Ep. 250 Understanding Why Unmet Family Expectations Create Anxiety & Stress in Midlife and Coping Skills That Help

Why do unmet family expectations create so much anxiety and stress in midlife?
If you’ve ever wished someone you love would be different, you’re not alone
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1.    Why unmet family expectations are often hidden wishes that quietly fuel anxiety and stress in midlife relationships
2.    How generational differences and life experiences shape family behavior in ways that can easily lead to misunderstanding and disappointment
3.    A simple practice that helps you notice when expectations create emotional intensity and begin responding with more awareness and coping skills
 Take 13 minutes to understand how unmet expectations drive anxiety and stress in midlife and begin creating more calm in your family relationships—you’re worth it.

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and  practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support. 

Transcript

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover why unmet family expectations in midlife create so much anxiety and stress. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, the podcast where you and I tackle stress and anxiety in midlife so you can stop feeling like crap, feel more present at home, and thrive at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 50,000 hours of therapy sessions and 32 years of teaching practical science-backed mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. Think back for a moment to a birthday. You remember fondly from childhood. Do you remember blowing out the candles while everyone around the table said, make a wish. Maybe you wish for a new bike. Maybe you wish to make a team. Or maybe like me in fifth grade, you wish for a super cool maxi coat. Wishing is a beautiful thing in childhood. But in adulthood, the wishes I hear in my office are often the source of enormous pain. Instead of wishing for bikes or coats, adults often find themselves wishing for something very different. They wish the people they love would be different. In this episode, you'll discover why unmet expectations in families often trigger anxiety and stress in midlife. Why the people closest to you activate the strongest emotional reactions, and how understanding these patterns can create more calm and connection in your family. And we'll end with an Inner Challenge. Something simple you can notice this week that may change how some of these moments unfold. Last week I had back-to-back sessions where one client said, I wish my daughter in midlife paid more attention to me. In the very next session, a midlife daughter said, I wish my mother wasn't so busy and critical. Then each of them described enormous pain and disappointment that their family member wasn't the person they wanted them to be. In both cases, they had spent a great deal of energy trying to coach their loved one to be different. And in both cases, not only had they failed, but they had continued to create lots of tension and negative energy between them. And their loved one. Why? Because humans are funny creatures. Long before the UBU movement became popular, most of us were pretty committed to being ourselves, and in my humble opinion, one. Unintended consequence of psychology and self-help is that we sometimes begin to believe we have the right to tell other people how they should be or how not to be dysfunctional, or how to be more authentic or more evolved, or how to deal with their medical conditions, eating habits, or financial planning. What's interesting is we rarely see that right as being mutual. Let me give you a personal example. When I was in college, I had two experiences that opened up the world of self-awareness To me. It was 1980 and self-awareness was all around. The first experience was a class. The second was going to therapy. I was a business major and I needed help telling my well-meaning dad, that this major might be great for him, but it wasn't great for me. As I began to look at the world in a new way, I started to see the value of emotional intelligence. Although in 1981, that term was still 13 years away from being named, and suddenly I was looking at my parents members of the greatest generation and silent generation with new eyes. They had been raised in a culture where ignoring emotions was often valued. For much of my twenties, I was frustrated outta my Gord with them. I tried to get them to change. Did they? No. In fact, when my dad was dying of cancer 30 years later and my mental wellness program, Inner Challenge was in full swing, a hospice nurse offered him medication for anxiety. His response, I'm not anxious, I'm dying. As I grew older, I began to understand something important. Each generation is shaped by powerful forces. My parents were shaped by the Great Depression and World War ii. They learned to not complain and not focus on the negative. My generation was shaped by the explosion of psychology. We learned to value self-awareness and saying it as it is without even realizing it. I'd been asking my parents to give me something they simply didn't have. I'm not sure I've ever shared that story with a client, but the pattern I see in my office is often the same people wishing their loved ones were different so they could receive something that person cannot give them. One client of mine has lovely children who live out of town. They're in midlife themselves, crazy busy with jobs and raising children. She often feels hurt when they don't respond to her texts that she sends each morning saying, thinking of you. She wishes they would visit more like they used to. Of course that hurts. But another possibility is asking a different question. How is their generation different? If you're 70, you respond to every text. If you're 40, you may wonder why your mom is texting so much. My own children once told me, when I asked them why they didn't respond to the funny memes I sent them, nobody responds to funny memes, mom, different generation, different norms. Another middle aged client of mine won't let her father see her children. In his own words, he says, I was a C minus dad. He was obsessed with his career and golf and had very little time for her growing up. If he didn't have time for me as a child, why should I let him have time with my children? That would be like rewarding bad behavior. This is certainly one way to see it, but here's another. If you're lucky, life is long, and if you're lucky, you grow and change even a little bit. Her father had admitted he didn't prioritize parenting yet. She still had years left with him, and she was saying no, not because she didn't care, but because the pain of not feeling important as a child had hardened into resentment. It had never even occurred to her that forgiveness might be possible or that curiosity about her father might open something different. Another force shaping these expectations today is social media. If you spend any time on TikTok, Instagram or Facebook reels, you'll see a steady stream of advice encouraging people to analyze and often criticize their families. Some of that advice can be helpful, one unintended consequence is that you can begin to see the people closest to you through a very narrow lens instead of asking, instead of asking who is this person and what shaped them, you start asking, how are they failing me? Now let me be clear. Of course, I want people to understand how things like addiction, anger, and abuse in their families may have shaped them. I want my clients who have had these experiences to dig deep and to heal because understanding matters. But in that process, I also want people to look one generation further back to ask how those same parents were shaped by their parents addictions, anger, and struggles, and what they had to do to survive, cope, and do the best they could. With what they knew. It may not be what you needed. It may not be what you wanted. It certainly was not what you deserved. But the story is often much fuller than a 62nd TikTok video can capture. While it is often true that the sins of the father or the mother can be passed down to the generations, the real work in our time is something different. The real work is to have the courage and humility to stop those harmful patterns from moving forward. Another generation, and when possible to model something else for your children, repair, understanding, and sometimes forgiveness and reconnection. You might be wondering what all of this has to do with stress and anxiety. In some ways, what I'm really talking about here is disappointment, loss, and grief. One of the most painful wishes in adulthood is wishing someone you love or a different person, and when that wish collides with reality, anxiety and stress often follow because you end up spending a tremendous amount of emotional energy trying to control another person through your expectations. Remember, expectations are often wishes in disguise. Not that much different than childhood, no cake or candles, and those expectations create emotional intensity. The pattern often looks like this expectation. Disappointment, emotional spike. That spike can easily turn into resentment and stress, all very understandable, but it can also start a cycle that keeps your mind living in the past, sometimes even back in childhood, rather than responding from the adult you are today. Another client feels deeply hurt when her adult children don't invite her to the kids' games or activities as often as she hoped. She imagined being the kind of grandmother who sits in the stands cheering. Instead, she often hears about the game afterward, she interprets. As meaning she isn't important to them. She can spiral in that story for days. Now I'm not making light of her pain. That feeling is very real. But when she gets stuck in that cycle of expectation and interpretation, it only leaves her feeling more stressed and more miserable. On Thursday, I wanna introduce you to another way of working with these moments. And to get you ready for that, this week's Inner Challenge asks you to simply notice the moments when expectations create emotional intensity in your family relationships. You might notice feeling hurt when someone doesn't respond the way you had hoped. Feeling irritated when plans change. Feeling disappointed when effort isn't acknowledged. Feeling unimportant when you aren't invited. Instead of reacting immediately, pause for a moment and simply notice the feeling. That moment of awareness is the beginning of changing how these situations unfold. In this episode, you discovered that unmet family expectations often sit at the center of anxiety and stress in midlife but understanding how expectations, generational differences and human imperfections, shape family relationships can soften those reactions and create some more space for connection and calm. If you know someone who has this dynamic in their family, please feel free to forward this episode to them. I'll be back on Thursday where we're gonna talk more about transforming this stress and disappointment. Thanks for listening to creating Midlife Calm.