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.

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