A while ago a friend and I were talking about our parents - all the mistakes they made that continue to bug us even now. And how, of all the things that happen in the life of a human being, it is our parents mistakes that made the most indelible marks on our souls.
Inevitably the conversation turned to the notion of forgiveness.
Not whether to forgive our parents ... but how to forgive them, because to forgive is often difficult - particularly with parents.
I think this is because very often their transgressions and failings have created a subtle kind of childish rage within most of us, which is so close to our bones, and which we’ve lived with so long, that no matter how we want, we cannot let it go. It’s almost as if the rage has become a part of our self-definition and to let go of it would seem almost like a betrayal of everything we are.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was free from this kind of residual rage however veiled beneath filial regard it might be. And those who think they are free of it are often simply unaware of it - having lived with it for so long it has become a characteristic of their perception of mundane ‘normality’.
This rage often comes out as the childhood war stories that we entertain each other with - those stories of family lunacy which either make us squirm or scream with laughter - those moments that only children experience where they are profoundly at loss to explain why one or both parents are doing what they are doing. At its most extreme, a violent argument between mother and father, while relatively insignificant to adults, can seem to a child as if the entire universe is collapsing. Death, divorce, violence, or simply the lunatic idiosyncrasies of an average adult - before them a child feels small and utterly out of their depth, and they all leave a mark of some kind.
No childhood is ever free of the effects created by the madness of adults.
I’m not saying this is bad - but simply a fact of life. In fact, one could say it’s these stressors in childhood that create the emotional resilience we all need to cope with the life we enter as adults. After all, adult life can seem like we’re a kid stuck in the middle of a bad marriage sometimes - when we feel so very small in the middle of universal forces in collision, and it’s all we can do to hang on until we understand.
I think even those parents who try to to be perfect will inevitably stuff it up as far as a child is concerned.
I remember when I was a counsellor, I had a bloke come in who, in one stunning declaration expressed utter hatred for their father while at the same time extolling what a wonderful parent he had been. Somewhat perplexed, I asked, “So ... if your father was so loving, generous and easy going, why do you feel so bitter?”
The answer came back: “No boundaries!! He let me do whatever I liked!! He never criticized me ... so how the hell was I supposed to grow! And what makes it worse is I have no excuse to complain because he was such a perfect father. All my friends loved him!!!”
‘Gee,’ I thought, ‘what a bastard.’
Many children might have flourished with the unconditional love and trust of a father like that, yet here was this guy utterly fixated with his own unique spin, which came out for him a how his father had disempowered him with love. He interpreted his father’s liberal approach as indifference ... and chose to hate him for it.
And me?
Well, I hated my father all the way through the first thirty years of my life - loathed him utterly until at the age of thirty, sitting on the huge pile of my own mistakes, I realized I was just like him - a foolish and very flawed man trying to do the best with what I had.
I realized then that my hatred largely arose from disappointment, because my father had not fitted the template in my head of how the perfect father should be. So now I have accepted him ... the man - a terribly flawed, foolish and unique human being ... just like me.
In that I suppose the light of my own folly shines very kindly on him.
But even so, no matter how much I have understood the man he is, and no matter how intensely I could love him, I don’t think I can ever totally expunge the rage at what happened in my childhood - not because my father was bad man but because my own feelings of outrage run so deep within me they seem somehow untouchable, permanently burning, like the molten core of the earth. And even though I have reached an intellectual reconciliation, there always seems to be a more visceral part of me that is profoundly inconsolable.
It’s very strange to have a head that is entirely cool with the events of my childhood and has let it go, and a body that still is utterly unforgiving in relation to its history.
So then, as I said at the beginning, this friend and I were talking about forgiveness.
His own parents had been a nightmare - narcissistic, violent and judgmental. His childhood war stories were a litany of often bizarre public spectacles between his parents that all children abhor. He’d been beaten in anger, abandoned, told he was no good, and so on. If anyone had cause to hate his parents, it was him.
So there we were, swapping war stories, laughing ourselves sick at how horrifying it had all been, when he stopped and said, “but seriously, how do you free yourself of this darkness?”
I thought about this for a second or two.
“I don’t think you do.” I said. “You just learn to live with it I suppose. You forgive them.”
“Forgive them?” He guffawed. “Not a fucking chance!” he declared.
But still, the notion took our attention. In further discussion we decided that the only way we could forgive was to look further on down the line than the relationship between us and them - to taste a little of what our parents had experienced at the hands of their own parents - and their parents before them. Only then could we see that our parents had been as much victims as we apparently were.
At which point our exclusive claim to victim-hood might disappear, simply because we see that the perpetrators of our own suffering were themselves victims. And not only that, but it might also be seen that the thousand year battlefield of ‘children-becoming -parents-of-children-becoming-parents’ is littered with the best of intentions, most of which failed, simply because all humans are so terribly flawed.
All down the line from the first to the latest, I think most parents try their hardest to do the very best that they can .... and really, isn't that enough? To know that?
But it was at this point in our discussion that we came into difficulty, because we realized that, okay ... we accept that our parents tried hard ... but if we are to forgive our parents in this manner, by understanding them as they were made, then we must by logical extension, forgive everybody!
... (unless of course, you believe in the notion of innate evil, which I definitely don’t)...
We must forgive all the monsters of history ... the onmes we love to hate ... the mad sadistic emperors, the deluded dictators, monsters, serial killers, rapists, paedophiles ... all of them were once victims - before they became perpetrators, the all suffered at the hands of some other victim, playing out their rage.
All monsters were children once - innocent, their characters formed by their parents and their environment. Just as I am who I am because I was made this way, all of us are products of who and what came before.
Take Hitler for instance. Alice Miller Phd, in an article titled ‘The Nature of Abuse’, puts it well when she says:
“ ... the monster Adolf Hitler, murderer of millions, master of destruction and organized insanity, did not come into the world as a monster. He was not sent to earth by the devil, as some people think, nor was he sent by heaven to "bring order" to Germany, to give the country the autobahn and rescue it from its economic crisis, as many others still believe.
Neither was he born with "destructive drives", because there are no such things. Our biological mission is to preserve life, not to destroy It. Human destructiveness is never inborn, and inherited traits are neither good nor evil. How they develop depends on one’s character, which is formed In the course of one's life, and the nature of which depends, in turn, on the experiences one has, above all, in childhood and adolescence, and on the decisions one makes as an adult.
Like every other child, Hitler was born innocent, only to be raised, as were many children at the time, in a destructive fashion by his parents and later to make himself into a monster. He was the survivor of a machinery of annihilation that in turn-of-the-century Germany was called "child-rearing" and that I call "the concealed concentration camp of childhood," which is never allowed to be recognized for what it is.. A terrible childhood, abusive father, violence and so on. An enraged little child beat at the walls of his heart and he did terrible things, along with all his enraged mates. And millions of people died in horrible ways ...”
So then, could Hitler have been a monster and innocent all at the same time?
Can such a thing exist?
I think it does ... and I'm aware that a huge number of people would vehemently disagree with me. The notion of innate evil is, after all, a moral premise of our time - (I would say, among the most damaging, but that's another post).
And just as this paradox of opposite values describes Hitler, so too I think it also applies to us all. We are all within ourselves, the villains and victims at the same time ... so, as Jesus is reputed to have once said, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone ...”
So then, back to our parents ... and forgiveness? How do we do it?
After all, there is no denying that many of the things parents have done to children have been dreadful. Open any tabloid and the sins of parents are daily grist for the mill of public outrage.
We ( mew and my friend) came to a conclusion that the only way we can forgive is to make it an act of unconditional love rather than a judgement.
By this I mean, in forgiving we are not in any way validating what was done - nor are we discounting the terrible effect it might have had on us.
All we are doing is acknowledging the innate fallibility of any being, and in acknowledging the fallibility of others, we are also then able to grant it to ourselves.
Because there is a terrible burden that comes with judgment - the possibility that in different circumstances, we ourselves might well become whoever we judge.
As Nietzche wrote:
‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’
msfullphat
. Was actually thinking same thing night before, but not in a sense of forgivness, but thanks. Thanks for parents been parents. I trust though that My mother and your sister bought me up at a more socially respectable level if you don't mind me saying, but there were still nags and little irritations while living at home. But I realise how powerful a parents lessons, mistakes, teachings are. Without them you have no moral ground to stand on. It is only now that I have moved out of home that I realise how much there is to teach a child, so once they disband from their care they then can live safely and securely. I never grasped the concept of not being able to leave dishes for one night unwashed, or vacumning a carpet when I frankly didnt notice a mess. But without these rulesets and "chores" taught to me, I would be living in a hell hole. And I am too proud of my hell hole to not keep it in a good condition.
Today a man came to the door and told me he had recently come to the country and had this very night been chucked onto the street by the people he was living with and needed £4.50 to catch a train to the town where his brother lives. I gave him £5, whilst my son raged at me for being so stupid. I said I hoped that if ever he ( my son )was in trouble some-one might help him and he said I was being taken for ride. I believe it is as possible the man is lying as telling the truth. I also believe he needed £5. He needed it whether he was lying or not.
Sometimes it doesn't matter whether the other person is good or bad, it matters only how whether you are.
It is hard living with the contradiction of loving and hating our parents ( in my case this is mother, ) at the same time. My sister would, could never acknowledge any negative feelings toward our mother, I do sometimes wonder what the fallout from this will be one day.
I've been away for so long, could hardly believe it! Slowly healing myself and so very pleased to find you here and writing. I am applying to a course to support the publication of my poetry, so exciting!
I am still surprised at how few people accept the innocence of every child, even my kids can sometimes rail against me when I ask them to have some understanding for a human being who has wronged them in some way. I think that it is part of their thinking now though thank god!
peace and love distant bro.
x