Alienation strains your relationships. Whether they’re the relationships with your kids or your spouse.
Alienation has a way of cementing the distance in relationships. The longer the distance remains, the harder it’ll be to overcome. So when alienation happens, what can you do to rebuild the relationship?
A good place to start is with yourself. Examine your attitude. Your attitude may be a factor in keeping the alienation going.
If you have the mindset that it is “my way or the highway“, you better get used to being alienated. You will have to accept that the relationship is not going to be the way it was.
Something happened that changed all that. You’ll have to re-adjust your expectations. Expecting to have the kind of relationship you once had or hoped for is a recipe for trouble.
Once you change your attitude, you need to accept your child the way they are. Recognize that they are wounded.
Their wound is real and needs to be acknowledged and validated. When you dismiss, discount or ignore the wound, you are not validating them and their pain.
To re-connect, you have to validate them, validate their hurts, and validate their reality.
With any relationship, we connect with those we know.
If you don’t know your child, this is the time to start. They will also need to know you. In knowing you, they will need to know your heart, not your lessons or lectures about what ‘should’ be.
They need a relationship with you. If that means that you need to ask for their forgiveness, do so without justifying what you did to alienate them or hurt them.
When you defend what you did, it only serves to invalidate them. You will have to look at what happened from their perspective. That means that you consider other ways of looking at yourself and what you did or did not do.
That’s expecting a lot of some of you. That is the price of admission to a relationship after alienation has happened. You have to be real, you have to be honest, you have to be open.
There are other actions to take, yet taking these will put you well on the way to re-connecting. I address other ways of connecting and helping them with their wounds in the ebook, “Helping Your Child Heal‘. In it you’ll find ideas you can use in rebuilding the damaged relationships.
Best Regards,
Jeff
