What to Say When You’re Ready to Stop Explaining Yourself

There will come a time when you are officially done explaining yourself to your emotionally immature parent. You will surrender to the fact that you cannot come up with the perfect words, in the perfect tone, to convince them to care about how you feel. And when this moment comes, some of you may want to communicate that you’re done explaining yourselves, and there are several ways to do that.

The first thing you need to consider is the level of safety in this relationship. If you fear for your physical or emotional safety in this relationship, you may just need to stop explaining yourself. You should not tell your parent that you are done explaining yourself if they are only going to use that as an opportunity to continue to treat you poorly. In this type of relationship, I would commit to no longer explaining yourself internally and not communicating this decision.

If you are in therapy with your parent, you have a relationship with your parent where you feel you can state this decision, or you simply want to state this for your benefit, here are some other things you can say:

• “I’ve explained how I feel about this before, and I don’t think rehashing it is helping either of us. Let’s move on.”
• “I’m not going to keep explaining my decision. I know you see things differently, and that’s okay.”
• “I’ve already shared my reasons. I’m not going to go over them again.”
• “I’m going to step away from this conversation.”
• “We’re not going to see this the same way, and I can live with that. I hope you can too.”
• “Explaining myself over and over isn’t working, so I’m going to stop.”
• “I’ve decided I’m no longer explaining my feelings to you. It has not helped us in the past.”