One of the hardest tasks to manage in our healing, and certainly in the therapy room, is processing our relationship with our parents. Parents offer the most essential elements of care to their children - without them we'd literally be dead - and also inflict the greatest wounds. The reality is: we need so much from them, and because we need so much, because there is such a high level of dependency, we can be wounded so easily.
Let's focus briefly on the vast needs of a child:
Physically: food nutritious enough to sustain life and promote healthy development of all structures, elements, and systems of the human body, clothing for every growth stage and season, clean water, adequate shelter, protection, clean air to breathe, medical care when necessary, first aid for bumps, scrapes, scratches, etc., affection including hugs, kisses, nearness, holding, etc., and more.
Emotionally: being heard from the heart to the heart, compassion, empathy, humility, apologies, forgiveness, gentleness, attentiveness, attunement, emotional language/vocabulary, lessons on how to handle complex or painful emotions, freedom to express, instruction on self-control, compartmentalization, feeling known, handling conflict to healthy resolution, and more.
Mentally: stimulation, learning, education, recreation, leisure, hobbies, sport, art, creativity, self-expression, challenge, handling wins, handling losses, patience in learning, excellence, grace, competition, sportsmanship, obstacles, resourcefulness, knowing when to quit something, inner strength to keep going, and more.
Sexually: knowledge of the body, knowledge of the other gender's body, healthy, non-shaming sexual development, language for the sexual self, understanding boundaries and consent, self-respect, integration of the emotional and sexual self, and more.
Spiritually: connection to the deeper parts of the self, connection to God, how to pray, how to be still and silent, humility, fellowship, peace, service, sacrifice, self-discipline, conviction, ongoing spiritual development and growth, integrating spirituality into every day life, and more.
It's a LOT, isn't it? No wonder we say it takes a village.
When we are looking into our past, at our childhoods, how we were raised, what we came to believe about love - how to love and be loved, what was modeled for us, any trauma that we endured, we must eventually consider our relationship with our parents. Indeed, the entire system of psychodynamic psychotherapy (what I practice, mostly) is an exploration of our earliest and most meaningful attachments and how we are re-enacting those dynamics and expectations in our adult lives. Ultimately, this kind of therapy is a sort of curation: we must acknowledge what harmed us, discover what formed us, determine what was love, discern what was neglect, abuse, or manipulation, identify what was called love but wasn't, and in the end, decide what we keep and what we release. We begin to curate our lives with intention, wisdom, and knowledge.
Eventually though, to do this thoroughly, we must process which needs were met by our parents, which needs were not met, and, most importantly, how we felt about the unmet needs. Why? Why is this so important? Because the unmet needs in our lives create two dynamics that must be explored:
1. Unpleasant emotions for which we are likely blaming ourselves
2. Coping mechanisms
For every unmet need, there are unpleasant, painful emotions. If we do not name and process these emotions, we bury them which leads to both mental and physical dis-ease, or we create repeat life situations in which we reenact them again and again.
For every unmet need, there is a coping mechanism whose job it is to fill in the gap of the unmet need. Example: an unmet need for empathy may lead to the coping mechanism of denial - denying our pain because there was no one there to empathize with it. We were all alone in our pain then, and we deny it now.
For most people, this is a very hard exercise: naming the unmet needs. We have convinced ourselves that we have no needs or that we were too needy. Either way, we blame ourselves. This is what children do, and as adults we have not outgrown this coping mechanism. If we deny our needs, our parents are not at fault. If we were too needy, our parents were also not at fault. Indeed, the perspective people have is that they don't want to blame their parents. They are parents themselves, they know how hard it is to raise children, and they let their parents off the hook because it's hard.
I see three kinds of people in my therapy practice:
The first kind will reject any kind of parental accountability whatsoever. Their parents were saints; end of story. These people cannot endure the process of naming thier unmet needs and feeling the pain associated with it. Their parents may have indeed been loving, caring people but they were not perfect. No one is. This client cannot see that. They cannot name one fault in their parent. What this client doesn't realize is that this is the mindset of a child. To a child, a parent is like God. Part of maturing is accepting the ugliness of life, the failures of those on whom we depend, processing the emotion, and coming to real compassion and forgiveness. These people are often very naive in adulthood. Without the ability to see their parents as real people, they likewise cannot see the world as it is. They live with childlike naivety, often lacking depth and the wisdom to navigate relational conflict well. They also deny their own wrongdoing as parents. They let their parents off the hook and find it very easy to do the same with their own children.
The second type of person is the opposite extreme. There was real wounding in the parent/child relationship, and the adult can no longer see the good in their parents. They have written a completely negative narrative. This adult is usually quite angry and lacks forgiveness. To them, their childhood was their parents' failure. All needs went unmet, which is obviously not true. This person may be extremely hard on people in their adult world. They hold themselves to high standards. They cannot heal because the only emotion they allow is anger. They fear that remembering what was good will discount the wrongs they endured, and their anger is an ongoing validation that they were hurt. They won't let it go.
Then there is a third type of person who can do both. They do not blame their parents for their present struggles, but they do hold them accountable for their needs being met or unmet in childhood. This is someone who will process the feelings associated with the unmet needs without losing sight of the needs that were met. They seek self-knowledge and understand that it is impossible without a robust understanding of their own story. They are willing to feel their anger toward their parents - their hurt, pain, fear, and loneliness. They can feel it without forgetting what was good. As they process the real emotions, they can pursue a path of real forgiveness. This is what it means to heal. This type of person inevitably becomes a wonderful parent. There is a high level of self-accountability and also a high level of grace. These parents apologize to their children. They understand that parenting is undertaking a relationship with a growing human being. It's not a performance or a list of tasks to accomplish perfectly. It's engaging in relationship, perhaps the hardest and most rewarding one that exists.
To feel is to heal. We do not and cannot run away from difficult emotions, but we can process them. If we don't we will drink, eat, distract, deny, exercise, or work our way out of the discomfort. There is no way to heal - really heal - without acknowledgding and feeling the good, the bad, and the ugly about our parents.
The path of knowing our story and developing compassion is not easy, but it's essential for healing. If you want to learn more, consider participating in an online group, led by me, designed to do this very thing. Click on the "contact" link on the website. Send me an email, and I'll send you more information.
Comentarios