“Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist,” wrote Michael Levine. Fatherhood and motherhood are about love, shared time and the bonds created. Unfortunately, sometimes parents stray far from their supportive, protective, and loving roles, turning their children’s lives into hell.
In these cases, it is normal for children to end up harboring resentment, anger, or even hatred against their parents. Being deceived, betrayed, or even mistreated by the people who are supposed to care for, love, and protect us is a particularly difficult pill to swallow. However, not forgiving our parents keeps us tied to those painful experiences and those poisoned feelings, preventing us from finding the inner peace we need to live serenely.
How to forgive parents and heal the wounds they have left?
Forgiveness is not something that can be forced. It must be a conscious act, but also born from the heart. Only then can you free yourself from the weight that those emotional wounds represent.
– Acknowledge your emotions and give them all the space they need
In society, the role of fathers and mothers is overrated. Of course, no one doubts that their mission is extremely important and deserves our full respect. Giving life to a person and taking care of him/her is probably the most wonderful thing in the world. However, there are parents and parents. So you shouldn’t feel bad if you experience resentment, rage or anger for the mistreatment you suffered.
You may have been told that your parents did the best they could, so you may feel uncomfortable or even ungrateful for having certain feelings. However, hiding those feelings will not make them disappear, but will continue to feed all those latent conflicts between you.
Carl Jung affirmed that “What you accept transforms you; what you deny, submits you”. Therefore, the first step to forgiving your parents is precisely to make all those emotions you experience towards them conscious. Don’t judge them. Just take note of its existence.
– Delve into the life of your parents
It’s surprising, but many people know very little about their parents. You may know some of the stories they have told you, but it is likely that they have kept many of their most traumatic experiences, fears and insecurities secret.
Taking an interest in their lives will help you see your parents from another perspective. It will allow you to take them out of their parenting role and start to see them for the persons they are. This way you will be able to stop judging them in such a severe way since, as Enrique Jardiel Poncela wrote, “No matter how severe a father is judging his son, he is never as severe as a son judging his father”.
Maybe your parents weren’t ready to have a child. Perhaps they had to make great sacrifices. Or maybe they were also treated badly, so that the dysfunctional pattern they used on you was passed down from generation to generation. It is likely that your parents already dragged their own struggles and felt overwhelmed by life, pressured, insecure, fearful…
Trying to understand your parents doesn’t mean justifying their behaviors and the harm they caused you or that your experiences and emotions are invalid, but it will help you see the bigger picture and even empathize with them and feel compassion.
In fact, it is an important part of the healing process because by understanding them better, you will also be able to better understand what happened to you, so that you can make sense of your story. This way you will begin to process it and you will be able to turn the page.
– Develop realistic expectations and express what you feel
Parental mistakes are one of the most difficult to forgive, among other factors because you probably expect too much of them. It’s not even your fault, society has taught us to have high expectations of parents, so you’re likely to hope – often subconsciously – that they’ll eventually do the right thing for you.
Perhaps you are waiting for a good day to recognize the wrong they did to you and ask for your forgiveness. However, those long-awaited apologies do not always arrive. Parents do not always take responsibility for the harm they caused to their children and we cannot force them to do so. But we can get rid of its influence by addressing the issue.
If you need to express the damage that was done to you, you have the right to tell them how you felt and how you feel. You can explain: “However you remember what happened, I just want to tell you that I felt hurt/alone/mistreated/abandoned when I was little. That has caused me a lot of suffering.”
Perhaps in this way, your parents stop being defensive and recognize their mistakes. Or maybe not. In either case, having a frank conversation can help you let go of resentment so you can move on on the path of forgiveness.
If your parents are no longer around or, for some reason, you don’t want to talk to them, there are other exercises to forgive your parents that you can apply. For example, you can place an empty chair in front of you and imagine that your mother or father is sitting on it. Tell him/her everything you want. Tell him/her how he/she made you feel. All the things that hurt you. And everything that you would have liked, that never was. You can also write him/her a letter. Let off steam and, if you can, in the end, forgive him/her.
– Choose to focus on the positive
The vast majority of parents love their children, with very few exceptions. But no parent is perfect. Most people have their own unhealed childhood wounds, they carry their psychological traumas, they have their own shadows and they fight with their inner monsters. However, even in that darkness, it is often possible to find some light.
To forgive the parents, it is convenient to try to find the positive part or the good memories, which have often been overshadowed by pain. It’s not about “washing their image” and making excuses for what they did wrong, but about balancing the image you have of your childhood by also incorporating the positive things that anger or resentment normally don’t let you see.
And if your experiences, or traumas, are too great to find something positive, don’t feel compelled to. Forgiveness cannot be violated. If you can’t find anything good in your parents or the way they treated you, that’s okay. Instead, try to focus on how those negative experiences have made you a more resilient/compassionate/empathetic/fighter person…
Perhaps your parents did not treat you well as a child, but remember that as an adult, you are fully responsible for your life, which means that you can heal the emotional wounds left by your parents. Forgiving parents does not mean exonerating them from their responsibility, but rather that you have the right to live without that weight. When you realize this, it will be easier for you to bury the hatchet. Making peace with that stage of your life is allowing yourself to live the life you deserve, finally. Because, as Milton Erickson said, “It is never too late to have a happy childhood.”
In either case, remember that forgiving parents is often a long, complicated, and winding journey. The deeper the wound, the more difficult the process. That’s why we have to be ready to forgive. We have to want to forgive. We have to be convinced that forgiving will help us to be better. Because, ultimately, that’s the goal.
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