How are your relationships with your extended family—those you’re related to by marriage or through looser blood ties? Strained because you’re trying to form family bonds without the emotional history to make them stick? Or smooth because they don’t come with the emotional baggage that your immediate family of origin drags around? Either is possible in any individual relationship. How difficult one of these relationships is may depend on how important it is to you and how long you’ve been at it. Getting along with a brand-new mother-in-law, therefore mother, has left unpleasant emotional memories. On the other hand, it’s probably a snap to be cordial to the cousin you see only at holiday gatherings.
How good and how deep your relationships are with extended family will depend largely on what you want them to be. We feel guilty if we resent our own parents, but there’s nothing that says we have to love our in-laws, so many people don’t feel obligated to make a huge effort. Simply extend the same empathy to your extended family as you would to anyone else you encounter, and that means accepting the broad range of differences that’s bound to exists so you can find the common points of connection.
If you’re also willing to listen with empathy no matter who is speaking, admit error, and watch the nonverbal cues you send, you stand a pretty good chance of becoming everyone’s favorite niece, cherished uncle, or model in-law. Assuming you haven’t yet achieved that state, here are a few tips to make extended-family relationships rewarding.
Remember that you don’t have to like everyone equally.
Sometimes, even when you make your most open-hearted efforts, you end up disliking a relative or an in-law. Examine how much your own baggage keeps you from appreciating this person. Then accept your feelings and interact with the person only to the extent that you remain comfortable. You may find that removing the stress of seeing him or her under that pressure opens your heart a crack wider.
If you can only ask loaded questions, don’t say anything at all.
Research has shown that the emotional message is 90 percent of what people get from any communication, and that’s why it’s important to be emotionally aware of what your motives are, and to take responsibility for what you convey through gestures and expressions, as well as words. Too often we don’t say what we mean because we’re afraid to take responsibility for the feelings that motivate us. So, we manipulate people by making offers that beg to be refused or by saying we don’t mind when we do and then resenting the perceived offender. If you can’t be emotionally honest with your extended family, go somewhere else.