How To Love Our Parents When It’s Difficult

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves how to love our parents because it can get difficult.

I may sound old school or un-American, but they are the only people who can love us unconditionally. Sometimes they don’t know how to. Many times not in the way we’d like or accept. But they do, one way or another.

Our relationship with our close family heavily influences our relationships with ourselves and others.

When you spend energy fighting, despising, or avoiding the people who are supposed to be the ones closest to you, you’ll be at least a little miserable inside.

You wonder why things didn’t go the other way. Why you can’t be one of those happy families on the magazine covers. Or why you can’t simply accept each other, after all these years.

I won’t write about traumatic cases because I don’t know how they’re like. I’d like to think those are the exceptions and not the norm.

Still, many of us struggle to cultivate a loving relationship with our parents in “normal” circumstances. We grow further apart as we get older although we know we’ll regret it.

Family triggers our instinctual reactions

We go through many unpleasant experiences during our upbringing (many pleasant ones too, but we’ll focus on the unpleasant ones for now).

We may have incompatible personalities, different aspirations in life, or parental control. These created conflict among us for many years before we set off for an independent life.

We live together for a long time, seeing each other’s defects and standing mutual mistakes (or not). We do stuff that upset or disappoint each other. We come unfiltered in our family because we’ve been through so much together and we know how we have always been.

Our reactions to our parents are often the most instinctual. We’ve developed automatic behavioral patterns throughout the years and take them with us when we grow up.

So what can happen is

• We bear a grudge over unsolved issues well after we’ve left home
• We don’t change communication to adapt to the situation now, so we avoid them when overwhelmed
• We feel judged or controlled when our parents try to get close and know more about our lives
• We think we’re now supposed to take one step back and love our new/real family

But it’s possible to transform our relationships and love our parents even when there are many obstacles. Things can change if we make a conscious effort to change.

Here’s how, step by step:

Step 1: Take the time to know each other as adults

Our relationship needs to be different for this to work. When you’re a kid your parents treat you as someone who needs to be taught, guided.

But the truth is that you’re now an adult with a formed worldview. You don’t want to be “raised” but understood and accepted for who you are.

Get curious and start an adult-to-adult friendship with your parents.

Lure them to treat you as a new friend. You can take small steps to get to know each other: ask them questions you never asked, take interest in their past experiences and current views. Then show them who you are now.

It may feel a bit strange at first but keep at it. It takes a whole process for everyone to get used to a new attitude towards each other.

Whoever your parents are, it’s pretty sure that they won’t want to change their adult friends the way they tried to influence you when you were young. They may influence them, give advice, but respect boundaries.

If nothing changes, nothing will change. You will always talk to each other as you’ve done. You will always react in the same ways as before.

This part is so important because it will allow for a real switch of perspectives and freshen your attitudes towards each other.

Step 2: Sharing is caring, but with healthy boundaries

As mentioned above, when we have an adult-to-adult relationship with others, it comes easy to respect mutual boundaries.

When we try to change an existing relationship that was much more intimate in the past, the boundary part could be tricky. Some parents have a more controlling style and some less, but they tend to maintain it at first.

My mom has always been over-protective.

After I left home it’s still been hard for her to let her worries go and converse with me without willing to control my actions. At first, I tended to resist in the same way I did as a teenager, shutting down the conversation or reacting emotionally. That absolutely didn’t work and we fought each time I visited home.

Then I learned the simple things to say when it was too much, some examples are here below:

• Thanks for asking, I’m still working on that at the moment. I’ll share that with you when I’ve sorted it out.
• Don’t worry, I’ll sort this out on my own.
• I don’t want to think about it now, let’s talk about you!

More importantly, it was helpful to slowly show that I had my views on things, which I shared with her. Only once she understood I wouldn’t change my view on some important aspects of life, she accepted to listen more than influence me.

Step 3: Give it time, try again

Like any soft skill, cultivating a relationship is not a cumulative skill. Our theoretical knowledge won’t help us improve the situation any better than thinking about improving.

It’s only with time and practice that we will make gradual changes in the interactive dynamics with them.

Ask yourself these questions the next time it feels too difficult. How old are you? How many years have you kept this relationship working in this way? How long have you been trying to change it?

You’ll see that it took years, if not tens of years to get you where you are. How can you expect a sudden jump just because you’ve made a couple of tentative?

Trial and error works here too — and it takes time to find the right way.

Keep at it and you won’t regret it. Nothing good comes easy and this is perhaps the most important relationship we have in life.

I hope you will find your way to love your parents, even and especially when it seems so difficult.

Love, Jessica

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Previously Published on medium

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