Caring Parents of Estranged Adult Children Community Group
We have given our lives to our children and they reject us. We still love them but this love is now frozen in time. How do we deal with the resulting chaos of our lives? We talk and we listen to one another as we cope with this loss and assault on our sensibilities. Respect in our thinking and language are a must.
It seems to me that any type of restoration or healing requires and demands a lot of introspection. In addiction it often starts with "hitting bottom", where the person affected finds that what they've been doing is not working for them any longer and they want a different kind of life. It is a soul-exploring experience and is very humbling. I admire all who have turned their lives around in this way, including one of our dear daughters.
Where before the person has shut themselves off from the world, in a sense, they now want to rejoin the human race and see things in a new way, embracing a full and happy life with no secret patterns and behaviors. They've lived a double life for too long, pretending they don't have a problem!
When and how does one come to the point that they want to live fully and authentically, at peace with themselves and with others? Is it a God thing? At any rate, it is a deeply spiritual experience, it seems to me. And it's not one that can be explained easily, it is deeply personal.
When we became parents many of us promised our children we would do our best to love them and protect them and raise them to be happy and well adjusted adults. The reality is that our children are not extensions of ourselves but people separate from ourselves and will ultimately face many of the same challenges we've struggled faced. We can't protect them from life, and we often fail at loving them as we should as well. Throughout history, a child's emotional or intellectual well being took second place to simply surviving from one day to the next.
So when we've moved from simply surviving and being thankful for that, then what happens. There is room for growth in the artistic, intellectual and educational fields. We realize that there's more out there available to us, and perhaps better ways of living than what we've known. There is more leisure time, and with that, addictions and for some crazy reason we need to find ways to escape!
Anyway, here's the 12 step program, a tool for spiritual growth used by AA. Of course, no person undertakes this program UNTIL THEY ARE READY... and our estranged children (if I might use this as a comparison), simply are not ready and nothing can force them to be.. and we, in taking care of ourselves, need to accept that. (and that could be another post!)
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7, Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10, Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11, Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Where before the person has shut themselves off from the world, in a sense, they now want to rejoin the human race and see things in a new way, embracing a full and happy life with no secret patterns and behaviors. They've lived a double life for too long, pretending they don't have a problem!
When and how does one come to the point that they want to live fully and authentically, at peace with themselves and with others? Is it a God thing? At any rate, it is a deeply spiritual experience, it seems to me. And it's not one that can be explained easily, it is deeply personal.
When we became parents many of us promised our children we would do our best to love them and protect them and raise them to be happy and well adjusted adults. The reality is that our children are not extensions of ourselves but people separate from ourselves and will ultimately face many of the same challenges we've struggled faced. We can't protect them from life, and we often fail at loving them as we should as well. Throughout history, a child's emotional or intellectual well being took second place to simply surviving from one day to the next.
So when we've moved from simply surviving and being thankful for that, then what happens. There is room for growth in the artistic, intellectual and educational fields. We realize that there's more out there available to us, and perhaps better ways of living than what we've known. There is more leisure time, and with that, addictions and for some crazy reason we need to find ways to escape!
Anyway, here's the 12 step program, a tool for spiritual growth used by AA. Of course, no person undertakes this program UNTIL THEY ARE READY... and our estranged children (if I might use this as a comparison), simply are not ready and nothing can force them to be.. and we, in taking care of ourselves, need to accept that. (and that could be another post!)
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7, Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10, Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11, Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
I cannot personally agree with this post. In my heart and in probably your heart, we all on this site know we were good parents who tried all their lives to be the best parents that we could be. We were loving parents and we are loving parents in spite of the estrangements. If we were now operating from a position of anger and negativity towards our kids as is the norm in a group called Parents Who Walk Away, that love that we still have for our offspring would be very questionable. We are not parents who walk away or walked away in the past. We were always parents with love and the best interests for our offspring at heart.
With your 12 step program for parents of estranged children, we would be admitting to them and to the world that our basic position of love for our children is somehow lacking. We would be saying to them that we had even consciously done them wrong. I cannot for the life of me agree to such a selfincrimination that i would have to inflict upon myself. I am not guilty of abusing either of my adult kids. I never abused them, and i never ceased being a loving and concerned parent. I thus have no need for entering any thought system regarding the 12 step program. It is like saying that because i have a beer 3 times a year, i should be entering alcoholic anonymous. I occasionally play a game or cards or buy a lottery ticket. I have no need of joining gamblers anonymous.
By responding to my kids estrangement with an undertaking of being a member of bad-parents anonymous, i would be not true to my convictions and to my own understanding of what is right and what is wrong.
Sorry about the strong words i use. I feel that this kind of thinking is the exact opposite of what i aspire to be. xfmlg
This is going way out on a limb, but they are addicted to estrangement, they see no other way. Our ES has never been willing to be honest about why he's been so distant, we've just accepted it just to get along. As I distance myself more and more from this whole situation, the more I believe that it is his wife who is severely damaged and he has capitulated to her to keep his family intact. It is a high price to pay and he's paying it. I wonder how he will feel when we are gone from this earth and he deals with his own adult children and grandchildren. He's going to have a lot of time to think about it.
There is nothing more that can be done, and I'm daily working on getting used to the idea. I hope you are too, we've done all we can.
And the arrogance of your son and daughter being so close and yet so far away angers me, even as I"m trying to avoid being angry about anything..
How dare they. So sad.
I know I would if it would mean my daughter would talk to me again.