Five Tips to Have the Best Holidays Ever with your Parents

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I made a video a couple of days ago about “purposeful communication.” ( not the one above… another one!) Some people sent me private messages to say, “I’m going home to my parents, where all of this becomes the most difficult.” That is true for the great majority of people. The relationships where we are all most likely to hold on to resentment, to withheld and bottled-up love, is with our parents.

In this post I am going to share with you five tried and tested tips that can allow you to make this holiday season a time when you can have the greatest healing, intimacy and forgiveness with your parents ever. I used these tips successfully with my own father, and I have also passed them on to hundreds of people.

This is a nuanced topic, best not reduced to sound bites.  First I am going to share with you four important caveats, that will make this more meaningful.  Then I will share the 5 tips.

If you have a few minutes to spare, read it all.  If you are in a hurry, skip to the 5 tips here.

A ~ Why this is important for Evolutionary Entrepreneurs.

I am a coach for evolutionary entrepreneurs.  I’m not a psychotherapist or a psychologist: I don’t deal primarily with childhood conditioning or even personal relationships. My latest book, Radical Brilliance, is about how you can make the greatest contribution to the future of humanity. I work particularly with millennial entrepreneurs.

If you are engaged in business primarily motivated by profit, or fame, or growing the size of a company, and that is all there is to it, you don’t have to worry very much about the rest of your life. You can have a terrible marriage, terrible relationships, estranged children, you can have a terrible relationship with your body, you could be addicted in various ways, and still make a killing in business. Look around at the state of the world to see that this is true.
If your work in the world is primarily motivated by wanting to make a difference, and to being a vehicle for evolution, then everything becomes relevant. Every part of your life matters.

The degree of completion and forgiveness with your parents will dramatically affect your capacity to be of service. The quality of your marriage, your sexuality, your health, how much your children feel loved, all of these things are acutely germane and relevant to your ability to make a difference in the world. Whole people can be of service and spread wholeness. If your personal life is not fully in order, it is going to somehow dilute and sabotage your gift.

That is why I do sometimes attend to these things with my clients: not because I am primarily aiming to fix personal wounding, but because it can be incredibly relevant to you making the greatest difference you can.

B ~ Why is our relationship with our parents often the most “triggering?”

Imagine that one winter there is a flu epidemic, and you get it.  You are not going to focus a huge amount of energy to find out who in particular gave you the flu. If everyone is sick, you are probably not going to ask, “Where did I get the flu? Yes, It was YOU,  Joe Smithers, in the next cubicle at work. You gave me the flu, Joe Smithers, and now I’m going to get revenge at you. I’m never going to speak to you again. You breathed in my direction and now look, I’m sick.”

You don’t do that, do you? Instead, you will probably say to yourself, “Yeah, we all got the flu this week. It’s going around, and we all got infected by it. Poor old Joe Smithers, he got the flu, he caught it from Maggie Stein in the accounting department. Joe gave it to me, I think, and I probably passed it on to some other people. It’s just in the air. We all got infected by it.”

In just the same way: you, and me, and all human beings alive on planet Earth, we all have access to an intelligence, a great love, a great universal consciousness that gives us life, that animates us and allows us to connect and to be brilliant and to create. But we are also, all of us, to some degree or other afflicted by a collective virus of separation. The symptoms are that we feel judgmental, competitive, revengeful, we feel that the other is speaking and acting from a separate source than I am. Many traditions have said that this feeling of separation is at the root cause of human suffering. We are all affected by it. A few people have got relatively free of it, but that is still rare. Most people are affected every day by this virus of separation.

When you were very little, this virus was primarily passed on to you through your parents. We get infected by it in the first few years of life, when those were the people you were relating to the most. You might have got some from priests, or school teachers, or other family members, but it is mainly Mom and Dad who had the power to infect you with the virus that they themselves were afflicted by.

For this reason, we feel more resentful to our parents than we often do to other people, even though they may not have been any more contagious with the virus of “not love” than anybody else. That is simply where we were most affected. Going home for the holidays often brings to the surface deeply held feelings of that core separation, more than a high school reunion might.

C ~ I speak from My own Experience

I am not speaking to you today theoretically, or in a vacuum. I had a Mom and a Dad, who are both dead now. I had every possible reason you can imagine to feel resentful, and to feel like it was appropriate to defend myself and cut off from them. It was a very, very rocky environment. Neither of them were well prepared to be parents. It was a few years after the World War, they were both highly traumatized people, and I got all of that.

My mother died of cancer when I was 26. I was living in America already, and I went home to England for the funeral. I saw her dead body, it was an open casket. I remember standing there, and feeling such deep sorrow and regret. It was only after her death, when the body was inert and silent that I could fully feel that she had meant no harm. She was herself closed, and in that closure, this was all she could do. Only in her death did I I feel forgiveness, sorrow. So many things had not been said, but it was too late. Here was a dead body, and my options to complete things were now limited. It was a terrible feeling. It took me 10 years of many different kinds of therapy to come to a feeling of peace with her.

Luckily, I learned a lesson from that. My father died when I was fifty: twenty four years later, I had learned to prepare for his death. Before he died, I was able to say the things that needed to be said. I was able to bring things to completion, sometimes in a way that was difficult and felt counter intuitive, and sometimes I was concerned that it was not fully “authentic” or “honest.” But those were the things that I knew needed to be communicated before it was too late.

That is the invitation I want to offer you today, if your parents are alive, and if you are going home for the holidays to be with them. I am going to give you five tips in a moment that could save you a tremendous amount of regret later.

D ~ Sometimes Honesty is Overrated

Some of the suggestions I am going to offer you today may cause you to think, “Well, that’s not honest. That’s not authentic to how I feel. I’ve got all this resentment and it’s not authentic to express other than this resentment, because this is what is true for me.”

I am not advocating that you should be dishonest or lie to anybody. There is a way that you can be truthful with yourself about what you are feeling. That is what really matters the most: that you don’t hide things from yourself. Then  you can choose to be purposeful and conscious about what you put into the space with other people, so that you can create the future you want with them. You can watch a video about “purposeful communication” here.

You don’t necessarily have to vent and voice every wounded feeling to other people in order to be free. It is important to feel those feelings in yourself. But the most direct way to create the best life for yourself is to make your communication purposeful and leading to the outcome that you most want.

I have tried both. I have experimented with deep raw honesty, with being vulnerable, and what that does. I have also experimented with feeling those things in myself, sometimes with the help of a therapist or a close friend, and then being deliberate and awake and sober in what I create with other people. This is not to let any perpetrator off the hook, or to be fake. It is simply an invitation to reflect on the future you want to inherit for yourself later on.