How to not be like your parents
Your default programming is to make a fuss when you don't get what you want. That's how you stayed alive as an infant.
When you were hungry, you made a fuss.
When you were tired, you made a fuss.
When you were uncomfortable, you made a fuss.
As you grew, you started looking for more sophisticated ways to get things that you wanted. You copied and pasted your parents' operating system into your own brain.
How does Dad get Mom to do what he wants? How does Mom get Dad to do what she wants?
Whatever tools they used are the ones you learned.
If your parents were collaborative and kind, you also learned to be collaborative and kind. If your parents were deceptive and manipulative, you learned to be deceptive and manipulative. If your parents avoided conflict, you learned to avoid conflict. If one of your parents used emotional dysregulation to try to control the other, you took that to be a valid strategy.
All of the programming you learned from your parents is still in your brain, and it's not going to go away.
What you can do is become more aware of how your parents dealt with each other and how they dealt with you, and then make a deliberate effort to shift your behavior away from those patterns.
One way to do this is to imagine talking to one of your parents about the impact they had on you. If one of your parents had a negative impact on you, imagine having a very direct conversation with that parent where you talk to them, one adult to another, about the impact they had on you. If you write down the conversation like a movie script, it forces your brain to get inside your parent's mind, so you can figure out what it was like for your parent in that moment. What were they thinking about you? What were they feeling about you?
The more you understand of your parent's mind, the easier it is to separate out the person you want to be from who your parents were.
We all copy and paste our parents' operating systems and operating instructions. But we don't have to stay that way.
