Nedra Glover Tawwab - Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships

Set Boundaries, Find Peace

The Set Boundaries Workbook

Among the most significant contributors to your mental health, relationships can cause you pain, or they can heal you. Positively or negatively, relationships have an impact on your mental and emotional well-being. Psychologists have long supported the finding that healthy relationships can prolong your life, while unhealthy ones can influence health issues like cancer, heart disease, depression, anxiety, and addiction. So, we must take the health of our relationships seriously and strengthen connections where possible. While this applies to all types of relationships, no type of relationship is as formative as those we have with our family of origin.

My first book, Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, helped people understand the importance of boundaries in relationships. Healthy boundaries give you peace even when the other person hasnt changed. They can help you deal with challenges and chaos in relationships. While this book doesnt focus on boundaries, they are frequently highlighted as a way to thrive in family relationships.

When people enter therapy, family relationships are most often what they want to discuss. From a therapists perspective, many of the issues in marriages, friendships, and other relationships were birthed in our families. People may lament, Not everything is about my family, but so often it is.

One question that often comes up in therapy is Who was the first person to make you feel that way? The answer typically goes back to the first experience occurring in the family. How people engage in the family is usually how they engage in the world.

Family relationships are the most common type of unhealthy relationship. If youre wondering why, I will venture to say that they are where we spend our formative years and a considerable amount of time (if not physically, then mentally). The people in our childhood home are our primary teachers for many years. But what happens when we want to show up in the world with views, traditions, or a lifestyle that diverges from those of our family? It can create tension and resentment.

The truth is that during your childhood, you likely werent allowed to be yourself, so as an adult, youre becoming more your true self. And its healthy for you to figure out who you are, separate from who you were molded or told to be. If this does cause friction, dont worry. In this book, Ill cover how to be yourself around your family.

Some people will say, My childhood has no impact on who I am today. Not true. You cant simply extract all the good behaviors you learned and pretend away the ones youd rather not possess. Behaviors stick to you until you consciously change them. Tendencies within families have a way of tricking us into accepting certain family norms. For instance, Ive found that people from single-parent homes often struggle to understand the parent-child dynamics when two parents are involved. When they have a partner to support them in parenting, it can be hard for them to understand and embrace the involvement of another adult.

Of course, theres no such thing as a perfect childhood. Even when it appears fine from the outside, we have no clue whats going on behind closed doors. For some of us, the most complicated relationships we have are with our family. People tell me that they want to change or improve their family relationshipsespecially with parents, siblings, and extended family members such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousinsmore than any other relationships. Another huge sore point is our relationship with in-laws and blended family members, such as learning to parent children who have become adults. Plus, family relationships set the tone for how we operate in outside relationships, including friendships and romantic relationships.