There are entire rainbows of variety when it comes to different kinds of love and different ways of showing it, not to mention whole spectra of things other than love hiding under conscious parental displays of the superficial trappings of love. For me, one of the problems of the kind of discussion we're having here in this thread is the relative failure to emphasize, over and over, the huge multiplicity of ways of loving and showing love, the countless disguises, communication failures and unconscious lies regarding or with reference to "love", the faking of emotions, consciously or not, and the really, really basic fact that most of us, and most of our parents, are and always have been walking automatons most of the time.

The immense, almost unbearable, complexity of human emotional and psychological life should humble us when we judge others, including our own parents. My mother, completely screwed up herself, wasn't even CLOSE to being a "good-enough mother." Could she have done otherwise? Probably not. Even if she had gone through therapy? Probably not. Did she think, sincerely, that she loved her children? Absolutely. Went to her grave so thinking. Did she beat or starve or otherwise grossly maltreat her children? Never. Had I been a parent could I have done better than she? I would certainly hope so but I can in no possible way be sure of that.

Accordingly, the sole and only reason to focus in therapy, from time to time, on what went wrong way back when, is not to blame mom, which means nothing, really. It is to find out what was injured then and figure out how those injuries can, now, be repaired the best we can.

There's a built-in ambiguity when talking about the origins of truly fundamental psychic injuries. One cannot avoid talking about things that were done wrongly or inadequately. But while in everyday talk wrongs and inadequacies are always attributable to someone, some person, we do not have to blame our parents. We can clear up our understanding of what they did erroneously without implying that they were worse than we would have been under the same circumstances.

The biggest problem in this mountain of tasks called therapy is dealing with the feelings we had as babies and toddlers when our parents did not do the right thing. Babies and toddlers are directly hurt by parental error and inadequacy. Babies and toddlers feel great pain, anger, sorrow, loneliness and forlornness, and are not able to excuse mother and father's actions or inactions because their minds are just not up to that level of sophistication. And we, as adults, to help ourselves, must dredge up those old, overwhelming emotions we suffered as tinies, in order to dispel them, get rid of them, make them stop acting as constant irritants forcing us to live our lives in ways we do not wish to do.

For that period of time in therapy between the beginning of accessing the oldest hurts and wounds and their "working through," (which may take quite a while), we are continually exposed to the molten lava of the old emotions and feelings caused at the time by our early childhood experiences. To the extent that we ourselves believed at the time that our parents' errors were "our fault," that they were caused by something of which we ourselves were guilty, our therapy has to lead us to the reality of our parents having been at fault and not us. And in that process, before we've reached the final resolution of our pains and problems, it is healthier to rage against our parents than to take it out on ourselves. When the process is over, when the ghosts have been exorcised, when we can accept what happened in a historical sense without the intense emotional reliving of early childhood fears and terrors, we can also forgive our parents as we would ask to be forgiven, to understand them as we would want to be understood ourselves. We were born, we had children, we loved them, we raised them, we did the best we could.

In a place like PC each of us is dealing every day with other people who are all at different stages of the journey from the first consciousness of a problem to a final laying of ghosts, the exorcism of childhood nightmares of pain and misery. Since we never know just where on that trajectory anyone else might be, we have to give them (us) the benefit of the doubt, and assume, if they express hatred of their parents, that they are where they need to be in their journey from the beginning of therapy to its end, and that their expressions are what they need to do and say right now, though we ourselves may be in a different position.

So if Mr. A posts about how intensely he hates his mother and how he just can't understand how any person could be as cruel and hurtful as she, we need to consider his post as something he needs to do at this moment, as part of his healing journey. Perhaps we've gone beyond that ourselves and forgiven our parents. That does not at all mean that Mr. A., in making the comments he makes, is in any sense wrong or to be condemned. He's just in a different place. If he's lucky, he'll wind up where we are. If he's unlucky, he'll get stuck in the place he's in for the rest of his life.

It's really alright for people to condemn their parents, out loud and in company. It's also really alright for people to forgive their parents, and make that known to those around them. Neither is better or more praiseworthy; they're both stations on the trip from misery to serenity. Let's hope everyone makes it to the last stop. Take care.