TRANSCRIPT
From time to time, I have been asked by parents what I would suggest to them that they do in relation to their children when the parents have done terrible things to their children. Well, the first thing I would suggest is let go of the idea of expecting your child to forgive you. I think many parents secretly want that. They want their children to let them off the hook and say, “You know, you did bad things, but I know you did it for this reason, X Y Z reason. Therefore, let’s just move on and I love you anyways.” And I’d say, “Let go of that idea.” Instead, what I would really say is devote your life to changing. Devote your life to healing. Be as loving as you possibly can toward your child. Let’s say your child is now an adult. Be as loving as you possibly can toward your adult child, but sometimes that love might mean letting them go. Don’t bother them. If they want a boundary, respect that boundary. If they don’t want to talk to you, don’t bother them. Don’t reach out to them. If they say they do want a relationship with you, then listen to the parameters that they set for that relationship and respect them. Don’t be needy with your child. If you are being needy with your child and expecting them to give you X Y Z or even hoping for it, then you are betraying them again because you never should have done that in the first place.
Parents who are needy with their children, a very, very common thing, are setting up their child to be split off from their true selves. And that’s already a bad thing to do. But then what should parents do in their own relationship with themselves? Well, I’d say by start, or if you’re already on this process, continue to look at yourself, to really figure out what did you do, but more importantly, yes, why did you do it? To really understand your own history. Basically, to do what your child is probably doing right now, trying to make sense of where you came from. Understand your own history. Look at your own relationship with your own parents. See what happened to you. Find out how you were traumatized. And then work to heal it. And I should say this, just the process of looking at your traumas, opening yourself up, looking at your true self, studying your pain, studying your buried feelings, bringing up your repressed memories ’cause oh yes, if you really begin to look, memories will come back. Painful stuff, the ugly stuff.
Surround yourself to the best of your ability by people who love you, people who are not your children, people who you don’t expect anything from and who are not inherently at some emotional level now or historically dependent on you. Instead, people who are your equals or people who are healthier than you and expect nothing from you. And keep looking. Keep bringing it up. Journal. I would say yes, if you can handle it, journal like crazy. Get out your feelings. Look at yourself. Study yourself. Study your memories. Study how you were a month ago and two months ago and a year ago and five years ago. This is part of the beauty of journaling. You’re giving yourself a record to study your healing process. Study your dreams. Study the Your dreams are your fantasies and your memories coming up through metaphor. Study that. See if you can make sense of any of the patterns of this. Get rid of your addictions. And what are addictions? Okay, drugs and alcohol, porn, obvious addictions. But then there are addictions that aren’t necessarily called addictions in our society, the distractions that people so normally live with. And distractions from what? Distractions from looking within. Distractions from being with your feelings, with your history, with your knowledge of yourself.
And I know that’s a lot easier said than done. And I know that everything I’m saying is a lot easier said than done. Because you know what? If it wasn’t easier said than done, then everybody would be doing it because deep down everybody, everybody wants to heal. And everybody at the deepest core level knows that what I am saying is true. It’s even hard for me. I mean, I’ve devoted my life and decades of my adult life and even some of my child life to healing the traumas of my childhood. And I didn’t even have children. So I didn’t get lost in that diversion and that addiction because that’s what children are to many parents, to most parents to one degree or other. They are a distraction from looking within. They are an addiction, something that blots the pain of one’s own childhood. They are a way to further push down traumas.
And if your child breaks away from you and confronts you and says, “You screwed up. You were horrible. You were terrible. You messed up my life. You are responsible for this.” They are right and they are giving you an opportunity to look within and do better in this existence. They’re actually giving you an opportunity to now parent yourself in the ways that your own parents didn’t do. And some parents might say, “Yeah, but if my goal is to somehow repair my relationship with my child, then what you’re saying might even take me further away from that.” Yeah, it might and that’s okay because again, your existence is not to feed off your child, to get more from your child. Instead, your job now is to feed yourself, to heal yourself.
And I will say this and I’m going to say this with confidence. If you heal a lot, if you do a lot of really good work at changing who you are and healing your behavior, amending your behavior, becoming a better person, even heaven forbid becoming a fundamentally good person, a whole person, a connected person, your adult child, who you harmed, might quite appropriately never forgive you for what you did, but they might start to respect you. And they might start to like you. And they might start to watch and say, “You know, maybe I do want to have a relationship with you someday, even though you did terrible things to me.” Or maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll say, “You know, there’s too much water under the bridge. You’ve caused me too much harm. You’ve screwed up my life too much. I don’t want a relationship with you.” But they’re still going to watch you and they’re still going to watch and see what you make of yourself in this existence. And maybe at some level, they will feel good that you’ve changed and are doing more good in the world than bad and that you’re not harming people and that maybe as an extension of the nourishment you have figured out how to give your true self, the parenting that you’ve given to yourself, you can now, by extension, through a surplus, nurture others more. Actually give real unconditional love and be a healing force for good in this existence, a parent to others now.