CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Q&A: I'm Tired Of Being My Parent's Parent

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Feeling tired of being the parent to your parents is a common struggle, especially when they rely on you for emotional or even physical suapport. It can be overwhelming to manage their needs while trying to prioritize your own life and the family you're building. Setting boundaries is essential, not just for your well-being but also to maintain a healthy relationship with them. Healing from past hurts and learning how to rebuild relationships with parents who may have caused pain is crucial. It's important to protect yourself emotionally while still offering compassion and understanding, but also recognize when you need to step back to preserve your mental health. In this Q&A episode, Whitney answers real questions from callers about relationship struggles with their parents. Listen and learn how to set boundaries and protect your emotional well-being and the family you are building while maintaining respect for your parents. Tune in! What You Will Learn: [00:01] Intro and what in for you in today’s show  [00:26] How to set boundaries with parents in a compassionate way  [06:08] Healing from physical and emotional abuse from parents  [10:43] How to build a relationship with parents who have hurt you [15:54] When your parent wants to apologize resources  [16:23] Wrap up and end of the show Standout Quotes: “If you are a parent, set boundaries and make sure parenting your parents doesn't take away from your ability to parent your own child because there will be consequences.” [05:38] “You can’t have a real relationship without safety.” [10:34] “Healthy relationships are healthy and important for children; Unhealthy, abusive, or dangerous relationships are unhealthy for children.” [13:22] Let’s Connect Have a question for Whitney? Call Home at 866-225-5466.  Join Whitney’s Family Cycle Breakers Club for further support and discussion on family dynamics at CallingHome.co. Follow the Calling Home community on Instagram. Click here to get “Toxic Positivity” on paperback.  Follow Whitney Goodman on Instagram or TikTok. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice or other medical advice or services, is not a substitute for advice from a qualified healthcare provider, and does not create any therapist-patient or other treatment relationship between you and Calling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home’s Terms of Service. Mixing, editing and show notes provided by Next Day Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca slash yamex. Hey everyone, happy Thursday and welcome back to the calling home podcast. This is our Q&A episode where I answer a real caller question and tell them what I think about

the issue that they are having with their family. As a reminder, if you have any questions for me, you can always leave me a voicemail at 866-2-25-5-4-66. All right, let's hear from our first caller. Hi, Whitney. I really, really love your podcast. So I figured it was time for me to call in and ask a question for you. I deal with parents who were neglected emotionally and somewhat physically in their youth. They are very young.

and as I am now in my mid-20s in trying to navigate my relationships with my parents and with my grandparents on either side, I find that there is a substantial amount of emotional immaturity on all ends surrounding everyone, and it's quite chaotic. And I'm often put in this kind of middle ground as a third parent, as a therapist, to everyone's emotional needs, and as I now am a parent myself, I find this to be, A, quite exhausting. I don't have enough hours in my day to take care of everybody around me. And I also find it wildly inappropriate to be having these conversations with your children. And when I think about it, it started when I was very, very young, you know, four or five years old. How do I

put a boundary around myself to protect my own emotional sanity and protect the family that I am now creating without hurting their feelings further. I try to give them as much grace as possible to understand that they come from unhealed trauma and how that manifests in families. But again, it's just become quite taxing on me mentally and I don't know how to move forward. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you. Thank you for calling in and thank you for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it. I think what this caller is dealing with is something that a lot of people start to realize after they have children. And that is how much effort they have been putting into maybe being a parent to an emotionally amateur parent and how much emotional labor has been going into listening and consoling and therapeutizing a parent who maybe is like this. And once you have that realization and you have the additional stress and labor of both physically and emotionally caring for a young child, it becomes really difficult to go back to the way that things were. So when we think about setting boundaries in a compassionate kind way with someone like this, I always come back to like, okay, what can you control? You can control how often you are answering in situations like this when you are taking calls.

when you're responding to text messages, things like that. You can also attempt to set boundaries around the type of topics that you are going to discuss with this person and what you're willing to give feedback on. And there's a couple of ways to do that. You might explicitly say it. Like, Mom, I cannot talk about your relationship with dad with you. I cannot get involved in X, really trying to set a boundary on certain topics. They might not take that well and they might not respect it. So that might be also when you have to implement things like changing the subject, when those things are brought up, reinstituting the boundary of saying like, hey, mom, you're talking about this again. Remember, I'm not going to have these types of conversations with you. And they might react poorly to that.

Like I said, you might get some type of like what we would consider to be a tantrum or a backlash against that request. And I think this is when you have to remember that like your boundaries are not going to make someone who is emotionally immature or happy. They are probably going to respond to that with pushback, denial, trying to go past the boundary because that's the skills that they have. That's how they know how to get things and that's how they interact with you. You can't expect someone who is typically emotionally immature to become so mature when you are setting boundaries if they don't have that skill otherwise. You know, they're not going to react that way. So acceptance is all. also a big piece here of like, this is how my parents are. This is how they typically respond to me

and what they ask of me. So what can I do differently to try to control that situation? You might also have to cut down on the amount of contact that you have with these people, how often you see them, how often you talk to them, and the types of contact that you have with them. If you notice that phone calls tend to spiral out of control, then you may need to do more less frequent in-person visits, you may need to text more, email, send cards, only talk to each other at a certain frequency, but really just looking at this from a trial and error perspective of like how can I address this in the way that works best for me. It's difficult. It's not going to happen overnight, but I think the important thing to come back to here is that if you are a parent now and you have

children and you are trying to break cycles and do something different in your family, it seems like this is the time to set those boundaries and to make sure that you parenting your parents doesn't take away from your ability to parent your own child because there will be consequences to that. And it seems like that's something that you're really focused on not recreating or doing again. I hope this is helpful for anyone in that situation. And let's get to our next caller. I'm an adult survivor of complex childhood trauma and abuse with not only includes verbal, emotional, domestic violence abuse, but also includes incest abuse. And when I finally was able to speak up as an adult, 33 plus years later, and the long and sort of it is, my father said to me, we are your parents, it falls on us to handle this.

We are sorry you didn't come forward as a child and we wish you would have. and then they called me uncredible to speak untethered from reality they challenged my memory and they tried to inject the memory or lack thereof of the person who committed this abuse

now three years later they want to have a relationship supposedly with me and my wife and my son who was born about seven months ago and in my point of view they gave up any right to be parents and grandparents because when you don't show up for your child

you can't show up for your grandchildren kids that's what my head says my heart is a completely different matter my heart says these are good people who found themselves like many others in a situation that was so overwhelming that they reacted as opposed to being responsive

and that's been the general way my family has gone overreactivity as opposed to any kind of responsiveness and so I'm one wondering if you've dealt with this before and how it's unfolded for other people that you've known and if there is even a remote possibility in circumstances like this where you can repair that kind of rupture. Thank you. Thank you so much for calling and sharing your story with me and with the calling home community. I first want to say, I'm sorry that that happened to you

and that shouldn't have happened to you, and that I totally understand and hear, or I think I understand, but I totally hear the juxtaposition or the two like truths that you're trying to hold here of like what your, what your head says and what your heart says. I think in my experience, that is extremely common and that is something that I have heard many times before of like, I know that this was wrong, it felt wrong. And also these are my parents and I love them and I care about them. And I deeply want this type of family structure or family involvement that I thought was normal and expected and something that I was going to get access to. And so that makes a lot of sense.

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Hey, happens to the best of us. Enjoy some goldfish cheddar crackers. Goldfish have short memories. Be like goldfish. Now, I want to speak generally here because I cannot, I cannot give specific advice on something like this because I think it is so nuanced and there's like so many factors involved. But I want to speak to anybody that has,

been in a situation like this where they have been harmed emotionally or physically by a parent or another family member. And so this includes all different types of abuse, you know, sexual abuse, physical abuse, incest was mentioned here, that this, a lot of this is about safety for me when I start thinking about children, about being believed, and about you as an adults continuing this relationship. And so you mentioned this feeling of like the heart of like this is what I want and this is what I feel, you know, would feel good to have. And my first step would be trying to walk through the reality of that. If that is a reality or if that is a fantasy with someone who is wanting that with a parent who has harmed them in some way in the past or any family member

who has harmed them. And so when you feel like, okay, my parent didn't believe me or they covered something up or they tried to make me feel like I wasn't really a victim or maybe my parent was the one who actually inflicted the abuse, you have to ask yourself like, can I feel safe with these people? Because I don't think you can have a real relationship without safety. You can have a surface level thing, but you can't have like a true relationship. And then when I think about my child, can I, can I feel safe with that? And this is where you kind of have to remove the role of parent or grandparent and uncle, whatever it is and say, let's not look at this person as a family member. Let's look at them just as a human being. Knowing the facts that I know, would I bring my child

around this person? Would it feel safe doing it? And would I be able to back up my reasoning for doing that? If something went wrong, how would I handle it? What is the risk level here? Because your ultimate job as a parent is to protect your child. That is your number one job as a parent, right, is to keep your child safe. Your child cannot protect themselves. And so if that's your number one goal here, and I don't care who it is, if it's your parent, a cousin, or the guy down the street, Can I keep them safe in this situation? Do I feel like enough change has happened to where there's no longer like this threat with this person? And people can change and anything can be resolved or repaired under the right circumstances if those people feel that it has been repaired

for them. Like that's not, that's not for me to judge. And I can't make that judgment off of the information that I've been given here. But I think safety is like the ultimate first thing. And if the safety isn't there, then I'm kind of inclined to think that this is more of like a fantasy of wanting a family to be a certain way than a reality, which is totally understandable to have. The other part here is thinking about like what would this look like if I feel like safety can be achieved. Okay, what would this look like to have my parents around and in my child's life? Would we spend time together? Would my child be alone with them? You know, what boundaries would I need to set? How does my partner feel about this or my co-parent? How would we manage this relationship?

Do these people, in this case, parents seem receptive and open to boundary setting and to me saying, yeah, okay, we can see you, but these are going to be the conditions of that? Or is there a lot of boundary pushing and wanting to like push the envelope a little bit more of like, no, we want to do this, we want to do that? That would be something that would give me a little bit of pause, you know, if the person wasn't willing to be respectful of your wishes as the parent and like what is best for the child in this situation. I am of the belief that healthy relationships are healthy and important for children. Unhealthy, abusive, or dangerous relationships are unhealthy for children.

That means that those standards are true, no matter what the title of the person is. So I don't care if it's a grandparent, I don't care if it's a parent, a sister, whoever it is. If that person is dangerous to the child or could potentially harm them, their title doesn't make that and so that's just something to think about and also to think about you can you be a present good safe reliable parent um around your parents with your trials you know with with with under these circumstances and these are not questions that i can answer or that i can lead you one way or the other anyone listening i think this is ultimately just to like what's your gut reaction when i ask you these things and like what does it feel like to think about spending time in a room together and

you know even role playing this out of like okay I'm going to be sitting with my parents and I'm going to hand it in my baby and I'm going to see them holding my baby and how am I going to react to that? What's that going to feel like? And what are I going to do if I get uncomfortable? Do I feel like I have the self-regulation skills to manage that? And you know, we have a module on calling home for the month of April that's called when your parent won't apologize and it's making me think of that that like I have this checklist on there that's about like can I have a relationship with my parent if they didn't apologize and it walks you through like all these different types of relationships or things you could have just to like jog your thinking of like can I have a

relationship with my parent if they don't apologize if you know or can I do this with them whatever it is and it runs the gamut all the way from like very close relationship to I can't have contact with them if they don't apologize, that that might be helpful for anyone in this situation to work through, to really think about all the different scenarios and make sure that your reality is congruent with like the idea that you have in your head of what this is going to look like. And I don't know with this caller or anyone listening, what your situation is like if your parents have apologized or if they have taken accountability for the way that this played out and the way that it impacted you. But I imagine that that's a big piece of

this. And that's something that kind of needs to be explored and understood as well. I hope that this is helpful. And if anyone would like to go look at that when your parent won't apologize content, we have a ton of great resources at callinghome.com. And you can find the month of April on the content page. And it's called when your parents won't apologize. You can find everything there. Thank you again so much for calling, and I hope that this was helpful. Thank you so much to everyone that called in this week and asked questions. I love being able to help you with these family situations and hopefully help you find a way to better navigate them with your adult family relationships.

You can always call and leave me a voicemail, and I may pick your question for an upcoming Thursday episode of the Calling Home podcast. Just call 866-2-25-5-4-66 and leave me a voicemail. I do these episodes every Thursday, and I love being able to get to help each and every one of you with your family relationships. If you're ready to work on your adult family relationships outside of this podcast and take what you've learned to the next level, we do have the Calling Home community. You can join us for weekly groups and watch videos, take courses, get access to worksheets and more. And those groups are run by me so we can actually meet. And you just need to go to www.callinghome.com and join the Family Cycle Breakers Club. Thanks and I will see you all on Tuesday for another

episode. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Calling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.