ADULT CHILDREN OF HEART PATIENTS: WHAT ADULT CHILDREN CAN DO TO HELP
The family meeting just described may seem awkward to pull off, but a much more difficult and emotionally painful feat faces adult children who must free themselves from a parental triangle without the blessing or cooperation of the parents. Most people caught in their own versions of the Thibodeaux family struggle ultimately face a painful decision: they must choose to control their degree of participation in their family’s various dramas, because the dramas will continue forever.
In her excellent book, The Dance of Anger, Harriet Goldhor Lerner points out that family members caught in triangles must learn to get out of the middle of tension between loved ones. Furthermore, she recommends the practice of preventive medicine: learn to avoid getting triangulated in the first place, and your family life will go more smoothly.
Even when other family members are not appropriately managing their own lives or their relationships with each other, you are well advised to learn to create, tolerate, and maintain an appropriate degree of involvement with them. Here are eight helpful suggestions for handling complicated family triangles.
- Stay calm when dealing with conflicting family relationships. Anxiety and an inner sense of urgency are the driving forces underlying triangles.
- Stay out of the relationships between other family members. Do not advise, analyze, criticize, blame, attempt to fix, or take sides.
- Instead, casually and caringly express your confidence in the abilities of both of the other parties in the potential triangle to resolve their differences or to survive their lack of resolution: "I know that must be hard for you, and I sure do hope things get better. I love you both, and I hope you'll work this out. You know more about this sort of stuff than I do."
- Maintain a warm, nonjudgmental, nonreactive position, even if you have to react to persistent invitations to gossip. Here is an example of a caring, yet direct, refusal to be triangulated:
"You know, Mom, it's uncomfortable for me when you talk about Dad with me that way. I know you're worried, and I do want you to feel better. But I love both of you. Plus, I don't know how to solve your problems. When I come to visit, I like it best if you and I talk about you and about what's going on in my life. When I'm with Dad, I like to talk about him and about me. I don't like to gossip about either of you to the other. So, why don't we talk about_____" - If you are angry with one family member, deal directly with that person. Do not triangulate another family member by complaining to him or her that you are frustrated about being triangulated by others.
- Do not keep or promote secrets between yourself and another person in your family, particularly if you and that person are in different generations.
- Be open and honest in communicating with your family, but do so without gossiping or blaming another when reporting information. For example, it is perfectly appropriate to respond to a caring inquiry from a concerned family member with such statements as, "Yes, it's true that Betty and I are trying to figure out a new way to deal with our differences. This is hard to do, and we're both struggling right now."
- ang in there! This means two things. First, it is important to not turn your back on family members just because interacting with them is uncomfortable for you. Changing relationship patterns feels awkward until the new way of relating becomes more familiar. No healthy changes in family patterns can occur if you simply distance from each other.
Learning to control yourself and your own reactions is the crucial key to dealing with family triangles. It is a lesson well worth learning. If you are over involved in the problems of others in your family, you are probably making two mistakes:
(1) You are diverting energy away from dealing with your own life (your problems, your marriage, your family); and
(2) you are helping the family members with whom you are triangulated to stay stuck in their relationship problems.
Get out of there! Leave their relationship alone, and they may just surprise you with their individual and collective abilities to change or begin dealing with their old problems in new and healthier ways. There is only one guarantee: if you stay stuck in a family triangle, you increase the odds that someone in the triangle will become more symptomatic.
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