Dear Christy:

As to your last paragraph: I agree that you accepting yourself without judgment is necessary for your healing, absolutely. Accepting yourself with empathy is The Way, says I. Self empathy instead of self criticism, self berating, self beating (the works of the abusive Inner Critic, what I call Inner Bully).

I also agree that getting angry and resentful toward your parents (or toward yourself, see first paragraph of my response here) is in itself undesirable and as you already experienced in your past, it didn’t get you anywhere. In fact lots and lots of adult children are angry with their parents their whole lives. They keep complaining and keep trying to please their parents all at the same time. Or they keep resenting and stay stuck in their lives, in their sicknesses and dysfunction.

In your post to another member you wrote: “Think of your anxiety from back then as a good thing. It kept the family safe.” Some perspectives, like this one, may make you feel good for a short time, temporarily, like many type of Convenient Thinking, but on the long run, it may be harmful to you because it may be untrue. This is my correction of the thinking:

The anxiety back then was not a good thing. Anxiety: ongoing, excess fear- is never a good thing. It weakens a person, sickens a person, gets the attention away from business-at-hand.

Back when you were a child, if that is where your anxiety started, you perceivd yourself in danger. That was the cause: real and/ or perceived danger. The result was fear. If the perceived danger was ongoing, so was the fear.

The anxiety of past, in the context of the family, did not keep anyone safe.

That ongoing, excess fear (anxiety) from childhood got attached to a variety of thoughts, sensations, experiences and it keeps circulating in the brain, raining-on-our-parades in multitude of ways.

One way in the healing process is to pay attention to what is happening now, what thoughts are involved, what triggers it, methods to relax, all necessary.

The other thing that needs to be attended to is that danger in childhood: what was it? Underneath that anger that you felt for your parent/s, there is fear. Fear of what? Such insight is also necessary for long term healing.

Again, the purpose for looking into the past (and our relationships with our parents are a HUGE part of that past because our brains were forming then), is not to get stuck in blaming, it is to unearth the origins of …our misery, basically.

anita