Healing transgressions and neglect between adults and their parents
Help build the Center for the Adult Child™ – where we can explore and enhance our relationships with our parents, adult children, and in-laws. Donate today
With your donation, we can build these webpages as we have with our Center on Sibling Dynamics™.
Purpose
Relationships between adults of any age and their parents can be intimate, nurturing, intense, and hurtful. Among all relationships, those between parent and child can have the strongest expectations, complicated love, unresolved pasts, and intense heartaches, but also the strongest bonds; it’s widely agreed that the most painful loss is the death of a child, and at the end of life people often call out for their mother or father. If there is any disconnect or conflict, it is often hushed beneath the cover of respect and honor, secrecy, shame, and/or fear. Yet others experience outright animosity, and even estrangement. This havoc can be internalized with sad consequences.
In many families, neither adults nor their parents have been socialized to express disagreements, disappointments, challenges, or suggestions in healthy ways, nor were they socialized to listen and consider such critiques in healthy ways. Of the many dimensions to parent-child relationships, gender is a major driver of expectations: mother-daughter, mother-son, father-son, father-daughter. Gender is also a major factor among children and/or parents who are transgender or who identify as nonbinary.
The Center for the Adult Child™ helps individuals better understand their parent-child dynamic, heal from damaging interactions or neglect, and find possible ways to enhance the quality of this profound and influential relationship. We begin by focusing on in-law relationships, a relationship that’s often mocked, yet is fraught with the fear of disruption and estrangement, and which can amplify any discord, no matter how slight, that exists between a parent and child or a couple. Through our Discussion Groups, we’ll explore cultural and historical influences, expectations of and aspirations for these delicate relationships and their impact on one’s relationships with a parent, child, partner, as well as other family members. We’ll also celebrate positive in-law relationships that extend the bonds of family with warmth, affection, and wisdom.
Your donation will enable us to develop more programs that can help conflicted family members.
Services
“Let it Out!” – Discussion & Support Groups
We will offer two closed, 10-week, staff-led Discussion Groups addressing in-law conflicts:
More information, dates and times coming soon!
Learn more about our “Let it Out!” groups and what to expect. Contact us if you are interested in joining one of our groups.
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Resources
Programs & Information ( Preserving Parent-Child Bonds | Veterans | Honor Violence)
Bibliography
Books & Articles
Film & Television
Art Galleries
Images (clockwise from top):
Subharnab Majumdar, Dad and Daughter …, 2007. on Flickr.com. (CC BY 4.0) [Image darkened]
George Dawe, Naomi and her Daughters. Exhibited 1804. Oil on canvas. 961×769 mm. Tate collection. Fair Use.
Frida Kahlo, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I [Family Tree], 1936, oil and tempera on zinc, 30.7 x 34.5 cm, MOMA, NY. © 2017 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fair Use.
Tonny Christensen, selfie with father-in-law, 2016, on Flickr.com. (CC BY 4.0)
Family Spirals® 