Maybe We Should All Stop Tiptoeing Around Our Parents

Navigating a relationship with a parent as an adult isn’t always easy. The existing dynamic of one person being in charge of and responsible for the other is hard to shake even when everyone involved is grown up and equal. And for some parents, giving up that authority is a problem... which they will attempt to make everyone else’s problem.

TikTok creator Elisabeth, who posts as @elisabethrhe_ recently made a video highlighting this common issue.

“Can we normalize not tiptoeing around your parents anymore?” she begins. She began recounting a story in which she didn’t take a suggestion from her mother. This was followed up by a text from her father reading:

“When mom gives you a suggestions [sic] just say yes or maybe later. ... ‘No I don’t want to do that’ is a trigger for her.”

“Well then tough sh*t? Get over it?” she offers in bemusement. And seriously, if you’re triggered by a boundary, that’s not exactly on the person saying ‘no,’ right?

When Elisabeth went on to assert herself, she says, her dad cautioned her to “pick her poison.”

“I was like ‘What poison? There is no poison!’ It was a conversation that a grown adult should be able to have without getting triggered if somebody says ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’

“I spent my whole life choosing my words, staying silent, in order to not trigger her and not have her blow up in her emotions, and my dad, too, and I’m not doing that anymore,” she concludes. “We’re all grown. I’ve learned to push past my emotions, I’ve learned not to act impulsively or take things personally, and you need to do that, too.”

Elisabeth’s message has resonated, with more than 450,000 likes and almost 6,500 comments as of press time.

“I’m realizing that my parents never fkn grew up,” says one commenter. “They just had kids.”

“The generation that yelled at us for being ‘sensitive’ but they’re the ones who always get their feelings hurt,” says another.

When one commenter suggested the mother in question go to therapy, Elisabeth laments that she did go, but wound up being enabled by her therapist... which, frankly, felt clear when the dad used the word “triggered” to describe not being able to hear the word “no” from her child.

Many others harkened to a quote from Dr. Thema Bryant: “I was taught that keeping quiet kept the peace, until I realized: whose peace is it keeping?”

Establishing a boundary with someone who used to set boundaries for you is hard. It might feel uncomfortable or even wrong. But, ultimately, adults having a relationship that has an adult dynamic is the healthiest way forward.