How to Forgive Your Parents For Ruining Your Life
You’re a grown-up, you’re in charge now. Maybe it’s time to act like it.
Parents aren’t perfect. Some are better than others at raising happy, healthy children. How did your parents do?
If you think they did a shit job, maybe it’s time to deal with that emotional backlog you are no doubt hanging onto, unless you want to pack that baggage for the rest of your life like a loser.
I don’t think that turning your back on the problem is a solution. For your own good, you need to do some shadow work.
Mother’s Day passed by, and Father’s Day is approaching. This is a good time to think about where we came from and what was going on with our parents. And if you’re a parent now, you owe it to your children to not pass the problem to them.
It may have run in your family, until it ran into you.
This is the opportunity to end the old family programming and be better.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to downplay serious trauma and mental illness from a terrible childhood. Parents and adults may have done horrible things to you. The damage is real, and you might need professional help to heal and deal with these issues.
And.
You can also take responsibility for what you do now.My Childhood Was No Picnic
Who am I to tell you to stop your blame game? What gives me the right?
Simple. My parents did a shit job.
I was super angry with them for years. Eventually, I unpacked all of that and used it as soul fuel.
I’m not writing this to make anyone feel sorry for me. I don’t want to one-up your sad childhood.
You may have lived through some terrible stuff. This isn’t a contest.
But if anyone could claim their parents did a crappy job, it’s me.
My dad was an alcoholic who didn’t keep a steady job. He used violence on me, my brother, and his wife. I was accustomed to getting a beating if I went out of line. It happened a lot.
My mom wasn’t affectionate with us at all. Our family didn’t touch except for discipline.
She didn’t defend my brother or me against our dad.
She hid from her problems by drawing and painting with all of her spare time, ignoring us.
I was left alone with a sexual predator and abused at the age of 5. When I tried to tell my mom what happened, she wouldn’t listen. She ignored it, so it kept happening. I understand first-hand what sexual abuse does to your entire life.
Mom didn’t clean the house.
My parents were hoarders, just like on the show. I was surrounded by stacks of newspapers, garbage, unwashed dishes, and dirty laundry for my entire childhood. We lived like animals.
Dirty, unnatural animals. Most wild dens are cleaner.
No one did laundry, we didn’t have running water, and I only owned two changes of clothes. This meant that I went to school smelly and dirty. I got picked on, bullied, ostracized, and shunned.
I had no friends.
I ran around free-range, doing whatever I wanted, getting my own food, stealing, breaking stuff, and getting in trouble.
Life seemed short and hard, like a bodybuilding elf. It made me think of killing myself and escaping that cruel existence.
So, yeah. I understand why you might blame your parents for your troubles when you finally escape that life. I did.
Blame Only Gets You So Far
It feels good to assign blame to your parents because they ruined your life. And at first, maybe that’s all you can do. The problem is, if you get stuck complaining about the past, you can’t move forward.
While you focus on what happened years ago and look at what’s bad in your life, you aren’t open to the good things. You miss opportunities. You lose out on life.
Yes. The trauma is real. But revisiting it over and over in the blame game doesn’t do you any good. It just makes you miserable, and you feel justified in harboring hate or anger in your heart.
You have to let it go. Blame, anger, and hate are a cage that you build for yourself. Open the door. Leave.
And if you need help to heal, then go get it!
Your Parents Were Victims, Too
You show me an abusive parent, and I’ll show you someone whose childhood sucked.
My dad’s early life was terrible. It makes what I went through look like a day at the spa.
Dad was beaten and verbally abused for years, not only by his father but by all of his older brothers.
Several of his relatives died of alcoholism. His role models were the opposite of healthy.
“Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.”
— Bob Dylan
My mom was raised in a family loaded with sexual abuse, emotional cruelty, and religious fanatics. She couldn’t stand up to the men in her life and was forced to push down her true self. She lived through one winter with nothing to eat but turnips and potatoes. They were poorer than anything we could imagine.
My mom thinks success means staying alive.
How could I expect the perfect parents when they came from this?
They weren’t making choices, because THEY COULDN’T.
They did the best they knew how to, based on their programming. Mom and Dad were trapped in their roles by their families, their upbringing, and society at that time.
To Blame Victims For Their Mental Illness and Actions is Senseless
There are criminals, and those you would call evil, who do become parents. I’m not writing about them here.
I’m writing about regular parents who messed up. Their intent wasn’t to wreck you.
Did my dad wake up one morning and say, “You know what? I think I’m gonna have a kid so I can be his alcoholic abuser and ruin his life!”
Did my mom think, “Why don’t I marry an abusive man who will beat his family? Then I’ll become a hoarder and surround us with garbage so I can raise them to be twisted little individuals that grow up hating me?”
No. They didn’t.
They started as an optimistic couple that had fun together and dreamed of a happy life with happy children. They just didn’t have the tools to pull it off.
They failed, and I can lay some of it at their feet. Sure, if they had moved mountains and struggled like an ultramarathoner in the last 10 miles of a 200-mile race, maybe they could have busted through their heritage and bad programming.
Suppose they had gone for therapy, or moved to a different part of the world, or gotten help from an outsider? But they didn’t.
The deck was stacked against them. And they lost the game.
Most Parents Meant Well, and Hate That They Didn’t Do Better
Everyone’s situation is different. There are nasty parents out there who don’t deserve your love or forgiveness.
I know that my parents feel like they should have done more. And yes, they definitely should have.
Now I’m a parent with three grown children. When my kids were little, I was operating under my own crappy programming. And guess what? It wasn’t all helpful, healthy, or perfect. That’s because I’m a human, and life is hard.
I wish I had done better. I wish I could have been the ultimate dad who set his kids up for the best life possible. But I didn’t.
It isn’t because I didn’t want to or didn’t try. Certain people on the internet will tell you it’s because I didn’t try hard enough. I think this idea is poisonous and harmful in most cases. I did the best I could.
My wife and I treated being a parent seriously. If there was an action that we thought needed to be taken for our children's well-being, we took it no matter the personal cost.
We sacrificed our time, energy, and resources for our kids. Whatever good things we had, we threw on the “for the kids” pile. Sometimes that left us with nothing personally.
Was this the right approach? Probably not. But we put everything we had into it, and we went for broke.
Bottom Line
We need to have compassion for each other. Have you tried putting yourself in the other person’s shoes?
Imagine you were your mom or dad. What was their life like? Maybe they had some of these issues:
Young
Inexperienced
Programmed by society and parents
Broke or financially stressed
Depressed and beat down
Mentally ill or sleep deprived
Come from families with secret abuse you don’t know about
If you take the time to step into another person’s life with all of their hangups and problems, you might see them in a different light.
That’s what we need more of—reframing, forgiveness, and positive steps forward.
Blame is a dead end and won’t help you grow as a person.
If you have a relationship with your parents, call them and talk. They deserve that much.
I’ve forgiven my parents. They live on my property, and my wife and I help them as they go through the last stages of their lives. Without them, I wouldn’t exist. Even though there were terrible things, there were good things too. I am who I am today because of those experiences, good or bad.
You might not be able to forgive your parents or ever want to. Even so, it’s in your best interests to move on. Healing can only make you a better person.
It helps to talk about these issues with friends or professionals who aren’t directly in the situation with you. Counseling can help if you give it a chance.
Please, don’t hide from these problems. You deserve to feel better and get closure.
Thanks for sharing an important message. The human resilience is amazing.
Than you for sharing your vulnerabilities with us, Tim.
It reminds me of my dad`s story: Violence, the a lack of love and affection, a mother claiming she had done everything right, when in her mind, maybe she has. So my dad was often not present for his own family while trying to earn the love of his mother as an adult.
It showed me that no matter how bad the past was, he couldn`t give up on his mother and that came at a cost: him being choleric often but not violent and my mother seeing their marriage go down.
You and your wife have set an example of what childhood can be on the other hand: parents who care and go out of their way to make their kids feel loved and respected.