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In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about transitioning into your own person while changing your relationship with your parents as an adult.
In this podcast you’ll find:
- Graves Model Podcast
- Graves Level 3 – Red: Warlord
- Usually, people enter this transition in teen years.
- Some people have a truncated experience with Graves 3, so they may still have an attachment to parents that isn’t healthy.
- On the other extreme, a person can experience Graves 3 so strongly that they have permanently severed their relationship with their parents.
- At some point, we make the transition where we no longer have to be a dependent.
- Girls – Lena Dunham
- Rebellion starts to wane as we reach adulthood and our relationship with our parents will often shift again to a healthier place.
- Parents may not want the relationship to change.
- A person’s dependency on parent’s worldview may not always be financial; it may be ideological.
- DNA level programming tells us to rely on our parents for safety and instruction, which is why a parent’s betrayal is so painful.
- We pass on our DNA to our children, but we also pass on our ego. Our expression of who we are.
- The ego itself wants to live. People put their names on buildings, gravestones, children.
- We download all of our BS into the pristine little hard drives of our children.
- We are programmed to seek our parents, and our parents are programmed to download their egos into us.
- Cords can tie us to our parents, and our attempt to separate can cause some resistance.
- Add in ideologies where your parents taught you a specific belief system, and it becomes a more significant burden to the next generation.
- Stephen Covey’s Dependency Model:
- Dependence – complete reliance
- Independence – Zero reliance
- Inter-dependence – contextual reliance
- As children, we are extremely dependent upon our parents.
- As we grow older, we become more independent.
- As we mature, we begin to value the relationship we have with our parents, as peers.
- Cord Cutting podcast
- The more idyllic a childhood, the more likely someone will crave the safety that came with their Graves 2 experience.
- Such an adult can find it hard to generate safety from within, so when a parent dies the adult child feels unsafe.
- A non-idyllic childhood could look like a child’s neverending need for approval. Followed by resentment after realizing their childhood was colored by their parent’s choices.
- When you have an unhealthy relationship with your parents, your connection to them can be profound.
- Find the peace within yourself.
- It’s incredible how much our parents can still influence and trigger us no matter how old we get.
- This may come down to how we make peace with immortality.
- We know they are trying to infuse their ego on us.
- Make peace with your parent’s death.
- Let go of the responsibility that you have to keep their memory and attachments alive.
- Are you keeping traditions alive because of a sense of responsibility to your parents?
- It’s okay that an ego dies. Express your ego in your way. Live your life.
- Make a list with your parent’s names at the top.
- List their core values.
- Write down your core values.
- Compare and contrast the two lists.
- You don’t have any responsibility to your parent’s frame of reference – especially if they weren’t very good parents.
- Most people try to improve upon the way they were raised.
- You aren’t stuck in your point of origin. It doesn’t define your future.
- All the stuff you were looking for from your parents is actually within you.
- Real parenting is preparation. Teaching the child to be an autonomous human being.
- Take your power back.
- The true definition of peace with your parents is forgiving them then realizing there is nothing to forgive. They did their best.
- Find the power within you to get the needs met that were missing during childhood.
- You will know you have healed when there is no more resentment or blame.
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12 comments
Thanks for this interesting podcast. I realise I’ve spent my life feeling unsafe and excluded, and probably the explanation is that my dad ‘betrayed me’ by dying when I was 13. Then instead of my mum keeping me safe, she ‘betrayed me’ by being unreliable, constantly changing, angry, offended by everything I said and did. Sometimes she was nice and kind, but I NEVER knew which mum I’d get- the nice or the nasty one.
I reckon she has narcissistic traits, and delights in competing with me, pulling the rug out from under my feet, making promises she never intended to keep, being the centre of attention whenever she can e.g. at my wedding, my 40th birthday, my daughter’s christening.
I think the cord cutting exercise will be great- I’ve spent my life hoping she’ll be the nice mum every time. But she never is and over my 49 years I’ve been pulling away further and further until I’m hardly interested in her.
Thank you Chelsea for sharing you experience. It sounds like you have a lot of courage to write your dad a letter like you did. It tells me that no matter what healing and growth comes next… you’ve got what it takes to face it. It encourages me to hear. :-)
Thanks Lia for the comment. I would suggest (as you are probably already suspecting) that you may need to create some independence around resource as the first step. It’s hard to make autonomous choices when you are physically dependent. It can be done – it’s just more challenging.
Thanks Caty for leaving your story. Love to hear how mapping out your parent’s values helps you gain insight.
Great advice. These ideas around deriving permission, safety and autonomy from within is crucial in all relationships, and it was great to be reminded of that. I’m also interested in trying to articulate the ways in which my parents’ core values have subtly crafted my paradigms. For example, my dad has always made it clear that his wife (my mom) is the most important person in his life, even to the point where he tends to prioritize her needs above his own. Consciously, I feel rebellious against this idea—i’ve always felt that it’s a sign that internal work needs to be done if you’re privileging another person’s needs over the self. Considering that the self is the foundation on which all relationships are built, it seems crucial to build some type of boundaries. But I wonder whether this belief my dad has around my mom being the most critically important person in his life has built a potentially unhelpful paradigm in my head around relationships. I’ve noticed myself having trouble making boundaries between myself and other people, and it’s something i’m trying to get better at. It seems like articulating the values of our parents is a really interesting way to gain insight on how early childhood programming might be playing an undue role in our decision making.
Thank you both so much for all your insights. you have no idea how much your thinking has positively impacted my life. : )