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Now that I'm an adult, how do I go about fixing the lack of parenting I received early in life?
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Your job as an adult is to figure out two things: what you weren't taught growing up and what you were taught incorrectly. This discovery process will happen naturally because we will trip over those two things when we come across them in our daily lives. It is a little more elegant to sleuth them out ahead of time and fix them. This website is designed to help you find out what you don't know that you don't know so that, perhaps, you won't have to trip up so often.
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What do I do if I just want to forgive my parents?
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I see the willingness to let go of the anger and disappointment we feel about our childhood as the excellent second step of healing. First, we are fully, righteously angry. Then we are calmly, comfortably able to accept that our childhood was less than perfect. Forgiveness would be a part of that healing second step. I want to acknowledge, however, that many adults had upbringings that were characterized by such sustained cruelty that forgiveness may well be ill advised. In cases of abuse when a complete apology is absent, a healthy second step would be to release the perpetrator(s) from our lives with good wishes for their own healing.
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My parents are both deceased. How can I blame them when they are gone from my life?
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Good parents understand that part of their job is to accept responsibility for anything that went wrong in the parent/child relationship. If your parents were good parents, even after they are gone they would want you to be able to take this first step toward complete healing. Good parents can handle your anger, usually because they spent a little time angry at their parents. As one of my workshop participants put it: Think of their willingness to validate your anger as their last great gift to you as a parent.
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