TRANSCRIPT
I would like to talk about the two reasons why people reconcile with their parents after they’ve broken from their parents. The first reason, and this is the ideal reason, this is the reason that I would wish on the world if people break with their parents, is if their parents evolve. If their parents grow up, if their parents really begin to work to heal their own traumas, begin to grieve what happened to them when they were children, back when they were traumatized by their own parents once upon a time. As a consequence of this process of healing their own trauma, they begin to look at how they replicated their own unresolved traumas on their children, such that their children broke away from them and didn’t want to be around them, wanted to take distance, wanted to set boundaries, sometimes extreme boundaries from them. When parents really evolve, when parents really begin to go through a healing process and really put themselves in a position to be able to acknowledge what they’ve done, what they’ve done in terms of harm to others, it opens the door for a reconciliation. Not necessarily for apologies from the parent to the child, to the perhaps grown child whom they’ve harmed, but better than apologies, real amends, a real changed behavior, a new relationship that can take place. From what I’ve seen, experienced in my life, observed, witnessed, that is extremely rare. Most people in general, parents, are not really, don’t evolve that much. Really delving into deep childhood traumas is pretty rare. Most people don’t have any clue how deeply they’ve been traumatized. And because they’re unaware of it, because they’ve pushed it away, because they’re in denial of it, they consequently really have a very difficult time understanding the harm that they have caused to others, especially the harm which they have caused to the people over whom they wield the most power, their children. It’s literally like, because they haven’t dealt with what happened to them, they are blind to be able to understand what they have done to others. So how can they amend that behavior? How can they evolve? How can they actually really love their own children, children who may be fully grown up by now, especially love them in the areas in which they really once didn’t love them, failed them, violated them, traumatized them? What I’ve seen again and again is when people who are now adults, even children, teenagers, break away from their parents, take distance from them, it’s because their parents aren’t loving them properly. People don’t really break away from people who are loving them properly. Many, many parents deny this. “Oh, I love my child so well.” I hear this on this website, I hear it on my YouTube channel all the time. People say, “My child broke away from me, but I was a great parent. I was a good person. My husband was the bad one,” or “my wife was the bad one,” and they seem to have a good relationship with her or him and not with me. It’s unfair! I did everything right. They were the bad one. They were the narcissist. They were the sociopath. I was the rock. I was the loving parent, and I have to take the blame. A lot of times what I think is, well, when it comes to parents being bad, it takes two to tango. A lot of times both parents are equally at fault. Maybe one parent is more at fault, but a lot of times if you really look into the actual emotional dynamics, both people are at fault. And it’s very hard for people to really take responsibility for the harm they have done to others if they really cannot or are unable to look at what happened to them. And not just look at what happened to them, but really make massive progress at healing from it. Because I know a lot of people, actually parents, who are able to look at a lot of the traumas they suffered in childhood or look at a good chunk of them, or maybe just the extreme ones sometimes, and yet don’t or haven’t taken the leap into being able to see how that caused them to be bad parents, how they replicated that. And I think a big part of the reason why is it’s one thing to really look at the traumas that happen to one in one’s own life. It’s another thing to actually make great progress at healing from them. Very, very, very uncommon. So actually when I see people who reconcile with their parents after breaking from them, it’s actually very uncommon that it is because the parents have really evolved significantly changed. So that brings me to the second reason why people reconcile with their parents after having broken with them. And that is because, not that their parents have evolved, it’s because they themselves have devolved. What do I mean by that? Well, when people break from their parents, by and large in society, that is a very stigmatized act. You don’t get a lot of approval in society for breaking from your parents unless, of course, the parent was arrested for having raped you or something like that. And even then, sometimes people say, “You have to learn how to forgive that parent. You have to forgive them for their abusive behavior, massive neglect, massive abandon. They’re the only parent you have. They brought you into this world. Even though they made mistakes, everybody makes mistakes.” There’s a million reasons why people are told to forgive their parents. “Forgiveness is golden. Forgiveness is honorable. Honor your parents,” religion says it. “You have to learn to let go, move on, forgive. Don’t forget, but you forgive. You have to give them love. They brought,” etc., etc., etc. So much societal pressure for people to go back to their parents, and it’s considered mature to forgive. I’ve talked about this a lot. I learned it in my childhood. My parents taught me that to forgive them their abuses and violations made me a good person. They loved me more when I forgave them. But I forgave them without ever healing, without ever growing, without ever really evolving and dealing with the consequences of the traumas they were foisting on me, on their abandonments, their neglect, their sexual perversity, their terrible role modeling, their horrible fighting in front of me, the physical abuse even. I just forgave them, and they said, “Daniel is so mature! He’s so good at forgiving! He’s such a loving person! He’s a real model of forgiveness and maturity.” Well, it wasn’t true. It was surface forgiveness. It’s because you can’t really forgive someone until you’ve healed from what they have done from it. And until they have really acknowledged what they’ve done, until they’ve healed from what caused them to do that, and they stop doing that entire pattern of behavior, and they own it. My parents never owned anything, and I didn’t heal from it for a long, long, long time. In fact, I’m still healing from it to a degree. And yet I repeatedly reconciled with them. I would break from them and then reconcile with them. This went on through my teen years, into my 20s, even into my 30s, where I kept going back and back and back and back and reconciling with them, maybe even sometimes forgiving them, believing I was forgiving them. And I think that’s a lot of what society is about when they say forgive. They don’t really mean forgive because you can’t really forgive someone until full healing on both sides takes place. Instead, it’s just like a surface, shallow hologram of forgiveness. It’s dissociation! That’s what it really is. When people are able to push their feelings down, push their traumas down, push their memories down, especially push down the emotional reactions that they had and still have to the traumas they experienced, push it into the unconscious, and then deny entirely that that’s even what’s going on, that’s what gets labeled as forgiveness. And then people can go back and reconcile with their parents. “See, we’ve healed! We’ve healed our relationship!” Sometimes they even go to therapy together. I’ve heard so many stories of people who go to therapy with their parents, and the therapist helps facilitate this process of reconciliation. And yet it’s false reconciliation. What it is, is now you have, instead of two evolved people who are in a new place in their life, you have two devolved people. One who maybe never evolved at all, the parent, and one who started to break away, started to evolve, started to realize what independence was like. Maybe it’s terrifying. Maybe the stigma and the rejection from society and the family system is just too painful.
Too much. And some people realize, wait a second, if I keep growing, I’m going to really be alienated from the family system, from the world, from the workforce, from my friends. Sometimes everything pressures this person to just give up the healing process, bury it, bury your feelings.
And sometimes just in the person’s own relationship with him or herself, it’s just too painful. It’s too overwhelming. Can’t sleep at night, can’t function, don’t like anyone around them. Realize that everyone around them is kind of like their parents, and this is too much.
Also, a lot of people, from what I have seen, when they begin their healing process, they begin to exhume their traumas and look at what happened to them, look at how horrible it was. Simultaneously, what they start to realize is actually how much they became and have become and still are like their traumatizers.
It’s one of the sad, horrible things about human psychological emotional trauma is that we become like our traumatizers as the result of becoming traumatized. And if we don’t heal from it, we really replicate that on others. Sometimes not directly, sometimes very directly, but sometimes metaphorically. Sometimes it leaks out in all sorts of other ways.
Maybe we were physically abused and we emotionally reject people. Maybe we were neglected in different ways and we abandon our children, abandon our friends, abandon ourselves, abuse ourselves. All sorts of different ways that abuse trickles down intergenerational from our parents to us to our children.
And what I’ve seen is a lot of people, when they start to realize, when they start to get an inkling of the different things that they have done to others, and they realize, oh, if I keep blaming my parents, if I keep bringing up my traumas and realizing what happened to me and really start feeling the emotions of it, that gives the person who I’ve abused, the people who I’ve abused, just as much of a right to go at me.
Also, people feel incredibly guilty and horrible about the things that they’ve done. And one of the little tricks that people can play in their own mind, part of the human capacity for denial, for self-deception, is to think, oh, if I forgive my traumatizers, if I let them off the hook for the things that they have done, even without ever healing it, then I can also let myself off the hook for the things that I have done to others.
So in a way, by forgiving my abusers, I can forgive myself for the abuse I have committed on others. And if they ever do blame me, I don’t have to accept that blame because I am blameless because I have forgiven.