Accountability matters and can heal relationships. If youre a parent who is serious about improving your relationship with your children, this is for you! #parentingtips #parenting #relationships #Relationship #family #boomer #childhood #childhoodtrauma #psychology #therapy #attachmentstyle #millennial #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #conflict #communication #healing #kids #okboomer #MentalHealth #therapy #therapytok

Here's the most important thing I've learned from Boomer parents as a family therapist. The price of not taking accountability is isolation. You have a choice. When someone comes to you and says, "Hey, I need to give you some feedback because you hurt me." You can choose to be open to their feedback and figure out how their emotions make sense and how your behavior may have impacted them. Or you can choose to be closed to their feedback and get defensive, try to defend yourself and dissuade them to feel a different kind of way. Or to just stop telling you about it. The cost of that first choice of being open to receiving feedback and being accountable, it's very difficult. You have to tolerate your own distress and regulate your own emotions to make it through. And that choice is relationship enhancing. Choosing to be closed to feedback and to not take accountability for your actions will spare you of that pain and it's a relationship to destroying behavior. One more thing, they're also confused because as I've seen, when you remove yourself from the equation and you remove your behaviors from the equation, all you're left with is the other person. So if I made a negative comment about someone else's body and they began to cry, but I am unwilling to see myself and unwilling to evaluate my own comment, all I see is this person crying and I don't understand why because I've removed the trigger. And then I just get confused. Why are they crying? It must be something wrong with them. That lack of accountability allows me to blame it on them and to spare my own pain. It's a great strategy to protect myself against feeling uncomfortable emotions. And if I choose that, I will also be choosing isolation and no contact. There are any boomer parents who are watching this and who don't want to be in a no contact status where they're child. I just so strongly encourage you to begin going on a journey of learning how to tolerate your own emotions so that you can emotionally show up for your child.