The essence of old children’s insults can be reduced to one thing: parents loved us not the way we wanted. Angry because of this after many years, we still remain children. You can become a truly adult and free person only realizing that ideal parents do not exist.
Basic thoughts
- Lack of love or excessive custody – all this leaves wounds in the human soul. Constantly returning to them, we do not let them live.
- Putting the responsibility for our parents for our problems and failures, we, like children, remain depending on them.
- Understanding and accepting the shortcomings of our parents, we are preparing ourselves to ensure that in the future, with understanding to accept the reproaches of our own children.
“At one psychological training, we were offered to tell about their parents,” recalls 28-year-old Yana.
And everyone found a reproach: “My mother did not take me in her arms, and now I am cold with my beloved”, “Father was harsh, and now I am afraid of high positions” ..
I felt uneasy: today my daughter is only three years old, but suddenly the time will come when she will say bitterly to someone: “I behave like this because of my mother …”
Yana’s assumptions are true: practically none of the parents manage to avoid reproaches of their child.
The story of the patient who asked Sigmund Freud is known about how to become a good mother. “Whatever you do, it will turn out to be bad anyway,” replied the spokesman of psychoanalysis.
Such a pessimistic forecast can be treated with irony, but still has to admit: in his words there is a share of truth.
Sweet resentment
“Once, when I had guests, my mother called,” says 35-year-old Olga. -Hanging the phone, I sighed joyfully: “What are my wonderful parents all the same!” – and caught on herself clearly skeptical views. My friends were sure that I pretended to or refuse to notice some of my problems “.
The topic of relations with parents hurts many of us. Sometimes to such an extent that we strive to shift the responsibility for all our mistakes and failures, explaining them “wrong childhood” and … enjoying our own suffering.
Many customers “for 30” come to the rooms of psychologists who remained in childhood dependence on their parents, have kept too close a connection with them – and now they show off them with reproaches, blaming the callousness and lack of attention to themselves.
“The source of suffering can be both a lack of parental love and its excess,” explains the psychotherapist Ekaterina Mikhailova. – It doesn’t matter if the child is surrounded by excessive care or, on the contrary, pestering severity – from this he has deep internal scars. And give rise to bitterness, bitterness, and sometimes hatred in the soul.
It is not even about extremes such as cruelty, violence. The slap in the face at an unkind minute, offensive words, jealousy for a favorite-brow or sister-all these long-standing memories continue to hurt us “.
That we reproach our parents? Almost everything, starting from the simplest disagreements. Where did we get such a need to talk about it again and again, to worry and suffer?
“The opportunity to feel like a victim is able to give a peculiar pleasure,” explains the psychotherapist Alexander Orlov. – At the same time, the experienced suffering becomes the only meaning of human existence. In the end, he gets used to such a state, and he begins to like it “.
One lacks insight to understand: I am not in love with those in love, because I invariably choose one or the one who would like my mother (or, conversely, I would not like the dad). Others spend strength on complaints and experiences … Although each of us needs only one thing: to finally do our life – the life of an adult.
Learn to live with it
“It is important not what they do to us. It is important what we ourselves are doing what we did with us, ”said the writer and philosopher-explorationist Jean-Pol Sartre.
And it is very close to the truth. Some types of psychotherapy can be criticized for setting us up to return to childhood, for long and detailed memories of those insults that we had then inflicted.
But the point is that, having returned us for some time in childhood, therapy helps to see the situation that tormented us (and still painful) with a different look-the look of an adult.
“Some people recall only unpleasant episodes of their own childhood,” says the existential psychologist Svetlana Krivtsova. – A typical phrase: “Mom always forced me to do what I did not want …”
But in psychotherapy, a situation may arise when a person sees his mother from the outside and gets a chance to understand that with her behavior she showed, as she could, her care and love for him. I suppressed my son or daughter not because she wanted it, but just believing that it would be better for them. “.
Accepting the shortcomings of parents, a person reaches maturity, is freed from his primary dependence on them.
To accept your parents, you need to say goodbye to
the children’s dream of an ideal parent – just like a mother and father once part with a dream of an ideal child.
To accept that they are imperfect is to take their place in a series of generations, in a genealogical tree, where, of course, there are a lot of shortcomings, where hundreds of ancestors did what they could and how they could with their own suffering and resentment.
“To grow up is to learn how to live with them – as they are,” says Ekaterina Mikhailova.
Accepting the shortcomings of parents, a person reaches maturity, is freed from his primary dependence on them.
And although it is sometimes painful and difficult to cut these first ties, it is worth doing it: after all, staying in emotional childhood means living in eternal dependence on the parental view of our life. He is able to overtake us through any distances. It is enough for your mother, say, to criticize the name that you chose for your baby – and you will again find yourself in the position of an offended child.
Once realizing, “that all this is because of them, but not through their fault,” we will be able to free ourselves from resentment.
Alas, no school in the world teaches the “craft of parents”. What exactly the father or mother becomes each of us depends on the relations that we ourselves supported with our own parents. And so from generation to generation.
When the time comes, our children will take their place in this genealogical chain – already with their claims that we have to accept. And rejoice that we gave them the opportunity to have their own opinion and freedom to defend it. And this is already a lot.
Take responsibility for your life
“A few years ago, realizing that I was not able to build a serious love relationship with anyone, I turned to a psychologist,” recalls 40-year-old Anastasia. – We talked a lot about my childhood, especially about my father – tough, cowardly, causing my mother a lot of grief.
And then at some point the psychologist interrupted me: “Well, your father made you suffer, and no one denies your pain. But starting from today, from this very hour you will be with him, on a par with bear responsibility for this suffering. If you continue to support this condition, then you use it as an alibi, justify yourself for not wanting to live a full life – to rejoice at its joys and resist the risks. And this is not your father’s fault – this is your own responsibility, your choice “.
These were sharp, but saving words.
I realized that I was hiding from life, hiding behind problems with my father, so as not to admit that I am afraid of relations with another person. And it changed my life “.
