What do you do when you see hurtful patterns of communication recurring when your son comes home from college? We talk about this and a whole lot more on the podcast, Find Your Voice To Get Healthy.

Healthy Family Connections, the number one rated family therapy podcast, is sponsored by Neil D Brown, LCSW, and I’m your host, Neil D Brown and I’m here to help you get that enjoyable family you work for every day. Please remember this podcast is for educational purposes only, it is not a substitute for psychotherapy when you need it.

Today we’re hearing from Franchesca of Minneapolis, Minnesota and Franchesca writes:

I have a question about dealing with an old pattern in my family.

My son was just visiting home from college and he and his Dad got into an old familiar fight about our son’s habit of not putting things back where they belong. I left the area where they were fighting and grabbed a beer to calm myself down in another room.

Later, my husband came in still steaming about our son’s behavior and his unwillingness to take responsibility for his behavior. I told him that I thought the yelling was way over the top and that neither he nor our son were listening to each other. They kept repeating themselves and accusing each other of not listening. This just angered my husband even further and he accused me of siding with our son.

I realized that the fighting and my drinking are linked and that I’ve used alcohol to deal with family stress. I’ve been getting healthier this past year. I’m in therapy, cut back on my drinking, lost weight, and have been finding my voice with my husband and feeling much better. In this case, I can’t get him to listen, and I’m upset with myself for using alcohol to cope. I know I can only change me, but do you have any suggestions for how to deal with this unhealthy pattern?

First of all Franchesca, congratulations for committing to a plan for health, personal growth and for the great progress you’ve made.

I like that you’ve been finding your voice. That’s so important to personal and family health that you can be open with your thoughts, feelings, and your needs.

When we can’t be open or believe we can’t be open with our feelings, we become resentful, closed down, detached, depressed, and otherwise unhealthy and everyone suffers. So, finding your voice is what it’s all about.

I assume that issues within your family of origin started you off with a sense of unworthiness that limited you having a fully empowered voice. And then your marriage has been challenging in that your husband doesn’t easily make space for your voice. His own issues get in the way and for whatever good qualities he may have, listening to you, or your son for that matter, is not his best strength. Now you’ve decided that you need to take your own initiative and bring your own voice forward against the headwinds of family tradition.

Fabulous, you’re my hero and I’m sure an inspiration to all our listeners.

The pattern in your family needs to change for lots of reasons.

• Whatever is going on with your son regarding his tendency not to put things back where they belong, is obviously not being helped by being yelled at. There is no sense in doing the things over and over that don’t help.
• Being yelled at is destructive to our children’s emotional health and creates trauma. Not the worst level of trauma one can imagine, but enough trauma to injure self-esteem and create an overstimulated sympathetic nervous system.
• It’s even triggering your sympathetic nervous system Franchesca, such that you’re inclined to grab a beer to calm it down. (Using alcohol to manage feelings related to family dynamics is homeostatic. In other words, it supports the status quo.)
• Finally, your son is in his young adult years and family dynamics need to change as children grow into new stages of life. When circumstances change, such as our kids growing up, ways of communicating need to change accordingly. Not changing in accordance with changing circumstances is a sign of family system rigidity and family rigidity interferes with personal growth. Yelling at kids when they do something wrong, while unhealthy, is common with younger kids. Yelling at our college age kids is ridiculous and inappropriate.

Now to what you can do. Now that we’ve established that you are 100% right to want this pattern to change, let’s build on the progress you’ve made empowering your voice.

At a calmer moment, let your husband know that you want to discuss something important with him. Let him know that you want him to listen and not respond or interrupt until you are done talking. And that you want him to take what you are saying very seriously.

And before you start, get his agreement.

Then, run through the points we’ve just talked about.

Let your husband know that his behavior of yelling to make a point heard, fighting with your son, regardless of who is right and who is wrong, needs to stop. That you simply won’t tolerate it. Let him know that you aren’t supporting not putting things back where they belong, or taking sides. You are setting a limit with yelling behavior.

If he claims he isn’t yelling, he’s simply expressing his righteous point of view with vigor, let him know that regardless of how he names it, it isn’t healthy communication. Any communication that is overly emotional and isn’t respectful needs to stop.

It would be wise to get a resource for healthy communication that you both can have access to so that you share a common language for how to disagree in a healthy respectful way.

There are lots of books on healthy communication including Non-Violent Communication to name one well respected resource. There are also online courses and seminars on Non-Violent Communication you can take together.

But the important thing here is that you draw your line in the sand, and find your voice to communicate your standards and your boundaries. No more yelling at our kids or each other, PERIOD. It’s time for our family to grow and improve.

Thanks for tuning in today and special thanks to you Franchesca; Keep up the great work. Just a reminder everyone, Mental Health needs to be role modeled. Your children won’t be mentally healthier than you. So take care of yourself. You need it, you deserve it, you are worth it. Bye for now.