The more you were hurt by your parents, the more crucial you need to learn their history as humans.
“My father used to beat me especially when he’s drunk. Punches, kicks, verbal grenades. It’s so hard for me to believe he’s my father. When I became a teenager, I wrote him off and ran away from home,” shared Tony during a tearful Zoom session.
When he turned 40, Tony heard stories of his father’s boyhood from an uncle. The first time he heard how much his father’s father was also alcoholic and beat him.
The rage. The beatings. The emotional abuses. All these were only duplicated to Tony. All in the context of his father’s struggle for wholeness and happiness.
The deeper he heard about his father’s story, the more Tony noticed how much his view of his father was being inevitably altered.
After several sessions in therapy, he decided to pay his father a surprise visit during his 80th birthday. Decades passed since he last saw him!
No human lives without making mistakes and incurring regrets. Ok
It’s a blessing to Tony that his father had an extended old age. It gave him a “new opportunity” for reworking and repairing his relations with him.
Wendy Lustbader, a noted author and mental health counselor, observes and writes,
“As children, the chief illusions we project upon our parents are that they know what they are doing and that they have control over what happens. It does not occur to us that what appears to be inflexibility may actually be a cover for confusion, or what comes out as anger may stem from anxiety, or what seems to be neglect and a lack of concern may be the consequence of depression. All of this can only make sense later, if we allow them to account for themselves and to acknowledge the extent to which their actions stemmed from their own weaknesses … We are all children of parents, yet the ability to picture our parents as children can easily elude us.”
Learn your parents’ history as humans.
The glimpses and realities. They permit you to comprehend those who moulded you … and ultimately hope to have a worthy, better end.
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