What You Resist Persists
Everyone likes a short cut. People often ask me for a “technique” they can apply to improve their marriage and parenting. Well here’s what you want, but you might not like it…
Go visit your parents for at least one weekend every three months. Confide in them about what’s really going on in your life. And earn their trust, so that they confide about their lives to you. The best thing you can do for your children, and for your own life trajectory, is to spend more time with your parents. Not just “face time,” where everyone’s polite but distant. Rather, you need to become best friends.
Before you recoil in horror at spending all that precious time with Mom and Dad, let me explain what’s in it for you. What you resist persists. What you distance from, ignore, or pretend doesn’t matter persists. Consider your relationship with your best friend. You both have your peccadilloes, and you’ve probably had your fights. But you’re willing to accept a lot of disagreement, because of the pay-off of just how great all that intimacy feels. You can confide anything in your best friend. Nobody understands you like your best friend. You can call your best friend with an emergency at two in the morning, and he/she won’t be ticked off with you. What is better than that kind of refreshing, fun, honest intimacy with your best friend?
The answer is, that kind of refreshing, fun, honest intimacy with your parents. But that seems either impossible, or repulsive, right? I know, because I’ve been there. When I was young, I absolutely adored my mother, and feared my father. When I became a teenager, I avoided my mother, and resented my father. Then when I graduated from college, I avoided both my parents, and only visited once a year (if that). Why? Because I couldn’t see what was in it for me. It wasn’t fun to be with them, because they weren’t “cool.” Because I’m the youngest of seven, my parents were old enough to be my grandparents, so they didn’t understand me. After college when I told my dad I wanted to travel and live in Asia, he said, “Dave, why don’t you get established first? Once you have a career and are making good money, you’ll be able to see the world in style.” This made sense, and yet I knew it wasn’t true. I knew that if I got “established” in some career or married, I’d never be able to pull myself away to embark on my Marco Polo fantasies. It was “now or never,” and I chose now. I lived in Tokyo, Moscow, and Paris for a total of six years. I traveled to over fifty countries. I had the time of my life, and I have no regrets. But my parents worried about me constantly, and never understood why I wouldn’t listen to them.
So, why would I bother with my parents? I took pride in my independence. I paid off the loans they had given me for college as quickly as I could, because I chafed under the harness of financial dependence on them. I never confided my problems in them, because it only made things worse. If I was worried about some problem that was eating me up, to tell my parents would only make it ten times worse. They would get upset and worried, and bark out old-fashioned advice that never seemed useful, and the whole process would just leave me more upset. Who needs that? Why would I subject myself to their crazy-making? I was now a mature adult, and it was my job to solve my own problems as painlessly as possible. Talking to my parents about it just amplified the problem. So, I just pulled away, and convinced myself that this was part of growing up.
I suspect there are many readers out there who share my story. Please don’t make the same mistake I did. I don’t want you to go visit your parents out of a sense of duty. I don’t want you to become best friends with your parents because of obligation. I want you to befriend your parents because you see the benefits for your own life. And if the benefits still don’t seem to make it worth the hassle, then do it for your kids—for their future.
How you become an adult matters to your marriage, and your parenting. How you wean yourself from your parents is important. You might think the more separated you are from your parents, the more independent and mature you are. It’s not that simple. You see, if you were truly mature, spiritually evolved, and independent, then you would feel no blame of, or need to distance from your parents. You would feel nothing but gratitude. Here’s what I mean: what you resist persists. If you move out and abruptly cut off from your parents, and heave a sigh of relief to be rid of them, that shows resistance to them, and a lack of acceptance. Although you may feel a sense of freedom and exhilaration, you cannot see the huge, invisible baggage you are dragging behind you. What you blame them for, what you resist in them, is what you are now dragging behind you in your invisible baggage. Your lack of awareness doesn’t make your baggage any smaller. If you ignore it, it does not go away. As my first therapist used to tell me, “Either you deal with your “stuff,” or your stuff will deal with you.”
So, a gentle departure from the house, with a severance of financial ties, while maintaining regular, meaningful contact, is the ideal. The more you can achieve that ideal, the less baggage you will drag out of your parents’ house. The more gentle the transition, the less your parent’s baggage will persist in you. Fortunately, you don’t have to take my word on this. I invite you to read some of my articles on this site, to see if they’re compelling.
