Dear Christy:

The last two lines of your post are: “I think it’s so important that we move past blaming the parents and take responsibility for our mental habits ourselves. This took me a long time to be able to accept.”

I think that what should be most important for you, Christy, is to heal and be well. This is your personal responsibility because only you (with help from others) can initiate this path, this process and only you can, through persistence, work, patience, do it. Only you can and therefore it is your responsibility.

The blaming of the parents is useful in context of healing: you have to settle the responsibility issue in order to heal. You are responsible for your healing now, as the adult that you are. To heal you have to truly understand that the illness you need to heal from, the creation of that illness was not your responsibility, but the responsibility of your caretakers, in your case, your mother and father.

Why see them as responsible for your anxiety? Because that would mean that it wasn’t YOU who brought it about. It is necessary to realize this so that you can feel empathy for yourself as the innocent, clean slate, all loving and lovable child that you were:

Look at the very title of your thread here: “Forgiving Ourselves for Anxiety”- it is right there! You believe you need to forgive yourself for being anxious as if you caused it. This means you feel guilty for being anxious, as if you are … bad when in reality you didn’t cause it. You automatically reacted to the caretakers in your life, not your choice.

There is a powerful social criticism for blaming our parents and the motivation is to protect the parents, always has been. And of course, there is no use in blaming our parents if we are not engaged in healing. Only in the context of healing and for the purpose of healing, do we need to indeed, blame our parents.

What do you think?

anita