We’re in the middle of a family relationship crisis. At least one in four American adults is estranged from a close relative. Two-thirds of Americans say families aren’t spending enough time together. And these rifts occur equally across all age groups, education levels, races and religions, according to the largest ever study of family estrangement, which one of us, Dr. Pillemer, conducted a few years ago.
Yes, there are important reasons to cut ties with certain people intentionally. But we’re not just cutting people off — we’re letting our closest relationships disintegrate through neglect, busyness and an unwillingness to move past the things that bother us.
You may think it’s better for your mental health to slowly distance yourself from someone you have difficulties with, but, in the long run, it will likely have a devastating impact on your happiness and well-being. As a professor studying family estrangement and an author and podcast host, we’ve learned from very different vantage points that most of us wait excruciatingly long to absorb this message.
Research on end-of-life regrets reveals a consistent pattern. People don’t regret missing out on a promotion or failing to buy a bigger house. They regret not asking for forgiveness. They regret not expressing their love more often. They regret holding a grudge. And they regret letting relationships with their families and friends fall apart.
Fortunately, the same research that highlights these life regrets also points toward solutions. Despite an increased burden of disease, and the toll taken by the death of loved ones, research has shown that people over the age of 65 report, on average, being happier than younger adults. They report more satisfaction with their social networks and higher levels of positive emotions.
They do so not because circumstances align perfectly, but because they look for what’s working in life rather than what’s not.
This shift is natural. Older people, our research suggests, understand the importance of distinguishing between what they can control and what they can’t — and ruthlessly focusing their energy on the former. Your husband’s side of the family has politics that bother you? Or your college-age kids don’t call as much as you’d like? Accept it and move on. You can’t control their behavior, but you can choose how much to dwell on it or whether to hold it over their head.
Much of the research coming out of the Cornell Legacy Project, which has collected the life wisdom of over 1,500 older Americans, reflects these lessons in participants’ own words. One woman, who couldn’t leave her bed and had just a few months to live, expressed remarkable optimism in an interview for the Legacy Project: “I’ve had my bath, lunch was good, and I’m getting ready to watch my programs.” She’d grown up in terrible poverty and was thankful that she had three meals a day, a place to live and people to take care of her. “You will learn, I hope, that happiness is what you make it, where you are. Why in the world would I be unhappy?” she said. “It’s my responsibility to be as happy as I can, right here, today.”
And therein lies the secret: learning how to accept people as they are, sometimes in spite of who they are.
Thanksgiving can create the perfect opportunity to exert control in exactly the wrong ways. As family members come together, it can be difficult not to bring up your well-thought-out advice that you’re convinced will change their lives for the better. But decades of research shows that receiving unsolicited advice for a problem you’re having is stressful, especially when if comes from those who haven’t dealt with the same issue.
However well intentioned you are, you shouldn’t spend Thanksgiving trying to convince your parents that it’s time for them to sell the house and move into assisted living. Let them make their own mistakes, even if you might have to deal with the consequences. Your parents are adults. Give them the dignity of their own experience.
The same approach holds for children. You may have lots of great ideas about what your kids should do, but unless someone is in danger, it’s usually counterproductive to intervene. If your son seems to be wasting his life in a dead-end job instead of going to graduate school, that’s not your battle to fight. In fact, the less judged he feels, the more likely he will be to come to you for advice when he’s ready.
A key to making intergenerational relationships work is not harping on differences in values and life experiences. The best family relationships often operate more like friendships. Many people who’ve overcame estrangements didn’t do it by having huge, emotional conversations about the past. They started with an outing to a bingo parlor or a weaving workshop together.
One piece of advice older people share over and over again in interviews is simply to lighten up. Everything doesn’t have to be so darkly serious — and relationships don’t have to be a battle of wills. It’s almost impossible to convince someone to adopt your perspective. It’s easier to get them to sit on the couch with you, watching “Jeopardy.”
Or try this thought experiment: Imagine if you had a year left to live. Would you want to spend your last Thanksgiving resenting your father’s politics? Or avoiding your sister for something she said last Christmas? Or would you rather find the grace to focus on the positives? Perhaps your father, for all his social-media-fueled hot takes, has mastered the art of carving a turkey. Your sister might be judgmental but you love her holiday-themed nails. Accepting what you can’t change doesn’t mean you’re endorsing their beliefs — it simply means doing everything you can, right now, to embrace the positives and look past the negatives.
We’re fortunate that some of the biggest regrets of older people — not expressing love, not seeking forgiveness, not telling those who matter how they feel — are regrets that we can avoid. Giving unsolicited advice might be your way of saying, “I love you,” but it’s better to just say it in a straightforward way. You can’t assume people already understand how much you love them, how much you care about them, how proud you are of them. The only time it’s too late to apologize or ask for forgiveness is when somebody is no longer here.
This Thanksgiving, let your family members live how they’d like to live. They’ll be grateful for it — and, years from now, you may be too.
Karl Pillemer is a professor of human development at Cornell and the director of the Cornell Legacy Project. Mel Robbins is the author of “The Let Them Theory” and host of “The Mel Robbins Podcast.”
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