In my work as a therapist, I find that many families relate through emotionally immature patterns, often unconsciously. Children suffer the consequences of these patterns and go on to repeat them in their own families as adults. That is unless they become aware and intentionally practice breaking the cycle.
With awareness and practice, each generation can become more mature. As parents practice more emotionally mature ways of relating, children go on to have a stronger sense of self, greater emotional well-being, and healthier relationships as adults.
Here are 4 things emotionally mature parents work on not doing…
Emotional Parentification
Parentification is when parents rely on children to fulfill their emotional voids and needs. This can sometimes manifest as placing children in roles that another parent or adult should be in. This pattern is often driven by a parent’s unmet emotional needs in their present lives or from their childhood.
Parents are not doing this intentionally, but the children become a target for the parent’s emotional hunger nonetheless. This puts a lot of demands on children and limits their ability to fully emotionally develop.
How This Manifests:
Parents expect children to help soothe and regulate their difficult emotions.
Parents seek constant attention, validation, approval, and displays of affection and love from children.
Parents make children their confidant, surrogate spouse, hero, or little helper.
Parents expect children to save them from their loneliness, especially in later stages of life as children go on to have adult lives and commitments.
Parents expect children to be responsible for taking care of the emotional needs of other family members when the parent can’t or doesn’t want to.
To Practice Instead:
They work on understanding and evolving their emotional voids so they don’t act out their emotional hunger on their children or other people.
They have emotionally fulfilling relationships with their spouse and other adults.
They have several different sources from which they get their emotional needs met such as work, hobbies, friends, artistic practices, spiritual commitments, self-care routines, and personal development pursuits.
They have a part of their identity that’s separate from the children and spend time away from the children with people and projects they care about.
They practice self-validation, self-regulation, and self-love, and therefore liberate the children from having to help with those things.
They have a healthy understanding of their own emotions and ability to manage their emotional connections with other family members on their own.
Parental Projection
Projection is the process in which parents work out their fears, insecurities, unresolved attachments, and unlived lives on their children. By anxiously worrying about the children, parents avoid turning toward the things inside them that need attention. I talk about this pattern in greater depth here.
As a result, children often feel trapped by their parent’s pressures. They don’t have room to be their own person, learn how to function well on their own, or live out their unique dreams and life choices.
How This Manifests:
Parent unconsciously use their children to work out unresolved attachments with their own caregivers.
Parents anxiously focus on what‘s wrong with their children and unconsciously avoid acknowledging their own insecurities and fears.
Parents live vicariously through the adult children or expect the adult child to be the things they did not get to be.
Parents put a lot of pressure on a child to get things right and react to their shortcomings. They fear the child’s failure, rejection, disappointment, or pain because they experience it as their own due to the lack of emotional and psychological differentiation between parent and child.
Parents unconsciously expect children to live in their shadow or become the same as they were.
Parents unconsciously compete with their children, or feel envious or resentful of their children’s successes.
Parents believe their children owe them for the sacrifices they made as a parent to raise the child, demand loyalty and favors, and resent the child for what they didn’t get to live.
To Practice Instead:
They acknowledge and work through their unresolved emotional attachments with their family of origin and other adults in their lives on their own, potentially with the help of a therapist or other means.
They focus on processing the roots of their own fears and insecurities own their own, potentially with the help of a therapist, and free the children from this burden.
They chase their dreams, keep doing their own inner work, keep learning, and keep developing new parts of themselves.
They allow children space to be different, take risks, learn from mistakes and failure, have their own messy emotions, and trust children to be capable resilient, and grow from their experiences.
They celebrate their children’s successes and happiness even when children have accomplished more than they ever have or will.
They understand that children are not born to fulfill the parent’s dreams, expectations, and ideals, but rather to be their own person and live their own unique life.
Emotional Contagion
Misdirecting emotions can manifest in many forms, but the core root of the pattern is that parents struggle with acknowledging, regulating, and processing difficult emotions within themselves.
They end up putting them on the children through blaming, dumping, acting them out, getting defensive, or creating emotionally reactive drama.
How This Manifests:
Parents emotionally dump or act out their emotions on their adult children.
Parents blame others or play victim in emotionally charged conflicts.
Parents emotionally reactive or highly dramatic over little (or even big) things.
Parents defensive or turn it back the other way when adult children express dissatisfaction or hurt in the relationship.
To Practice Instead:
As a parent, acknowledge, regulate, and process your own emotional issues instead of expecting your adult children to soothe you or fix your emotional and relational problems.
Keep the focus on your own experience during a conflict or disagreement with an adult child and take responsibility for your part in the relationship dynamic.
Understand that emotional reactivity is contagious and practice remaining calm and grounded in emotionally difficult times.
Listen to your adult child’s feelings, needs, and wishes, which frees them to be authentic and honest in the relationship with you.
Boundary Negation
Enmeshment is a relationship with little to no boundaries and where people lose a sense of who they are as a separate person. Everyone gets pulled into everyone else’s drama and emotions spread like wildfire from one person to all members.
In enmeshed families, boundaries and individuality are experienced as threatening. Family members are expected to help save each other or at least make each other feel better.
How This Manifests:
Parents pull children their children into their drama and conflicts with other family members.
Parents get defensive or emotionally reactive when their children set or enforce a boundary.
Parents feel threatened when their children express their individuality through independent beliefs, behaviors, social connections outside the family, and life choices.
Parents overfunction for others and jump into save them when they are struggling with something.
To Practice Instead:
Ask adult children regularly what their limits and preferences are and consider them in your interactions with them.
Respect the boundaries adult children set with them without taking it personally.
Enforce and model healthy boundaries with their adult children and other people.
Encourage their adult children to think and make choices for themselves, even when it’s different than the parent’s beliefs or ideals.
Encourage adult children to live their own lives, even if the parents miss them.
They resolve their conflicts one-to-one with the other adults involved and model good conflict resolution skills for the children.
A Final Note
All parents will do some of these patterns to some degree or another throughout the course of parenting. All parents were likely on the receiving end of some of these patterns as well.
Patterns of relating pass from generation to generation. Some of them are perfectly adaptive. Some have room to be evolved. Most are unconscious and unintentional.
The practice of reflecting on these patterns is to help us a) develop greater awareness, b) interrupt the patterns that no longer serve our well-being, and c) continue evolving into more mature ways of relating.
One of the greatest gifts we can give future generations of our lineage and humanity as a whole is to continue our own personal evolution as parents.
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