This is a delicate subject, I admit,
I'm not a specialist , yet I am a lover of life/family/and the future. Of late many clients are presenting with more than LYF 4U's usual strain of family fallouts.. so I offer these suggestions in the hope that they ease your path of resistance somewhat.
It's not easy when families have a divide of any type. Often when it is a child versus parent the divide is even more emotionally painful. Parents rarely choose to let go of their children, so children let go of their parents. They move on. They move away. They build their own set of values and beliefs in which to build their own adult lives with. The ways in which they were acknowledged or sought approval changes.
Do know it's so common, although as a parent having their parental hearts pulled it sure feels very unique to you. to the point where it is not uncommon...and in many ways necessary. Also hold onto the fact that it is temporary. Because by the time those 1st attempts in business don't succeed, or relationships fail, or 1st gray hairs show, or the sound of baby's feet hit the floor they will be back, for the love you still have; oh so much of.
You will always be the parent to your child... even if you feel a little redundant right now.
The historian Steven Mintz, the author of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, made a similar observation in an email: “Families in the past fought over tangible resources—land, inheritances, family property. They still do, but all this is aggravated and intensified by a mindset that does seem to be distinctive to our time. Nowadays conflicts are often psychological rather than material—and therefore even harder to resolve.”
Also Covid now has its claws buried into societal lives, and is ripping through personal family values and beliefs, creating unknown fears and rifts not felt before…not to mention sabotaging one's freedom of choice.
I would suggest it is not so much harder, than perhaps in centuries past, merely more unique to the 2000s. In fallouts of today it is the common drive to use ghosting or blocking, even the notion of deleting others in general, when rifts occur.
I believe much of this stems from Media sites such as FaceBook, the "NEWS" Or similar, where rather than being Face to Face with a person, (now masked) emotions are confused at best. Technology has been taught as a coping technique when any communication becomes a little harder.
The thing is people disagree, not on logic; They disagree on their own personal values and beliefs..
There are no crystal balls.. (thankfully) life is full of pasts, and futures.. and without sounding like a verse often said yet often mistaken for what it means.
We are ALL different , how we live, act, make decisions..l
Find your own peace in your now , the present, so that when the time or if the time for reconciliation comes along, you and yourself have let go of past hurts, or how you think the relationship should be, accepted what is and planned a space with this family member in how it could be now, in harmony-even take a cup of kindness; in so as you move forward together. As poet of Scotland, Robert Burns wrote- For the sake of Auld Lang Syne,
Or at the very least be civil enough to agree to disagree..
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