The essence of old childhood grievances can be reduced to one thing: our parents did not love us the way we wanted. Angry over this many years later, we are still children. You can become a truly adult and free person only by realizing that ideal parents do not exist.
“At one psychological training, we were asked to talk about our parents,” recalls 28-year-old Yana.
And everyone found a reproach: “Mother did not take me in her arms, and now I am cold with my beloved”, “Father was harsh, and now I am afraid of high positions” …
I felt uneasy: today my daughter is only three years old, but suddenly the time will come when she will bitterly say to someone: “I behave this way because of my mother …”
Yana’s assumptions are true: almost none of the parents can avoid the reproaches of their child.
There is a well-known story of a patient who asked Sigmund Freud about how to become a good mother. “No matter what you do, it will still turn out badly,” answered the creator of psychoanalysis.
Such a pessimistic forecast can be treated with irony, but still we have to admit that there is some truth in his words.
Sweet grievances
“Once, when I had guests, my mother called,” says 35-year-old Olga. — After hanging up the phone, I sighed happily: “What wonderful parents I still have!” – and caught on itself clearly skeptical glances. My friends were sure that I was pretending or refusing to notice any of my problems.
The topic of relationships with parents touches many of us. Sometimes to such an extent that we strive to shift the responsibility for all our mistakes and failures onto our parents’ shoulders, explaining them as “wrong childhood” and … enjoying our own suffering.
A lot of clients “over 30” come to the offices of psychologists, who have remained in childish dependence on their parents, have kept too close a connection with them — and now shower them with reproaches, blaming them for callousness and lack of attention to themselves.
Each of us needs only one thing: to finally take care of our life — the life of an adult.
“The source of suffering can be both a lack of parental love and its excess,” explains psychotherapist Ekaterina Mikhailova. — It does not matter whether the child is surrounded by excessive care or, on the contrary, pestered by strictness — this leaves him with deep internal scars. And they give rise to anger, bitterness, and sometimes hatred in the soul.
We are not even talking about such extremes as cruel treatment, violence. A slap in the face at an unkind moment, hurtful words, jealousy of a beloved brother or sister — all these old memories continue to hurt us.
What do we blame our parents for? Almost everything in a row, starting with the simplest quarrels. Where do we get such a need to talk about it again and again, to worry and suffer?
“The opportunity to feel like a victim can deliver a kind of pleasure,” explains psychotherapist Alexander Orlov. “At the same time, the experienced suffering becomes the only meaning of human existence. In the end, he gets used to this state, and he begins to like it.
Some lack insight to understand: I fall in love with the wrong people all the time, because I invariably choose the one or the one who would like mom (or, conversely, dad would not like). Others spend their energy on complaints and worries … although each of us needs only one thing: to finally take care of our life — the life of an adult.
Learn to live with it
“What matters is not what they do to us. What matters is what we ourselves do with what has been done to us,” said writer and existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
And this is very close to the truth. Some types of psychotherapy can be criticized for setting us up for a return to childhood, for long and detailed memories of the wrongs that were inflicted on us then.
But the point is that by returning us for a while to our childhood years, therapy helps us to see the situation that tormented us (and still tormented) from a different point of view — the look of an adult.
“Some people remember only unpleasant episodes of their own childhood,” says existential psychologist Svetlana Krivtsova. — A typical phrase: “Mom always made me do what I didn’t want to do …”
But in psychotherapy, a situation may arise when a person sees his mother from the outside and gets a chance to understand that by her behavior she showed her care and love for him as best she could. She suppressed her son or daughter not because she wanted to, but simply believing that it would be better for them.”
By accepting the shortcomings of parents, a person reaches maturity, frees himself from his primary dependence on them.
To accept your parents, you need to say goodbye to the childhood dream of an ideal parent — just like a mother and father one day give up the dream of an ideal child.
To accept that they are imperfect means to take their place in the succession of generations, in the genealogical tree, where, of course, it is full of shortcomings, where hundreds of ancestors did what they could and as best they could with their own suffering and insults.
«Growing up is learning to live with them — the way they are,» says Ekaterina Mikhailova.
By accepting the shortcomings of parents, a person reaches maturity, frees himself from his primary dependence on them.
And although it is sometimes painful and difficult to cut off these first connections, it is worth doing: after all, to remain in emotional childhood means to live in eternal dependence on the parental view of our lives. He is able to overtake us through any distance. It is enough for your mother, say, to criticize the name that you have chosen for your baby on the phone, and you will again find yourself in the position of an offended child.
Once we understand «that it’s all because of them, not their fault,» we can free ourselves from resentment.
Alas, not a single school in the world teaches the «craft of parents.» What kind of father or mother each of us becomes depends on the relationship that we ourselves maintained with our own parents. And so from generation to generation.
When the time comes, our children will also take their place in this genealogical chain — already with their own claims that we have to accept. And be glad that we gave them the opportunity to have their own opinion and the freedom to defend it. And this is already a lot.