Adult Perspective on Parents

When we won’t look at the parents of our childhood years objectively, here are a couple of several results.

• We overly blame ourselves: “I’m not good enough. It’s my fault. I’m screwed up.”
• We overly blame others: “You ignore me. You hurt me. You don’t care.”

One perspective for counseling is to look at our family of origin, the one we grew up in. In order to see how it impacts our lives, we have to be open to looking at it. There’s often resistance. It gets spoken in these statements.

• I don’t want to be one of those people who blames my parents.
• My parents weren’t perfect. They were good, really good.
• They had a really hard life themselves growing up, so I can’t blame them.
• I love my parents. I don’t want to think badly about them.
• They just gave me what I deserved. It’s how things were done back then.

This isn’t about them being good or bad. It isn’t about judging or forgiving them. It is NOT about confronting them. It’s not about whining. It’s not about years of therapy or self-help books.

It is about coming to terms with our lives and ourselves. It is about seeing them for who they were or still are. It is about trying to understand how it impacted us as children, which helps us understand our adult lives.

It’s not everything, but it’s an important piece of the journey.