Parents who already have adult children often make their lives more difficult instead of helping them when needed. They often unknowingly hinder their ability to properly care for and develop relationships with their partners and their own children, because they are excessively or even primarily preoccupied with their parents, their parents’ partnership, or the consequences of a lack of a stable relationship between the parents.
Many problems arise when an adult child has to care for a parent more than necessary or has to do so chronically. Sometimes older parents simply don’t know how to function without constant attention, care, and influence from their adult child, especially since they had to focus most of their past efforts on achieving material stability and maturity, and had little opportunity to properly develop emotional maturity and stability in their relationships. As a result, many parents of adult children are unable to maintain healthy, independent relationships and instead keep a parental relationship with their adult children or even develop a pseudo-partnership, resulting in emotional incest (https://youtu.be/JGmY0PrrV5s).
Such situations are common in practice and significantly affect the quality of life for adult children, their partners, their children, and the parents themselves. This primarily occurs due to the major shift in the use of technology to ease daily life over the past decades.
We have developed machines, devices, and artificial intelligence that take over tasks that were once difficult and demanding. Artificial intelligence, in particular, is increasingly prominent and, when properly used and integrated, can improve the quality of life for adults. The difference over the last 30 to 40 years is enormous. We have moved from a time when adult children had to help their aging parents survive (heating, farming, harvesting, and similar tasks) to an era where we mostly no longer produce food ourselves but buy it from others.
Today, for example, we have washing machines, dishwashers, and dryers. A modern person living in a developed country now uses around 40 different technological aids that make life easier—devices like phones, computers, blenders, vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers, and many others without which we can hardly imagine life.
This significant technological shift has fundamentally altered the traditional patterns of relationships between adult children and parents that were still in place just one or two generations ago. Since around 1990, technological progress has enabled more independent living. Instead of relying on adult children, people now often turn to robots or automation. These tools allow more energy for diverse tasks in a given timeframe—more interactions, more spoken words, more read information, and more things seen. However, due to information overload, adult life today is also much more complex, particularly from the perspective of the subconscious, which evolves more slowly than conscious awareness.
A common issue I observe in clients with chronic physical and behavioral issues, as well as relational and work-related difficulties, is that at a subconscious level, we still operate based on traditional patterns from the past.
These traditional patterns were once necessary because, in older generations, parents could not function independently, especially in old age, and depended on their children for care. Today, however, adult children’s care for aging parents is often delegated to retirement homes, in-home care, or various automated systems that enable different lifestyles.
Both adult children and their parents are aware of this. However, the subconscious still pulls them back into outdated and inefficient ways of behaving and living. The step from generally understood awareness of this issue to chronic relational problems is not a large one.
Most people experience a major disconnect between the perspectives and conditioned responses stored in their subconscious and midbrain—shaped over centuries—and the desires and needs of modern conscious life. The subconscious still perceives certain behaviors as natural and correct, while the conscious mind wants or needs to live differently due to the demands of modern life. This disconnect causes inner conflicts and tension, which increase muscle tone and disconnection between body and awareness.
The body and subconscious patterns impose feelings of guilt and obligation to care for the elderly and parents as was once necessary. But today, this is no longer always required, as advances in medicine, pharmaceuticals, and other fields have extended the quality and length of life. A 50-year-old today is far more capable of self-care than 200 years ago, when reaching 50 was exceptional. Research shows that the average lifespan in the West 200 years ago was under 40, while today it is well over 70. This leap is the result of advances in technology, medicine, food processing, antibiotics, and more. The issue is that the subconscious remains mostly unchanged. Most people struggle to function in the modern environment.
The purpose and goal of the AEQ approach is to understand the influence of second-level subconscious emotions from adult children to their parents and vice versa. Understanding these influences and the changes in environment and societal functioning over recent decades helps us see that traditional relationships in their old form are no longer effective. Subconscious relationship patterns must be updated—just like we constantly update technology—and with increased emotional maturity between adult children and parents, we must finally “wash the dirty laundry” accumulated in the past.
Aleš Ernst, author of AEQ Relationships
