How to Stop Loving Your Parents

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Many adult children grappling with a cheating parent say that one of their biggest issues is they want to want to spend time with their parents.

But they don’t actually want to spend time with them.

They want, sometimes desperately, for the love and connection that they felt with their parents before the affair came out to still be there. Often with the upheaval of the affair, the fighting, the secrets, the pain, it feels like it would be easier to just stop caring so much. It would hurt less.

There is good news and bad news. First the bad news.

You can’t stop loving your parents. Nor should you.

Even the worst childhoods typically have moments of genuine love and care from parent to child. Often when things go bad, we hold onto those memories and they hurt us even more acutely. Also, no matter how terribly your parents may have acted, you likely have the maturity to understand that few people are all bad or all good. Sometimes it is just that nuance that is so frustrating. You wish you could just write your parents off completely, but your heart stops you.

The good news is that there is absolutely a way to feel better about your relationship with your parents, simply by changing your understanding of what is bothering you most about your interactions with them.

Here are three ways to think about what is bothering you most about your relationship with your parents and how to cope.

It is an issue of boundaries

It could be that your love for your parents is being steamrolled by the fact that they do not see or accept your needs. This happens especially often with young adults who have recently left the nest. You are trying to figure out how to be an autonomous adult and still be your parents’ child, and everyone is trying to figure out what the new rules are. Throw infidelity into the mix, and things get complicated.

Especially if one parent is hurting badly, sometimes adult children don’t feel that they have a right to express what they need, for fear of adding more pain.

While this sounds like a kind thing to do, the reality is that trying to save your parent pain by stifling your own needs rarely works, especially in the long term. Because it makes you crazy, and because you cannot save your parents from the pain of infidelity. If you value a relationship with your parents (or anyone, for that matter) telling the truth nicely is the way forward.

I have written extensively about holding boundaries with parents after an affair, start here.

It is always amazing to me the value that respecting someone’s boundaries has in rebuilding trust in a relationship. You may find that if your parents make an effort to respect your boundaries, even if it is slow, that you feel more genuinely like you want to spend time with them.

If however, you feel you have been clear with your boundaries and you are not being respected, it may be that…

It is an issue of detachment

Detachment refers to the practice of accepting what the relationship is, rather than working on the relationship in the hopes that it will change.

The aspect of detachment that is most helpful for adult children dealing with parent infidelity is the refocus of your energy and attention on yourself, rather than your parents. Many children of infidelity spend months or years investigating a parent affair, keeping the secret of it, figuring out hoe to confront their parents, or helping to take care of their betrayed parent. Eventually that leads to an unbalanced equation of spending more time taking care of parents than self.

This is particularly difficult for older teens and young adults, because you are at a time in your life of huge brain development and emotional growth. You need to spend time focusing on yourself and figuring out what you want for work, for relationships, for lifestyle.

This skill of refocusing your energy on yourself is super important for adult children of cheating parents to develop, because your locus of control is quite small. You can and should make your opinion about the affair known. Both what you think your parents should do, and how it has made you feel.

But, here is the thing, just because you voice all of your opinions, doesn’t mean that your parents will listen to you. Nor should they. And the end of the day, they are the only ones who know all of the puzzle pieces to their relationship, and are the only ones who can decide how to proceed. While you may think your mom is batshit crazy to stay with your cheating dad, she is the only person who can decide to to that. You trying to force her into something different would be like her trying to force you to marry that high school boyfriend that she loved so much. It’s simply not her life.

In my experience, adult children often end up in a codependent relationship with their betrayed parents for all of the right reasons. They want to help, they feel terribly about what the cheating parent did, they feel the pain that the betrayed parent feels emotionally and sometimes physically. They want to help, which they think means getting more involved. So they end up being the listening ear, the shoulder to cry on, until they realize that it feels yucky to them, then they feel stuck. Because it feels selfish to abandon the betrayed parent by backing away.

Detachment is not selfish, for the same reasons setting boundaries is not selfish. Because you cannot solve your parents’ pain, and because detaching may be what allows you to continue to have a relationship with your parents amidst the upheaval of infidelity.

Detachment can help you to spend time with your parents and stay away from the issues that you disagree about, while enjoying the things that you share in common.

If setting boundaries and detachment don’t work, it may be that…

It is an issue of incompatibility

Incompatibility in relationships means that each person in a relationship has different views and desires that don’t match. So spending time together is by definition difficult.

I know what you are thinking. Of course I have different views than my parents! There should not have been an affair at all!

This is of course true, but not what I mean. To explain, I need to go back to what is, in my mind, the most important information to come out of the parent infidelity research.

How a family communicates about the affair has as much impact on the family as the affair itself.

In my experience, when affairs happen in families, it’s not the actual infidelity that decimates the family. It is the incompatibility. Consider this common example:

Dad cheats on mom, and mom knows but choses to turn a blind eye.Dad comes home late regularly and everyone just ignores it. You see what is going on, and the lack of honesty drives you bananas. What is a survival strategy for your mom, would make you miserable in your own life.

It’s not likely that your mom will change the way she treats your dad, regardless of how much you detach, or that your dad will change his behavior, even if you set boundaries. You have different ways of seeing the world.

From here your choices are to manage time with them and build your own chosen family, which is a concept I will address in a future post.

I hope that these three ideas have helped you understand more about your relationship with your parents. Sometimes it helps to understand that your struggle to feel love for your parents is not about you being a bad person, nor is it about your parents being bad people. If boundaries are crossed, codependency is active, and you are incompatible with them, it is going to be hard to muster up those loving feelings. But once you understand, you realize that you can feel love for your parents regardless of all of it.

Indeed, sometimes the best way to love someone is from afar.

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