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Dear Peter,
I am sorry that both your parents passed away. What I am reading from your words is that you felt guilty for disappointing them (“The inevitable experience of being disappointed but more so the fear of disappointing”, and “honor them including the disappointments and hurt we gave each other”).
It appears you couldn’t let go of the feeling of guilt for them “carrying you”, but then with the help of therapy, you managed to let go. Am I understanding this right? Could you talk a bit more about your guilt for not “carrying them” – is it that you didn’t help them enough, you weren’t there for them when they needed you?
This feeling of guilt sounds like the central theme for you. You say the disappointments were mutual, and that you were all “idiots”, even though you – both you and your parents – tried your best to be “reasonable good person to those we cared about”.
So they tried their best, and you tried too, but it didn’t work. Although you understand it and have forgiven yourself and them somewhat, the injury has nevertheless happened and needs to be processed. That’s the wound on the foot we were talking about…
For that wounded inner child that still exists. I still see him standing alone on the school ground vowing never to let others get to close to hurt him, hurt me.
This is the protector part in you vowing to never allow your wounded inner child to be hurt again. You closing your heart is a consequence of that original wound – of not having received the love and care you needed. And perhaps that’s why you later closed your heart for your parents too. Now this wound needs to be healed…
Dear Felix,
I appreciate you sharing some more, and telling us more about your family. I understand your love and loyalty to your family. I love my parents too, and they help me whenever I need it. However it doesn’t mean that their style of parenting, specially that of my mother’s, didn’t affect me and my life even as an adult. Because we all carry the wounds from our childhood with us into our adulthood, and we employ various defense mechanisms to protect us from pain. Whether we like it or not, we’re directly impacted, even programmed, by our childhood experiences. So when you say “It’s big boy time“, it’s not completely true, because the little boy is still inside of you. You may try to make it work without tending to him, but it will be very very hard, and there will be always something missing.
You seem like an independent, capable man, who’s been through a lot, and came on the other side. You also know what your values are, and you don’t want to sell your soul for profit. Excellent! But still, you’re suffering because it’s so damn hard. You feel lonely, and on top of that, the universe is throwing you curve balls. You’re trying to let go, to not expect anything, to toughen up even more… but as you say, it’s exhausting. You’re tired, you can hardly take it any more.
What if the way is not in toughening up even more and not hoping for anything, but instead, to soften? To connect to the vulnerable, fragile side of you, that needs help, needs company, needs respite from the constant struggle? That dares to hope in providence, in good things to come, in love… To change the approach and allow yourself to be vulnerable, and yet not weak (because the two are not the same)?
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.
Dear Peter,
Part of that process is pulling back our shadow projections and ‘becoming our own mother and father’, learn to nurture and protect ourselves. Or set healthy boundaries. Having the best or worse parent, the task is the same. Finding peace with our parents inevitable failures while creating healthy boundaries.
I agree that we need to become a loving, compassionate parent to our own inner child, and learn to nurture and protect ourselves, as you say. Eventually we need to forgive our parents, regardless of how inadequate they might have been. What I was saying is that we can’t forgive by simply changing our thinking – we need to also process it emotionally, i.e. work on those unmet needs from our childhood, i.e. our wounded inner child.
The memory of the pain we felt as we step on the piece of glass is just that a memory. Perhaps their is even a scar and a lesson to be more careful around broken glass.
Until we heal our wounded inner child, i.e. give ourselves the love and affection we didn’t get as children, the wound will be active and festering under the surface of the skin. It first needs to be cleaned in order to start healing and a scar developing. Only then can it become a memory which doesn’t hurt any more. We can then truly forgive our parents and hold no resentments, because we know that they too were just a wounded children themselves and didn’t know better.
Dear Peter,
I think I understand what you’re trying to say – that we can help ourselves by changing our perspective, by looking at things differently. That’s true up to a point. But if we step on a piece of glass and hurt ourselves, we can’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt. We can’t look at it differently and say “no, I’m not in pain.” It’s pretty simple with physical pain.
With emotional pain it’s a bit trickier, because we can actually tell ourselves that it doesn’t hurt. We can rationalize it. We can try to “transcend it”. But the inner child is the part of us which still feels the pain – and the pain is very real. It’s like when we step on a piece of glass, only the glass is in our soul, in our heart. We can try to ignore it but it comes out in different other ways.
“Because perhaps it’s true what they say, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and uncontrollably for one simple reason, you’re theirs. Your parents and siblings can love you for the rest of your life, too, for precisely the same reason.” ― Fredrik Backman
It’s true that a child loves their parents unconditionally, because it depends on them completely. They are the source of love, nurturing and protection, and the child depends on them to meet their physical and emotional needs. Without the parents or care-takers, the child wouldn’t survive.
Parents or care-takers (or siblings) on the other hand, don’t necessarily love the child unconditionally. Sometimes they withdraw their love when the child doesn’t behave in a certain way. Sometimes parents can be physically and/or emotionally abusive. The fact that someone is our parent doesn’t guarantee they love us unconditionally. We might have been wounded by the very people who were supposed to love and care for us, and that’s why it’s so painful. We need to heal those wounds if we want to have a happy, fulfilling life.
Dear Peace,
now it’s getting clearer to me why you were so unhappy in childhood – your mother was too busy with various chores and was a type of person who didn’t say much. It seems like she didn’t ask you too many questions either, e.g. she didn’t inquire how was school, or what’s up, neither did she notice if you felt disturbed or sad about something. Probably that’s why you never had the urge to go to her to complain or confide in her when you had a problem. You didn’t tell her about your period either, neither did you dare to mention the sexual abuse when it happened to you. You had to carry a very big burden by yourself, and it appears that your mother didn’t show too much interest in you and your feelings. Although she didn’t criticize you, she was actually emotionally distant – it was a sort of emotional neglect.
This probably happens quite frequently in big families like yours, but still, you didn’t get the care, attention and protection (and guidance) a child should get. I can imagine you didn’t feel important enough to even bother your mother (or your father) with your problems, did you? You didn’t feel seen and you didn’t feel worthy to be seen either. And this is why you prayed to God to die, it was so unbearable for you.
To be honest, when you first told about your parents – that they were loving and haven’t criticized you – I didn’t understand how come then you had such a hard time as a child. But now I understand – it wasn’t emotional abuse, but emotional neglect. Perhaps if you had been more demanding, your mother would have paid more attention to you. But you were sensitive, you rather withdrew and suffered in silence, because you believed you don’t have the right to demand attention.
All this explains why you’re longing for attention now – you are longing for someone to see you and “mirror” you, to understand you, to be there for you. You said in one of your earlier posts that you wanted from a man to “take a stand for you” (“i feel like no one will ever accept me as a partner everyone will come to pass their time but none will ever take a stand for me“). Your mother, and it appears your father too, never took a stand for you. Never even asked you how you’re doing and what you’re feeling. Never noticed that you’re hurting. You don’t want to go through the pain alone any more, so you’re looking for a man to be there for you. But until you learn to be there for yourself and soothe yourself, no one will be able to give it from the outside.
I think you should find a counselor to work on the sexual abuse trauma, and also to help you heal emotional neglect. So you can be whole within yourself and be able to soothe yourself, without looking for a man to soothe you (which always ended up badly so far). If I were you, I would focus on my healing, I wouldn’t engage in relationships with men for now, because you always end up hurting afterwards. Try to put aside for now the pressure to get married and the whole issue of being a virgin. You need to first find yourself and own yourself, before you can enter in a healthy relationship with a man.
Once you heal, you’ll be able to attract more balanced and emotionally mature men, who will appreciate you for who you are as a person, in your entirety, and won’t see you as a piece of meat or a piece of hymen, as you said. The process of healing and self-discovery may take a while, even a few years, but it’ll be worth it, because the benefits and consequences will be for a lifetime…
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