Sins of the Parents

and their effects on your Journey

It's a somewhat somber blog today, and it's to do with dysfunctional parenting and its effects on children...

Having a great childhood guarantees you nothing really except a more hopeful start to life.  You travel through those early years, with all your baby angst, your fun kiddy times, your teen perils, to arrive into adulthood, hopefully with a fully formed character without too many major flaws, and ready and able to tackle what life will invariably throw your way as you venture forth.  The good, the not so good, and the downright awful.

Having an unspeakably dreadful childhood, or one filled with the miseries of alcoholism, molestation, violence, drug use, absentee parents, narcissism and the like, not only doesn't guarantee you a good clean start in life, but what it does promise you is a lot of work later on, if you are ever going to overcome those rocky beginnings. It's been on my mind somewhat lately, and this afternoon, watching The Shawshank Redemption (again), the same bits always speak to me.  One is when Red says, "Get busy living or get busy dying." The other is when Andy DuFresne crawled through a river of shit to come out clean on the other side, after enduring decades of hell.

Some will never enter that stinking sewer to attempt to find that redemption; they will simply quietly get busy dying, and drink or drug themselves to death.  They will never really feel the pain and decide to address it, or die trying.  But it is worth fighting the good fight, because the rewards can be enormous.

Narcissistic parents have a lot to answer for, although they never will do that, simply because these types are "wired wrong," and therefore will never know - or care - of the scars they inflict on everybody around them, including and especially on their own flesh and blood.  Those who get to experience the fallout from being raised by a narcissist suffer lifelong from the experience, and sadly, those who don't educate themselves about what this condition means, will wait forever for a redemption that never comes. At some stage, you have to put defective parenting firmly into the past, if you have experienced it, or it will slowly but surely kill your very being.

Adult children of narcissists and addicts and abusive parents never really feel whole.  They guess at what normal is, not having grown up with it.  They do not trust easily.  They can be hard judges and jury, given that when raising their own kids under normal conditions, they sometimes cannot relate to normal childhood angst and behaviors, because they tend to benchmark it against their own demented upbringings, and find their own children's problems trite and insignificant by comparison.  But our children are our NOW, and we need to always remember that.

So, the good news.  Provided these adult children are not infected with the same narcissistic gene, as can certainly run in families, they can in fact turn out to be the most wonderfully caring parents, who, although still frequently getting it wrong due to their own faulty radars, are driven to growth and learning and insight in a way that perhaps the more grounded simply don't need to.

There are a couple of wonderful things about growing up in those highly dysfunctional home settings, however, and these aren't often talked about.  Certainly it's not the childhood trauma itself.  It's the flip side of the legacy those adult children are left with; the huge resilience, the empathy, the determination to be so much better than what they had themselves.  I mean, you can either look at it positively or negatively, like everything in life.  The negative - and those who have suffered such a start find it very, very easy to go down this path - are the "Why me?  What did I do to deserve this?  Life isn't fair."  These are all fair statements, coming from a child from that kind of unspeakably awful beginnings.  Why indeed?  Who knows?  It is what it is, or more accurately, it WAS what it WAS.

The biggest hurdle of course is to not let that kind of pain and fear affect your NOW.  The past, as horrible as it was, is in the past.  It need not have any say in what you are going forward, except you can take all the strength, the courage and the compassion and love into your life going forward, to come out clean and joyful at the other end...

Once you let go of that past, and embrace your now, the final step is absolute forgiveness, for what happened to you, but also, forgiveness of yourself. Because for some unknown reason, we tend to be hardest on ourselves, and punish ourselves, through lack of self-esteem, abuse of substances and the like. And it can take a lifetime to sort that tangle out.

A shortcut out the other side, however, is forgiveness. Because once you honestly forgive what was perpetrated against you - well, you’re free of it! Free of the reasons to keep harming yourself with poor choices, and also free of placing the blame for your choices, and your attention, on the people in your past. Because after all, you weren’t responsible for those things happening - so it follows that you don’t need to carry blame forward into your now, and your future.

Note: you’ll know when you’ve authentically forgiven, and moved past the trauma, by the mere fact that memories of those people and events will no longer trigger you. The emotions that were attached to those happenings have miraculously dissipated.

How do you forgive them then?

By being 100% present with the memories, observing the pain that those recollections bring forward for you - and letting it all blissfully go. Float that shit away. You might even then, like me, develop a curiosity around the people who harmed you back then - and want to know more about them. What was their story? What was their pain? What level of consciousness did they have at the time? And maybe they were just doing the best with the limited self-awareness they had? I mean, it would’ve sucked being them, right? And once you let go of feeling the self-pity from your own pain, you can genuinely develop the compassion for how their lives must’ve been, to know no better than to treat you the way they did. How awful for them!

It is so much more powerful to look at it this way. You get to choose.

Letting these possibilities into your own consciousness will begin to take the heat out of those memories, when you develop compassion for those who wronged you, and accept that they weren’t 100% bad people. They lost their way, for reasons you may never understand. And it’s okay that you may not understand the why of it. It just was. The point being, all the emotion now can get taken away from the pain you were hanging onto, and suddenly you’re on smooth seas, untroubled by the past - and sailing serenely forward into - what?

Well - miracles happen, and all the time.

What do you want to happen in your own, personal, hopeful Now? Now that you’re not hanging onto the pain, or blotting out your future by dwelling in the past - or clouded by anger over past hurts -

your world magically opens up!

Sometimes we just need to howl at the moon, accept, and release.  And the Universe in all its wisdom, invariably sends us what we need to cope, to grow, and to move further into the light.  And to love life, and to love again.

Yours in love and light,

Caz