LETTING GO OF OUR ADULT CHILDREN
Chapter 7: The Heart Slowly Heals
Page 22
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.
Forgiving Others
There is no question but that all of our parents failed us, in one way or another, when we were children, and that we have, likewise, failed our children. For both parent and child, dealing with those failures can sometimes require a good dose of forgiving.
In 1968, when David was just five years old, the idea that I might need to forgive him, or he might need to forgive me, had not yet crossed my mind. But that was the year Henry T. Close wrote some words of wisdom in Voices that I would read years later, at a time when I needed to address the issue of forgiveness. A colleague had copied his words and the Xeroxed paper was a kind friend to my broken dreams.
Close wrote that no parent is ever adequate for the job of being a parent. No parent ever has enough love, or wisdom, or maturity or whatever to succeed one hundred percent of the time. And so it is necessary for us to forgive our parents and our children not for their sake, but for ours. We cannot afford to hold onto grudges while we wait for them to forgive us any more than they can afford to wait for us to forgive them.
There Is Usually Someone We Need to Forgive
The following statements illustrate the variety of people disappointed parents may hold grudges against, viewing them as wholly or partially responsible for their child's current problems or for the parent's pain. In interviews with parents and conversations with my clients, these statements were always preceded by the words, "I resent . . ." or, if the individual had worked through the issue and let go with forgiveness, "I used to resent . . ."
" . . . my son-in-law for deserting my daughter when she became pregnant."
". . . the neighborhood gang that led our child to drugs and crime."
". . . my boyfriend for molesting my daughter."
".. . my spouse for having affairs that led to the breakup of our marriage."
". . . my father for being abusive and failing to teach me how to trust men."
". . . my wife, because she didn't want a girl and let our daughter believe that girls are inferior."
". . . my daughter for putting me through the pain of watching her addiction."
". . . my second wife for not getting along with the daughter from my first marriage."
". . . my son for being a pathological liar whose immaturity has caused us a great deal of pain and expense in trying to get him straightened out."
". . . my wife for being very possessive of the biological child in the family and stricter with our adopted children."
When to Forgive Others
At what point in dealing with resentments is it time to let them go? If you have not yet recognized and worked through at least some of your anger toward a person you think you "should" forgive, an attempt to forgive at this point may be premature. In fact, lightly skipping over resentments can prevent you from knowing exactly what it is that you need to forgive. You may end up simply hiding your resentment under the rug. Forgiveness in such cases often feels "phony" and does not lead to genuine harmony and peace. This can certainly happen when you are dealing with very serious behaviors, such as sexual abuse by your ex-husband. There is a lot of work you will need to do before you can let go of your hurt enough to even see him as a person with frailties, as one who did not know how to be a responsible parent.
However, you can delay healing by thinking you have to deal with every scrap of negative emotion before you can even begin to forgive. And be aware that you may have to repeat these exercises more than once before you experience complete release of resentment. I found it necessary to forgive David — and myself — many rimes. Each occasion provided release from my pain as it removed one more piece of the hurt that kept me focused on my disappointment that things didn't turn out as I wanted them to. It has been several years since I last felt the need to forgive either of us, which is an indication of how well I am doing. Yet I imagine it is possible I may feel the need to forgive one of us if something else comes up in the future.
A Few Techniques for Forgiving Others
Patty McConnell offers the following method for restoring inner harmony by forgiving others. She recommends you use it as is or adapt it to suit your needs:
Take a pencil and a notebook to a comfortable place where you'll be uninterrupted. Sit quietly for a few minutes.
When you feel relaxed, complete the following statement. Today, for my own well-being, I choose to forgive these people: (List them.)
Then read that statement and the names out loud, followed by: I let go of these incidents, and my reaction to them, and I wish the people I have named sincere goodwill. lf an individual is deceased, I wish him or her eternal peace. In doing so, I release myself from the past and its pain. The people and incidents I have forgiven no longer have power over me.
Her approach is slightly different from the following method for forgiveness I have used with myself and my clients, although both can be highly effective. The attitude involved in this exercise is the willingness to take responsibility for oneself and to allow others to take responsibility for themselves. From this perspective forgiveness is a decision to no longer hold onto pain caused by the wrongs of others or by circumstances over which you had no control.
You can either write this exercise on a piece of paper or place a chair in front of you and imagine that the person you want to forgive is sitting there. See him or her as clearly as possible. Then go through the following steps, either to yourself or out loud, saying:
- "You said or did ______, while I would have preferred you had said or done ______. I have let myself be tied to negative feelings when I think of what you did or did not do. And I have held onto my demand that you should have said or done something different. I choose to let go of the tension and hurt that accompanies my memory of what you said or did.".
- "Therefore, I cancel all demands, expectations, and conditions that you do or say ______. You are totally responsible for your own actions and deeds."
- "I now send my love [or, if that word is too strong for you, my acceptance] out to you as a human being just as you were and are now."
After this part of the exercise, close your eyes and imagine that your love or acceptance, without conditions, demands or expectations, is going out to the other person. Take your time. Become aware of how your body feels and whether you are holding on or still demanding that the person be different from the way he or she was, or is. If you do not feel release, then repeat the process again.
Incidentally, you will probably need to go through the process for many different resentments you hold against another person. The human mind finds it almost impossible to grant a blanket forgiveness. Each incident must be processed separately. However, forgiveness is like the untangling of scraps of yarn and string that have been tightly bunched together. At first it's hard to untangle a single strand, but with persistence the first piece can be removed. And then another. And another. Eventually it becomes easier and easier to pull the pieces apart, and the last ones can be removed with almost no effort at all.
The idea that by choosing not to feel badly you can actually prevent yourself from feeling badly may be a new concept for you. After all, when someone is mean-spirited and says something she knows is hurtful, you are likely to feel hurt at the time. However, in looking back on the situation later, you can distance yourself from your painful reaction by choosing to let go of your insistence (the demands, expectations and conditions you place on her) that she must be kind-hearted. The power of this approach is that it allows you to be in charge of how you react to what others do or say. You can decide how you will react even when others fail to meet your expectations, no matter how reasonable those expectations may appear.
Forgiving Ourselves
Some parents don't spend any time analyzing what they did wrong in raising their child, even though their child's current values and lifestyle may be not only different than theirs but even, from the parent's point of view, undesirable and destructive. They do not hold themselves responsible for what he does, although others may insist the parents have to accept blame for how their child turned out. These parents may or may not recognize their parenting mistakes, but they are able to leave the past alone and can separate their own value and success in life from that of their child, giving him plenty of room to make his own mistakes.
Other disappointed parents don't experience a need to forgive themselves because they believe genetic factors, such as dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, were primary influences on the development of their child's problems. Some parents, usually fathers, don't hold themselves responsible for their children's problems because they were not active in the daily care of their children, although they don't necessarily blame the other parent. And if the spouse was mentally ill, a parent may excuse herself in the belief that the ill partner influenced the children negatively more than she did.
Even when parents accept responsibility for the contribution they made to their child's current problems and lifestyle choices, they don't necessarily use that self-awareness as a whip to continue berating themselves for what they didn't know how to do better. For example, one mother of three sons, all of whom have difficulties in maintaining relationships, felt badly for years that she didn't "do a better job" as a parent. One day, however, she had the clear awareness that she had done the very best she could after her husband died when their youngest was only three. With that insight she was able to let her guilt dissipate. She could then stop being concerned over things like the length of her son's hair and "give up taking responsibility for how things turned out."
Most parents disappointed in their adult children regret something they did or did not do when their child was young. What they do with that regret can have a profound effect on whether they are able to build an adult-to-adult relationship with their child or remain mired in remorse and self-recrimination.
A Step-mother Who Needed to Forgive Herself
When Patricia married Doug sixteen years ago, his son, Colin, now twenty-two, stayed with Doug's former wife but came to visit every weekend. There were hints of Colin's future difficulties even then, when Colin would refuse to stack blocks, determined not be structured. So Patricia's contribution toward Colin's life is not straight-forward, as it might have been if she weren't a stepparent and if he hadn't always seemed to be a "different" kind of child. Nevertheless, Colin's rough entry into adulthood illustrates how a parent can come to terms with her role in The Parenting Game.
In my interviews with parents I begin by asking some standard questions about such things as where the child lives and what his education has been. On my interview form I notice Colin's career choice is "undefined;" marital status is "living with woman who has a five-year-old child;" and grade average is "terrible." After getting this standard information, I asked his parents to describe Colin. The first of my notes says, "Dropped out of high school as sophomore; very self-willed; gifted; inquisitive but makes judgments prematurely and decisions too far-ranging; egocentric; can be very loving and caring and sharing but more often gets absorbed in the flow of his life; very impulsive; very, very excitement/adrenaline oriented."
Colin lived with his mother until he was ten and then with Patricia and Doug for a few years, back again to his mother's where he eventually ran away, acted out in erratic behavior, used crack, and later participated in drug dependency programs with only moderate success. To get into the Navy he had to be sober, and that, apparently, was the incentive he needed to get off drugs completely. And since structure has always been a problem for him, boot camp was good training. Colin has been sober now for two years and uses twelve-step meetings as a resource when life gets chaotic. However, Patricia doesn't think he's working the steps, and believes he resists dealing with important issues in his life. For example, he insists that he wasn't responsible for a car accident, although there were witnesses to the contrary, and that he's not liable for the judgment against him because he wasn't served papers directly. He is in debt to many people, including his parents, and is unlikely to pay what he owes.
As Patricia looks back on Colin's life, she realizes that she and Doug have to accept their fair share of responsibility for what has happened. For example, as members of the sixties generation they both used marijuana and alcohol, although they did not use them in front of either Colin or Patricia's daughter Sarah when the children were young. But Patricia and Doug allowed themselves to get into a fast crowd in their upwardly mobile community and had to declare bankruptcy. Eventually Patricia joined AA and has worked hard to stay off alcohol and drugs, especially the codeine she became addicted to when she had migraines.
Patricia's story, like the tales of many parents, has many more facets than I've presented here. However, even this much can give you a sense of what she was responding to when she made an inventory one day of twenty things Colin did that made her angry. To her surprise, nineteen of them reflected her need to control. Consequently, even though Patricia knew it was necessary that she forgive her son for the turmoil he caused the family, she came to see that she needed to forgive herself for the way in which she added to those conflicts.
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© Copyright 1994, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Reprinted with permission
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