“Letting go of adult children. It’s something parents do all the time. At least we’re told that’s what parents are supposed to do about the time their children turn eighteen”, says author Arlene Harder in her book on dealing with grown children who haven’t turned out the way parents hoped and expected. Whether our grown “adult children stayed living under our roof longer than we want, or strike out into the world earlier than anticipated, parents are told they need to cut the apron strings that have kept us focused on our child.”

In other words, says Harder, “when our children reach the age of maturity, we are expected to make a major change in our relationship with them- to transfer responsibility for decisions concerning their lives from us to them. If we successfully complete this transition, we will, says conventional wisdom, accept our children as independent individuals just as they are, including imperfections, values that conflict with ours, and different needs and desires. And they will accept us in return. We will communicate openly and share our values and experiences with one another without believing we have the right, or the power, to change the other person.”

Sound easy? Not if you’re the parent of a grown child who marches to a drum very different from the one you played for your child when he or she was young. You know it would be better for both of you if you could let go. But you can’t. You remain uncomfortably, perhaps painfully, “stuck” because things haven’t turned out the way you expected.

Parenting Adult Children

Letting go of grown adult children can be especially difficult for parents with adult children who have serious problems with drug addiction, alcohol abuse, mental illness, and/or choose to break societal laws and perhaps go to jail or prison for crimes committed. Many such parents have discovered that there are no guarantees that children will turn out the way they were raised, or how the parents expected, hoped and prayed their children would become as adults.

Arlene Harder’s book, “Letting Go of Our Adult Children, When What We Do is Never Enough”, is a FREE online book parents and families struggling to let go can read and receive helpful tips and advice on letting go with love. Having been granted permission to reprint the intro of the free book, parents who enable their grown children, or parents who can’t or won’t let go of their adult kids for various reasons may relate to many of the personal experiences discussed in the book and find the encouragement and support needed. The Introduction to the nine-chapter book, published in 1994, continues with the author saying:

Parents may unintentionally fail their children in some fundamental way so they aren’t really able to meet the standards we hold for them. Even more, because they have minds of their own, they can choose a lifestyle that we don’t approve of or that we feel is less than they are capable of achieving. Being stuck and unable to let go can arise from minor, irritating differences between you and your child or major obstacles that appear to be intractable. For example, you may be unable to get past frequent arguments over relatively unimportant issues that both of you always seem to turn into contests of who is right. Or while you and your daughter don’t often disagree, you can’t shake the disappointment you feel when she loses yet another job.

You want to accept the fact that how well she does at work is her problem. But you know she doesn’t demonstrate the commitment to work that employers want. How can you let go when you blame yourself for not teaching her responsibility? Or perhaps you need the money from the sale of a family house your thirty-eight year old son has been living in rent-free for Fifteen years. The only “problem” is that he doesn’t have money to move else- where; forcing him out would make you feel like Simon Legree.

Or, while you may realize that there is probably nothing you can do to prevent your son’s divorce, you remain entangled in accusations and defenses with your son’s in-laws because you’re afraid you will lose contact with a precious grandchild. And sticky in-law problems are legion in complicated step-family configurations.

Even if your children are happily married, however, you may have a hard time understanding and accepting in-laws who are of a different race, religion, or social group. You hadn’t thought of yourself as prejudiced, but you are having a hard time adjusting. And what if your child is single and living with a member of the opposite sex; or has chosen a member of his or her same sex as a life partner? With less than 25 percent of families made up of father, mother, and dependent children, family constellations aren’t what they used to be.

Letting go may be particularly difficult if the problems you face seem highly resistant to change. This is especially true when your child is mentally ill or is in serious trouble with the law. And if your child is like my son, whose difficulties in relationships and jobs have been compounded by drug and alcohol abuse, the road to letting go can be extremely long and trying. Yet your situation may be even more painful if your child died before you were able to work out the issues that kept you from letting go; all that unfinished business leaves you with pain you are sure will never go away.

You may be a parent who claims you have no choice but to let go when your child refuses to have any contact, or has extremely minimal contact, with you. Don’t kid yourself. On the surface you may look as though you have let go, but anyone probing a centimeter deep can see that your hurt in being excluded from your child’s life penetrates deep into your heart. This may be especially difficult if you are at a loss to understand what went wrong.

Yet the situation isn’t any easier if you recognize all too clearly how you contributed to the rift that has torn the family fabric in half. For example, perhaps you abused alcohol or drugs when your children were small. Today, although you are now clean and sober, your child is unwilling to forgive you, despite your apologies. In that case you may be paralyzed by guilt; concluding that you have permanently injured your child and that the gap between you can never be bridged.

On the other hand, you may be a parent who is perfectly satisfied with how your child has turned out and who thought you had a good relationship with her. Recently, however, she has accused you and her father of being “dysfunctional” and perhaps even “abusive.” Even though you realize you weren’t perfect parents, you are saddened by alienation created by her anger and your hurt.

If you see yourself in any of these situations (or ones uncomfortably similar), you realize that you’ve been unable to let go no matter how hard you try. This is what is meant by the subtitle of this book, “When What We Do Is Never Enough.” No matter what we say, think or do — no matter how hard we try — until we let go with love we remain uncomfortably bound to a child who is legally old enough to make his decisions without parental interference or approval.

As parents of children whose values and lifestyles are in conflict with ours — whether we experience a fairly small amount or a great deal of disappointment in that fact — we have probably already discovered that heavy-handed bullying and significant bribes cannot make our child become what we had hoped he would become. Money may work in the short run, of course, but in the long haul it can’t buy the integrity, honesty, determination, and responsibility we desire for our child.

Yet masking our attempts to change our child through less obvious measures is not unlike trying to run him over with a fuzzy bulldozer; it only leaves him, and us, bruised. Let’s face it — as long as we keep trying to get our child to live according to our values, we don’t stand much chance of having the kind of adult-to-adult relationship we all deserve with our children when they grow up.

The first part of the book, “Getting Caught up in Our Expectations,” deals with what happens when parents discover their child is marching to a different drummer. In it I offer a path to letting go with love and to forming a more positive relationship with your adult child, a path involving five stages of healing. In these chapters you will see that your disappointment and pain are not unique; nor is it unusual for you to keep trying to get your child to change. Most important of all, you will realize why it is essential for you to shift your attention from your adult child to yourself.

If you already know you must change your focus away from whatever stands between you and your child, you may want to go directly to the second part of the book, “Finding Peace by Letting Go.” These five chapters offer suggestions for healing the pain caused by the realization that your child does not share your values or cannot live up to the expectations you once had for him or her. Here you will find motivation to explore the issues that keep you pulling on your end of the rope in the family tug-of-war, to grieve your unfulfilled expectations, to forgive yourself and your child and, finally, to let go with love. And if differences between you and your child are still irreconcilable, you can learn how to bring closure and healing to that situation as well.

The concept of a path of healing for parents first arose for me during the painful years when I struggled with great disappointment in a child who was not living the kind of life I envisioned for him. Gradually I realized that I was moving through a series of stages and turned my attention from my son’s problems to those which I needed to address in my own life. I continued to observe this process and to further develop my theory in working with disappointed parents as part of my practice as a licensed family therapist.

Later these ideas were reinforced in interviews with over seventy-five parents, both those who were disappointed in how things have turned out and those who were very satisfied. To protect confidentiality in sharing the stories of others, I have changed names and identifying characteristics. In a few instances I have combined several elements from more than one situation to emphasize a particular point.

Letting go can be difficult for parents whether they are married, divorced, or widowed; adoptive or biological parents; single or step-parents. Since the specific circumstances in everyone’s life are different, and since we all have somewhat different expectations for our children, we will each experience different reactions to our adult children if those expectations are not met.

Consequently, the act of letting go with love will be easier and go more quickly for some and be more difficult and take longer for others. Yet this book offers to every parent the evidence that it is possible to let go and find peace even in the most difficult of circumstances.

It is my hope that this book will guide you in moving past your disappointment and pain into peace, healing, and acceptance of your child, even if he or she continues to make choices that have, until now, driven you up a wall. We cannot change our grown children. But dealing honestly and openly with our disappointment creates an opportunity to change ourselves — and in the process to let go with love so that our disappointment no longer causes us pain.

Parents, you can begin reading the free online book by Arlene Harder on letting go of grown adult children at Support4Change.com.

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The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus The Rest Of Us Martha Stout, Ph.D., advises that sociopaths are more common than most people realize. In fact, Stout says that sociopaths comprise four percent of the population, which essentially is one out of every twenty-five people. While the prison population has its fair share of sociopaths, many if not most are currently on the streets because their “crimes” are not recognized by the criminal justice system.

As a result, the remaining ninety-six percent of us encounter sociopaths on a regular basis even though we are typically not aware of it. Unfortunately, sociopaths can devastate and damage lives of people because sociopaths essentially lack a conscience.

Sociopaths are conscienceless individuals who lack the ability to feel emotions such as love, caring, regret, social and familial responsibility, and perhaps most importantly, remorse. Sociopaths view the world as their playground, and they target people who they can swindle, dominate and control, and they do so to achieve their personal goals.

The goal of Stout’s book is to educate the general public about sociopaths, and The Sociopath Next Door serves as a guide to understand how sociopaths work, how to identify them, and how to avoid them and not be affected by their ruthless behavior. Stout has her own clinical practice, in addition to being an instructor at Harvard, and she specializes in providing therapy for individuals who have been “damaged” by others or certain experiences, and her patients include those who have been victimized by sociopaths.

Stout explains how a person must have certain characteristics to be classified as a sociopath. However, she explains that sociopaths are often charming, gregarious (social, sociable) individuals. People tend to be drawn to sociopaths and therefore are often unaware that they are at risk.

Many describe sociopaths as having certain “energy” to them that the rest of us do not possess or that they are simply incredibly nice and caring people, when in reality sociopaths are emotionally “ice cold” and do not care about anyone except themselves. Sociopaths come from all walks of life and easily can be a family member, a coworker, a business partner, a “friend,” and even a spouse or partner.

Most people are unaware that a sociopath has victimized them until it is too late. Their bank accounts may be drained due to acquiescence to the sociopath’s enticing but risky “business venture,” they may be permanently discredited at work due to a sociopath’s lies about them, they may find themselves in an empty relationship without love, and so on.

The possibilities are almost endless depending on the type of sociopath, as their personalities differ, but they all have the same driving force: to achieve their own personal agenda without thought or care to whom they take advantage of and damage in the process. Stout’s goal is to help us prevent this from happening to us by being able to identify a sociopath in our daily life.

It is difficult for most of us to envision what a sociopath really is because we cannot relate to a person who does not have a conscience. Therefore, Stout provides three examples of sociopaths.

• Skip is a rich, highly successful businessman who has a marriage that he keeps for “appearances,” and his ability to be cruel is unfettered, beginning from his childhood “play” of blowing up frogs to his breaking a secretary’s arm as an adult.
• Doreen lied about her education and credentials and paved her way to being a top administrator at a psychiatric institute, and part of her daily agenda is to damage coworkers whom she views as professional threats to her.
• Finally, Luke has a lower-key personality but is nonetheless a sociopath who marries a woman he does not love and almost immediately quits working, claiming “depression” so he can avail himself of his wife’s home and swimming pool for relaxation while she works and raises their son alone.

Clearly, Stout has a firm grasp and understanding of sociopaths and how they can damage innocent people. The Sociopath Next Door is an extremely valuable tool to help us stay out of the clutches of a sociopath, and the book is informative without being sensational. The book is well-organized and has an index at the back, although I found this book interesting enough to from beginning to end. Stout wants to educate us, not scare us, and I highly recommend this fascinating, informative book to all readers.

After reading this book I realized that I am acquainted with people who are most definitely sociopaths. I feel more comfortable after reading this book because I now “understand” the behavior of these individuals – and I plan to give them an even wider berth.

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