Parental influence on us cannot be overestimated. But in order to live by your own rules and in accordance with your true desires, you need to work on separating yourself from your parents: carefully analyze the experience of the past and learn to perceive father and mother more realistically. Clinical psychologist Lisa Firestone explains.
We are told from early childhood that we should respect and appreciate our parents, sympathize with their problems, and at the same time forgive and forget any pain they caused. If we do not get along with them, we are advised to make up and maintain warm relations.
Of course, such beautiful qualities as respect, compassion, gratitude and forgiveness are worthy of all admiration. But they are not able to erase traces of parental influence, both positive and negative. Whatever our relationship is today, their voices ring in our heads and affect us in many ways.
Our vision of ourselves, behavior and expectations towards others are formed in the first years of life. As infants, we adapt to the social environment in which we were born, and therefore our earliest interactions have a lasting effect. Unfortunately, situations where contact did not work out—for example, adults misunderstood us, we did not receive comfort, or did not feel safe when we were treated badly—also shaped our subsequent connections with others and with ourselves.
Recognizing that parents, like everyone else, made mistakes does not mean that we criticize them or dwell on the past. Our goal is to better understand ourselves and decide which behaviors from our childhood prevent us from living today.
Perhaps it’s time to let go of some destructive parenting and misconceptions, and change life patterns that no longer work for us.
It is important to face the past, but this does not mean that we should remember in great detail what happened to us.
Whether we are in contact with our parents today or we have cut contact because they harmed us in childhood, we still feel their impact on us in the first years of life. The goal is not to demonize parents, but to feel like a victim or get stuck in a cycle of anger and guilt. The challenge is to understand what happened to us and recognize the very fact of parental influence. Then we can look at ourselves and others with more empathy and understanding. And we will see our point of view, our position on some issues more clearly. And eventually we will be able to change behavior and act in accordance with our true desires.
An important part of the process is learning to perceive parents more realistically. Obviously, they were not as exaggeratedly bad or good as the caricature that we drew in our imagination. We were influenced by their various qualities — both positive and negative. We may feel something new about them now, but that doesn’t change what happened. And it is quite normal to explore and question their slightest influence on our development — unintended, negative or destructive.
To do this, we must acknowledge that any pain we felt as a child, and any emotion associated with that experience, is real. What we then felt and what we learned was our reality. As children, we were made to feel a certain way, and that matters.
We don’t need to make excuses for our parents or justify the behavior that hurt us. We can show compassion for them as individuals who are separate from us, who overcome difficulties of various kinds. But this does not mean that we should agree with how they treated us, or adhere to such treatment of ourselves.
It is important to face the past, but this does not mean that we should remember in great detail what happened to us. Putting together all that has been said or reconstructing the chain of events can be difficult, but this does not detract from or negate the experience.
I recently spoke to a young woman who was struggling to remember if her mother had thrown a book at her as a child. The particular scene was vague and confusing, but she clearly remembered the feeling of horror associated with her mother’s unpredictable nature. Or another story. The man admitted that he was disappointed with his father. He seemed to show no interest in the little son. But the son felt guilty for his feelings, because the father nevertheless took some actions — he took him to the sports section and paid for his college education. The man couldn’t remember if his father had ever said definitely that he didn’t love him. But how indifferently his father looked at him, how he bypassed him with his attention, he could not forget.
In these cases, it is not the exact facts that are important, but the feelings that small children were seized with and which continued to resonate in the soul of adult women and men. Both of these people absorbed a certain attitude from their parents, and it influenced them throughout their lives.
As for the woman, she always felt “bad” afterwards, as if something was wrong with her, it seemed to her that she annoyed everyone around. She experienced fear and distrust of others, was suspicious and in any situation began to defend herself. As for the man, he spent most of his life at work, giving all his best, in an attempt to win someone’s approval and love, which he did not receive in childhood. The emotional climate in which we grow up shapes our identity and our relationship with others. Including feelings of distrust, fear, insecurity, or feeling unattractive.
Clarifying a relationship with a real person does not necessarily help and often leads us in the wrong direction
Attachment theory explains that in how we build relationships and what kind of parents we are, the most important role is played not by what happened to us in childhood, but by the depth and intensity with which we felt and realized what happened. There are strong two-way links between the happiness (life satisfaction) of parents and children, even if the children have long grown up, moved into their homes and started families.
We must emotionally rethink the experience of communicating with parents in order to freely live our lives. This does not mean that you have to go into conflict with them. Clarifying a relationship with a real person does not necessarily help and often leads us not at all where we would like. But we need to solve our problems with those parents who “lingered” in our heads so that we can move on according to our own rules.
From the moment we are born, life belongs to us. We can be grateful to our parents for giving us life, but we should not give our life to them, that is, follow the prescriptions that they gave us in childhood. We are able to accept our parents as individuals, to appreciate and emulate their good qualities, and to freely reject their bad ones.
It involves a willingness to challenge their vision of us and find their own understanding of who and what we are. This is not an act of hostility towards parents, but a liberation of ourselves. And for those of us who become parents, this is a real gift to children.
About the Author: Lisa Firestone is a clinical psychologist and author of Beat the Inner Critic: A Revolutionary Program for Breaking Negative Thoughts and Constraints.