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It’s natural to feel responsible for things you’re not responsible for. Feeling like everything is on you can be exhausting and can lead to breaking you down physically and/or emotionally. Let’s talk about 3 things that you can let go of and remind yourself that …
The holidays can be a time of reflection or a time when repeating patterns, stressors and emotions come to the surface. If any of these three things come up, that’s your sign that it’s a great time to go to therapy. Therapy is for people …
There can be tension during the holidays when you try to decide which family you’re going to spend time with each holiday. It can also be tough to be caught in the middle between your partner and your family.
Here’s how to navigate boundaries during the holidays that protect your peace and your relationship.
When you think about holidays you think about traditions and that’s part of what makes them so special.
But couples can sometimes struggle with honoring traditions for each person’s family. Your family’s tradition may be a get together that takes place on a certain date each year, but what if it conflicts with an event or tradition that takes place every year in your partner’s family?
How do you decide which family you spend that day with? Communicating about this ahead of time is key.
You may have to talk with your family about being flexible with dates, times, etc. so that you both get a chance to participate in your own family’s traditions. If that doesn’t work you could alternate each year. It can work as long as you are both willing to compromise and work towards a plan that gives each of you time to participate in the important activities and traditions with your families.
If it becomes too stressful and you can’t find a solution to maintaining your past traditions, you can make your own traditions. As a couple you get to decide what your traditions will be and although your family may expect you to keep all the old traditions, you may need to start some new ones. This is just one example of a common boundary that may need to be implemented which is saying no.
Saying, “No, I won’t be at that event this year” to your family can be hard but there may be many things you have to say no to in order to protect the peace in your relationship during the holidays. It may be social events with friends, work holiday parties that take place after hours, giving to a certain cause when you are asked, or anything else that you don’t want to do or would cause stress in your relationship.
“You can say no because you simply don’t want to do something, you’re tired, or you feel anxious. Your boundaries don’t have to make sense to other people; you’re an adult and you know what’s best for yourself.”
Another point of stress, and maybe the biggest one couples experience during the holidays is finances. Unfortunately, society tells us that you have to spend money on others in order to show them that you love them and that’s just not true. Going into debt to buy expensive gifts for your partner, friends and family is never a good idea.
Create a budget for gifts and holiday activities and stick to it. Talk about it and hold each other accountable. You know what you can afford and what you can’t so don’t let yourself get caught up in the materialism that is pushed through the media and lose sight of what is really important. It’s okay to buy them gifts but don’t go overboard. Spending time together, doing things for others and homemade gifts mean so much more to the people who love you.
Spending time together and communicating openly through all the chaos of the holidays is the best way to protect your peace as a couple; so setting a boundary to prioritize your relationship is essential.
Because things get so hectic, it can be easy to neglect each other, put off date night or not check in to see how your partner is doing. You may have less down time to just be together, but make sure to make the most of the down time you do have. Talk about how you are feeling and ask them about their feelings too. Holidays are a time for joy and happiness but sometimes they can bring not so happy emotions and you need to be there for your partner to lean on if they need support.
Entering the holiday season as a couple, it’s important for you and your partner to be prepared to deal with family expectations, coordinating events on both sides, keeping up with a busy schedule and all the other stressors that arise. But with communication, compromise and support from one another, you can experience a peaceful holiday season.
If you need help setting boundaries or strengthening your communication skills with your partner, contact us, we are here to help.
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Emotional neglect can have a significant effect on a person’s life. The neglect may occur in childhood, however, the emotional and psychological impact can last for a very long time and show up in a variety of ways; especially because neglect isn’t always obvious. You might have feelings about how your parents cared for you or what their lifestyle was (stressed, preoccupied, dealing with health issues), but you might not realize or label it as neglect. Sometimes it’s hard to detect or put your finger on the absence of something, especially if the absence is how it had always been.
Let’s look at what it is and how it can show up in adulthood.
“Emotional neglect can be defined as a relationship pattern in which an individual’s affectional needs are consistently disregarded, ignored, invalidated, or unappreciated by a significant other.” (Ludwig, Stephen. “Family Function and Dysfunction.” Science Direct. 2009. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/emotional-neglect)
When it comes to parents who emotionally neglect their kids it can be intentional or unintentional. They may not really understand the importance of love and support and how withholding it affects their kids, they may not feel capable of meeting those needs so they just ignore them, or they may feel jealous of their kids and maybe even resentful for having them. This can come from parents’ own experiences in childhood or cultural norms.
People who are a part of neglectful families are usually disconnected from one another and don’t share the closeness that a typical family experiences.
“Ongoing childhood emotional neglect is a form of child abuse and can lead to lasting trauma. This trauma can make it hard to develop a healthy relationship with others and with ourselves.” (Gould, Wendy Rose. “How Childhood Emotional Neglect Can Show up in Our Adult Life.” Very Well Mind. August18, 2023. https://www.verywellmind.com/childhood-emotional-neglect-in-adulthood-7568040)
It’s hard to express or process emotions as an adult if you were not taught how to do so early in life. It’s even harder if those emotions were totally ignored and you felt like your feelings didn’t even matter.
“When we have experienced emotional neglect, wounds, rejection, hurt, betrayal, or suppression, a part of our emotional self becomes unavailable to us. And when it becomes unavailable to us, it becomes unavailable to life, connection, vulnerability and intimacy.” (Ally, [awakenwithally]. “What is emotional unavailability?” *Instagram, January 3, 2024. www.instagram.com/p/C1pTsO6LUgA/?igsh=MWQ1ZGUxMzBkMA==)
So here are a few ways emotional unavailability can show up in relationships:
Avoiding Intimacy – Whether it’s simply an intimate conversation or physical intimacy, it requires people to feel strong emotions and that feels scary. So relationships may only get to a certain point and just fizzle out, or the person may self-sabotage causing the relationship to end so that they don’t have to move to the next step.
Defensiveness – Trusting others can be hard so instead of letting their guard down, people will tend to blame others or look for a way to justify the mistrust. It can be used as a coping mechanism to deflect and not have to accept the emotions that are triggered when there is a disagreement within a relationship.
Lack of Empathy – If someone is not able to understand or process their own emotions, then they are likely to also struggle with understanding how others feel or what they need emotionally.
“In other words, an emotionally unavailable person may not be able to relate to you, put themselves in your shoes, or consider your feelings when making a decision.” (Marks, Julie. Casabianca, Sandra Silva. “How to Spot Emotional Unavailability: 5 Signs”. Psych Central. September 24, 2021. www.psychcentral.com/lib/signs-of-emotional-unavailability#5-signs-of-emotional-unavailability)
We talked about how to recognize emotional unavailability and how to improve it in a previous post, check it out HERE.
Emotional neglect can show up for adults in their personal life and in their relationships with others, but it’s possible to develop healthier coping strategies and work towards healing. If you’d like to work through the effects of emotional neglect and improve the quality of your relationships, therapy is a great place to start. A therapist is trained not only help you process the trauma, but also to engage in healthy, emotionally attuned relationship. It’s a safe place to start experiencing a healthy relationship where you are seen, heard and supported. Contact us, we’d love to support you.
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You’ve probably heard before that things get worse before they get better when you start therapy. For adults, the reason is because you start to open your eyes to things you might not have been aware of in your life and in your past.
For kids, it’s actually really different. Here’s why:
Initially kids might be excited to have time that’s completely focused on them. They get to play, or do art, and they build a connection with the therapist. Or, if your kid is a little more cautious, they might be a little quiet at first and then warm up over the first few sessions. So things start out good and all seems well until the newness starts to wear off and things go a little deeper.
Your child will act it out in their relationship with the therapist. They will not want to talk about something hard, they will lie, they will want to leave, they will have the same complaint about the therapist that they have about their teacher. The same behavior of bouncing off the walls at school will show up in the therapy room.
This is called “reenactment” and this is a good thing.
Why? Because it lets the therapist work with the exact issue that is bringing your child to therapy LIVE. As therapists, we want this because it’s much more effective to work with a live issue than to try to communicate with your child about some abstract (not present here and now) issue that they don’t want to talk about.
The struggle is: they will tell you they don’t want to go to therapy or they don’t like the therapist. As a parent your instinct is to take care of your child and making them do something they don’t want to do can feel wrong. But you got to this point of attending therapy out of love and concern for them, so don’t make yourself feel bad about encouraging therapy.
If your child comes to you complaining about therapy or their therapist and doesn’t want to go, this is when you need to have a parent session. Of course, your kid will be very convincing and you will want to listen to and protect them but you may not want to immediately pull them out of therapy without digging a little deeper.
A parent session can help you assess what is really going on and if there is a legitimate reason to discontinue and/or find a new therapist, or if they just don’t want to experience the uncomfortable feelings of working through their issues.
You have already invested a few hundred dollars in therapy, plus driving time, plus all it took you to find the therapist and set up the relationship in the first place.
If you really don’t think it’s a good match between the therapist and your child, that’s OK! But don’t waste your investment by not finding out the therapist’s perspective on what’s going on. This is literally what you paid to get.
If the issue that’s come up in therapy is a re-enactment, I would strongly consider keeping your kid in therapy to see it through. Ask the therapist what he/she recommends, collaborate to see how the re-enactment can be a way to resolve the exact symptom or pattern that you came to therapy to resolve.
Ask the therapist about how to get your kid to keep coming to sessions when they don’t want to. Also, check out this article here about kids being resistant to therapy.
Even if it makes sense to end therapy, you will at least have this information about the behavior and it will be super helpful when you work with another therapist.
The problematic behavior was created for a good reason and it’s hard to let go of it. It may not be a positive coping skill but it is a coping skill that they have come to rely on. Nobody likes change, even if the behavior is causing all kinds of issues. Most people will try to maintain homeostasis. Known and familiar is better than new and unfamiliar to the brain.
So, of course, they’re going to resist change. You might also feel like it’s hard to create change even though you want relief from the problem. Change is hard for lots of reasons and we talk about several of them here.
But it’s important to put in the work now when you are already in the therapeutic relationship and have support. You’re here, now it’s time to do the work. You can do it, so can your child. But it will require going through some discomfort.
Hang in there. Partner with your therapist and move forward together.
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