This tip is for children of estranged parents, parents who are separated/divorced and 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 who is willing to formulate the intention to effect a transformation in his/her parent's relationship.
We begin with five premises:
1. Children want and need their parents to love each other. Married or not they want and expect their parents to relate with each other lovingly with supportive respect. When this need has not been met the child is incomplete.
2. Children learn how to create, have, complete, and recreate relationships by emulating their parents. Children who have not learned how to recreate a loving relationship after they have caused a rift are missing certain fundamental leadership-communication skills.
3. A child who cannot bring about (inspire) harmony within his/her own family experiences invalidation. 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, assumes that they 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.
4. 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 validates a child more than to see his/her parents loving each other.
5. 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 each parent brought about the estrangement using his/her leadership-communication skills.
For you to recreate a loving supportive relationship between your parents you will have to be willing to acknowledge several things:
- 1. That at some level you’ve always known that you were responsible for the estrangement. Responsibility has nothing to do with fault (we know it has not been your fault).
2. That you have held a belief that you cannot mediate supportive harmony between them, that you have tried and failed. You have constructed an entire logic system to support your position, that you are right, that it's impossible, they don't want to, it's not worth the struggle, they're doing OK, they both have new partners, etc.
3. That you have possibly taken sides and have come to believe that one parent is more damaged (abusive) than the other.
4. That if you keep communicating and relating with both of them as you have been you will most likely produce more of the same.
Step #2 You must be willing to look at the remote possibility that you have in fact been unconsciously intending the estrangement. 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. The focus of each parent’s rehabilitation is to acknowledge his or her cause of the estrangement 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 and relationship communication skills coaching sessions.
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 to 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, or say, if in the middle of another typical argument between them you would say, "Either you two get therapy or I'm leaving." And of course mean it (it backfires on you if it's simply a threat).
With aloha,
Gabby
Last edited 11/25/19