How to Cope With Difficult Parents – For Adult Children
When Your Parents Don't Understand You - or Make Your Life Hell
Knowing how to cope with difficult parents as an adult child will help you find happiness and peace in your life. These tips for dealing with toxic parents will help you overcome childhood difficulties and achieve your life goals.
Before the tips, a quip:
“Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy,” said Robert A. Heinlein.
Easy childhoods can set you up to falter in adulthood because you haven’t learned the necessary life skills. But, having difficult parents can certainly set you back, too! To learn more about coping with difficult parents, read Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life by Dr Susan Forward.
And here are three ways to move past an unhappy childhood…
How to Cope With Difficult Parents – For Adult Children
Note that these coping tips are more psychological than practical.
For practical ways to cope with difficult parents, read 6 Tips for Toxic Relatives – How to Handle Family Problems.
Some moms are more apt to boil rabbits and stalk married men (like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction) than balance a successful white-collar job with a nurturing home life (like Claire Huxtable). Adult children of difficult parents need to know how to build good relationships with them anyway – even if we have a mother-in-law who doesn’t accept us – or we suffer the consequences.
I know firsthand what it’s like to cope with a difficult parent; I’ve learned to love my mother, who has struggled with schizophrenia for most of my life (which made for a very unhappy childhood for me). If you’re the adult child of an alcoholic, mentally ill, or toxic parent – these suggestions may help you connect with them and and help you move past your own unhappy childhood.
Remember: even the most unorthodox childhood can be a springboard to success – depending on your attitude and perspective!
Become Aware of Your Feelings
“When we’re not aware of what we’re feeling, the feeling becomes the master,” writes Sue Patton Thoele in The Courage to be Yourself. “A repressed or suppressed emotion builds up power until it’s impossible to contain and, as a result, erupts destructively.”
Take resentment, for instance. Maybe you feel rejected because your mother smothers you or keeps “lending” thousands of dollars to your brother. Maybe your mom nags you to lose weight, get married, clean your house, or get your hair out of your eyes (oh, to have a normal mother!). Avoiding your feelings of anger or resentment does pay off – otherwise you wouldn’t do it. Avoiding your feelings is easier, less painful, and requires less energy — in the short run.
In the long run, however, swallowing your feelings about your childhood or difficult parents can lead to anxiety, depression, physical illnesses, and unhealthy relationships. Violent eruptions become more likely, such as emotional meltdowns over computer glitches and screaming fits over lost keys. If you’re coping with difficult parents as an adult child, you need to find healthy ways to express your feelings.
Accept Your Feelings
Knowing and accepting your feelings brings freedom and a stronger connection with difficult parents. As an adult child, simply saying out loud, “It aggravates me when mom tells me how to discipline my kids!” can be liberating.
Resisting your feelings makes them stronger; accepting your feelings makes them manageable. Talk about difficult parents: when I was in high school my mother regularly visited me at lunch – she had long scraggly hair and wore dirty, baggy street-person clothes. I fought my humiliation and embarrassment for years and those feelings grew, just like compound interest.
When I couldn’t swallow my pain anymore (it was leaking out in self-destructive ways), I finally let myself simply feel my despair. And it was bad, but then the feelings became less strong. Now, it’s easier to connect with my difficult mom because…
It is what it is.
Practice Forgiveness
Oprah recently said that forgiveness is releasing the hope that things could have been different. True forgiveness is realizing the gift in a bad childhood – and learning from it. Every experience you’ve had makes you who you are and makes you more yourself. Your unique personality and spirit wouldn’t be yours if you had different parents or siblings – even if you got a bad deal. Coping with difficult parents is easier when you accept and let go of the past. Sometimes that means letting go of someone you love.
Forgiveness is easier when you accept that your parents did the best they could.
For more family help, Dysfunctional Families – 5 Tips for Solving Family Problems.
If you have thoughts or questions about coping with difficult parents, please comment below.
Related Articles:
- Should You Lend Your Adult Child Money? Tips for Parents
- How to Cope With Children Who Are Energy Vampires
- Coping With Controlling Parents? 5 Ways to Take Your Life Back
Category: Family Tips, Parenting Tips, Psychology Tips, Solving Relationship Problems
Thank you for your article. It is nice to at least know others struggle like I do.
My storey:
I grew up with an alcoholic father and cyclical mother (sometimes she was great). I have worked past my childhood (I think). Where my challenge comes in is my adult life. I am an only child and am 31 now and live a country away from my parents. I am successful by most definitions, but still struggle with challenges in my own life to keep me on track. 6 years ago, my grandmother passed away and my mother “lost it”. I took care of everything regarding my grandmothers passing and tried repeatedly to help and talk to my mother. After a series of drunk nights from my mother including some suicide attempts and a most concerning shooting between her and my father on Christmas eve, I cut down my interaction time selfishly because I couldn’t take the stress anymore and it was too much. My interaction was about once ever 2 mos. This was fine with me and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. A couple years later I moved internationally, at this point life with my parents got worse again. My mother wants my calls weekly but I have nothing to say and I get upset by most of them. Then recently she had a nervous breakdown and her therapist has been emailing me issues I am supposed to fix. The challenge I have is sadly I don’t believe the stuff my mother tells her therapist because my mom has a pattern of chronic lying. Similarly I know my parents fight, have a bad relationship, and have many many financial issues (of which they don’t help themselves). I spent the first 25 years of my life taking care of them and trying to help their relationship and give them financial advise to no avail. They made me who I am of which I am greatful but…. I feel like enough is enough and at some point they need to take care of themselves I have tried, a lot and I just don’t know what to do anymore. They don’t want to hear my logic and I can’t take the stress they bring to me. I feel like an awful daughter so it’s like I have no way to win. I either talk with them and feel like crap or don’t and feel like the bad daughter. I just want to live my life. There is more, as I am sure there is with everyone else, but in short I just don’t know what I should do. For my sanity I keep the communications minimal but there is no one to take care of them an they haven’t prepared for any kind of retirement.
So I have read some people’s issues and comments and it’s crazy how parents are supposed to love you no matter what. If you are doing positive things for yourself I feel you are on the right track. So a few years ago, I saw my mom wasn’t doing to well in her living situation and I asked her to live with me(I ended up paying most of the bills) Two and a hlaf years later she is still with me and there was some bad things said. Moving ahead,I met my fiance and he moved in. OMG she went at it with him calling him all kinds of names and I said I’m moving out. She stated tha she would (she didnt). So I ended up applying for another job and my fiance and I moved. Moving forward again.I told her she had to get off my cell phone plane and she said it was fine. She never calls back and I had no idea where she was. Finally I got into her bank acct to see if she was actually alive and to find out, she was using her card. I SAID IM DONE!!! She doesn’t contact me for two months. She contacts me by text (looks like on accident) I ask where is she?? NO RESPONSE!!! So I’m like ok cool! So now I’m getting married in three months and she didn’t once ask to help or seem happy at all. I can’t even stand looking at SAY YES TO THE DRESS, because the mother/daughter moments of happiness wasn’t there for me. I have been so damn stressed over this. My fiance is a great guy , he’s sweet, funny, he’s not a millionaire, but he works his a$$ off to pay the bills and I’m happy with that. My friends say that I have replaced her with him bc I am the only child and a female. This has been so hurtful and now I may have a medical issue that may be cancerous and this will add more stress in my life and the wedding is so close. I have thought of seeing a counselor, but I think they will put me on pills or something and I don’t want to end up a drone. I think I have a bit of an anxiety. Depending on my diagnosis, I might have to see someone, because I am a little sensitive right now and it hurts my relationship at times, because my attitude isn’t right at times. As for my mom, I’ll text her the address and time of the wedding and it’s up to her, but of course I’ll be dead a$$ hurt if she doesn’t show up and I’ll have to tell everyone a lie on why she isn’t there (sigh) THIS IS BS and not nice of her as a mother.