Why do we not like ourselves?

Why is that so many on here tend to blame their parents as the culprit to all of their issues? As adults, we have to accept part of the blame. Many of us have made bad choices that put us in situations that have caused alot of our issues. I don't blame my parents at all. I blame ME for making stupid decisions that have affected me, and will affect me the rest of my life.

I sure hope that my children won't end up in therapy blaming me for every issue they have. I apologize to those of you who did grow up in abusive and dysfunctional homes. This is not directed toward you at all. It just seems that the overall consensus on here is to blame the parents!

Not getting what is needed doesn't mean failure of parents intentionally. It just means that many of us believe that psychological difficulties begin in the developmental period of our lives and form patterns that we follow unconciously the rest of our lives, unless we learn about them to see where they lead us and if there is another way of looking at/thinking about things. Our parents, saints or not, happen to be the persons who were the ones we were our primary caregivers during the developmental period.

I haven't achieived in life what I wanted to because of decisions I made, but the decision-making is complex. Exploring the depth of why decisions were made helps me understand them, to not judge myself harshly for making them, to be kinder and gentler and more understanding to me.

I have never used my difficult childhood or my parents' failing to excuse myself.....my brother and I have been down this road many times, with him saying something he does is all dad's fault and me saying that while our parents' failings/our dysfunctional upbringing may be the explanation for patterns of thought (and behavior, or mental/emotional issues) it's not really an excuse! I have never used it as an excuse for myself anyway, nor do I blame my parents for my problems now; I'm not angry with them, either. I take responsibility for myself, my mistakes, my actions/emotions...
And I know they did love me & my brother.....but how to show that love and how to teach us to love ourselves they didn't know so well, since they didn't have that knowledge themselves. So what I have for them is an understanding of why they were as they were and a certain compassion...
But still.....I just simply did not realize how deep my own pain was, how deep the roots were, how some of the thought/behavior patterns and coping mechanisms I have now are relics of my childhood......things I did not have help to deal with then and things that are hard to get out now that I've added many more years of unwittingly living in/reinforcing those negative patterns. I also sincerely hope that I can get help now because I want to be able to give my children a stable, secure, happy childhood and not be inadvertently repeating the patterns of my upbringing with them....

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.

WOW! That's brilliant writing, ygrec!

I'm impressed with your thoughts and how well you expressed them, too, Ygrec! A lot to think on in your post.....
I agree about the 'huge multiplicity of ways of loving and showing love'....and about how we are all at different stages in our individual journeys in dealing with dysfunctional parents, difficult childhoods. Anger does often come before acceptance/forgiveness and is a part of the journey, yes.......

I don't know that it's "blame" necessarily. Still, apart from definite abuse (which happens), if in one's formative years there were experiences, or key things missing, or withheld, for whatever reason, which caused one to develop in varous areas inadequately, or in a misshapen way, or even not at all, these things need to be identified in later life and worked on.

Parents have a LOT of power, and it's not always used wisely or well. Parents have a heavy obligation, and it's not always lived up to.
I am in such admiration of those on PC who have mentioned problems in their families of origin, who have children today and are determined not to repeat the past but to do better for their own kids.