Providing Care for the Elderly
Watching a loved one enter the final chapters of their life can be a heavy experience, but it doesn’t have to be. Providing care for the
What will we do when we stop living our adult children’s lives for them?
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
As might be expected, the actions Stan and Sandy need to make will not be popular with Roger. He will almost certainly accuse them of not loving him or of being selfish themselves, or he will make any other number of untrue assertions designed to get them to resume the game they’ve all been playing for so long.
One young woman, whom I’ll call Sarah, related her anger when her parents established boundaries in her life:
I was pretty ticked off at my parents when they closed my checking account and canceled my credit card. But looking back now, it was the best thing they could have done. I was blowing it, and I think on some level I knew it, but it was kind of like smoking, you know? We know it’s bad for us, but it’s a hard habit to break. I had to drop out of a few classes and take another part-time job, but all that talk about gaining self-respect and becoming empowered turned out to be true. The more I accomplished on my own, the better I felt.
When we make the decision to release our adult children to fend for themselves, it can be both freeing and frightening. For many of us, this sudden freedom to live our own lives will seem like a breath of fresh air. For others, it will bring deep foreboding and fear.
What will we do when we stop living our adult children’s lives for them?
We will start living our own.
On my journey to freedom from enabling, I’ve found the following ten steps helpful:
I can hear many of you saying, “That sounds great in theory, Allison, but I don’t have time in my life right now to follow a list. Things are falling apart around me, and life is out of control.”
Most parents in pain know this feeling. If your present crisis has so incapacitated you that you must make important choices prior to starting your plan — if it is indeed that bad — I strongly suggest you seek the advice of a professional interventionist or a member of a support group right now. You don’t want to repeat a response or behavior that hasn’t worked before. It’s time to do something different.