[Leed]

Days of Healing Days of Joy - a Hazelden book

"It took me years to figure out that Mom needed the same thing I needed. Nobody gave it to her either." .................................................Patty A.

Why go back into your family of origin? Not to blame, certainly. And not to whitewash, either. Useful understanding is positioned between those two extremes. We go back to look again, as adults, at people and events in the past. We need to understand that the care we were given -no matter how inadequate or inappropriate - was probably the best care they knew how to give.

Do the people we love most know how we feel? Does our expression of that love fall short? Perhaps the people in our past had trouble bridging the same gap. It's enlightening and often crucial to understand the environments and systems that taught and formed those people. Were they themselves gifted with what we so desperately wanted them to give us? The nurturing we needed and deserved, the holding we longed for - were they nurtured and held? Perhaps we didn't get it because they simply didn't have it to give.
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Evil and incapacity are not the same thing. I will judge the people in my past as kindly as I hope others will judge me.

I've said many times to newcomers that my parents gave us nothing in the way of attention -- no hugs, no nothing. But after grilling my mother about her past, and even further back than that, I discovered she got nothing too! And the same was true of my father, since he was one of 11 children. How could they give me something they didn't have? It took years to discover this, but once I did it was easier to forgive them.

[Travelinglady]

Thanks, Leed! That's so very true.