Forgiveness of parents - virtues - self-knowledge - catalog of articles - unconditional love. Internal conflict with parents

It happens quite often that children hold a grudge against their parents for a long time. Perhaps they want to get rid of it, but they cannot free themselves. Resentment becomes a problem that gives rise to numerous complexes. The children can't help it. Resentments accumulate, poison life, and are an obstacle to open feelings. The resentment suffered can become a serious injury.

How to forgive parents for old childhood grievances?

Feelings have no statute of limitations. Unpleasant childhood situations can live in the memory for many years. Previously, they were considered by the child as an unfairly caused grief or insult. He experienced negative emotions. He harbored anger towards the offender, felt sorry for himself, and cried quietly. In such a situation, it is difficult to make corrections, as opposed to reproach or complaint, when there is still hope of possible change.

Childhood resentment is a bitter feeling that destroys the soul. She doesn't let me calm down. Makes you constantly mentally replay the situation that happened. This feeling appears when the child’s expectations are not met by the behavior of adults.

Childhood resentment is accompanied by changes:

• facial expressions;
• intonation;
• moods.

Parents often teach resentment:

1. they feel sorry for children when they are offended;
2. prohibit children from showing emotions;
3. they themselves express and demonstrate resentment.

Don't forget, life is not always about positive moments. Life experience is formed over the years. The emotions experienced in childhood make a person who he is.

How to forget grudges against parents?

First of all, you should find the reason why everything happened. Try to understand her. Analyze the behavior of adults at that time. Wondering if they could have done things differently.

• It should be remembered: parents are ordinary people. It is common for every person to make mistakes that must be forgiven, because they forgive you too;
• think about the good things your parents did. After analyzing, it turns out that there are much more good deeds than offensive ones. Perhaps this will be a reason for forgiveness;
• Quite often, hidden grievances against parents interfere with building relationships with the opposite sex, starting a family, and making friends. You should let go of grievances, live in harmony with yourself and others;
• It is necessary to remember: parents are not eternal. While holding a grudge, children forget to say words of love, gratitude, and appreciation;
• Talking to your parents also helps. Having expressed what has accumulated in your soul, you come to understanding and relief comes.

Think about what hurt your parents did. If they didn’t understand your actions, punished you, beat you, it will be a lesson not to do this to your children. When you tune in emotionally to this thought, the resentment will noticeably decrease. This is not easy to do, however, it is quite possible if the desire to overcome grievances is great.

By forgiving parents for long-standing childhood grievances, a person cleanses himself morally, physically, and comes into harmony with himself and the world around him.

You should remember good things more often, childhood resentment will go away.

How to forgive your mother for childhood grievances?

This is a difficult question. The wound in the heart bleeds and does not heal for many years. There is only one explanation: mother is the dearest person in everyone’s life.

If a son or daughter, expecting the mother to repent, expresses everything that is boiling over, and she takes it with hostility, the person remains dissatisfied. He is looking for a target that resembles his mother, so that he can subsequently pour out negative emotions on her. For him, it will still be the same mother only in a different guise. This situation will last a lifetime. It is very important for moral balance to forgive the mother for childhood grievances.

How to forgive a mother for childhood grievances:

Compare your life to school. Certain lessons have to be learned. They help in the future to live without mistakes and move forward. Not every mother controls her speech. The spoken word, instead of protection, sometimes greatly hurts children.

Learn a lesson, do not criticize the child’s appearance or lack of abilities. A mother's insulting words remain a stigma for life. Resentment will become a complex. Only forgiveness can reduce this pain.

Put yourself in your mother's place. Try to live the situation in your mother's place. Every person believes that he always acts with good intentions. Finds justification in everything. It is necessary to understand why she acted this way and not otherwise. This may be a difficult step, but it must be done.

Imagine yourself as a lawyer. Look for arguments to reduce my mother’s prison sentence, assigned in childhood. Back then you had the role of prosecutor and victim. In this situation, you will look at your childhood grievances from the outside. Detachment will help you look at everything with different eyes.

Try to raise your self-esteem. The methods can be very different:

• when merits and successes are recognized by others;
• climb higher on the social ladder;
• allow yourself to buy expensive things;
• you cope with what others cannot.

Only after coming into harmony with oneself, resolving internal conflicts, realizing that there is no need to prove anything to anyone, a person gradually lets go of the pain and forgives his mother for childhood grievances.

He immerses himself in complete freedom of sensations, self-love. He no longer notices the strings that his mother was pulling. The fear of offending the child and repeating the mother’s actions will go away.

Why does a man get offended like a child?

Quite often you can hear that a woman is difficult to understand, her opinion and mood changes every minute. However, male psychology also has its own characteristics.

A man knows how to be offended, and does this no less often than a representative of the fair sex. He reminds me of a child at such moments. His actions sometimes cause bewilderment even to himself. To understand the reasons, watch him and analyze the situation.

A woman’s attentive attitude towards her partner helps to avoid quarrels, resentments and conflicts.

Reasons for a man's childhood resentment:

• in a woman. She is reminiscent of her mother, who was constantly terrorized as a child. Also insults and humiliates in public;
• a man tries to attract attention with an insult. He shows with all his appearance that they would take pity on him, caress him, say a warm word. In this case, resentment acts as a method of struggle for attention;
• increased sensitivity, vulnerability. He takes offense at every little thing, every word spoken. It is important to note this feature in a man in time;
• inflated self-esteem. He will not tolerate jokes even from close people. His dignity is his greatest asset. Most likely, his mother instilled in him the idea from childhood: he is better than everyone else.

As you can see, a man’s character is formed in childhood under the influence of numerous factors. The insults inflicted at this age turn out to be very strong. He can unconsciously carry them throughout his life. They shape his relationships with others.

Resentment manifests itself as a heavy burden that you have to constantly carry with you. This emotion is strong among similar sensations. It has been layered in the subconscious for many years. Tears, self-pity, hatred of the mother are considered negative factors. Problems have a huge impact on well-being and character. Resentment can cause psychosomatic disorders.

Grievances and problems with the law. Childhood grievances as the cause of the appearance of a maniac are often considered a common phenomenon. The underlying cause is a dysfunctional childhood. A terrible upbringing contributed to the birth of pathology. My heart was filled with hatred for others and myself. However, outwardly these are intelligent, understanding, well-mannered men.

Childhood grievances and complexes left an imprint on their psyche. In adult life, criminals strive to assert themselves at the expense of others, humiliating and insulting. Such people manipulate souls, look for weak points, and use them for their own purposes. They do not forgive their parents for their children’s grievances; their psyche is disturbed and sometimes difficult to control.

It is important to learn to free yourself from grievances and forgive offenders. Positive feelings will allow you to look at close relatives and yourself differently. Having forgiven your parents for their children’s grievances, you will feel how much easier life has become.

For a small child, all the imperfections of the world are personified in the parents: “Mom, don’t go to work, you’ll get sick again!” - and the mother, who went to work, is perceived as bad, but you couldn’t tell her this - because you’ll get it in the butt. And the child disconnects from his emotions, splits off affect, for a long time, if not forever: after all, you need to love your mother, hating her is life-threatening.

And she leaves for work at the wrong time, and she doesn’t raise her like that, and she herself is somehow not like that... but sometimes it’s impossible to even comprehend this imperfection, you have to love who she is. Sometimes there are so many split-off affects that a person has nothing to feel; then even as an adult it makes him feel bad. And here, as you understand, it doesn’t matter at all how objectively the mother is guilty or innocent; We are talking about the fact that with such internal content a person feels bad.

How to deal with this “bad”?

It is clear that, like any extremes, both positions are unconstructive.

Everything can be forgiven; The question is when, and with what consequences.

The first, let’s call it conventionally near-religious, way of working with such problems was once again described to me a couple of days ago: “You take a blank sheet of paper and write: “Dad, now I blame you for…”. Then you take a second sheet of paper and write: “Dad, now I forgive you for the fact that you...” - you rewrite everything from the second sheet. Then you take the third sheet and write: “Dad, now I thank You for the fact that...” - and again you rewrite everything. Stock up on paper - you may need a lot of sheets.”

This path, unfortunately, is not optimal: emotions suppressed in childhood have practically no chance to unfold in the short interval between the first and second sheets. Such “forgiveness,” and even more so “gratitude,” threatens to turn into endless turning of the other cheek, which is, by definition, an ineffective course of action. The cheek, you know, hurts and falls off.

However, the second way cannot be called effective: after all, what does this “impossible to forgive” mean? - it means that the traumatic factor still continues to operate.

Yes, negative affects have become conscious - but it has not yet been possible to live them, process them, and put them into life experience: mental strength is spent on internal indignation at the lack of parental love necessary to satisfy needs, because the opportunity to independently satisfy these needs has not yet come.

Often in the second position we find people who once visited (are visiting) a psychologist, which is why I called it “near-psychological” - although, obviously, from a psychological point of view it is not optimal.

The power of emotional affect there was in full swing, but the completed work of grief and loss of significance of the event, alas, did not occur. There are many examples of such emotional involvement.

Such strength of indignation suggests that the traumatized child’s emotions have already been accessed; but it has not yet been possible to grow up; infantile anger remains at frustrating loved ones instead of happily mourning what happened and taking care of satisfying one’s own needs. Including the need for self-love, yeah.

How does psychological work on relationships with parents normally take place?

1. Denial

At this stage, negative feelings towards loved ones are not realized at all: “I had a great mother, she always loved me.”

2. Aggression

At this stage, imperfections are realized, and often childhood negative feelings flood the person entirely: “This is not a mother at all, but an inhuman tyrant! Punish her! Thanks to this aggression, internal separation from loved ones occurs, normally at about 15 years old, but it can happen in any way. Nevertheless, this is a constructive and necessary stage, if it is precisely a stage, and not fixation on one’s own aggression from the inability to move on to mourning; This, alas, also happens for a variety of reasons.

3. Mourning

At this stage, the understanding comes that no matter how much you punish, you will not get the love you dreamed of: time is lost. Self-pity rolls in, without aggression, and normally, on its basis, self-love and the ability to take care of oneself are strengthened and transformed, “growing up.”

4. Acceptance

When (and if) a person learns to love himself, the urgent need for maternal love decreases, traumatic childhood events lose their emotional significance, relationships in the present can be built without retraumatization and turning cheeks.

5. Forgiveness

It is after a decrease in emotional significance that intellectual work on understanding why this happened is possible. Close ones can no longer be considered as functions onto which all the imperfections of the world are projected, but as people with their own weaknesses and shortcomings. They can already be understood - and therefore forgiven, without turning the other cheek.

6. Gratitude

There is an opportunity to look at what happened retrospectively and discover additional meanings in it: what was good in this relationship and what you can be grateful for.

The good news is that all this work can be done if you do not try to forgive prematurely - or, conversely, do not force yourself from it.

The bad news is that this is unlikely to be feasible in a week or month. This takes years. But it's worth it.

Before the New Year, many sum up the results - some of the year they have lived, others of the life they have lived. And our relationship with our parents runs like a red thread through our entire lives, either filling it with love, warmth and care, or darkening it. It is impossible not to relate to parents in any way. I have met people who do not communicate with their mother for a long time and say that she is nobody to them. I see so much pain inside such a person that he preferred not to feel anything at all towards his parents than to experience suffering. Clients came to me who said that they had long ago forgiven their parents, who drank, raised a hand against them in childhood, and ignored their needs. But in the process of therapy it suddenly turns out that there is a lot of hatred, anger, and resentment inside. All these feelings for our mom and dad, locked inside, take away a huge part of our energy, a piece of our life that we could live in love and joy.

1. We have the right not to forgive. This is the first thing that is important to realize. Yes, many people really feel guilty for their anger or hatred and condemn themselves for it. And the fact that we do not give ourselves the right to feel what we feel does not move us towards forgiveness and love at all, but, on the contrary, blocks ALL our feelings for our parents. So, if for some reason we cannot forgive our mother or father now, we give ourselves the right not to do this for now.

2. After we have given ourselves the right to feel the feelings that we really have towards our parents, it is important to express all these feelings. In the Gestalt approach we work with the “hot chair”. We “sit down” one of the parents and tell him everything that is in his heart. There may be a lot of tears, there may be fear (after all, since childhood we were forbidden to say unpleasant things to our parents). It is often very difficult to do this on your own, then it is better to ask for the help of a psychotherapist. You can write if it is difficult to speak. At home, I spoke to my parents on my own, on my knees - it’s difficult, but it immediately establishes child-parent subordination. And this is also a serious job with pride.

3. First, we talk about our anger, resentment, and all the pain that we may have experienced in childhood. Then we can move on to our feelings of guilt. And guilt often appears after the anger comes out. Sometimes it appears earlier, like anger turned on oneself. So, we apologize to our parents for what obnoxious children we were. I think everyone will have something to apologize to them for.

4. Forgiving your parents and starting to love them does not mean establishing a relationship with them. And this is also important to realize and accept, no matter how painful it may be. Perhaps the parents are no longer alive, perhaps they are one of those people with whom it is basically impossible to be in a relationship. But if we manage to truly forgive them, it will become much easier for us to communicate with them. Then you can react to some of your mother’s “quirks” with a calm phrase: “Mommy, I love you too” and go about your life.

5. Everything that I have listed is not a matter of five minutes or one day. You can return to this for a long time. What matters is the intention, and then the opportunity will appear.

Forgiving parents hurts. All grievances, guilt, unspoken claims, like splinters, sit in our hearts. The heart is freed from them sometimes with burning pain. But at the same time it opens to love.

It would seem... what a strange question! How can you forgive those who gave life? Who cared and loved as best he could? But more and more often, as a family psychologist, I come across in my practice the fact that women aged 30, 40, 50 years old carry a terrible grudge against their parents in their hearts... And they don’t want to forgive! So what - you ask! Maybe they have the right to it! Who knows how their parents treated them? And, indeed, while working, I hear terrible stories about how my father ran around drunk with an ax, and my mother raised me exclusively with a belt! It’s difficult to forget something like this, but you say “forgive”!!!

But why is the entire world of psychotherapy built on the fact that acceptance and forgiveness of one’s parents is the main condition for self-understanding, self-knowledge and inner maturation! Because whether we like it or not, we are made up of parents! No one has canceled genetics! And if I don’t accept my father, mother, then I will never accept myself!

It is through the parents that the child’s unconscious identity is derived! In simple words, the boy takes his father as an example of what a man should be! And the girl, accordingly, is from her mother! And if role models are very far from perfect... For example, dad is an alcoholic, then the son needs to make a lot of effort not to become like that... because he has been spying on his father’s behavior strategy since childhood and absorbs it like a sponge! To rebel against your father and become someone else is a challenge that not everyone can handle! But, on the other hand, each of us has all the resources to achieve this!

If, for example, an older daughter continues to harbor grievances against her mother, whenever the opportunity arises, she reminds her of them! And, as a rule, these are childish grievances - "Not enough attention! Not enough love!". Does this young woman become feminine, affectionate, loved? How is it possible to open up to the world, to love, if there is a deep resentment towards one’s feminine, i.e., mother’s nature!? Do you understand? It's like covering your soul with stones of grievances and complaining that there is no female happiness! Conclusion! It is necessary to forgive your parents, first of all, for the sake of yourself, your health and happiness!

Everything will change for the better when you forgive your parents! It is useless to expect that your parents will give you the attention and love that you did not receive as a child... If you do not forgive them, you simply will not allow them to do this, you will not allow them to take care of you when you are adults! Take the position of a capricious child, and everything will not be enough for you! This is the position of the victim! And, as you know, it is impossible to help the victim! Therefore the following. Tasks and recommendations for those who will free themselves from children's grievances against their parents!

How to forgive? Where to start? To begin with, write therapeutic letters to mom and separately to dad, next. scheme.

1. For which I thank you.
2. For which I apologize.
3. For which I forgive.
4. For which I thank you.

These are quite painful letters. You need to write them with your soul in order to remember all the negative and positive details of your childhood! Let all emotions remain on paper! After writing the letter you can burn it! Of course, don't show it to anyone!

Then I would suggest seeing in the parents - the little girl in mom and the little boy in dad... how did they feel in their childhood? How did you live? Did they have enough attention and love from their parents? Analyze their childhood to understand that mom and dad loved us as best they could! In the best possible way for them! Everything they could give, they gave! This is the maximum they were capable of in their youth, when they raised you! Look at them not through the eyes of a capricious child, but as an adult who is able to look at their parents with understanding, sympathy and gratitude!

And the final task. It's take a photo of yourself as a child and start asking questions.

• How are you feeling?
• What are you thinking about?
• What are you afraid of? What do you want?

And, most importantly, we write questions with the right hand, and answers with the left (for those who are left-handed, vice versa)!

This is a task to understand the needs of your inner child! Talk to your little self from the perspective of the most loving parent! Calm him down and give him what he asks for! If you are over 21 years old, then you have every opportunity to take care of the spiritual comfort of your “inner child”! And become an ideal parent for him yourself!!! This is the position of an adult, mature person! This is responsibility for your life and your happiness! And gratitude to your parents for giving you the most important gift - they gave you life!!! And you can be infinitely grateful for this fact alone!

I remember one of my clients who was “unlucky” with her parents - both drank. Dad beat mom. When she grew up, she hated her parents! Her personal life did not work out. At that time she was 33 years old. She despised men and believed that they were all like her father. I gave up on my feminine happiness! And you should have seen how she changed from the inside when she forgave her parents! At the 3rd consultation, she already began to defend her father, justify her mother... Now for the first time she has a serious relationship with a young man... and career growth! She's happy!

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting grievances... because when the opportunity arises, they will be remembered! Forgiveness does not mean accepting what was done to you! To forgive is to forever let go of the pain from your heart and free your soul from stones in order to let in the healing energy of love and wisdom! This is what I wish for you with all my heart.

Lyudmila Petranovskaya: Should I talk to my parents about the past? And what if they deny everything? How to forgive a deceased parent and is it possible to discern parental love in criticism?

Psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya spoke about this at the lecture “Childhood grievances: is there a chance to mend already damaged relationships?” Try not to forgive, but to understand

— They didn't have the resource. Remember that they had a very hard life - work, lack of money, getting food, labor-intensive life, standing in queues. Severely stressed parents were not psychologically sensitive and gave their children the resource they had enough for.

— They were young and inexperienced. Sometimes it can be very helpful to remember what age your parents were at the time. Often these were people 25-26 years old, inexperienced and unsure.

There is no need to remain silent. If you feel resentment towards your parents, do not remain silent about it. You can't help but admit that you felt bad. For a very long time this topic was taboo and there was only one option: “Parents are holy people, they raised you and gave you life, you need to love them, respect them and not complain” or: “If you felt bad, it’s your own fault.”

Don't live your whole life with childhood traumas.. This is the other extreme. It would be nice not to spend your whole life complaining about your parents and attributing all your failures to their mistakes.

Try not to live your whole life under the banner of “the child of an alcoholic,” “the person who was not loved by his mother,” or “the person who was beaten as a child.” Sometimes such a period of experiencing trauma is necessary, but it would be nice for it to end.

When we were children, we had no choice whether we would be offended or not. Now we have a choice - we can leave the trauma simply as an experience, or we can allow the trauma to shape our personality. If you can’t get over this on your own, consult a psychotherapist; you don’t have to live in this state for years.

Try talking about childhood grievances with your parents. Should we try to convey to our parents that they were wrong? Sometimes it helps. Parents have become calmer, wiser, they are no longer as stressed out as before. They are already raising grandchildren and often discover qualities of warmth and acceptance within themselves. Some of them are already ready for such a conversation. Sometimes they may admit and express regret about past mistakes. And this could be the beginning of a new warm relationship.

Sometimes accepting responsibility is simply necessary. This mainly applies to cases where there was serious abuse on the part of parents. Just admit that it happened. This recognition can often become the only condition on which children agree to continue communicating with their parents. You need to say in plain text: “It is very important for me that you admit that this happened. I don’t need an apology, but it’s important that no one pretends that I made this up.”

Leave them the right not to admit their mistakes. If parents defend themselves and say: “We did everything right, you’re the one who’s ungrateful,” they have the right to do so. You have your own picture of the world, and they have theirs. Sometimes their psyche denies and represses everything. Re-educating a person at 70 years old is a bad idea. But often this means that there will no longer be a close relationship between you.

Have pity on your little self. When we receive insults from our parents, we are in the position of a very small creature. You are not a judge, just a little child who had no choice. And when we think about whether to forgive or not, we take on a responsibility that we do not have and could not have. We cannot be older than our parents, we cannot judge them from above. We can acknowledge our feelings and, from today's adult state, feel sorry for our little self. Explain to your little self that, in general, you can’t do this to children, so that he can hear it from at least some adult.

Give yourself permission to be sad. At some point, you need to allow yourself to be sad and admit that you didn’t have something in childhood and won’t have it anymore. Because your parents simply couldn't give it to you. And this may make things easier.

Don't expect your parents to change. Very often, behind complaints against parents there is a child’s hope that the parents will change - dad will finally praise, and mom will finally love. But dad and mom didn’t praise or love simply because they, in principle, were not capable of it. They have their own difficult childhood, their own circumstances and their own psychological profile. Learn to translate your parents' love language Quite rarely, there are parents who are completely incapable of giving anything, but only criticize and reject. Sometimes their love language just isn't what we want to hear. We wait for good words, but their love is to bake us pies and feed us to our fullest. We must learn to translate their language into our own. Let’s say your mother grumbles all the time, but at the same time she cooks you endless borscht and washes the dishes. These pies, borscht and dishes are her “I love you.”

Sometimes criticism is also caring. Endless criticism is such a parental amulet. It seems that if you always tell a child what’s wrong with him, then he will someday understand everything and finally do everything right. If you see it from this side, it will not destroy you so much. We must learn to treat this as a matter of concern.

If your parents are dead, then your claims will definitely not harm them. A deceased parent is not so different from a non-dead parent. After all, when we are offended, we are offended not at today’s parents, but at those parents who were then, at the time of the offense. Sometimes the dead are idealized and it seems that it is forbidden to think badly of them or make claims against them. But if they have already died, then your claims will definitely not harm them in any way, and it can help you. Sometimes you need to express anger and complaints in order to open the capacity to love. If you let go of the resentment, you will be able to deal with the warm part of the relationship that you had.