Allison Bottke - Setting Boundaries® with Your Aging Parents: Finding Balance Between Burnout and Respect

In Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children, Allison Bottke candidly described painfully watching her only son self-destruct in a web of addiction and financially destructive behavior. As she explored ways to help him stop this spiral downward, she realized the only ways she could help him were by changing her own thinking and behavior and by no longer enabling his addictions. She came to the conclusion that her inability to set appropriate boundaries had perpetuated a dysfunction that was jeopardizing her own health as well as his. She shared with readers what amounted to a fearless personal inventory of her psychological and spiritual world that ultimately allowed her to understand the necessity of boundaries in a close relationship.

Setting Boundaries with Your Aging Parents is written in the same spirit of hope, generosity, and faith that allowed the readers of Allisons first Setting Boundaries book to find a sane and safe place of recovery, optimism, and healing. It is an inspiring and important addition to the body of literature that addresses the problem and pain of adult children dealing with difficult parents. I happen to be an expert in this subject, but I am always in need of the collective wisdom shared by a community of survivors.

Allison Bottke adds to each of our efforts to garner hope, wisdom, and support to create lives of loving relationships unclouded by abusive childhoods. Her personal story is gripping and compelling as are the painful stories of any of us who have had to learn new and self-protective behaviors.

In Setting Boundaries with Your Aging Parents, the stories of adult children drowning in despair ring true to me because Allison so accurately describes the gut-wrenching agony of adult children doing the right things for their parents and still feeling troubled or abused. I was eventually estranged from my parents when I set a boundary and stopped accepting their abusive behavior. With time Ive come to an inner reconciliation that is still often challenged by the cultural belief that family relationships should be protected and sustained at all cost.

My training as a psychologist precluded faith-based solutions to psychological problems. But over time, Ive come to reject the scientific dogma rampant in my profession and have incorporated prayer and faith in God in my professional practice and daily life. I realized that when my parents cut off ties with me, my struggles were not only psychological. Rather, and even more importantly, they troubled my soul and made me yearn for faith and trust in God. Allison Bottkes Setting Boundaries books offer sound psychological advice that is stunningly integrated with the importance of understanding that God is the ultimate authority who overrides both societal and psychological beliefs.

Residing in New York City, I was nine months into my family estrangement in 2001 when I was challenged to call on all the spiritual resources I could muster to get through the painful and demanding days, weeks, and months that began with the September 11 terrorist attacks. During this time, I learned the importance of the spiritual component in healing of any kind. That day I responded to a call I heard on the local news for mental health volunteers to go to the Red Cross to work with victims of the tragedy. The mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, set up a mental-health hotline for the families of victims who needed immediate attention. I spent that nightperhaps the longest night of my lifetalking to people who had missing relatives and were still hoping against hope that their loved ones had survived the attack on the World Trade Center. At this point no one had any idea just how few survivors there would be.