Realigning Your Relationship with Your Parents/Caregivers

It might be easier for some of us to admit than others, but here’s a truth: we all have imperfect parents/caregivers.

And another truth: our imperfect parents/caregivers were raised by imperfect parents/caregivers.

And yet another truth: Our parents passed down their imperfections to us—and this has a profound impact on our ability to create healthy relationships as adults.

For most of us, realizing and accepting the imperfections in our upbringing can be both cathartic and complicated. Not only that, but it can also be difficult to know what to do about these realizations.

Moving beyond the imperfections in our upbringing

How do you balance the recognition that your parents/caregivers were imperfect with your desire to break free from childhood patterns that no longer serve you?

It starts with 2 kinds of forgiveness:

1.     Forgiving yourself for how you coped as you were growing up, which I write about here. 

2.     Forgiving your parents/caregivers for being imperfect—and for passing on their inherited imperfections and/or trauma(s) to you.

This post focuses on the second of these two: forgiving your parents/caregivers for their imperfections.

Forgiving your parents/caregivers

Forgiving your parents/caregivers starts with knowing where they’re coming from.

You want to get to a place where you can recognize that your parents raised you based on what they experienced in their emotional environment growing up.

You want to be able to acknowledge that they did the best they could, given their circumstances.

At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that understanding your parents’ perspective does *not* mean you have to deny your own pain. As children, if something goes wrong, we automatically think someone is to blame. As adults, we want to replace blame with understanding, to focus on cause and effect instead of right and wrong.

Ultimately, the goal is to develop empathy for your parents/caregivers and their imperfections as you hold on to empathy for yourself and your own imperfections.

What if your parents/caregivers are dysfunctional?

If you come from a dysfunctional family, it can be challenging to develop empathy for your parents/caregivers and protect yourself in the process.

For example, my client Karine grew up in a physically and psychologically abusive home with two parents who also came from abusive homes.

For Karine, cutting off contact with her parents for a while turned out to be the best way to heal, give herself space to grow her self-esteem, and let go of some of the resentment she felt toward them.

In the meantime, she worked on creating secure attachments with other people. (In a secure attachment, you strengthen your capacity to hold on to your perspective and understand the other person’s perspective at the same time. This is an important emotional skill in any relationship, especially in relationships with your parents/caregivers.)

Letting go

After years of being out of touch, Karine felt ready to try again with her parents. She decided to meet them for lunch. Though they told her they were grateful to have her back in their lives, things deteriorated quickly. Toward the end of the meal, her dad went on the attack: “You’ve always been manipulative and selfish,” he said. “It’s your fault we’re not close.”

Karine left the lunch in tears. I can’t have a relationship with them, she thought. It’s just too painful.

In the end, only you can decide whether it’s possible to have a healthy relationship with your parents/caregivers. The question to ask yourself is: Can you hold on to your true self as you interact with them?

After that painful lunch with her parents, the answer for Karine was ‘no.’

After you establish that, it’s important to ask yourself why. If you can’t hold onto yourself, is it because you haven’t built up enough internal strength? And/or because your parents are stuck in their own pain loop and incapable of being emotionally close?

These questions can be tough to answer. And they can change over time. They certainly did for Karine.

Resetting

As she grew older, Karine worked on strengthening her relationship with herself and building a fulfilling life. Besides creating a circle of supportive friends and deepening her relationship with her significant other, she had an accounting job she loved. She reached a point where she felt she didn’t need her parents anymore to feel happy and fulfilled. That’s when I encouraged her to get in touch with them again.

“Why?” she asked. “Why would I want to get back in touch with people who’ve caused me so much pain?”

Because when you stay cut off from your parents, I said, you’re telling yourself you’re not strong enough to be in relationship with them.

Now that she’d developed such a strong relationship with herself, I wanted her to feel her power to cope with anything and everything in her life—including her relationship with her parents.

So she met them for lunch again. This time, she went in with an attitude of empathy and emotional curiosity. In the end, she came away with more knowledge and a new understanding of the trauma her parents experienced as children. She cried again, but this time the tears came from relief instead of pain. For her, this was a major true self win.

What’s the takeaway here? When we can let go of anger and blame in relation to our parents/caregivers—even if they are dysfunctional—we create the emotional space to form healthy relationships with other people. And with ourselves.

Do you want to learn more about how to reset your relationship with your parents/caregivers? In my book, Life Launch, I write about how to realign and release negative emotional patterns from childhood and how to build healthy relationships in adulthood. Download a sample chapter here.