A Joyous Perspective on recognizing our origins: I Don't Blame My Parents

 

"Tell me about your parents..." 

Yikes. I can almost sense it in my clients. "Here it goes, time to address my past..." Sooner or later, in therapy, we get to the parents. I'm a little worried when they come in, ready to dive deeply into that part of their lives. That usually means they are really very angry and traumatized. 

Those stories, my friends, are not what I'm referencing today. Not that I don't get it. I empathize with the pain of complete confusion over being the object of someone's anger over not having the life they imagined. But most people have lived their lives believing that the past is best left behind and can't really hold a benefit to this present. Even the traumatized don't enjoy talking about their parents: most don't see the point, some because they think they just need to move forward. I get it. Who in their right mind would not prefer thinking about a new future to excavating the pain of the past? They may dance around it for several sessions, and then, a day, a memory or event comes up, and suddenly, they have all kinds of ways to feel. 

And they realize that to begin to be healed, we have to go back to the beginning.

We must go back to see what happened to people early in life. What were these parents like, and what role did they play growing up in this family. And that's just a piece. What about the siblings, the school, and the significant events they always carry? Our history is a treasure trove of root causes for our lives today.

Most people don't want to return to their past because they fear guilt, anger, or obligation to forgive something they just can't. They hate taking all the blame themselves, but neither can they bear to blame their parents. I've found it not unusual to have people tell me a painful story of emotional or physical injury by a parent and then have them quickly say, "But I don't want to blame my parents."

Reluctance to blame is understandable since childhood is something we want to leave behind.

If I blame someone for a hurt I carry, I'm told to forgive to put it behind me. "Say you're sorry." is one of the primary statements we all recall learning at an early age, followed by "Forgive them." And then somehow, and I'm not sure where this comes from - an idea that somehow forgiveness causes amnesia, we are expected to forget it. "Let bygones be bygones." We are not Deity, even if we do our best to be like a Savior. Forgiveness isn't to help us stop seeing the truth. It's to help us not to carry the extra weight of suffering. Forgiveness also doesn't require reconciliation. To reconcile means to make the scales balanced and start again. You can forgive and free up the space to move forward without continuing a relationship.

It starts with the willingness to examine your past to find the fastest way forward.

Therapy is the only place I know where going backward is the fastest way forward. Looking at how we interacted and lived as children teaches us who we are and gives us an in-depth view of what we expect from this life. The primary caregivers, Mom and Dad, are most likely primary contributors to how we feel about present-day life. And yet, many people would not explore that idea if it meant they might have to blame their parents.

But here's another way to look at it, and one that will help you with the guilt of examining the role of your parents. 

This isn't about assigning blame; it's about finding the truth. 

The truth is that both your parents were fallible human beings with enough psychological injuries on both sides to sink a battleship. The goal of a good therapist is not to completely disparage your parents but to accept them as the limited human beings they most assuredly were. Then you can see something important: 

How their limitations affected your view of yourself and your world.

Just like babies, parents signal their distress through bad behavior, making us feel as upset as they are. Neither babies nor parents maliciously strive to make life miserable for others; they just express their pain in the only way they know how. When I look back at how my parents acted, it's like attempting to decipher a coded language. I'm figuring out what psychological issues they were struck by through how they treated me. I'm not justifying the mistakes but finding a path to understanding. 

Obtaining insight into our parent's deeper motivations and unresolved trauma brings a new awareness.

Years of interactions that made no sense appear in a new light. Epigenetic trauma now has a name and a source. There was a cause, and we lived the effect. We were hurt not because we were bad people, nor were our parents bad people. It happened because the generations before us lacked the understanding and science with which to mitigate the costs of unattended emotional pain. Therapy and examining our past bring us to a place where we can describe what has been driving our family's pain for generations.

Is this blaming our parents? Hardly. It is expressing our parents.

As we grow in self-understanding, we translate their unspoken needs in a way they could not. This opportunity to figure out our relationship with them is our crucial hope to not pass along untranslated pain to our children. Our parents might not have figured it out in their lifetimes. They could only pass along their pain in silence, perhaps wondering if it might be deciphered by someone later. 

That family codebreaker might turn out to be you.

Could it end with you?

Examining your past frees us from a predetermined future.