Improving relationships with difficult parents: a 5-step guide

Relationships with by parents/unsplash

Parents are our guides to this world. However, relations with them are not always easy. If you feel irritated, ashamed, guilty, tired, or even afraid while communicating with your mom or dad, it may be a result of manipulation or passive aggression on their part.

This is stated on the “Psychological Support” platform in Telegram.

Difficult parents can violate boundaries, blackmail, shift responsibility, resort to hyper-protection, demonstrative suffering or destructive behavior. However, even with difficult and toxic parents, communication can be established in 5 steps:

1. Accept.

Realize that you cannot change your parents. You can only learn to safely and environmentally interact with them.

2. Become an observer.
At the same time, monitor what you feel, what your inner state is.

3. Speak directly and frankly.

Do not respond to manipulation with manipulation. Talk about your feelings directly and openly. This will also encourage your parents to have a frank dialogue.

4. Set the tone of the conversation.

Do not respond to provocations, instead set the style of communication yourself. In this dialogue, you should be in the position of an adult who moves the conversation in the right direction.

5. Control reactions.

Do not allow yourself to be drawn into a manipulative game. You – an adult, and therefore must be able to control emotions and, accordingly, – to choose your reactions to the provocations of your mother or father.

If you think that these tips will not have results in communication with your parents, then you probably did not go through all the stages of parental perception and stopped at the stage of “devaluation&rdquo ;. We will remind you that there are three stages of perception of parents that a person must go through:

• idealization: when a mother is the best for a small child;
• devaluation: when a teenager believes that his parents &ldquo ;do not understand anything;
• de-idealization: an adult comes to the realization that his father and mother, like every living person, have both positive and negative traits.

And until you reach the stage of de-idealization in your perception of your parents, you will not be able to learn to communicate comfortably with them. See your mother and father as real people with their own pluses and minuses: just from this realization it will become much easier to communicate with them.