The other day I ran into a friend who is a well-known film director. In spite of doing pretty well professionally, when I asked her about her life, she choked. I was surprised to find how a strong, unconventional, and creative person like her was living an unhealthy family relationship. A relationship where her parent’s behavior and actions are manipulative, upsetting, and selfish. They basically do everything to put her into a pang of guilt so she runs back to them, sometimes for love and safety or sometimes as an obligation. A relationship where they often prioritize acceptance of her being a conventional daughter over love, trust, respect, and understanding.
The 15 minutes conversation with her made me realize, how we as children sometimes fall into trap of our family’s definition of love and care. Love and care, where being a perfect and ideal child is the only parameter to get acknowledged and accepted in the family, where you are obligated to honor the family rules, give in to family expectations like getting good grades, doing a job, being a certain way, getting married and giving an heir to the family and fit into the society.
Now, you must be thinking, shouldn’t we be listening and respecting our ancestors and parents who gave us birth, raised and helped us become who we are in life today? Shouldn’t we accept them as the way they are? After all, they are our parents so we must not dishonor them. Right?
The situation that I share above you may find rare, but if you really think and review your network everyone knows about at least one story of a child having a toxic parent or parents. Where things are not normal, but estranged. The child is either completely cut off from communication with the parent because of their emotional abuse, personality clashes, comparison, and unacceptability, or the child is continuing to accept the oppression because of fear, dependency, hope, and expectations of change.
Well, I know many stories like that and so it’s not rare from far. We all know these stories exist in large numbers.
Relationships are nothing but invisible contracts, these are some unsaid agreements that we give to another person to remain with us. When it comes to our parents, we signed a contract with them too. This is revealed to us in stages and in the form of conditions; like you need to get A grades to get that toy, become an engineer and get the respect of friends and family, marry the one in our religion and become part of the community and most importantly don’t dishonor parents and get the acceptance. The problem with this contract is that we were made to sign it when we were minors and not equal. Somewhere it’s an unfair contract, especially for the child who is unique and has his own experiences and feelings. The child who doesn’t feel the need to abide by the terms along the way and wants to show up as desired. A contract like this is one-sided and puts the child in an awful state only to self-suppresses his true nature. The fear of not disappointing and dishonoring the parents become the unsaid promise in the relationship making the child stuck in a bad contract that no longer lets him be true, live a fulfilled life, and achieve unconventional success.
Well, there is no need for these rare stories to remain unfair stories of unhealthy contracts. Where people either break the contract or remain suppressed in the contract. Even though you may have signed a contract with your parents when you were a minor, you definitely need not continue to accept the offer when you are equal to them. Being equal means you now have the capacity to re-negotiate your contract with them. It means confronting the old and invisible terms, dissecting them accurately, and then re-negotiating for the benefit of both parties. It means both parties share their current truth, listen and acknowledge the existing terms and conditions, express their feelings, objections, and expectations without blame or accusation, and then re-negotiate the offer to make a new contract. Even though re-negotiating doesn’t confirm a happy ending, it definitely will set the parties free from the guilt and shame of not showing up as they wanted each other to. The new contract with your parents means rewarding yourself to live an unapologetic and courageous life. It means choosing you.
It is always to remember an unhappy parent never raises a happy child. It’s the same with the child. An unhappy child is never a happy parent either.
Being a good parent is self-work.
