper understanding of one another.
Be responsible for you
We each are responsible for our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Blaming our parents isn’t helpful in taking ownership of ourselves. When we own our stuff, we have the power to make changes. When we put the responsibility for how we feel onto someone else, we give them the power.
Broken relationships are hard.
But they can be healed when both parties are willing to take steps towards one another. New ways of communicating help facilitate the healing.
Communicating clearly with your parents isn’t easy, but it can bring a deeper understanding of one another. Appreciate who they are and where they have come from. They’re human, too. Even though it’s hard, as you work to be more vulnerable with your parents, and them with you, old hurts can be transformed into deep connection.
Keep loving them.
Written by Cindy Picht, LPC, CEO
About Cindy:
Cindy is director and co-founder of Light the Way Counseling. She is a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional and a Certified Clinical Anxiety Treatment Professional. She combines her skills with compassion and encouragement to help people find hope and healing.