Adults Setting Boundaries with Parents: A Guide

When you are in the sandwich generation phase of life – an adult with children and aging parents of your own – you are feeling pulled in every direction. In this situation, you could be assisting your parents manage their finances while simultaneously helping your children deal with middle to high school social stressors. An adult in this situation has numerous responsibilities and can feel hectic and out of control of their own lives.Many do the best they can to keep up with the expecations of others. But others fall into a pattern of giving to the point they emotionally break. This is when adults need to set boundaries with their own parents.

This is all an act of love and responsibility for the family in your life. We know that to be true, but it becomes overwhelming. Eventually, it causes a loss of your own sense of a self. You too are a person with wants and needs and finding time for you is still important and valid. The emotional strain of this is magnified when a parent has had emotional health issues of their own, are enmeshed into their adult children’s lives, or are finding difficulties in their own aging process. This is a major reason why adults need to set boundaries with their parents.

While it can be hard at first, setting healthy boundaries with your parents is important and can be done! Once an adult begins to hold boundaries and has communication that is filled with respect and compassion, family relationships become closer and more connected. Below are simple approaches to helping you rebuild and maintain those boundaries so you can find time for yourself again, and some calm and control in this phase of life.

Here are some thoughts on navigating this delicate balance in creating boundaries with your adult parents:

1.  Communicate openly and respectfully: Express your boundaries clearly but compassionately. Be exact in your language so there is no misunderstanding of what you expect. Let your parents know what you need while acknowledging their feelings and perspectives.
2. Set clear limits: Identify specific behaviors or topics that make you uncomfortable and communicate your limits firmly. These specific incidences will help you to request and measure clear change over time. Be consistent in enforcing these boundaries. Tell your parent(s) know how you will respond if the limit is not respected.
3. Recognize your own needs: Affirming your emotional and practical needs first is key! Understand that it’s okay to prioritize your well-being and assert your boundaries when necessary. Your needs are valid, even if they may differ from your parents’ expectations. Respectful communication creates space for both your needs and that of your parents.
4. Be assertive, not aggressive: Asserting boundaries doesn’t mean being confrontational or disrespectful. Maintain a calm and assertive demeanor when communicating your needs to avoid escalating conflicts. Remember, love is a language too!
5. Practice self-care: Take care of yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally. Setting boundaries with parents can be emotionally draining, so make sure to prioritize self-care activities that recharge you.
6. Seek support if needed:  Ask for help if you find any of these steps intimidating. If you’re struggling to establish or maintain boundaries with your parents, consider seeking support from a therapist or counselor. They can provide guidance and help you navigate complex family dynamics.
7. Be flexible: Recognize that boundaries may need to evolve over time as circumstances change. Asserting your boundaries is just the beginning of change. It does take time. Stay open to renegotiating boundaries as necessary while staying true to your needs and values.

Remember, setting boundaries with adult parents is about creating healthier and more respectful relationships, not about distancing yourself from them. By establishing clear boundaries, you’re fostering mutual respect and understanding within your family dynamic. If you need help preparing how to set these boundaries with your parents, please contact one of our clinicians who can help you get started!

How to manage a setback in healing your trauma

How to manage a setback in healing trauma

Many of our therapists are trauma treatment specialists, and one thing that is often seen are set backs in the healing process. These moments can stem from a recent personal crisis or upheaval of one’s life routine. In short, when this occurs it can feel like your entire world is falling apart again. What is critical is to remember that setbacks are normal and can actually be a part of the healing experience. Give yourself a little grace and continued hopeful effort, you will see yourself finding yourself on the healing journey again. As Brene Brown has stated, allowing ourselves to experience vulnerability is not only brave but also allows space for deeper authenticity with ourselves. 

Steps to Start Healing Again

Allow yourself to feel it. 

In any setback of life, it is important to feel and acknowledge the emotions that come with it. Thus, disappointment, shame, anger, and confusion are common emotions to have when you find yourself falling backwards from progress. In fact, while some of the emotional experiences you may be having are similar to what you went through in the past, they may provide you with useful information on what areas of yourself may need further attention. Give yourself some grace in having these emotions, and share your observations with your therapist. 

Reflect & Begin Again

Spending time reflecting to understanding how the circumstances of this event may help you to recognize patterns or poor boundaries that you may need to examine and reset your life. First, try being curious and open to observing the situation without preexisting assumptions. Second, build new insights with this information. This new level of self awareness can be powerful and jumpstart your again on a healthy, healing path. 

Connect with Supports

Healing from a trauma requires support in all forms. Friends, family, or professional counselors give you the opportunity to receive comfort and validation in your healing journey. Sharing your struggles and seeking support is a strength, not a weakness. Ultimately, speaking with these confidants can provide you with new awareness, compassion, and encouragement during a difficult time. 

Decide on changes for a better future

In this setback, you may find out learning new coping skills is just what you need to manage similar situations in the future. Perhaps being more consistent in your mindfulness practices is exactly what you need, or letting go of unhealthy, toxic people in your life will give you future safety. This setback can reinvigorate your commitment to your wellness practices, and boundaries in your life!

A time for Self-Compassion & Recognition

In this moment, it is important to practice self compassion and frame your inner voice in a compassionate, encouraging way. It is normal to struggle at times in life and your inner voice should not be shaming or criticizing yourself right now. Recognize the gains you have made in your life up to this point. This will help you to foster a positive growth mindset and continue to acknowledge to yourself that healing is an ongoing process with its own sets of ups and down. 

The healing journey can be a winding road of ups and downs. With supportive outlets and commitment to healing you will find your way beyond the past and into your future. Continue the journey with one of our skilled clinicians, you can find a well matching therapist for you by visiting our clinicians page. 

Infertility, Addressing the Grief

If you have ever experienced infertility or the loss of a child by miscarriage, then you are probably all too familiar with the roller coaster of emotions that often accompanies this type of loss. Although it may go unmentioned or unnoticed by others, the pain and grief of infertility (both primary and secondary) can be excruciating for those going through it. In fact, one of the things that can make this journey so painful is the shame and secrecy people often attach to it. This shame may be a result of one’s own ideas of what it means to be fertile, as well as influenced by their familial and cultural expectations about reproducing. While a variety of options now exist for creating families, the path to these options for many parents may be long, emotionally tiring, physically draining, and financially taxing.

The Emotional Toll of Infertility

In my experience, it matters little whether infertility is explained or unexplained—it carries heartache nonetheless. Most couples report that they assumed they would be able to get pregnant easily and unless they have some pre-existing condition that directly impacts their ability to get pregnant, it comes as a blow to find out the process may not be so easy after all. Some couples discuss adoption during courtship and others quickly jump to this option (or others) upon hearing they cannot conceive without intervention. Many others, however, struggle with accepting their infertility. Even if they do go on to have children, the loss of a child by miscarriage or years of struggling with infertility can leave a mark.

One thing that is important to recognize when dealing with infertility is the grief involved. I have worked with couples that were so focused on growing their family that they forgot to take time to grieve along the way. In the case of adoption, this can be particularly concerning because unresolved grief can inhibit a parent’s ability to bond with an adopted child. When couples have a mix of biological and adopted children, for instance, there can also be a difference in how each is treated based upon how they joined the family. Unfortunately, children quickly pick up on these differences and adoptees often feel unwanted or less loved as a result. Unresolved grief related to infertility can have wide reaching implications.

How to Address the Grief of Infertility

One adoptive mother I worked with likened her grief process to a picture she might keep on the night stand, explaining that the picture, like grief, never goes away; however, as time goes by, the picture might be moved to another position on the night stand and no longer kept at front and center. Her grief, due to years of infertility and unsuccessful invitro treatments, healed over time as she addressed the loss and what it meant for her as a woman not to be able to conceive and carry a biological child. With time, she shared, the grief took a back row to the other pictures on her night stand. I also worked with an adoptive father who had Hodgkin’s Disease as a teenager, the treatment of which left him sterile. While he always knew he would not be able to conceive a child, it was not until he was married that the emotions of this loss really hit him. In therapy, he confronted what it meant for him to be a virile man and his shame over “letting his wife down,” which was not how she felt at all, by the way. One man I worked with was happily married with several children, yet he had never grieved the baby he and his high school girlfriend lost because of a spontaneous abortion. He finally reached a certain point in his adult life where he could no longer ignore the impact this loss had on him. Even though he recognized that raising a baby at 16 would have had certain challenges, he grieved the loss of what might have been and how it led to the eventual break-up with his first love. Through the course of therapy, he even realized how this loss was also impacting his current intimate relationship with his wife. Together, we were able to work through these varying elements of grief and the client was able to stop blaming himself for what happened and finally feel peace. In many situations, I have helped couples sit with their sadness and acknowledge their conflicting emotions, as well as identify possible alternatives for growing a family in the future.

How to Provide Support if You Are a Friend or Family Member

If you are in a relationship with someone who is struggling with the grief of infertility or have a close family member or friend who is struggling with this, there are some things you can do to be supportive:

1. Listen. Don’t offer platitudes, things like “You’ll get pregnant. Just stop trying so hard. Don’t worry, it will happen with time.” Clients report that while these statements may be well meaning, they are not helpful and often feel dismissive.

2. Don’t offer advice. Instead, ask what would be helpful and how they need you to show up at this time.

3. Refrain from comparing your experience (or that of your sister, mother, cousin, co-worker) to theirs. Everyone experiences infertility very uniquely and it is so deeply personal, which again makes comparing feel very dismissive.

4. Remember your loved one. Send a simple text or card letting them know you are thinking of/praying for them. Let them know they are not forgotten and that you are there for them.

5. Finally, if you notice your loved one is becoming anxious or depressed because of their loss and grief, kindly ask if they have considered talking to someone. Finding a professional who is experienced with grief, infertility, adoption, and other related topics can be extremely validating and healing.

Sarah Groff, LCMHCS has over 22 years of experience in the mental health field, many of which have specifically focused on adoption, infertility, and working with the entire adoption triad, as well as assisting women with making a parallel plan for adoption and parenting. If you or someone you know may benefit from counseling to focus on one of these areas, please submit a request to speak with someone at one of our offices.

Learning to Identify Your Emotions: A Path to Emotional Recovery

Learning to Idenfity your Emotions

Oftentimes in my work with clients, it becomes apparent that someone does not possess adequate language for their emotions. Sometimes this is the result of growing up in a home where emotions functioned more as skeletons in the closet or as dust under the rug. Other times, it develops from painful lessons in emotional danger, where vulnerability came at a cost and emotions were minimized, ridiculed, or even used as fodder for abuse. There is also a category of individuals whose emotional maturity is lacking. This can be due the cultural idea that expressing emotion is the equivalent of being a drama queen (or king) and they work hard to curate their emotions into socially acceptable displays. In each of these instances, the capacity for appropriate and healthy emotional expression is limited.

Beginning the Path to Emotional Recovery

Before I can teach a client language for their emotions, we must first address where their conceptualization of emotions comes from and how this shapes their current comfort level with emotional expression. For example, if a client grew up with a parent whose expression of anger was generally one that was out of control, loud, full of profanity, demeaning, scary, and so forth, then allowing him/herself to feel and express anger as an adult can be extremely challenging. These individuals often perceive other people’s anger as being unsafe, as well, and project their past experiences of anger onto whatever relationship they find themselves in. While anger can certainly be expressed inappropriately, it also points to something important: It shows us what we care about. In fact, there are times when anger is appropriate and needs to be expressed before a client can move forward in their healing process. Creating a safe space for clients to explore their anger and learn that it can be expressed in a healthy, safe way is a primary goal of therapy for these individuals. As with many emotions, the crime is not in feeling anger, but monitoring how it is expressed is essential. Addressing these associations of emotion is critical to the recovery process.

Developing a Language for Your Emotions

Once a client better understands where and how his/her emotional literacy was shaped, they can begin to learn the language for their emotions. Without language to describe what we are feeling, it is very difficult to take ownership of these emotions, to process them, and to learn healthier ways of emotional regulation and expression. It is also difficult to understand why we are feeling a certain way if we do not possess the words to describe these feelings. Additionally, a lack of emotional language inhibits our ability to form meaningful connection and intimacy with others. With children and youth who are struggling to identify their emotions, I often show them the emojis on my phone and ask them to point to one that best describes how they feel. I then ask them to describe what that picture communicates to them and from there we can have a conversation about what is going on inside.

Tools to help you through this…

A wonderful resource for older teens and adults is Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown (2021). I like to use this book as a resource, an emotions encyclopedia, if you will. Brown has done a phenomenal job of categorizing emotions into families and helping us to better understand which emotions are connected and how, as well as teaching us more specific language for describing what we feel. For instance, did you know that resentment is part of the envy family? Did you also know it is possible (and very normal) to feel multiple emotions at once, even if they seem to be conflicting? Several years ago, I worked with a client who told me each session that she was exhausted. While this statement was not untrue (she carried the emotional and physical exhaustion of years of trauma and untreated OCD), I began to challenge her to explore this feeling further, suggesting that she might be feeling something other than exhaustion. As our work unfolded, she learned a whole variety of words to describe more accurately what she was feeling, which, in turn, allowed us to focus on the root of those feelings and achieve greater recovery and healing.

Embracing the Role and Importance of Emotional Experiences

When a client has a better understanding of their emotional development, as well as language to describe what they are feeling, I then help them to understand the role of emotions. At this point in therapy, we work on developing a certain comfort level with these emotions, which includes not judging but normalizing them. I often tell clients that emotions are one of the few equalizers in humanity—no one is exempt from having them and we cannot pretend that we are above feeling certain emotions that seem taboo or bad. In fact, there is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” emotion—they simply are. They are not meant to define us nor to guide our decisions, but to be felt. In therapy, we also practice ways of expressing emotion and releasing them in ways that are safe, healthy, respectful of other people’s boundaries, and provide resolution over time.

If you, a child, or partner is struggling with emotional expression or you find yourself stunted and afraid of letting out your feelings, you may benefit from doing some emotions work with a therapist. While it may seem daunting at first, keep in mind that learning any new skill can be uncomfortable in the beginning. However, with time and appropriate therapeutic support, you can grow this muscle and learn to be present with your emotions, as well as to hold space for others’ emotions.

Sarah Groff, LCMHCS has over 22 years of experience in the mental health field, many of which have specifically focused on adoption, infertility, and working with the entire adoption triad, as well as assisting women with making a parallel plan for adoption and parenting.

Signs your relationship is drifting into a parental or sibling dynamic

As relationships become established and move into the category of being ‘long term’ we all justifiably become comfortable. That’s the goal, right? We want to feel safe to be ourselves with the person who is our partner in life. So, it is also reasonable that our relationships fall into routine patterns together. Those patterns can feel comfortable which is great. But in some situations, this causes us to inadvertently lose intimacy, healthy communication and respect, and the connection that a healthy relationship requires. Are you concerned that your relationship has fallen into a parental or sibling dynamic? Let’s look at the indicators that this could be happening to you.

Is it the parental dynamic?

1. One partner tends to be the decision maker. They are the one who steers the ship and sometimes can do that through communication that nags, prods, controls, dictates or scolds.
2. You are the planner and organizer of your partner’s life. Does one of you feel the need to repeatedly remind your partner of an appointment? Do you tend to schedule your partners medical appointments?
3. A partner has committed to changing the other partner to help them be better. You may have the sense that you can help them to lose weight, control their anger, and be more financially responsible. You have emotional ownership of this change need.
4. Your relationship has turned into competitiveness, one-up-manship, and bickering you tend to not share as much in common as you formerly did.

Is it the sibling dynamic?

1. Your partner leans entirely on you for their emotional support and needs. You are possibly their only friend who they share anything with.
2. One partner may need to use strategies of bribes, convincing, or chastising to obtain follow through by the other for needs in the home or the joint responsibilities of the relationship.
3. It feels as if without you, your partner would not be able to maintain their own independence or autonomy to keep their lives in order and be successful.
4. Feelings of resentment and exhaustion are experienced due to the burden of the relationship. You no longer feel a balance of responsibilities or needs are being met.

We all deserve to have fulfilling, satisfying relationships that allow us to be the best version of ourselves. Not just noticing these unhealthy patterns but working on changing them is important to achieve the goal of have an emotionally connected dynamic that helps you both to thrive. You both deserve this, and we are happy to help you work towards achieving this goal! Visit our therapists page to further address this concern with a qualified clinician.

Supporting Others in Their Season of Grief

Grief, like life, is unpredictable just like the changing of our seasons…

It is filled with the bustling of new life in the Spring, excitement of Summer and family vacations, shedding leaves in the Fall, upcoming holidays, then comes the cold and longer nights of winter preparing the land for the renewal of Spring.  Just like the changing of seasons our lives are filled with excitement, love, joy, new life, and yes even darkness.  Grief waltzes in and turns our life upside down.

Over many years I have had the honor of accompanying parents, spouses, children, and families who are grieving the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship.  Grief is an immovable part of our lives.  As holidays approach and time change ushers in longer nights our grief changes as well.  We are reminded at each holiday gathering of what we are missing, the longer nights and holidays can cause our grief to intensify. 

So how are we to handle this time of year?  Many articles have been written with helpful suggestions for the griever, I would like to share ways in which you can help others in their grief. 

How do we accompany our friends and family during this season of their life?  Megan Devine, in her book It’s OK That You’re Not OK, beautifully outlines ways that we can support those in their grief.  Remember that grief belongs to the griever, and you have an important role to play by supporting them and being fully present.  The following are my recommendations:

• Stay present and state the truth, do not try to fix the unfixable, grief is not something you can fix or make better. 
• Be willing to witness their pain. 
• Become an advocate, if someone asks about the griever be honest, you can say, “some days are better than others,” or “grief never ends.” 
• Anticipate, don’t ask.  Don’t wait for their call or for the griever to reach out, they may not know what they need so make concrete offers. 
• Above all love, be willing to listen and know that you do not have the answers. 

The most important thing I have learned from those who are grieving is that it is a relief for them to share stories.  In telling their stories it allows for healing and remembrance.  While in this season of our life we may only be able to see our grief and the fog that comes with it is endless and blinding.  In the ever-changing seasons of our grief what we need is to allow those grieving to follow their hearts and provide them with grace, love, and empathy.

For the griever, your feelings, no matter what they are; fearful, angry, anxious, disconnected, or the multitude of other emotions that make you feel as-if you are going crazy, is normal.  If you feel stuck, reach out for support, you do not have to be alone in your grief.  Finally, it is okay for you to take a break from your grief, although it may seem impossible, however taking a break is necessary.

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