Growing

I have a question, "if someone was constantly rude to you at your job and acting like a child at your job" would you invite them to family functions? Would you have them around you and you immediate family? Would you choose to hang out with them?

"Our whole lives we have known this isn't the way an adult should act"...but you choose to expose yourself it regularly?

How about setting boundaries with your parents and working on your individual recoveries?

Maybe its time to re-evaluate time spent with your parents. More than expecting them to change, you owe it to yourself to expect YOU to change....create a peaceful life where you are responsible for your own emotional well being. You get to decide how or if your parents fit into this equation.

For me, I cannot let my parents have a whole lot of control over me as an adult (emotional control, manipulation ect)...I also have my husband and child to think of. They deserve a wife and mom who cares for herself in a healthy way. If I find myself investing in people, parents, whoever, and I don't get my investment returned, then I learn to invest more appropriately in the people in my life who ARE trying.

My parents were both alcoholics....I am amazed now, that I thought "they are my parents so I HAVE to be super-involved with holidays ect." I realize today that just isn't true for me. I worked through the fear of abandonment with them because I realized on many levels I HAD already been abandoned by them, especially emotionally. I began to experience more peace as I grieved the fantasy of ever having normal or healthy parents. I grieved what I deserved that I never got from them. I grieved the person I could have been if I had healthy parents....I had to learn how to accept who they really were, today------not who I wished they would be. When I did that, I began to accept reality....that we were vastly different people.

The hardest part for me was accepting that my parents didn't really want to be involved in my life...that more times than not, I was forcing myself and my expectations on THEM.

When I backed off, (detached) started caring and being responsible for myself, and let my parents be who they really were and left them alone...our relationships actually improved.