When I lived and worked in one of Arizona’s retirement cities and was doing group therapy with older adults, one question that came up in group discussions again and again was: “How can I have a better relationship with my grown children and grandchildren?”

Some people just wanted to know how to get their grandchildren to say “thank you” for birthday gifts. Others were struggling with how to say “no” to their adult children who “were still on the payroll,” expecting money that their parents were not in a position to give. Others were in conflict with adult children who objected to their entering into a second marriage. Others were estranged from their adult children. All of them were trapped in old, painful family patterns.

Now, back in Seattle where I work with adults of all ages, the question remains a compelling one. Some of what I learned in my Arizona experience and in my own family relationships is shared in these “10 Tips for Parenting Your Grown Children.”

1. Continue to have a life. Keeping your own interests and activities alive is healthy for you and makes you more interesting to others.
2. Be true to yourself. Pay attention to your feelings, your intuition and your beliefs, using this information to help you make good decisions.
3. Choose when to talk and when to listen. Improve your sense of timing. Recognize that you can do only your half of the relationship.
4. Recall your own relationship with your parents and in-laws. Let yourself be guided by what you learned about what worked and what didn’t.
5. Expect everyone to treat you with respect. All the time. Be respectful of everyone else. All the time.
6. Understand that you need not address everything. Some things that need to be said may not need to be said by you.
7. Be willing to do nothing when that appears to be the best option. Often when nothing seems to be happening, something quite important is.
8. Accept that you are, forever, the parent. At some level, your children are reassured by your willingness to hold on to that role. Gently.
9. Take responsibility for managing your own feelings. When you’re angry, fearful or despairing, find ways to work through it.
10. Keep putting kindness and understanding into your relationships. Accept realities, set reasonable limits and choose how you want to behave.

1. Give up the belief that there’s only one RIGHT way to do things. Be willing to consider new possibilities and other ways of looking at the world.
2. Try to stay in the present moment, rather than letting yourself slip back into the past or drift into the future. Focus on things you have some control over.
3. Accept an appropriate amount of responsibility for maintaining a comfortable and safe emotional “climate” in your home, but don’t get stuck in managing every detail. 
4. Recognize that everyone gets to feel the way they feel, but make and enforce rules that ensure that people act in ways that are fair and respectful.
5. Develop stepparent/stepchild roles gradually and thoughtfully, with the original parent primarily in charge of his/her children, while people are getting used to the changes.
6.  Accept that parents and their original children will always have a special bond, and that this isn’t necessarily a threat to the newly developing family.
7.  Resist overburdening particular days or events (birthdays, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, graduations, etc.). Instead, focus on creating good long-term feelings and memories.
8.  Arrange to have some time alone as a couple EVERY DAY– time to share information, plan and, most important, pay attention to your relationship.
9.  Insist on some individual time EACH DAY for taking care of yourself.  Adults who are responsible for meeting the needs of their children and others on a daily basis can’t run on empty.
10.  When things look as if they’re getting out of hand, take a deep breath and try to remember which people in the family are the grown-ups and which ones are the kids. Then try hard to behave like a grown-up – and expect the other grown-ups to do so as well.

1. Get two copies of the book so that each of you has your own personal copy and, if you want to make notes of your responses and ideas in it, you can.
2. Approach your reading together with “a teachable spirit.”  As you consider your relationship, agree that you’ll refrain from staying too much in your head or repeating old, unhelpful patterns of thought. Be willing to go to your heart.
3. Take your time.  Read the book aloud to each other, one brief section (about 3-5 pages) of a chapter each day. As one of you reads aloud, the other can follow along in his or her own copy of the book so that the ideas are coming in both through your ears and your eyes. Given the busy lives most couples have, it’s realistic to allow three or four months in which to read the book in this manner.  Agree that you will stay together, reading at the same pace.
4. When you’ve read the day’s section, talk to each other about what things caught your attention and why these are meaningful to you.  Consider the questions the author raised.
5. Let yourselves fully enter into the stories of the couples in the book. Try reading them as if you were in a play, speaking the lines to each other. It can be surprising and empowering to hear yourself and your partner saying words that, in your own relationship, tend to lead to a meltdown. You’ll find that using a ‘script’ can increase your ‘awareness capacity’ — the ability to observe your own negative patterns of communication in real time. When you can see the patterns, you can change them – transforming problematic interaction into communication that is grounded in mutual respect and creates greater closeness. You can move from “stand-off” to “stand together.”

(For a similar and specifically Christian book, see Safe Haven Marriage by Sharon Hart-Morris and Archibald Hart.)  More information about Susan Johnson’s book is available at:
http://holdmetight.net/video.php; http://holdmetight.net/audio_interviews.php.

Johnson, S. (2008) Hold Me Tight. Lebanon, IN: Hachette Book Group/Little, Brown and Company.

Forgiveness is not a popular concept in this culture where perfection is over-valued. Our self-esteem is too often measured by how perfect and admired we feel we are. When we find ourselves on either side of the equation — having hurt someone or having been hurt, we face the human reality of our not being perfect. It is hard to accept that there is no possibility of going through life without making mistakes. Yet, it is through acknowledging our mistakes and our vulnerability that we grow deeper in our relationships.

When we ask someone for forgiveness, we become vulnerable. When we acknowledge that we’ve hurt somebody, even without intending to, we are accepting that we are not perfect. It is a risk to do so, because we know we could feel humiliated, rejected or we could lose that person’s love and respect.

The fear of not being loved can prevent us from acknowledging the pain we have caused someone else, but not taking responsibility for that person’s pain does not means it doesn’t exist. When we don’t take that responsibility, we risk damaging or losing the relationship altogether. For example, your spouse’s pain will continue to be there whether you acknowledge your part in it or not. He or she can doubt your love and wonder if their feelings matter to you. While your spouse might try to forgive your hurtful behavior in order to keep peace, resentments could build. I invite you to reflect on these questions:
Remember a time when you hurt somebody. What did you tell yourself about that? What did you do?
Remember a time when you were hurt by somebody close to you. What were your feelings and what did you do?

Humans are emotional beings. When we avoid or hide our emotions, it drains and restricts our capacity to feel a variety of emotions. For example, if I’m filled with anger, it becomes difficult to experience happiness. When we hold on to resentment, we decrease our emotional flexibility. But we can choose to free ourselves by asking for forgiveness or by forgiving those who have hurt us. Forgiveness doesn’t happen quickly. It is a healing process. These are the steps in that process:

• Recognize you are hurt and recall the details of the event.
• Explore the feelings under the anger (fear, hurt of being abandoned, unloved, etc.).
• Ask yourself what the hurt meant to you (i.e. what did I tell myself?).
• Ask yourself, “What do I need now?” Is what you need attainable?
• Choose to let go of your anger and move toward forgiveness.
• Ask God to help you through this process. He wants us to be free.
• Let Him intercede and invite him to heal you.

Standing in the self-help section of the bookstore at the age of 49, looking for a book on divorce, I felt conspicuous, desperate and in a state of disbelief. I wished that I were invisible.

Once before, years earlier, I had become unexpectedly and painfully single because of my husband’s death. The role of a widow seemed somehow more honorable. Death was clear cut; divorce was not. This is the trajectory no one wants their life to take. Being divorced seemed shameful, tainted with regrets and uncertainty.

Everyone knows that marriage takes daily attention and work. My second husband and I had managed this for many years but eventually we saw that we could not maintain it for a lifetime. We became aware of the destructive nature of our life together. What had been for us the joy of meals, conversation, games of hide and seek, appreciation of the moon and one another had eventually dissipated into disappointment and despair. As much as each of us loved our son, we could see that our marriage relationship was draining our home of its life-giving quality for him – and for us.

To embark on the path of divorce required courage and a great deal of discernment. For us, it wasn’t an easy way out; it was a necessary one. While we were divorcing each other, we were clear about the need to remain connected in order to parent our son well. The losses we all sustained were many.

I believe that our communities have the capacity to support us all–those who are married, those who are divorced, those who have never married, and those who are widowed. We all make choices and life happens to all of us. Whether we are coupled or single, it is our responsibility and our privilege to live a life that speaks of energy and hope, a life that is rich and makes room for meaning. For me, in the various ways I have lived, the one clear and unchanging factor has been my faith. My belief system may shift, but my faith has remained a constant. I have been strengthened and supported in times of scarcity and times of plenty. I give thanks for this and for those who were there with me when I needed someone to listen and care.

In retrospect, if I could speak to that woman who stood in the bookstore feeling so anxious years ago, I would tell her that, yes, there are books that might be helpful — Passionate Marriage by Snarch, Hold Me Tight by Johnson, Anxious to Please by English and Rapson, and The Good Divorce by Aarons. In addition to that, I would advise her to get some exercise each day, try to eat decently and suggest that she would benefit from entering into a practice of daily prayer and meditation.

May God bless us all in all.

At first glance, there was nothing outstanding about the way she looked. I stood behind a woman and her young family in a buffet line—all of us waiting to fill our plates. Nothing caught my eye until the woman turned toward me, making her full face visible, showing half her face unmarked and half seared with burn scars. An additional quick scan took in scars on the exposed parts of her right forearm and hands; she walked with a limp. I also noticed the easy manner the woman and family related to each other. In the seconds viewing the woman’s scars and her family, I imagined a story of trauma and recovery.

It is nearing ten years since I saw the woman in the buffet line, and while I never learned her story, I often think of her scars and how I came to see them: hidden at first, then visible when she turned to full view. For this woman, a piece of her story was available for others to see and I’ve often wondered what people would look like if faces showed the many scars of traumas and pain experienced in daily living. Would scars serve as a reminder that pain from trauma and loss is not quickly or easily healed? Would we feel less isolated and alone in our pain if it were easily seen on the outside?

Three years ago, a friend knocked on my Samaritan Center office door at Bellevue Presbyterian Church’s Upper Campus, interrupting a meeting to find out if I had heard from my daughter, Katie — was she safe? At that moment, Seattle Pacific University, the school my daughter attended, was on lockdown and there was a shooter on campus. Twenty minutes after the knock, Katie called and reported she was safe after hunkering down in a nearby apartment. While I was quickly relieved for the safety of my daughter, I soon learned the story did not have a happy ending—what shooting does? My daughter, and hundreds of other victims, came out without visible scars, but the pain did not stop—has not stopped—for many. Two of the shooter’s victims were wounded, and one young man, who was a dear friend to many, died. Many others—untouched by bullets—have invisible scars on the inside. Two years later, many continue to feel the pain.

As a Marriage and Family Therapist at Samaritan Center, I spend most of my workdays listening to stories of physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual pain. The issues cover a range of topics including recovery and healing from various traumas. Trauma events, like the shooting at SPU, often impact individuals long after the event, and long after friends and families think it should. Perhaps one of the difficulties in healing from trauma is that many wounds are on the inside, invisible to others. Months and years after the event, individuals may experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress, anxiety, panic, and depression. The same is true for emotional and spiritual pain of any cause—we feel the pain, but our faces may not show it, especially when taught to hide the pain from others.

I’m thankful for the Psalmists who wrote about both their joys and laments. I’m also thankful for modern Christian writers who have shared their personal traumas and grief—Gerry Sittser and C.S. Lewis to name two. The stories of grief validate both the feelings of wanting to quickly “get over it” and the experience that grief and pain pay no attention to our desire. In order to heal from traumas, we need to move through the pain, as the way to move forward, weaving the event and impact into our daily life and faith. Individuals often come to counseling when help from family and friends has been exhausted, and when working through the pain on their own is ot enough.