Chip Jacobs

From a fascinating MSBNC column that most of us can relate to as we gorge and celebrate each other.

” … Suppose, thanks to the presence of a new love’s fresh eyes, you are struck by how often your mom criticizes your dad’s disintegrating hearing, and how he nitpicks at the way she loads the dishwasher. The white noise of bickering you grew up with may suddenly seem nightmarish.

So you say to yourself. “No! I will learn from this. I vow that my relationship will not be like my parents’.”

That might be a big mistake, psychologist, relationship therapist, and New York University professor Judith P. Siegel believes.

A wake-up call to patterns you’d like to avoid in your own relationship can be nice, but strident vows can “narrow our options” for behavior, said Siegel, author of “What Children Learn from Their Parents’ Marriage.” “Very few things in life are absolute.”

‘Comfortable acceptance’

Don’t overreact to the negative things you see in the relationship between mom and dad. Instead, the goal should be to reach a kind of “comfortable acceptance” that a little conflict is OK, said Siegel. Otherwise, “you may be silenced or become passive and withdrawn. You need a voice to express your differences and disappointments,” she said.

Overreaction is not uncommon, especially if you’ve been away from mom and dad for awhile. The trick is to avoid locking yourself into a pattern just because your folks drive you nuts.

For example, if you’re a woman who sees her mother taking a lot of guff from pops, and you tell yourself “I will demand respect!”, you may shut yourself off from constructive, legitimate criticism. Then, when your own boyfriend or husband suggests that perhaps you could do a little more to keep your home clean, you may become needlessly enraged.

“Everything could come across as criticism,” Siegel explained. “Her intolerance [of criticism] could be so acute it could preclude her ability to separate what’s a genuine request or expression of dissatisfaction from what is truly devaluing.”

All good relationships have room for disagreements. You don’t need to fear that you’re becoming your parents.

What if you are the visitor accompanying your partner home for Thanksgiving? There are commmitment clues you can pick up from observing the in-laws.

In a twist of ‘monkey see, monkey do,’ the kind of relationship parents have can be indicative of the kind of behavior their children will exhibit in their own relationships, said Sarah Whitton, clinical director of Boston University’s Child and Adolescent Anxiety Treatment Program who also provides couples therapy to adults …”