Are you the “ungrateful” adult child at Thanksgiving?
‘Tis the season for your emotionally immature parents to feel entitled to your time, energy, and money! It doesn’t matter how far you’ve come in your education, work, family life - somehow things just never seem to be good enough.
This pattern can show up in small jabs: “You made sure to put in sugar instead of salt, right? I’ll never forget that time when you were seven!” (insert rage-baiting parent chuckle)
This pattern can show up in deep cuts: “Well if you’d decided to go to medical school, like your sister, you wouldn’t be having money problems, now would you?”
It’s so frustrating, right? And at the same time, so many adult children struggle with feeling guilt about their frustration with their parents. We’re going to talk about the ways blame and criticism show up at Thanksgiving and how to cope with these types of interactions during the holidays.
You’re never going to make them happy.
If you’re like most adult children of emotionally immature parents, you have bent over backwards to keep the peace with your parent. As a kid, you may have tried to please your parents with achievements, such as good grades, athleticism, or artistry. You may have been criticized for not doing enough even after babysitting your younger siblings, doing the dishes, and taking the trash out. Your parent might have sang your praises to your coaches & teachers, but behind closed doors you were told that you were lying about being sick (even though you could barely get out of bed) and you still had to go to school.
As an adult, it looks like hosting Thanksgiving dinner and helping your parents get flights & hotels, or offering space in your house for them to stay. You’ve been hosting these dinners for years, but your mother still finds a way to hover inside of the kitchen while you’re cooking. She may not lift a finger, but she has a lot to say about how much butter seems to be going into these recipes (and how your figure has changed recently). Or your dad might have a suspicious cough, but he refuses to acknowledge it. Instead, he insists on lifting heavy furniture to "get the house ready” but blames you when he needs to lie down and can’t finish the project no one asked him to do. And don’t forget any drinking or substance misuse that might be making all of these things worse!
The point is that you could be the world’s best chef and cook a Michelin star rated meal, but the best you’d get is a “thanks, kid” before the other shoe drops and your dad picks a fight with his brother or your mom runs into your guest room to chain smoke. The pattern never changes, so the first piece of advice I have is to be unsurprised when they behave the same way they do every year.
You may ask: Can they change?
But I ask: Have they?
We don’t know what your parents are capable of in the future, we only know what they’ve done in the past.
“So what do I do?”
If you’re like most adult children, your first instinct has been to help your parents understand why their behavior is so hurtful to you. You feel certain that if you could just find the “right” way to explain to them why hugging your children at Thanksgiving is inappropriate after your 8 year old son said he doesn’t like being touched, they might finally understand, and things might actuallly be peaceful.
I have a hard truth incoming: Emotionally immature parents do not view themselves as the cause of problems or the source of the solution. They perceive events as “happening to them” and they do not acknowledge their own contributions to how situations in their lives turn out.
This is just about the toughest pill to swallow for naturally empathetic adult children who have spent their entire lives being understanding of others and considering how they may have contributed to problems in their relationships. People who have a sense of emotional understanding often feel very surprised that their parents don’t want to understand emotions. In fact, emotionally immature parents fear feelings. Even the ones that seem to have almost uncontrollably loud feelings. They don’t take time to sit with their internal world and witness their feelings in order to process their experience. They react to their feelings by projecting onto the people around them.
Some parents can make some changes in the long-term. Most parents don’t. There’s no way to know which one your parent is. The only thing you have to work with is this:
Are they changing now?
If not, the only thing you can do is change how you respond to them.
How to set boundaries with emotionally immature parents at Thanksgiving:
Your options range from creating small, manageable boundaries to turning your phone off and booking a flight to Hawaii on Thanksgiving day. Below is a little guide to help you decide what might work best for your circumstances.
Quick Clarification: Boundaries are not requests. A request is asking someone else to change (which we’ve already established isn’t happening). A boundary is an expression of how you will change your own behavior.
My first question is: What do you want to do? Are you fed up? Do you need some space, at least for now? If you do - that’s valid! Or… do you feel some guilt at that idea? That guilt may be telling you you’re not ready for a decision that big, and you may want to try some of these boundaries out:
Behavioral Boundaries: Do you really want to host? If not, can someone else do it? If not, are there ways to ease your mental load (like, hiring a caterer or a cleaning service?) If you end up going to someone else’s place for Thanksgiving, maybe you remain until your parent starts engaging in certain behaviors. I’ve even heard of an adult daughter who planned to wait until her mother ticked off 3 boxes - blaming, denial, and gaslighting. She was able to leave the party in under an hour.
Time Boundaries: You can also plan to host or stay for a limited amount of time. Set realistic expectations based on how long you can tolerate your parents’ behavior. Even if that’s only 30 minutes!
Distress Tolerance Boundaries: On a scale from 0-10, if 0 is no disturbance and 10 is the highest disturbance you can imagine, leave the holiday party once you reach a 5. Staying isn’t worth the tax on your mental health. If it’s hard to assess this kind of thing on a numbered scale, listen to your body - does the distress feel like a whisper, conversational tone, or a yell? Don’t let it get past a conversational tone.
Boundaries are essentially an experiment of how much you can or cannot tolerate your parents. You can assess each time you try them out whether the interaction with your parent was manageable. If it was, keep the boundaries. If it wasn’t, you probably need to build stronger boundaries.
You don’t have to get through the holidays alone.
One more thing that’s true of adult children is that they are fiercely independent. They’ve had to be. While this quality makes them highly reliable it also makes it extremely difficult for them to ask for help. Needing help was usually seen as a weakness growing up. But, if I may offer some perspective…
Asking for help is actually a sign of strength.
It means being in touch with your emotional wounds enough to know that you deserve to have teammates in overcoming these really challenging circumstances. I love serving my clients as a therapist, coach, and support group leader in their healing journey. Support groups are a rare & powerful way to connect with other people who really get what these families are like. Coaching can offer personalized support in identifying & implementing the next steps to move forward from these relationships. Therapy can help relieve your heart & mind from traumatic memories you may still be holding onto from the past. You deserve care. If you’re ready to heal, reach out for a free 20 minute intro call to get started!