Your family’s past habits don’t have to dictate your relationship’s future.
We all come from a family and sometimes it can be a mixed bag. Our parents aren’t/weren’t perfect. They did the best they could raising us with the information they had at the time.
So now we may be parents with children of our own. What do we do with the modeling and examples we received as a child? We hopefully try to model the loving behaviors our parents passed to us, but sometimes we either consciously or unconsciously take on the negative habits one or both parents exhibited in our upbringing.
These negative behaviors can wreak havoc in our relationship with our children and with our mate. Here is an example:
Perhaps a parent used silent treatment when upset with us. Instead of communicating the reason for the upset, our mom or dad may have simply stopped talking to us. To our parent, it might have made sense to shut down, but to us it may have felt isolating and punishing.
Maybe a parent’s communication style was to yell. To him or her, the louder the voice, the more the message came across. To us, we might have tuned out our parent and felt fear.
These were habits our parents used and we may have gotten a course in how to follow in their footsteps. But now we are adults and we can break that cycle!
It begins with awareness of our own behavior, ownership of our behavior choices, commitment to getting new information to replace those behaviors, and practice, patience, and forgiveness of ourselves to be able to change those behaviors.
A wise friend of mine once said, “As adults, we either repel or repeat.” The goal is to repeat the positives of our upbringing and repel (break the cycle) the negatives.
By doing this, we will strengthen our relationship with our children, our mate, and ourself!
I have a FREE Family Meeting Guidelines that can help you manage and have successful family meetings. You can download that HERE.