Dear Peter,

A stumbling block many have may be associating the idea of forgiveness with the idea that a forgiven person can no longer be held accountable. That would not be Love or a path to healthy boundaries. Unconditional Love becoming a unhealthy unconditional allowing.

I agree. Unconditional love or unconditional forgiveness can be just an empty phrase, and is sometimes used by spiritual people who find it hard to face their pain (or to accept responsibility for their actions), so they’d rather transcend their pain and pretend that all is love and light. I also agree that true forgiveness doesn’t mean allowing others to abuse or disrespect us, or to cross our boundaries. Even if we forgive our parents for having treating us badly, it doesn’t mean we’ll allow them to do it again. If they don’t want to change, we need to protect our boundaries and e.g. reduce contact with them.

I also wonder if that some times instead of healing our wounded inner child the tendency isn’t to cling to them.

Many people react from their wounded inner child. Actually, according to Internal Family Systems, our wounded inner child is only one part of our personality – the most fragile one, which was hurt by the lack of love, care, appreciation, support etc in our childhood. But we have other parts, called the protectors, which serve to protect that wounded inner child from pain. A protector part is e.g. when we act tough and distant in a relationship because we’re afraid of intimacy, we’re afraid of actually being hurt again. So we use various defense mechanisms to protect our wounded inner child. Those mechanisms are dysfunctional, they don’t help us, but still, we believe they shield us from pain.

So yes, we can cling to those defense mechanisms for a long time, till we decide to feel the original pain and heal it, so that we don’t need the false protection any more. That means that e.g. we heal from the fear of intimacy, which enables us to become open and vulnerable in a relationship. We aren’t playing defense any more. As a result, we can have deeper and healthier relationships.

What makes you wonder if Felix hasn’t found his way to heal the wounded child?

I don’t feel comfortable talking about Felix without him participating in the discussion. But I’ll just say that whenever we don’t want to look into something, it’s a sign that a defense mechanism is at work.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by Tee.