Parents And Grievances Against Them: Opportunities For Reconciliation

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

Each of us had to meet with feelings of resentment towards our parents. We all come from childhood. And our parents, too, were once children. And we all would like to have ideal parents and a happy childhood. Including our parents.

Everyone has their own experience of relationships and their own list of complaints about their parents. “They didn't praise”, “didn't buy”, “demanded a lot”, “forced”, “punished”, “ignored”, “paid little attention”, “cared badly” and so on … that institute, others - because the parents said: "choose yourself." Someone once did not buy the desired toy, but someone was brutally beaten throughout childhood, someone did not have enough emotional warmth and praise, and someone was sent to an orphanage or to be raised by a grandmother …

When I work with my clients on the topic of grievances against parents, I consider one of my tasks to analyze the adequacy of the client's claims and expectations to the parents' capabilities.

Resentment resentment - strife

Grievances are sometimes based on comparing their experience with the experience of those for whom it seems to be better in getting more or quality "goods" (Example: client T. was offended and angry with her parents because her parents did not buy her a fur coat … Masha's girlfriend had several fur coats donated by her parents). Sometimes the stories of other people with much "worse" experiences can have a therapeutic effect in working with these clients. That is to say, by comparison we have been traumatized, by comparison and we are healed. Thus, the picture of the world expands, and your experience does not seem so “offensive”.

Some children's grievances are associated with severe traumas of physical and psychological abuse received in parent-child relationships, work with which requires long-term and careful psychotherapeutic assistance (Example: client N. told that for any mistake, misconduct, or her disagreement on a regular basis and brutally on the orders of his mother, beaten by his father).

I will not describe the whole path of psychotherapy that we went through with the client, it was long and included work with many aspects and difficulties of her life. I will just tell you an example that was associated with a grudge against parents (permission to publish was received).

Practical example

"I always annoyed my mother, she seemed to be unable to cope with her annoyance at me." First, I suggested that the client write a letter of grievance against her parents, after writing which I asked her to draw up a “guilty verdict.” At the next stage of the work, I asked the client to tell about what she knows about her mother's life story, on the basis of which she formulated a “defense speech ". It turned out that my mother was born into a family in which two older children had died in front of her. She was born after their death. The client describes her grandparents as caring, overprotective and anxious, indulging her mother in everything, even in adulthood. The trauma of the loss of two older children determined the parenting style of the client's mother. Grandfather and grandmother, out of fear of losing, raised the client's mother in an atmosphere of permissiveness. The client's mother grew up not knowing what the boundaries of others were. All her whims and desires were satisfied. The personality of my mother was formed from the “want and receive” position, I always get what I want. This style of upbringing contributes to the fact that children grow up as infantile egocentrics, unable to cope with their affects, to control and manage their emotional world. Mom's husband, father, grew up in a family in which he did not have the right to vote, the right to choose, as a result, he married a woman, whom he obeyed completely and unquestioningly. Then I asked the client to take the position of a judge and pronounce the verdict: "Execute, forgive, pardon," to which the client replied: "But they have already been punished." "How?" I asked. “The fact that they have lived their lives so unconsciously. The fact that they do not know how to love. " “And what will the verdict be?” I asked. “Have mercy,” the client replied. The next few sessions were devoted to comprehending past experience, assigning its value (“I survived, which means I have strength and resources”, “I have children”, “I can live and act”, “I can forgive”, “I can not repeat the mistakes of my parents in raising their children "), and at the end of the psychotherapy process, the client said:" You know, I have a lot of sympathy for my parents and at the same time gratitude to them - just for what I am, I have there are children, and I continue, and it became so easy on my soul."

In psychotherapy, children's grievances against their parents are one of the most difficult, hard to "work through" problems. And this phenomenon is explainable. When you are a child, you are dependent on your parents. You cannot survive without them. And your acquaintance with the world happens through your parents. And your fears, complexes and deficits are formed precisely in the child-parent relationship. As well as the perception of the world and Others. And further life is unconsciously built on the basis of what the experience was, how it was lived and processed by the psyche.

However, as we grow older, our freedom becomes more, the space of options for choice expands, but, unfortunately, through the prism of our grievances, these options are difficult to detect, notice and choose. The prism of resentment distorts reality.

In my previous publications, I suggested that resentment should not be viewed as a feeling, but as a process that is subject to meaningful management. After all, each of us is given freedom. At the point here and now, choose - how to live further, with what feelings, how to fill your life … Allow grievances to determine your future or give a chance to live without them? Everlasting victim or taking responsibility for your life?

What to do?

• Admit what it was. And that it is impossible to change into the past. It is not possible to change your parents, their parents, and the parents of their parents. It is possible to change your attitude towards what happened.
• To mourn your experience, to grieve, to be angry that the world is unfair and not perfect and the parents were not perfect.
• Analyze the experiences of the parents' lives and how they grew up when they were children. Resentment against parents - always hides a claim and accusation. And what facts can justify them? In order to see the Others, you need to lose your temper. And in order to see in the parents not monsters, but living people, first you need to abstract from your resentment. What were their parents like, and what did they experience and feel when they were children themselves? What was the time then? What was the situation in the country? What was the situation in the family? What events have filled the life of your parents? Indeed, more often than not, our parents were themselves the disliked children of their disliked parents. And them - the experience of their trauma. They did not have the opportunity to undergo a course of psychotherapy, they did not have the amount of information that you have.
• Fill this experience with your own meaning and value.

Life without offense is possible. I don't force my clients with the idea of forgiveness. Many clients have resistance to this idea, behind which they feel that their experience is devalued. The path to forgiving parents is through understanding and rethinking their life experiences. Understanding provides a basis for acceptance, acceptance over time can lead to reconciliation with experience, and there, perhaps, forgiveness will come, for which gratitude can open - as a gift to yourself to live without offense and a chance to see the picture of the world more holistically, to see in your parents people who are also suffering and experiencing, having experience of their trauma, and who did not have the opportunity to resolve it.

To live with or without resentment is up to you!