This tip is for children of parents who fight a lot, parents who are argumentative, stuck as adversaries, treating each other abusively (abusively meaning—in ways that don't feel good to you, each other, or others).
This tip communicates to a young person willing to make a significant positive1 difference in his/her parent's relationship.
We begin with five premises:
- Children want and need2 their parents to treat each other with respect and kindness. Married or not they want and expect their parents to relate with each other lovingly with supportive respect. When this need is not being met the child is incomplete.
- Children learn how to create, have, complete, and recreate relationships by emulating their parents. Children who have not learned (through observation)3 how to recreate a loving relationship after they have caused a rift are missing certain fundamental leadership-communication skills.4
- A child experiences invalidation when they cannot bring about (inspire) harmony within his/her own family. To not be able to effect the experience of love between the two people he/she loves most leaves a child with a sense of futility and hopelessness. Even worse, the child, having tried to suggest healthy choices (food, exercise & drugs), assumes that they (the child) are the cause for the unhealthiness (lack of energy and happy aliveness, perhaps overweight) of his/her parents. Such failures affect a child for life—most grow up to be like his/her parents.
- Until parents demonstrate to their child how to recreate a loving supportive relationship after a fight/divorce they have not finished their job of raising a well-adjusted child. The finest gift parents can give their child is the experience of knowing that through his/her leadership-communication skills they have contributed to their parent's growth—nothing validates5 a child more than to see his/her parents hugging and loving each other.
- A child may conceptually love a parent but he/she cannot respect or admire a parent who feigns to be the victim, who covertly badmouths or communicates blame for the abuse and failure of the relationship. At some level children know that, like themselves, each parent, using his/her non-verbal leadership-communication skills, starts each fight.
For you to recreate a loving supportive relationship between your parents you will have to be willing to acknowledge several things:
1. At some level you've always known that you were responsible for the bickering arguments. As with all observers (enablers) silence condones. Responsibility has nothing to do with fault (we know it has not been your fault). More specifically,
there is a communication that will effect a transformation.
2. You have held a belief that you cannot mediate supportive harmony between them, because you have tried and failed. You have constructed an entire logic system of reasons to support your position, that you are right, that it's impossible, that they don't want to have it work, it's not as bad as it used to be, it's not worth the struggle, they're doing OK, they both have new partners, etc.
3. You have possibly taken sides and have come to believe that one parent is more damaged (abusive) than the other; this reveals that you have a misunderstanding of the word
responsible and of the power of non-verbal abuse.
4. If you keep communicating and relating with both of them as you have been you will most likely produce more of the same.
Step #1 To effect a transformation you must be willing to acknowledge that your present leadership-communication skills produce friction. Yah, silence has an effect.
Step #2 You must be willing to look at the remote possibility that you have in fact been unconsciously intending the friction. No matter what your mind tells you, the results clearly show that you've empowered (supported) both to continue treating each other abusively.
Step #3 You must be willing to not have them, to not interact with either, until each have completed 25-hours of individual therapy. Both parents must acknowledge his or her cause of the arguments (what he/she does, or does not do, to start the arguments) and to be willing to be coached on how to recreate a loving supportive relationship. You must be willing to not interact with, for life, the parent who refuses to attend therapy or relationship communication-skills coaching sessions.
Note: Each year thousands of children run away rather than put up with intolerable living conditions.
For you to read and ignore the above will reveal that you also require 25-hours of therapy and coaching, that you have become stuck as an enabler of abuse; it would reveal that you are addicted to abuse, to abusing and being abused.
Yes, it is abusive of you to support one parent in abusing the other. For you to sit by and support the abuse silently makes you a co-conspirator, an unconscious intender. Picture if you will, what each would think, do, and say, if in the middle of another typical argument between them you would say, "
Either you two get therapy or I'm reporting you to the school counselor." And of course mean it; it backfires on you if it's simply an empty threat.
1 The word
positive reminds us that we all have the same amount of support skills. Some of us are programmed to uplift and forward others, while others, using their unique support skills, cause mediocrity, and that others use their leadership-communication skills to thwart and take others down with them.
2 "need" In order to become successful happy adults.
3 "observation" To include hearing/experiencing. For example: Father to mother (in front of the child), "I get that what I just said didn't feel good."
4 More accurately, the leadership-communication skills they learned cause deceit and friction.
5 "Validates" It's a visceral sensation.
With aloha,
Last edited 6/23/18
