Category: Psychology

  • The Step by Step of Parental Estrangement

    The Step by Step of Parental Estrangement

    Why are so many adult children cutting off their parents? It is one of the most common problems Dr. Ray hears on the radio and in his office: faithful parents shut out by their grown kids, sometimes kept from their grandchildren. In this audio blog he lays out the chain of events he sees again and again.

    “Common, so common, so very common”

    If you’ve listened to this program at all, or ever sat in my office invisible, you would know that one of the far more common problems I deal with is parents who have been estranged, shut off, excommunicated by their young adults or even their middle-aged adults. Common, so common, so very common.

    A couple of weeks ago on this program I had an article that talked about this from a secular psychology perspective. It said a lot of young adults are writing off their parents. “Rightfully so!” was the tone of the article. Because, it said, what used to be looked at as just faulty parenting, struggling parenting, or just human parenting, we now realize is a lot more pathological. That was the tone of the article. It was awful.

    The chain of events behind estrangement

    These are generalizations, but here’s how it typically goes.

    1. The parents believe; the kids don’t. The older generation is more religious, and that’s borne out by the stats. Something like 40 percent of Gen Z, up to about age 27 or 28, are “nones.” Not sister nuns. They are nones of no religion. That has plateaued, and there are even little spurts of younger people embracing the faith, young men more so than young women. So the folks I hear from are by and large more religious, and their young adult children by and large are not.

    2. The kids aren’t content, and they look for someone to blame. To the degree that these young adults are not content in their lives, they make bad decisions. Especially in their thirties and forties, there is often a history of relationship problems, life problems, struggle. They’re not settled individuals. They’re unhappy, they’re discontent, they’re anxious. And of course they look for someone to blame, and the easiest target is their parents. “You did this to me.”

    3. Discontent leads to therapy. The percentage of adults in America who have at least tried therapy is over 50 percent. So it stands to reason: the more discontent, the more likely you are to approach a therapist.

    4. The therapy focuses on the self. In general, therapists practice a very secular type of psychology: it is most important that the individual feel at peace in their existence. If anybody is rattling that peace, then we have to consider separation from those peace disturbers, which oftentimes are parents.

    So we start out with religious parents who raise the kids pretty much in religion. The kids shed religion and want no part of it. They’re shaped by the culture, and they look at their parents like throwbacks: I don’t like your religious views. I don’t like your morals. I don’t like your politics. I don’t like the way you look at life. And you screwed me up.

    They go to therapy, and the therapist, listening to how they describe their parents, says, “Wow, you need to put some distance between you and those folks. From what you’re describing, they sound toxic. Have you set boundaries? Maybe for your own mental well-being you need some distance from them.”

    That’s where individual therapy goes. It focuses on the self, whereas Christianity focuses on the other. So there you have it: a confirmation that I’m not the one who needs to look at myself and what I’ve done to my parents. My parents have done this to me, and the therapist says so. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across that chain of events.

    “Unprecedented in human history”

    It’s only slowly starting to become apparent. I noticed this years ago. Dennis Prager was talking once, before his accident, about how many calls he got from older parents who said: I have no relationship with my young adult or middle-aged kids. I can’t see my grandkids. They don’t want me in their lives. I’ve tried to reach out. I’ve tried to apologize for whatever, but they don’t want to hear it.

    I read a column by Dennis Prager about this, and I thought: finally, somebody in the secular world is noticing that this is happening. I believe it is unprecedented in human history, that the next generation, in such huge numbers, looks back on the generation that raised them and says, “Ew! You’re pathological!” An interesting, interesting generational dynamic.

    Facing this in your own family? Dr. Ray answers parents’ hardest questions about faith and grown children in Family Faith Under Fire: Practical Answers to Everyday Challenges.

    Transcript of Dr. Ray’s audio blog, lightly edited for reading.

  • Look and Listen!

    Look and Listen!

    Why do people start their answers with “look” and “listen”? Dr. Ray talks about a communication habit he notices in interviewees and sometimes in parents, and wonders what is behind it.

    “Listen” and “Look”

    I have noticed that when people are asked a question, and this is particularly true of pundits, perhaps political figures, there is a communicative habit that’s ugly. I think it’s easily done even in normal conversation, and the implications of it are not good. What am I referring to? Let’s say you ask me a question and you say, “Ray, I want to get your opinion on my 17-year-old daughter.” And I start my answer with, “Listen.” Now that’s very commanding, isn’t it? That struck me, because I’ve heard an awful lot of interviewees begin their answer that way. Or a parallel word: “Look.” In other words, I am dictating to you to pay attention.

    I don’t know why this is so common. One of my explanations is that we tend, by osmosis, to pick up on speaking styles. The word “well” is used constantly to answer any question. I would say at least 80 percent of the time, when someone is being interviewed on radio or TV about a subject they have experience in, they’ll start out with “Well.” But “look” and “listen” are particularly pushy. In other words, “Look and listen.” They imply, “You need to pay attention to me.”

    I think it’s as though, if I don’t say “listen,” they’re not going to listen. Or, I don’t know what I want them to look at. Apparently, look at my reasoning. You could say “Think,” or “Pay attention,” or “Watch out.” All of which say, “I’m going to say something really important to you now, and you need to focus on it.”

    “Well, being a shrink”

    Now, some might say, “Kind of being a little picky here about language, aren’t you, Ray?” Well, being a shrink, what you’ve got to do is listen to language. That’s the coin of the realm in therapy or counseling. Trying to understand somebody, you’ve got to listen to the words they use. You’ve got to listen to how they use the words. You’ve got to, between the lines, try to figure out what they’re saying. You’ve got to connect this sentence to a sentence they said 12 minutes ago. You have to hyper-focus on the way they phrase things.

    It’s very hard for me. My wife sometimes will be watching something on TV, and she’ll look at me, because she’ll know I’m just getting ready to comment on this. She’ll say, “Ray,” and I go, “Yeah, okay, okay, okay.”

    There’s a certain emphatic pronunciation to both of those words. It’s not “please look” or “would you listen?” No, no, no, it’s “listen,” and I can’t help wondering what the motive is for using those words. Is it just a habit, just a way of talking? Is it to fill up a little bit of time until you formulate the thought you were going to say? Or is it something more? Is it stressing that my opinion needs to be taken into account here, because it’s very accurate, formidable, and something you should seriously consider? I don’t know. I just thought about that. I made a little note here in my book: comment on starting answers with “look” and “listen.”

    Sometimes parents do that. Lecturers, you notice that? Kid does something, and we want to try to straighten out their thinking on it. “Now listen to me.” We do that. “You look here, young man.” I guess those are kind of variety words, and you can use them in a bunch of contexts. But I’ve got to take a break here. So when I get back, I hope you’ll listen.

    Dr. Ray has plenty more on how we talk to each other in How to Get Along with Almost Everybody.

    Transcript of Dr. Ray’s audio blog, lightly edited for reading.

  • He’s a Special Child

    He’s a Special Child

    Should I go easy on discipline because my child has been through a hard time? Dr. Ray describes the “He’s a Special Child” trap, where parents of kids hurt by life back off on limits. He explains why love and support are one thing and lowering the standard for behavior is another.

    A little guy with a hearing problem

    I consulted for several years to a number of Head Start programs. Basically I did evaluations and consulted with the teachers. I remember one year we had a little guy, about four, four and a half. He had significant hearing problems, to the point where it really affected his interaction with other kids. This little guy was an extreme behavior problem. He was uncooperative. He threw major league resistant fits. Very difficult.

    One interpretation, and I think this is one that would be glommed onto by someone looking for a lot of complicated psychological reasons, would be that he’s frustrated. The poor little guy can’t interact with people, so his emotions get the better of him and he reacts. I’m not ruling that out. That could be a part of it.

    But as I met with the parents, I found that they felt very guilty about life ripping him off, that he couldn’t hear normally. As a consequence they didn’t want to put limits on his conduct or discipline him, because they felt he was so frustrated by his deficiency in hearing that holding him accountable for some of the nasty stuff he was doing would be mean-spirited and unpleasant. So what you had was a little guy whose conduct was more of a handicap for him than his hearing handicap.

    “He’s a Special Child”

    My first book was titled You’re a Better Parent Than You Think. It sprang from my experience at a mental health center, where I quickly became the parenting go-to guy and saw an awful lot of parents. Good people! Insecure, second-guessing, irresolute, lacking authority, frustrated by their kids. A lot of it was because they didn’t allow themselves to have legitimate, fair, helpful, healthy authority. One of the chapters in the book was called “How to Talk Yourself Out of Authority.” One of the sections of that chapter was “He’s a Special Child.” Here’s how it works.

    You have a child, and it doesn’t have to be a six-year-old, it can be a fifteen-year-old, who you believe has been ripped off by life. One of the more common rip-offs is a divorce. The custodial parent feels very badly for the child because the mom or the dad is not a consistent part of their life anymore. Or you have a child on the autistic spectrum, with a developmental problem that makes it more difficult to interact appropriately with others. Or a child who’s developmentally delayed, who’s ten but functions like a seven-year-old overall. Anything that brings a child out of the realm of normal, unhindered development is a risk. A lot of parents say, “Life has not been fair to my child, therefore I have to understand what he’s dealing with, and therefore I have to be very loose in implementing any discipline, because of his overall frustration level and his struggle to deal with his handicap, whatever that might be.”

    In situations like that, I’m quick to counsel parents. On one hand, you do understand that this child may have his own special issues in learning responsibility, learning self-control, learning to treat people with respect, acting appropriately socially, because of his particular developmental, emotional, and sometimes transient issues. If a parent dies, I’ve had that a lot. I’ve seen some severe behavior problem kids in my office whose parent died when they were seven, eight, and nine, and the surviving parent, now that the kid’s 15, essentially stopped disciplining because they felt so terrible that this kid was hurting so badly about losing a mom or dad.

    I counsel them: it is one thing to give emotional support. More hugs, more kisses, more positives, more time. That is one thing. But you do not do a child any favors, any help, any good by saying, “Because life has been tough on you as I see it, I can’t add to it by expecting you to act appropriately or respectfully or socially right.” I’ve seen so many kids, because of that, become very difficult young adults. And it isn’t because of the original handicap or life struggle. It’s because the parents backed off in teaching and socializing and moralizing this child.

    Don’t do it. It’s one thing to be hurting because of your particular situation, but that is not a justification for being nasty or disrespectful or hurtful or mean-spirited to other people. They still have to be held accountable with loving discipline.

    “Ray, you big dummy!”

    When we adopted our twins, they were undisciplined. They were four years old and had not been disciplined well for the first four years of their lives, and the son especially was just out of control. I remember one time lying in bed and saying to my wife, “Honey, I don’t know. Maybe we ought to loosen up here with him.” And she said, very supportively and lovingly, “Ray, you big dummy!” Okay, she didn’t say that, but I could read it in her eyes.

    She said, “We can’t do that. We’ll give them more hugs, more kisses, tell them how much we love them, but it wouldn’t be fair to them to lower the standards for them that we don’t lower for the other kids.” And she was right. So they did get more discipline in the beginning because they just had so many things that were socially inappropriate and out of control. But with time, they settled in. It did take a while, but they did settle in.

    My wife is exactly right. She said, “Ray, just because they’ve had a very difficult first four years doesn’t mean we turn around and say, ‘Well, okay, we can’t ask you to treat your sister nicely.’” One of the biggest traps parents fall into is “he’s a special child,” and therefore my discipline becomes permissive or lax or overlooking. It doesn’t help anybody.

    This idea comes straight from a chapter in Dr. Ray’s first book, You’re a Better Parent Than You Think!

    Transcript of Dr. Ray’s audio blog, lightly edited for reading.

  • How do feelings change?

    How do feelings change?

    Can you change how you feel by changing how you think? Dr. Ray uses a Mark Twain quote and his own experience to show how thinking changes over the years, and how feelings follow. He applies it to a parent whose grown child has left the faith.

    “Has your thinking changed since age 14?”

    Mark Twain supposedly said this: “When I was 14, my father was so ignorant I could barely stand to have the old man around, but when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man learned in seven years.” Here’s the question that quote prompts. Has your thinking changed since age 14? How about since age 21? At that time you were pretty sure of the way you looked at things, right? What’s changed since? Probably a whole lot.

    You just don’t look at things now as you did then. Whether it’s religion, politics, life, emotions, people, or relationships, your thinking has radically shifted. What changed it? Was it reality? Was it personal experience? How about making mistakes, listening to other people, even your old man? Your thinking changes all the time.

    Thinking changes, and feelings follow

    So when people say to me, “I can’t help it, that’s the way I feel,” I’m tempted to say, “Well, wait, how did your thinking change from twenty years ago about all kinds of stuff?” Obviously you felt a certain way then. How come you don’t feel that way now? Because slowly, sometimes by getting hit with a two-by-four, you realize the way you were thinking is not good, doesn’t help you, causes problems for you, makes you feel bad, creates emotions that you don’t like. You start the process of saying, “I don’t want to think like that anymore. I want to accept that I can’t change that person. For years I felt terrible because that person was a certain way and I couldn’t do anything about it, but I don’t feel so terrible anymore.”

    Why? “Well, I guess I’ve just accepted that I can’t do anything about it.” How’d you accept it? What did you do? It wasn’t magic. You changed your thinking. You kept reinforcing to yourself, “I can’t do anything about that.” In the beginning you thought you could. Later on maybe you realized you couldn’t, but you were upset, devastated, frustrated because you so wanted to change that other person. You were desperate to change that other person. There’s got to be a way. Over time you realized, “No, I can’t. I tried every way I knew how. I even called that dude on the radio, Ray Guarendi.” He said, “Are you sure you can change that person?”

    So you came to accept, to your own peace, that you can’t do anything about that situation. Obviously your emotions changed with it. You’re not as disgruntled, not as unhappy, not as frustrated, not as ill at ease or lacking peace about the whole scenario. Because as you analyzed it, thought about it, and reassessed it, ever so slowly your thinking changed, and as your thinking changed, so did the feelings. They’re not as burdensome anymore. You’re not as hurt. You’re not as devastated.

    From evangelical to Catholic

    Your thinking does that all the time. Not just from when you were 14 until now. It does it from last year. When I was in the evangelical world, I was pretty certain that the way they looked at things, their particular theology, was pretty solid, pretty correct. Well, as I started to look at things, church history, church logic, church thinking, church theology, my thinking changed. Yes, there’s a lot of beauty in the evangelical world, but I found the Catholic Church made more sense to me. My thinking changed. That happens all the time.

    If you’ve got a kid who’s 23 years old and flat out doesn’t want to hear anything about religion, and you’ve been beating yourself up, “Where’d I fail? How’d I do this? What happened?” You thought you were doing right. Maybe you weren’t doing right. Maybe you missed something. You should have prayed the rosary in Aramaic, not English. But over a couple of years you became more at peace with the situation because you recognized, one, that you did what you thought was best, however imperfect and human, and two, that you’re not responsible for how he thinks. You can’t be. He doesn’t want to hear anything you have to say. If he did, maybe you could try to reach him, but he doesn’t want to hear it. Not at all. Zero, zip, nada.

    And ultimately your feelings of self-defeat and self-deprecation started to fade because your thinking changed. Feelings do not occur in a vacuum. They are fueled or tapered by the way we look at things.

    Dr. Ray goes deeper on how our thinking shapes our faith and our peace in Thinking Like Jesus: The Psychology of a Faithful Disciple.

    Transcript of Dr. Ray’s audio blog, lightly edited for reading.

  • The Body is Dumb

    The Body is Dumb