Contents
We all have something to reproach our parents with; moreover, these reproaches are an indispensable part of growing up. But how to live on if the wound once inflicted on us is too deep or difficult to see and recognize?
- All parents have weaknesses and shortcomings., but this is not a reason to demonize them.
- Negative emotions help us to recognize the real abuse we may have experienced.
- Deciding to forgive (or not), we are discovering a new space of freedom.
“I don’t know a single adult who doesn’t have grievances against their parents,” says family therapist Eric Trappeniers (Éric Trappeniers). From childhood, we keep memories of injustices, large and small, and fleeting grievances and episodes of despair and longing. Summer communication with relatives in the country or on vacation brings us back to this painful experience and sometimes reopens old wounds.
Our bitterness reminds us of the relationship between ideal and reality, between what we expected and what we got. “Until a certain age, children see their parents as omnipotent gods,” explains transactional analyst Ekaterina Ignatova. If so, they must be perfect. Therefore, adults usually associate everything bad that they had in childhood with their parents: after all, the gods can do anything, and if they didn’t do something for us, it means they didn’t want to. Which, of course, is unfair: our parents were just like any of us: too inexperienced, too young, or too tired. Like us, they were absorbed in work or love stories, suffered from worries and complexes … And someone himself was beaten by life, sick, absent from the lives of children or treated them badly. Reproaches are inevitable because the history of parent-child relationships, whether conflicted or happy, is always a story of “non-meeting”, “fullness never found,” recalls psychoanalyst Maryse Vaillant in her classic book1.
“When we ourselves become parents,” notes Ekaterina Ignatova, “we realize how difficult this task is. Then many of us begin to show indulgence to our parents. Recognizing how immature our tendency was to blame them for all our failures. Although some of us, on the contrary, have more complaints. After all, if I can be gentle with a child, why couldn’t my mother do this?
Read more:
- Julia Gippenreiter: “Parents should not take everything upon themselves”
Stop feeling like a victim
If the share of the old resentment continues to live in our souls, then we are still settling scores. When in the face of our parents – whether they are alive or already dead – we still feel, to some extent, misunderstood or unrecognized, irritated or filled with hatred, we need to be able to discern what exactly they have done or continue to do that hurts us and hurts. “Feeling and identifying your anger is the stage that opens the door to acceptance and the ability to forgive your parents,” states Eric Trappenier. We need to acknowledge that we have been victims of their actions in some way. And the next stage is to get out of the position of the victim, so that we are no longer shackled by those parts of the personality that were traumatized in childhood, so that we gain the ability to freely love, make our own choices, build our lives.
But sometimes reproaches are given to us with difficulty. After all, to admit our resentment towards our parents means to touch that part of us that remains in childhood and of which we are ashamed. We are ashamed when we hear their demands and criticisms over the phone or during family dinners. It is a shame that we are still sometimes afraid or ready to burst into tears, unable to object or respond. It’s a shame that “we haven’t outgrown it”, “at our age”. And instead of listening to our suffering, we muffle it with contempt, not noticing that we have a way to alleviate it – to figure out where it came from.
Read more:
- Stop being angry… at your parents
Refuse to idealize
However, there are happy exceptions, notes Ekaterina Ignatova: those who understand that their parents were not perfect, but have no complaints about them. However, those who believe that parents are beyond criticism may not have any complaints, – explains the transactional analyst. They’re like “faultless comic book characters” and of course you can’t blame them.
Psychoanalyst Alice Miller has written about how difficult it is to see the “silent violence” that adults do to wish well for children out of a deep sense of love for them.2. These manifestations of violence are less visible than abuse or neglect. They are expressed in a lack of attention and communication, denial of the child’s feelings and emotional blackmail, in the requirement to be obedient and be the best. As a result, they break the will of the child in order to make him a submissive creature, corresponding to the dreams of his parents. But it seems to us that our parents behaved this way for our good, wanting to give us something that they did not receive themselves. And when we criticize them, we feel ungrateful. It is not easy to establish the right distance, which will allow you to see that with all their love they have abandoned us in our desires, devalued our feelings and forced us to turn away from ourselves. Forgiving them too quickly, trying to prove them right, reassure them that they did the right thing, we run the risk of remaining emotionally dependent.
Read more:
- How to stop settling scores with parents?
“It is important here to eliminate any risk of demagogic indulgence, which will force us to take into account their good feelings and grant forgiveness out of blind complacency, out of fear of conflict or tears,” Maryse Vaillant warns. “Forgiveness is a serious act that involves reflection and maturity.” It is not only about stopping idealizing or demonizing our parents, seeing both their good and bad sides, but also, as Eric Trappenier recommends, “letting go of the experience: allowing yourself to feel sadness, resentment, anger, guilt, shame who tell us about our wounds and may allow our parents to recognize them as well.” Then we can, having achieved clarity as a result of long work, come to reconciliation with them and with ourselves.
Allow yourself to forgive
In some cases, what we blame parents for is so terrible that forgiveness seems impossible. It is vitally important for a child that parents value him and protect him, therefore their rejection, their sadism is infinitely more unacceptable for us than similar actions of other people. And then we are left in the grip of fear, hatred or revenge. How can forgiveness bring us relief? Why is it necessary to forgive if the culprit does not show the slightest remorse? Is it possible to forgive someone who does not regret what they have done? But the fact of the matter, emphasizes Ekaterina Ignatova, is that forgiveness is our decision, our conversation with ourselves. Parents take a passive part in it, only as images that exist in our minds. The philosopher Jacques Derrida generally believed that forgiveness only makes sense if there are things that are unforgivable. Forgiveness is a selfless gift when we forgive what cannot be forgiven. To arrogate to oneself the right to forgive means to straighten up and assert one’s freedom to live on. Let our “Dossier” show you the ways where you can heal your wounds and move forward.
1 “Forgive your parents” (“Pardonner à ses parents”, Pocket, 2004).
2 A. Miller “Education, violence and repentance” (Klass, 2010).