How to Have a Good Relationship When Your Parents Didn’t

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Are you afraid of following in the footsteps of your parents?

It is well known (or ought to be) that the children of a broken or troubled marriage are much more likely to have trouble forming their own healthy relationships. This is natural, of course; if parents fail to model a good relationship in their marriage, their failure forms the foundational experience of their children, who grow up steeped in the atmosphere of an unhealthy relationship.

This is all the more so since children naturally look to their parents for guidance, and follow their example far more than their precepts. Thus, an unhealthy relationship forms a self-perpetuating cycle by often leaving its children ill-equipped to form or even recognize healthy ones.

Now, if your parents had a bad relationship, that doesn’t mean you and your children are doomed to the same; it only means you have a bit of extra work ahead of you to break the cycle.

Recognize the situation for what it is.

The first step is the simplest, but probably the most difficult: bringing home to yourself the fact that your parent’s relationship was unhealthy and that, as a result, your own experience on this point is warped and unreliable.

As I say, this sounds simple, but in practice it is extremely difficult. It requires us to admit that in one major aspect of life, we do not know what we are doing and have to simply forget or unlearn most of what we have been learning from infancy. It requires us to step out into the dark, putting our trust in ideas that we cannot verify ahead of time and which often seem to run counter to our own knowledge. It must, in fact, be very much like dying.

But there is no other way. If you are ever going to escape from this cycle, you have to first bring home to yourself that there is something to escape to. You have to remind yourself again and again that, though you yourself may not have experienced it, there is something better out there.

In short, the first step to getting a clue is recognizing you don’t have one yet.

Look at what your parents did wrong, and avoid it.

All that being said, there is one point of your experience that you should keep in mind: the experience of what doesn’t work.

Take a serious look at your parents’ relationship and try to identify what they did wrong to bring about the unhealthy background to your life. Perhaps the problem was infidelity, or a mismatch of temperament, or that they had different aspirations in life.

Talk to people who know them well, such as your aunts and uncles, family friends, your own siblings, and so on; people who know the situation and whom you feel you can trust to be honest on such a subject (depending on your specific circumstances, you might even talk to your parents themselves).

Once you think you have discovered the main reasons for their difficulty, take steps to avoid them. It won’t be easy, but you must make a special point of correcting these particular errors, as they are likely to be ones that you are naturally disposed to fall into.

And whatever you do, do not fall into the trap of thinking that, because your parents did something you grew up hating, you are therefore protected from doing the same thing. You may be guarded from that particular expression of the fault. but for that very reason you will likely be disposed to express it in some other way (e.g. the son of a drug addict may express the same character flaws through internet pornography), and the fact that you are fixated on the one will leave you off your guard for the other. Focus on the underlying issue, rather than the way it manifested itself.  

Identify and start to work on these danger areas as early as possible. 

Learn from couples who have a good relationship.

Going off of the first item, once you understand that there are such things as happy couples in the world, try to find some and learn from them. Perhaps your aunt and uncle have always seemed to you a model couple. Maybe the people you sit next to in church appear to be living in fairy-tale like bliss. Whatever the case may be, cultivate the acquaintance and see if you can’t learn a thing or two.

Of course, there is also all kinds of advice on the internet and in books, and these can be a very useful resource, especially in the early stages when you might still be learning what a healthy relationship even looks like. Even as you grow and come to understand more what you are looking for, getting more advice from different points of view on the subject may be helpful, provided you do a little vetting first (e.g. is the person running this vlog currently on her fourth ‘committed relationship’ in as many years?).

But it’s best if they are someone you know and can interact with on a personal level. This allows you to make your own observations, to seek advice specific to your situation from people who actually care about your welfare, and, best of all, it provides a concrete example for you to follow and against which you can judge any advice you do receive.

Besides which, if you can form a close relationship with people who know what they’re doing in life, it will certainly not do you any harm. 

None of this is easy, and it requires direct and conscious attention. Such is the hand you’ve been dealt. Just remember: you are making this effort so that your children will not have to.  

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