Blame Your Mom and Dad For Your Bad Relationships?

By CocoaDiva on Jan 23, 2009 with Comments

Can your family interations create negative relationships?

So, I went to go see the T.D. Jakes movie Not Easily Broken. I generally am not a fan of the church brand of movies because the roles played by the women are typically stereotypical and follow the same bad girl learns a lesson motif. These movies show women as full of attitude, nagging, mean spirited, and money hungry. Yaaaawn. I understand that many church congregations are filled with women….but can’t we get some new characters? Anywho, the movie did me think of a few questions concerning relationships.

How much of an effect do your parent’s relationships have on your personal relationship outlook?

The female character in the movie, Clarice Johnson, continually took advice from her mother, who had a broken and angry relationship with her father. Clairice indicated that the problems she was having in her relationship with her husband were because she never truly learned how to love and forgive from her mother. I thought “wow what a deep connection!”

How many of our relationships are scarred because we learn bad relationship habits from our parents?

Researchers have persuasively linked certain demographic and socioeconomic factors — many of which you can’t control — with higher odds of marital breakup. Your race, occupation, income, age at first wedding, the length of courtship and whether you have children from previous relationships all can preordain the success of your marriage even before the “I dos.”

Did your parents divorce? Your own marriage is twice as likely to end that way than if you grew up in an intact family. Do you and your spouse practice different religions? Chances are your marriage won’t endure as well as those of couples who worship together.

Wolfinger analyzed data on 33,000 Americans from two major national household surveys to calculate how divorces recur through generations. His conclusion: Having divorced parents greatly jeopardizes the odds of keeping one’s marriage intact and heightens the likelihood of multiple divorces.

Wolfinger found that when both husband and wife come from families of divorce, they are nearly three times more likely to split up than couples whose parents stayed married. If a parent was divorced at least twice, the odds that an offspring’s marriage will survive are only one in three.

Wolfinger attributed the phenomenon partly to learned behavior. Having seen their parents give up on a marriage, people are more likely to bail when their own relationships turn turbulent.

In this day and age many parents are single or many marriages end in divorce. We all know that marriage is not a sunny day in the park and everyone has struggles. You may have noticed that as you age, you become increasingly aware of your traits and the history of the traits of your mother and father. Your response to this epiphany depends upon whether the inclinations, tendencies, and penchants you learned from your ancestors are acceptable to you. You may incorporate some of their traits while rejecting others.

Here are a few food for thought questions

Do you have problems with forgiveness? Do you strike out in anger or nag alot?

Were you parents single parents? Do you place less emphasis on relationshps as a result?

Do you cheat on your significant other?

Are you a bystander in your own relationship? Can you pick up on the needs of your partner?

How many of your good or bad habits have an effect on your relationships?

Do you realize the effect of these qualities in your own life?

Can you change these habits?

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