Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartjacques
Is there anyone who felt loved and valued by their parents? I guess they wouldn't be on here or having issues.
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I'm sure there are many, some of whom do visit this forum too. I think a lot of it involves a sort of reinterpretation and getting to know your parents as real people. I think the real picture that emerges is rarely a black and white picture of of saintly acceptance and valuation, or devilish malice. Not always, but often it would be a mix.
I think at the end of the day, at least for me personally, a kind of a faith or spirituality (or some other ways to raise above it all) that goes above and beyond my own life and my parents' life becomes a necessity. A lot of the kinds of things people discover about themselves or their parents in therapy, those things don't answer any ultimate questions of "why?" Yes, you get more trivial "why" answers (genetics, environment, parents were raised that way, you had this kind of personality, this mistake led to other mistakes, etc) but none of those answers are inherently meaningful or connect with each other in a way to make things meaningful, in terms of fairness or deserving the way you were treated or why "you", etc.
A lot of times you are just left with a kind of "it just so happened that." In therapy I felt quite devalued by randomness of events of my own life. I felt small and insignificant. There was a logic to those events, in explaining them, but that itself was random still. There was a terrible unfairness to it. It's almost like someone just "happens to" be born in disease ridden region in Africa or never ending war zone in the Middle East or a poverty stricken village in South America. A lot of things will follow logically from that, but not the original happening of being born there. Or people born with serious genetic/bodily illnesses or malformations. There is a terribleness in how the logic of that can be explained, like parents who would leave their kid because taking care of her was too much for them, too emotionally painful, too expensive, too involved. So an original "bad luck" leads to worse things yet! Bad encouraging more bad. How is that fair?! They did not deserve the first bad, now a second bad as a result of the first?
But not to move far off track here, for me a big part was getting to know my parents as real human beings with limitations (just like myself), and this included actually talking to them about some of the things that happened to me (in a language far from blame, though inevitably it did involve it), then follow that with trying to find a meaning system and place of safety and value above all this misery and randomness of life.