13 Things That Happens When Your Parents Fight With Each Other
You refuse affection
You are more likely to shy away from people who send affection your way because it is not something you are used to. Just the thought of having someone come up to you and saying they love you makes you get anxiety. You also find yourself incapable of showing said affection back and it usually just makes you look like you are heartless.
Commitment Issues
Why do we need to put titles on anything? You ask yourself. You are afraid of things moving fast with your partner and cannot stand things getting serious between the both of you. The thought of your partner wanting more than a causal relationship with you is terrifying. There is also the issue that you might think that you are too damaged for your partner and would not want to involve them permanently in your life for their own sake.
Non-confrontational
You are used to listening and watching arguments and getting into one, you would rather avoid getting into a fight than letting your true feelings get shown. You tend to walk away from arguments refusing to become like your parents whatever the situation and end up being used as a walk-mat because you refuse to stand up for yourself.
Lack of self-respect and worth
You’ve watched your parents insult and downgrade each other in every way and as a child, you start to mirror such feelings onto yourself and begin to view yourself as a product of failure, as having no worth which continues on to adulthood.
Lack of parental respect
You have seen them hurt each other so much in your presence that you just learn to either ignore them or just lose respect for them because of the emotional torture they inflict on you without even realizing it.
Middle man
You are skilled in resolving the conflict between two people by delivering insulative messages to the both of them in such a way that it leaves you in the clear and a neutral party to both sides.
Manipulation
You tend to be able to manipulate their destructive feelings for each other to activate your own agenda to get what you want which ends up being an active part of your life and behavior because if you can do that to your own parents, who else can’t you do that too?
You stay single
You would rather avoid all possibilities of ending up in a toxic relationship like your parents. You tell yourself it is better to still be and remain single than to ever find yourself in a comparable situation ever again no matter the cost.
Do any of the situations mentioned in the article relate to you?
Similar conduct in relationships
When in a relationship you act the same way, your parents did to each other towards your partner as that is the only way you know relationships work and in the process end up alienating your partner because of your brashness.
Conflict resolution
The only way you know how to resolve conflict whether you admit it or not is from the examples shown to you as your parents and you may end up developing similar resolution patterns in your approaches with partners, friends, coworkers and basically anyone you have a conflict with.
Blaming yourself
Even up to an adult age you tend to blame yourself for whatever happened and try to fix them but it is not your fault as they are old enough to make their own decisions and whilst they may want to remain stuck in that phrase it is not your duty to apply glue and stick yourself to them.
Always Suspicious
When a person acts or behaves nicely to you, you begin to wonder what ulterior motive they have and wonder what they want in return as you and begin to make up problems and situations because you refuse to believe that a person can just be that nice and want to have a relationship with you.
Depression
This is something that stems from childhood after watching your parents fight so much eventually it would have a mental effect on you without you realizing it which could lead to depression and would require a lot of effort on your part to recover from.
Sources
- CHRONIC ARGUING BETWEEN PARENTS FOUND HARMFUL TO SOME CHILDREN - NYTimes.com
SOME feuding parents try to hide their fighting from their children; others make a point of letting their children see that parents do become angry at each other. There are parents, too, who do not seem to care much one way or the other. - Effects Of Parents Fight, Impact Of Fighting On Children - Parentcircle
Often in the fight between parents, children are the losers. This article explores the dangerous impacts parental fights have on the mental wellness of the children. - What Happens to Children When Parents Fight — Developmental Science
When I was a child, my parents’ fights could suck the oxygen out of a room. My mother verbally lashed my father, broke jam jars, and made outlandish threats. Her outbursts froze me in my tracks. When my father fled to work, the garage, or the wood
© 2017 Naomi Adeniji