Dear Javier,

While reading your post, I got the “sense” of relief and your reasoning enlightened me. But, seconds later, the negative thoughts and guilt and all the self-hate came back again.

I understand your reaction – even if we understand something rationally and it sounds true to us, and we accept it as true, it still doesn’t mean we can suddenly stop our negative thoughts and feelings. That’s because those thoughts and feelings stem from an earlier phase, when we were little children, sometimes even before we could talk. The inner child in us is hurt but it also blames himself for causing pain to his parents.

The first thing you could do is to start having compassion for the little boy that you were many years ago, who endured all that abuse. Start having compassion for yourself as a helpless, innocent child. It was absolutely not your fault that your father was a bully and was terrorizing your mother, and that he later brutally punished you for the slightest mistake. Try to have compassion for that little boy who just wanted to be loved but couldn’t, because he was living in such terror. His mother wanted to love him but she couldn’t protect him from his abusive father. She wasn’t able to protect him. Try to have compassion for that boy who had to endure beating and terror for full 5 years. Do you think you can do it?

 I just want to see her happy, and like everybody else, she deserves to be happy.

Everybody deserves to be happy, but we cannot make our parents happy if their unhappiness is caused by their own wounds. I could never make my mother happy, no matter what I’ve tried and how perfect of a child I was. Your mother’s unhappiness isn’t caused by you – it is primarily caused by her. She endured an abusive marriage and probably would have endured it further, had your father not left. She endured a relationship in which she was a mistress for 10 years, in which she certainly wasn’t happy but it was still better for her than to be alone.

She might be blaming you for depriving her of her happiness, but is her, with her own weaknesses and childhood wounds – who deprived herself of true happiness and settled for breadcrumbs. She accepted and tolerated men who didn’t really love her or respect her. It has nothing to do with you. It was she who was creating her own unhappiness.

That’s why you can only work on your side of the relationship with your mother, but you cannot make her happy. You can have compassion for her, understand her, help her, however you cannot heal her wounds. Your task is to heal your own wounds, and be able to relate to her from that healthy place, from which you can offer more both to yourself and to her.