Unforgiven Parents

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Author: Alexander Neill

Each of us can make claims to our parents. We were also criticized. We were not understood. Our parents could have been too harsh with us. Or guardians. Or annoying. Or indifferent. They were sometimes inattentive to us, sometimes too demanding. We could be humiliated. Someone - to beat. To manipulate someone.

I know that an even, benevolent, loving attitude towards a child, based on respect for his personality, on his unconditional acceptance and unconditional love, is an exception to the rule, a rarity. And you are very lucky if you were brought up in such a family, in such a relationship.

But if, nevertheless, you were criticized and rejected and sometimes they did not understand, you still have grievances and claims to your parents.

Unforgiven parents live in us

We, adults, store whole deposits of unspoken feelings to our parents when we were offended, or rejected, or did not understand. Because we (like our children now!) Did not always express (could express!) Our feelings of disagreement with their parents.

And as long as these unspoken reproaches, claims, grievances live in us, our relations with our parents cannot be called good, “cleared”. Between us - deposits of unspoken feelings and emotions, unsaid words. And until we free ourselves from these claims, we don’t free ourselves from these grievances, our parents will not be forgiven by us.

But every parent, in order to become a good parent, must first forgive his parents for all the mistakes that they unwittingly made in relation to him. Because until your parents are forgiven by you, you will inevitably, constantly be doomed to repeat their same mistakes. And you, who swore in childhood: “When I grow up - I will never treat my children like that” - you will do it in this way.

Your unforgiven father in you will raise your hand to strike your child. Your unforgiven mother will make you open your mouth and yell at your child the way she did.

Whether you like it or not, the parents not forgiven by us really remain in us, their aggression or closeness, their indifference or their obsession remain in us. And they begin to crawl out, manifest in us.

And there is nothing mystical about it. I kind of do not let go of the aggression accumulated towards my father - and it crawls out, pours out on my own child.

Our children are victims of our past relationship with their parents. To bring up a child “in a new way”, purely, lightly - you yourself need to become a pure and bright person, not burdened with grievances and claims, aggression and unforgiveness.

And it's easy to get rid of it. No matter how strange it may sound to you, it really is - to get rid of resentment and forgive your parents is much easier than living with constant pain in your heart, with hatred or rejection.

Because to be free is to forgive. And to forgive is to understand. Understand why they did it. Why did they do it.

And they just were what they were. And they brought us up as best they could. How they could, being what they were. (As we are doing now.) And not taught by anyone, not prepared by anyone for raising a child - they inevitably (like we do now) made mistakes, most often without even noticing that they were making them.

Moreover, our parents were even less taught to raise children. If you make mistakes in upbringing now, at a time when a huge amount of literature on raising children has appeared, when there are radio and television programs dedicated to raising children, there are trainings that help to master competent treatment of a child - what our parents could know, who lived in times of scarcity and scarcity?

They were even less prepared, less developed. Therefore, they did it the way they could do it.

And everything that they did in relation to you, they did (as you do now!) - with the best intentions. They did it because they wished you well, they wanted to make you a good person. And they sacredly believed that it was by these methods that truly good people were made!

Moreover, the very time in which our parents lived, their parents - our grandparents, largely determined their ineptitude, haste, and illiteracy of upbringing. Generations of our parents, our grandfathers and grandmothers grew up in a country that always needed a small, executive person, obedient, “like everyone else”.

Nobody set the task of forming a bright, strong personality, defending their views and beliefs. This is what you need to be now, at the present time.

Generations of people in our country have raised obedient, comfortable children. The country itself formed obedient, comfortable people, performers, "cogs" who obediently raise their hands at the vote and agree with the policy of the party and government.

A whole system of education worked for this, from children's and youth organizations to the family. Our grandfathers and grandmothers, our fathers and mothers did not know that we, their children and grandchildren, would live in a different order, where you cannot be small and obedient, where you need to be confident, strong, active, where you need to be able to stand up for yourself, defend their positions, achieve their goals.

Our parents fulfilled, albeit unconsciously, the social order of the society, the country in which they lived. And we, modern parents, are still "infected" with this goal, although we did not realize it.

In addition, the generations of our parents and grandmothers grew up in times of hardship, hardship, and limitations, when it was just necessary to survive, to feed the family and children. Even the framework of living on one salary with the impossibility of additional earnings has already toughened their lives and hardened their hearts.

Our parents, who lived in a situation of inadequacy, material constraints, forced, as they say, to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows, did not have time, did not have the strength and ability to deal with us, to express love and support to us to the extent that we needed them.

I remember well one of the participants in the training, a man who spoke with bitterness about the indifference and insensitivity of his parents. They worked at the factory and, like all factory workers, had a small plot of land. Potatoes and vegetables were planted on it - times were difficult, summer cottages and such allotments were a necessity of that time.

And from spring to autumn, every day after work, the family - parents and a schoolboy - met at the entrance to go to work together on this site. Always at five o'clock in the evening.

- I went to the army, I was not at home for two years. Finally, I returned, came home, phoned my mother at the factory from home.

- Mother. - I said happily, - I'm back!

- Okay, - she said - Then at five o'clock at the entrance …

Talking about this incident, the man could not contain his bitterness: to meet him like this after two years of separation!

Yes, our parents really were sometimes dry, insensitive. But what else could they be, preoccupied with survival? God forbid us to live in such difficult times when "I don't have time for fat - I would live!" Can we blame them for this?

And even after times of poverty and hardship, many of our parents were forced to pursue material wealth (in order to create a more prosperous life for us too!) - and always at the cost of limiting the time for communication, closeness, understanding, so necessary for us. And we ourselves now continue to pursue material wealth, we are in a constant race through life.

And we have no time - and nothing to give, to express to our children. Because our hearts are filled not with love, but with constant vanity, anxiety, doubts about the future, a desire to earn more. We are not far from our parents. So do we have the right to condemn them?

Our parents were what they were. They were the way they were raised. Our parents were raised that way by their parents, who were raised by their parents, who were raised by their parents. You can go, as they say, to the fifth generation, even to the ancestors of the Neanderthals. You can blame everyone. But why?

There is no point in blaming anyone. It makes sense for us to do things differently, “in a new way”. They are not to blame for the way they manifested themselves. This is rather their problem. How can you blame them for this?

One can only regret that they were what they were. That they have lived the lives they have lived. That they still receive the consequences of their upbringing. One can only sympathize with people who have lived their lives not filled with love.

Blaming your parents for treating you this way is like blaming them for speaking to you in the language they spoke to - Russian, Ukrainian or Kazakh. They spoke it because they themselves were born into a family where they spoke this language.

And you, being born to these parents, also began to speak it and now you are speaking. And no one is to blame for this. You just ended up in a place where they spoke such a language. But now you have grown up and learned that there are still other languages. And you can learn to speak these languages if you start learning.

And it's the same in upbringing. The language of criticism, the language of rejection that your parents spoke to you, which their parents taught, is already outdated. And you can learn another language. The language of love.

But first, you need to take responsibility for the relationship you want to create with your child. And do not make excuses that you were not taught this, that your parents did not give you something. They gave what they could. But now, having realized all of them and your mistakes, you can give your children much more.

There is another way to forgive our parents. This way is to feel grateful to them. Our parents did the most important and wonderful thing in relation to us - they gave us life.

THEY GAVE US LIFE.

THEY LET US INTO THIS LIGHT.

Only thanks to them we live now and can love and rejoice, and bear children, and learn new things. They opened to us a whole world called LIFE.

And this act of theirs - justifies, forgives them all subsequent mistakes and sins. Moreover, there was no malicious intent behind all their actions and sins. They loved us as best they could. And they brought up as best they could. And they tried very hard to educate us to be good. And they did it.

From the book "Education in a new way" by Marusya Svetlova