Get Ready for Romance

Let me describe an all-too-common conversation I've had with increasing frequency over the course of my career:

A parent enters my office and quickly begins crying. "My son speaks to me horribly. He is constantly berating me and criticizing my performance. Just last night he told me I'm the worst mother he knows. My feelings are so hurt."

Wow. Take a look at that last sentence. This mother's feelings have been injured by the comments of her child. The fact that her feelings have been hurt speaks volumes about the nature of her relationship with her son. And what it says is not good.

Let's begin with this fundamental contention: parents should never give their children the power to hurt their feelings. Our children can frustrate us, disappoint us, annoy us, delight us, or make us proud, but the relationship should never be one where our feelings can be hurt by anything our children say to or about us. Let's explore why.

Who is it that can hurt our feelings? Peers whose approval is important to us-friends, spouses, colleagues, other adult family members. But if our children can hurt our feelings-that is, if we give them the power to do so-it means that we want their approval. And if we want our children's approval, we don't have the sort of relationship with our children that they need from us.

Our job is to guide them, direct them, nurture them, restrain them, teach them, but it is not to have a good relationship with them or win their approval. They should be seeking our approval, not we theirs.

If you have given your children the power to hurt your feelings, then you have more of a peer-to-peer relationship with your child than an adult-to-child one. It seems preposterous to Since I have a 13-year-old daughter, I am always reading books to understand her behavior and improve mine with her. I just finished Not Much Just Chillin’ the hidden lives of middle schoolers by Linda Perlstein. Linda spent a year shadowing a group of kids in a suburban Maryland middle school. Her book offers insight on how middle school kids think, what is important to them and some brain development information that can tell us parents why they act the way they do. It doesn’t offer much in terms of how to deal with them on a daily basis but does provide insight in the hopes that we may be able to empathize with them between arguments. The presents have been opened,we all feel 10 pounds of e xtra weight and we’ve spent time with family. Now that its January, and the whole year is ahead, I’d like to suggest that instead of the traditional New Year’s Resolutions, each of us take a look at our family situations and evaluate how they impact our life. The purpose of this reflection would be to determine if we are happy with the status quo or if we would like to make changes before next year’s holiday. In essence, I am suggesting something akin to tax planning. We all have to pay taxes. Can we analyze the last holiday season and determine if we paid too much or just the right amount. If it was too much, is there anything we can do to reduce next year’s payment? Parents For those of us who still have living parents, is it worthwhile to examine this relationship? When you are with your parents, do you feel like an adult or do you revert back to the roles of childhood? Are these old roles still useful or even relavent? Are you angry and hurt after spending time with your parents? Could this be because you are carrying old resentments and expectations of them? How likely are your parents to change? Unless they are highly motivated or insightful, people who have lived their live a certain way are unlikely to change no matter how much they love us. What can potentially change is how we view our relationship with our parents. Many things factor into our openness for change. Perhaps we realize that our parents’ health is declining. Maybe we consider the pain that our parents faced in their own lives and as we mature we can better understand how this might have impacted their world view. Finally maybe we get to a point in our life where we just try to forgive them and move on. If there is tension when spending time with parents, consider changing your view of them to reduce this tension, not for them but for you. This is difficult to do alone and may require the aid of an objective person like a therapist. Siblings Siblings share the same upbringing and often know us better and longer than any other person in our lives yet distance can be present both emotionally and geographically. Issues like birth order, perceived favoritism and simply differences in personality can contribute to this distance. When evaluating the sibling relationship it is useful to look at if you were ever close to each other and when this changed. How are you alike and different? If there has been a rivalry since you were both little, what were you competing for? Does this still matter to either of you? Often siblings unite as their parents age and they begin to parent their parents. If you have the opportunity to spend time with your sibling, try to get to know them as they are today. Often our perceptions of our siblings are as they were as children. Be open to the possibilty of discovereing a new friend in a sibling. Friends Just as we analyze our family relationships, so may you also analyze your friendships. At times when family bonds are tenuous, friends fill in the emotional gaps. Other times friends may disappoint for a variety of reasons. Now might be a good time to review your freindships. Are my friends good friends to me? What kind of a friend am I? Who might I like to get close to this year and how might I accomplish that? As you examine relationships in the post holiday season, consider if they are they are working for you. If so, keep up the good work. If not would you like for things to be different. Specifically what would you like to change and what would it cost to make that change. Consider being as intentional about your relationship planning as you are about your taxes. In the end, the payoff might be greater. Feeling stressed? Getting angry a lot? Problems in your relationship? I am a therapist who can help by talking with you via email, phone or office visits. I also provide e-courses for stress and anger management. I also provide coaching services for truckers who are on the road for weeks at a time. I do this via phone and email so they can stay on the road and have access to a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. I work with children of all ages and college students. I enjoy working with families in forming solid attachments, abuse and trauma post-care, teaching parenting skills, working with learning and physical disabled, and helping foster children transition. I also work with families on a whole to discuss problems and issues and try to find healthy solutions for grieving families, blending families, and foster/adoptive families.

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