“fixing” parental relations

I spent most of my teens and 20s with people who were wildly volatile, drama prone, erratic, emotionally undercooked.

That only changed when I realized the common ingredient was me. I was attracting these people. And I started to ask myself why.

What they all had in common, in retrospect? They all gave me friendship that echoed my mom’s mothering style. Intermittent validation and engagement, followed by long bouts of complaining about other people, bringing drama to me to fix, screaming at me because

I was there and they needed to scream. Then some more validation, more affection. Then back to wild mood swings, emotionally stunted relating, and emotional sniping. I was constantly having to comfort them and fix their problems and

bear the brunt of their hurricane of stunted emotional reactivity. And to hear it stoically, without showing pain, unless I wanted to weather another storm of them abusing me for my reaction to their abuse.

Sounds cliched, but I’m very concrete ways, I was just living my relationship w my mom on repeat.

Now there’s a lot of focus in wellness and psych and trad and holistic circles on fixing your relationships with your parents. I’ve had a lot of experience with this, and I think this discourse is often taken too literally.

I’ve tried to literally fix up my relationships with my parents many times. About once a year from age 16-22, and every couple of years since then.

But the thing about a relationship is that it’s between two people.

Without going into needless details, my attempts have never gone well. One or two of these were probably partially due to my own clumsiness or the attitude I carried in. But a few attempts, I’ve been quite proud of how I handled them, even when they didn’t lead to anything.

So how to make sense of this “reconcile with your parents” discourse, when your parents can’t or won’t meet you halfway. Or quarter way. Or anywhere?

Part of it for me has just been lowering my expectations. I chat w my parents a couple times a year, mostly pleasantries, but that’s all they’ve really been able to handle without bringing their own trauma to put on me, and I’m just not accepting that anymore.

And yet, without healing the literal relationship, I’ve been able to make big turnarounds on my relationships that follow that pattern.
I did this by accepting that the relationship with my parents is not a concrete THING between people, but a pattern that moves outward from me.

I got better at noticing these patterns, relating to them as an internal relation with an image of my Mother, rather than the sum of my interactions with the flesh and blood person.

It’s to the point where when I meet someone I’m drawn to, and the draw is an outgrowth of that pattern, I can usually just spot it, say to myself “okay, Mothering is here now” and treat the relating accordingly.
I don’t let myself get tangled in with these people anymore.

I’ve met and talked to other people (mostly from the Midwest. Not sure how relevant that is, but ) who have taken similar routes. Trying to fix things up w the flesh and blood parents, no budge there, so they turn to fixing up the ways they carry that relation w them.

I still get jealous of people who are able to call their parents and just chat about whatever’s happening in their lives, without having to maintain several layers of protective boundaries. It seems like a wholesome and enriching way to live.

But I’ve accepted that that’s not anything in my control. My lack of access to it isn’t my fault, it’s not because of anything I did, and there’s nothing that I alone can do to get there.
So I’m more comfortable just doing what I can now.

tl;dr: fixing up your relations with your inner image of Father/Mother is the best thing to do if you have broken, traumatized, or toxic parents. Sometimes doing that will also repair the relation with your flesh&blood parents, but you can’t really expect it to. And that’s okay.