LETTING GO OF OUR ADULT CHILDREN
Chapter 7: The Heart Slowly Heals
Page 21
BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT
Continuation of Chapter 7 of Letting Go of Our Adult Children, in which you learn how to gradually find peace even if your child doesn't change.
Using Our Grief to Make a Difference in the World
Parents whose children are accused of heinous or highly publicized crimes are undoubtedly in profound emotional pain. As a Los Angeles Times article pointed out, "They are thrust into a sordid kind of limelight, besieged by police and reporters, blamed for their errant child's behavior, ostracized by friends and neighbors, or even sued by the victim's parents."
Yet often these parents turn their grief and tragedy into efforts to change society. Jack and JoAnn Hinckley were devastated when their son, John, nearly assassinated President Reagan in 1981. "I am the cause of John's tragedy," Jack Hinckley said in testimony during his son's 1982 trial. "I wish to God I could trade places with him right now." In an effort to make up to society for the damage done by their child, the Hinckleys sold their company and founded the American Mental Health Fund, to prevent other such tragedies through public service announcements, a free booklet on mental illness, and an 800 number that answered inquiries from over 330,000 people.
We need not be famous parents with profound pain and guilt (or have a lot of money) to work through our grief by trying to help others. There are many ways we can transform our grief and negative emotional energy into something more positive, bringing light into the small comer of the world where we live.
If your grief is caused by guilt for not giving your children what they needed when they were young, you can transform that guilt-driven energy by helping children whose parents may not know what you have painfully learned. You can be a big brother or big sister to teenagers in trouble, tutor in a local school, work in a women's shelter, teach an illiterate adult to read, or become the friend of an AIDS patient.
Adding these activities to your life will have a threefold effect. You will get more than you give; your grief will dissipate more quickly; and you will have far less time to fret over the problems your child may be having.
A Technique For Saying Good-bye to Lost Dreams
We help release the grip grief has on our hearts when we say good-bye to our hopes and dreams one by one. The following method has been helpful in facilitating the process of releasing unfulfilled and broken dreams.
Write on separate pieces of paper all the hopes you had and all the pain you have experienced. Each page should contain a different item, such as, "I expected that my daughter would want to keep her baby;" "I expected my son would want to visit me;" "I hoped to share the holidays with my daughter;" or "I have spent far too much time trying to get my son to change." Make certain you cover everything you can remember that has kept you imprisoned in unreleased grief.
Next, take the pieces of paper and the hopes and pains they represent and let go of them in a ritual that has meaning for you. You might want to burn them and watch the paper turn to ashes, take them to an ocean or lake and toss them into the waves, or flush them down the toilet.
Each time you burn a paper, throw it away, or flush it down the toilet, say aloud a statement that affirms your desire to release that which has kept you in pain. On those papers that involve lost dreams write, "I release my expectations that . . . " (For example, "I release my expectation that I would share religious beliefs with my son.") On the papers that describe your pain write, "I say good-bye to . . . " (For example, "I say good-bye to lost sleep because of worry.")
With each paper, allow yourself to experience the healing and peace that come when you willingly give up something you have wanted but cannot have.
When that part of the "ceremony" is through, you can then welcome what you see in the future by writing on new pieces of paper — ones you will keep — the realistic hopes you can now have. Imagine how wonderful it will be to write, "I welcome the opportunity to accept my child just as she is" or, "I look forward to spending less energy worrying." You may want to write the same statement on several pieces of paper and then put those papers somewhere where you will see them every day. They can become a beacon of light out of grief.
A Comforting Picture of Peace
I want to share with you how I discovered a way to release my lost expectations and hope when I was in the midst of great pain over the situation with our son. I believe my experience illustrates what can happen when we are open to healing.
When David was forced to move out of our house for the last time, we knew that letting him go was the most loving action we could take. Yet it was extremely painful to force a child to leave knowing he was poorly prepared to face the trials ahead of him. That night I was unable to sleep and went into my husband's study hoping to find some measure of comfort.
To understand what happened, you need to know that during that time of my life, and even sometimes now, I found it helpful to talk out loud when I was trying to sort through a problem. Because I am fairly verbal, hearing the words could give me insights I might not have discovered if I processed my thoughts internally.
On the door of the study was a poster of a gentle stream high in the Sierras far above the timberline. I happened to be looking at the picture as I said out loud, with great sobs, "If there is a God, please grant me the peace I so desperately want. I have done everything I can, and yet my grief seems more than I can bear."
Almost immediately I felt calmer and in a quiet, soothing voice I said, "You are seated on a stone next to the stream. Lying at your side is an invisible rope which you have just let go of. The rope is of infinite length and has been used by you and David to manipulate one another. The other end of it is still being held by David, who has started down the mountain and is out of view. Your letting go of the rope indicates you are willing to trust your son to find his own path, just as you are learning to find your own." Then I added, "Bob is standing next to the stream and he has also dropped his end of a rope that has connected him with David. Your son will find his own path because you have both been willing to let him go."
Where did that healing wisdom come from? It does not matter whether God really spoke through me or whether the words I said were simply my own inner wisdom expressing itself in a metaphor I could understand. What matters is that I experienced a sense of peace I could not have imagined possible earlier that day.
There is a footnote to this story. Thanksgiving came two months later and for many reasons we chose not to invite our son for dinner. His absence created a hole in the fabric of our family and reminded me of the deep pain I had felt earlier. As I wondered how I could get through the day without being constantly reminded of the fact that David was spending Thanksgiving alone, I decided to go into the study and look again at the picture of the mountain stream. Immediately I felt comforted as the peace I had experienced earlier returned to soothe my heart.
The Need to Forgive
Geraldine was one the most interesting parents I interviewed. Her situation represents the complexity of the healing process and demonstrates that dealing with Velcro issues and grieving are not always enough to heal relationships. Forgiveness is often the missing ingredient.
Geraldine's father and mother were both alcoholics. Her father was a highly successful businessman before he died at the age of fifty. Geraldine describes her mother as "a cold woman for whom appearances meant everything: she never touched me because I might break her long fingernails." To escape the situation at home, she entered a convent. When she left ten years later, she had an automobile accident that led to an addiction to pain killers, and soon she was on her way to years of drug and alcohol abase.
She married and had three daughters: Becky, now twenty-seven, Laura, twenty-four, and Julia, twenty-one. After her divorce she was married twice more before entering a lesbian relationship, which has also ended. All the men in her life were addicts of either drugs or alcohol.
Modeling her parenting on her mother's example, she says that her daughters were taught to be charming and well mannered: she had them practice etiquette during tea time with their dolls. She was a "smiling morn" and believed that "if I could impress you with what was on the outside, I thought I had it together."
Today, however, her beautiful smile is much more congruent with what is going on inside her. And she has shed many tears, in and out of therapy, during her long recovery process, grieving over a lifetime of troubles she has had a hand in creating.
Geraldine says her relationship with her children is currently "on hold, as though they are on a shelf," adding that she "doesn't feel anything for them." From her perspective, this stance may have been necessary in order to stay clean and get her life in order. Yet she is clearly pained in not seeing her children, especially because she and Becky had been "best friends."
Since sobriety and honesty are Geraldine's primary goals, she has attempted to make amends with her children and let them know she is aware of the mistakes she made when raising them. But since her latest recovery from a relapse, she says her daughters "don't want to hear what I'm going through." She does not think things will get better, expecting "history will repeat itself," since she has not seen her own mother for fifteen years.
Yet history does not have to repeat itself. Just because Geraldine broke off contact with her mother does not mean that her daughters will necessarily continue to reject her. They may just have a problem being with her at this time because she is preoccupied with her recovery process, which has been, in a sense, her Velcro issue.
In fact, when discussing the last time she had dinner with Laura (many months before), Geraldine said she had talked about herself almost the entire evening. At the end of the conversation Laura commented that her mother had never inquired into what was happening in her daughter's life. Ironically, Geraldine's focus on making an inventory of her mistakes and on attempting to make amends may be her current contribution to the rift with her daughters.
It is probably true that her daughters were raised with an emphasis on appearances, but they also enjoyed childhood. There was fun and laughter; they saw Geraldine as a good morn. It is not surprising that they balk when she tries to get them to see her mistakes, to recognize she could have done better, to forgive her. She thinks they don't want to forgive her because that would be admitting everything wasn't fun and laughter.
The real issue, of course, is not whether her daughters experienced their childhoods as she believes they "should" Ñ if only they could see through the lens of her self-examination. Rather, the real issue and a more significant stumbling block to a better relationship with her daughters is her reluctance to forgive herself. It can seem impossible, of course, to forgive oneself when one's life appears to have been a series of major mistakes. Yet it is not only possible, it is essential, that Geraldine forgive herself; not only for the sake of a potentially healed relationship with her daughters, but for her own peace of mind.
When we insist that our particular sins are too great for us to forgive or that we must maintain our resentment against those who did us wrong (so that our pain will not be "meaningless"), we might consider the story of Edith Eva Eger. Edith is a former ballerina whose parents were killed in a Nazi concentration camp. Her career as a dancer was ended when her back was broken by a guard in the camp. Although her life is filled with frequent flashbacks to the horrors of those days, she says that she has no time to hate. She is convinced that if she still hated today she would continue to be in prison, giving Hitler and Mengele their posthumous victories. If she hated, they would still be in charge of her life, not her.
Just as an unwillingness to grieve our lost dreams can prevent sunshine from entering our lives, the heart that cannot forgive others holds it own self hostage. And there is only so long we can continue saying, "mea culpa, mea culpa," and refuse to forgive ourselves.
What Is Forgiveness?
Forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood essential qualities of the human spirit. Perhaps this is because there are really three kinds of forgiveness, each with its own peculiar characteristics, and we confuse one with the other. For example, one kind of forgiveness is that which God is said to bestow through an act of grace; another is granted by the state in the form of official pardons; and still another is the forgiveness humans try to achieve with one another.
I can't speak authoritatively on what God will or will not forgive, and pardons are not ours to grant. However, I can talk about the last kind of forgiveness, that which heals the one doing the forgiving and which can also lead to healing for the one being forgiven.
Some of our difficulty with forgiveness seems to stem from our belief that forgiveness means forgetting and that forgiveness acts as an excuse for one's behavior. When someone says "I'm sorry," we frequently respond, "Oh, forget it." In fact, the word "amnesty" comes from "amnesia" - to forget. So when we forgive someone, we may assume that we should act as though nothing has happened. Perhaps that is what God's kind of forgiveness means.
Human forgiveness, however, does not mean forgetting. It does not negate the consequences for the person we forgive. And it does not mean that we insist on reconciliation with the person who has injured us. All it requires of us is that we release the demands, expectations, and conditions we place on other people (and on ourselves) that they (we) should be someone that they (we) did not know how to be, or to do something that they (we) did not know how to do.
Patty McConnell discusses the necessity for the kind of forgiving that parents (and children) need to do for one another in her book A Workbook for Healing, which was excerpted and adapted in Mothering Magazine. Recognizing that we sometimes feel we cannot forgive because of the depth of a wound, she suggests that those who are wounded ask themselves whether they "want to get well or get even." "Not to forgive," she says, "grafts you to the past like a flowering branch to a disfigured tree. Not to forgive isolates us through judgments and self-righteousness . . . Forgiveness, however, unifies and heals. When you forgive, you let go of separateness, anger, guilt, loss, and other persistent tormentors. Freeing others, you free yourself."
Let me add that we contribute to much-needed peace in the world when we learn to accept and forgive those with whom we disagree. After all, how can we expect societies to be understanding and tolerant of others if we ourselves cannot forgive those closest to us?
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© Copyright 1994, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Reprinted with permission
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