Why do people forgive parents after not raising them well?

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Does that mean I have to like someone again if I move on?

I was abused physically and psychologically etc. I haven't forgiven anyone but for practical reasons I have chosen to get along with my family as much as I can. For that reason most people think I'm making it up- because I'm not making a drama out of the whole thing- but then again, when I did do just that- people still said I was making it up- because I was making a drama out of it and aparrently real abuse victims are too ashamed to tell anyone.


Can't win. I probably wouldn't be in contact with my family for a number of reasons, including what I suffered at their hands if I had much of a choice. But I have nothing. Because I wasn't diagnosed before 18 (even though I was in the process of diagnosis), I am not entitled to a lot of help that I need to live independantly- so my family is like a safety net if ever I should find myself homeless (I've had so many near misses). So dumb, but I suppose it's easy for the borough council to make it so because, rather than admit flaws in the system, they can allow the general public to believe that only the mildest cases go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed until adulthood.

Not at all, but it means you won't obsess over what they did.

That's something that I will never understand.

Wasn't that something like the third worst case of child abuse in California history, though? I wouldn't have wanted to forgive her either.

I understand what you are saying but firstly...

The parents who are like that are obviously mentally ill and would have had to go through depression to get in that state so they are victims too.

And secondly it is a childs instinct to love there parents even if they don't deserve it but...
I would never forgive my parents if they did that to me but I guess it depends on the situation, kinda difficult one to conclude

Jake x

[quote="lexis"]I was abused physically and psychologically etc. I haven't forgiven anyone but for practical reasons I have chosen to get along with my family as much as I can. For that reason most people think I'm making it up- because I'm not making a drama out of the whole thing- but then again, when I did do just that- people still said I was making it up- because I was making a drama out of it and aparrently real abuse victims are too ashamed to tell anyone. :roll:


Can't win. I probably wouldn't be in contact with my family for a number of reasons, including what I suffered at their hands if I had much of a choice. But I have nothing. Because I wasn't diagnosed before 18 (even though I was in the process of diagnosis), I am not entitled to a lot of help that I need to live independantly- so my family is like a safety net if ever I should find myself homeless (I've had so many near misses). So dumb, but I suppose it's easy for the borough council to make it so because, rather than admit flaws in the system, they can allow the general public to believe that only the mildest cases go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed until adulthood.[/quote]

Exactly.

Eventually, people realize that their parents are fallible humans. They are perfectly capable of making mistakes, even very large ones. The "forgiveness" comes when they no longer hold their parents to a standard of perfection. They'll always wish that their parents hadn't been abusive, and their relationship with their parents will never be all that good; but it's about moving past their childhood and getting on with their lives.

Wisdom of the young Katie topic

Spokane Girl also said as much. My parents are both long dead. It is not forgiveness, it is more like a coming to terms with the fact that ou cannot change what happened in the past. You can only change yourself. Writing about what happened purges the mind and objectifies the problem. Then you can physically bury the problem and put the past in a grave. It is done, finished, like my parents, and will not be resurrected.

This approach has worked for me. You may also find another way of solving your past troubles.

My parents are dead, so there's no possibility of getting even with them (not that I felt the need to once I'd left home). Nor will I ever be able to convince them that a lot of the things they did were wrong.

To be honest I don't know what forgiveness is, the term doesn't quite fit the emotions I experience when I've been harmed by people. If it's ceasing to desire revenge, fine. If it's ceasing to want to challenge them about their behaviour, I think I'll always vaguely want to do that, though it never did any good when I was young, and like most goals that defy all attempts to attain them, the desire paled into insignificance, or at least my awareness of it did.

As for what they did, well my mother was extremely highly strung, harsh, melodramatic and overbearing, and stifled a lot of my creativity and ambition, so that as an adult I've failed to reach anything like my full potential, and will probably battle forever with a lousy self-image and poor confidence. My father was also rather authoritarian, arrogant and restrictive but his biggest failure was in not standing up to Mum on my behalf. When I was grown up he used to tell me how, if it hadn't been for her, I'd have had so much more freedom. When some of my schoolteachers blamed me for my poor performance in class, they always believed them, and usually deferred to authority even when it was harmful to me.

They never really cared much about what I wanted, they always "knew best." They never once apologised to me because they saw apology as something kids do for adults, not the other way round. They had terrible fights and would often involve me and my sister in that stuff, which I found so devastating that eventually I had to cut off from both of them emotionally because I couldn't stand the anxiety and heartache of watching them tear each other to pieces.

Once I was grown up they stopped harming me in those ways (hard to see how they could have continued it, as I was by then quite independent of them), and that allowed us to patch things up so that we could be fairly cordial with each other again. But I found I never really wanted to hang about with them for long, and couldn't recover the closeness we once had.

Just recalling it again makes me want to slap them or to list a string of uncomplimentary adjectives to describe their narrow world. But they had their good points - physically they ensured I came to little harm, and my father could be quite wonderful to me at times. No doubt they were trapped by their own childhood experiences - the old culture of demonisation and ill-treatment of children by adults is well documented by historians.

Anyway, it can't be helped now. No point carping on about what I might have been if only the dice had rolled differently. I've "let it go" in as far as it's possible to let a bad upbringing go, though I'm unlikely to be able to completely move on because there are so many valuable clues in my upbringing that can show me why I have certain weaknesses and insecurities, and hopefully somewhere between abreaction and logical thought, I might reverse some of the worst damage. Until quite recently I'd remembered a time when my father left home after a fight as just me thinking he was never coming back, and could never understand why I rejected him emotionally so much after that, if it had been my mistake, until I remembered that he'd actually told me to my face that he was leaving forever and that I'd never see him again. And when he returned after a day or two, nothing was ever explained.

Forgiveness, like closure, is a simple word. The reality for me is more complicated.

That's good because people have thought I didn't move on when I had because I would bring it up. It's like they want to control me and my curiosity and they have something to hide. I'd say they're the ones who didn't move on or else they wouldn't get so upset.

....

Last edited by Sorenna on 25 Nov 2008, 6:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Forgive? NEVER!! ! My mother abused me mentally and physically. I tried to get along with her with my sister not present. But all to fail.

My mother moves away, only to tell one person about it, my brother who then told me. And little old me got nothing. In that letter was THREE sentences. Hi, we've moved to (Essex, I think). We're OK, been here 4 months. Here's the address : - whatever the address is ... Not even a simple "How are you?" ....

That's right, she didn't bother to write for FOUR months!! !
I don't care. Her actions were highly predictable, she did it once. What was to stop her doing it again. Haven't seen her for 5 years this December.

I don't care, I will never forgive her, it doesn't mean I can't move on until I do. It ONLY means that I shouldn't worry about someone who doesn't care for me.

There was another letter, addressed to - MY brother saying that her mother had died. I, however find out with a simple phonecall, "Have you heard?" - "uh, no, heard what?"

I try to call all day to arrange transportation with my brother so we can all go there together. All day, I never get through, so I try the next day only to be greated with a simple "Hello" I say it's me "Oh, it's you! What do you want?!?" I speak to my mother only to find out the funeral was the SAME day as recieving the letter. What's wrong with a simple phone call? Probably with the simple "Oh, he's too young to understand!" I've never been too young to understand anything, yet they presume this always.

Now I just forget her, getting worked up about it is not going to do any good for me...

And people can forgive their parents? Probably foolish, but up to them

I am a living example here.

You ask why "We" forgive? It's simple - You can not move forward when You're stuck in the darkness of the past... "We" don't do it for them. "We" do it for ourselves - to not fatigue our minds with this negative memories or feelings or emotions...

It's only because "We" want nothing from them anymore - there is no place for them parents in our minds and hearts; not even a place for hateing them.

ToughDiamond, my childhood appears to have been very like yours. My folks would tell me that they'd 'never rowed before I came along' just to make me feel guilty. I don't believe this was true. My dad could be very easy-going, but if pushed hard enough he would flip into a rage, and my mother (who perhaps liked the challenge) could push him that far. And he had a lot of anger, I think, around his health issues, which nobody talked about, but I was usefully there to yell at instead. I went through my teens feeling I'd committed some awful crime against them both just by existing.

It's only in the last few years that I've even realized how deeply I was hurt by my mother's behavior in particular. They say anger turned in on itself is depression; I've had at least three bouts of serious depression in my life that I can pinpoint. I realize, now, that it came at times in my life when I was, consciously or not, trying to be someone I wasn't.

That was my mother's particular form of torment. As I was, I was never good enough. I always could be pretty, could be successful, could be popular...if I only tried and tried harder...but the ways to be pretty, successful etc. always involved things I wasn't naturally any good at. And the pressure never, ever stopped. If any of my natural abilities or tendencies showed themselves, and especially if they got praise or attention from other people, she would scotch them immediately.

What she expected me to be, I now realize, was her, or at least an acceptable extension of her. She believed it was best for me to be treated that way, but I don't believe that's any excuse. She knew she was hurting me emotionally, but she would insist that hurting was 'good for me'. She also blackmailed me into believing that she - who could verbally strip me down to feeling worthless in seconds - was the only person in the world I could trust, and that anyone who treated me nicely was trying to manipulate me. A more socially aware kid might have seen through this, but I had no way of knowing.

The deepest damage, though, was that what she was saying all along was effectively 'Don't be who you are'. At a certain point, your inner self starts hearing this as 'Don't be'. I tried so hard to not be (me) that I very nearly succeeded.

Getting to the root of all this has meant that the anger that was turned in on myself, for failing to live up to those impossible expectations, has begun to come out. I think that's a good, constructive thing in the circumstances. The problem is that I'm still looking for a suitable outlet for it (bearing in mind that my mother is now old and mentally compromised enough that I can't actually sit down in front of her and say 'Look, you did this to me, it hurt and it was wrong'). I'm finding writing it down helps considerably.

Forgiveness, though, is a word I have yet to get my head round. The damage done when you were young - and my experience is nowhere near what some people go through, I know that, which often makes me feel like I'm making a fuss over not much - goes right down to the core of you. Things that were said can't be unsaid, and you can't forget them. I know that's not what forgiveness is supposed to be about, but I get the feeling it's the kind of 'forgiveness' I'm actually expected to come up with. I can't do that. All I can do is hope that I can release this, somehow, at some time in the future.

What I refuse to do, ever, is the thing I've also had thrown at me much of my life as blackmail, which is 'You'll regret the way you've behaved when I'm gone'. I have absolutely no regrets other than that I didn't stand up and tell her where to get off in much stronger terms. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I refuse to bow to some sentimental idea of the guilt-ridden offspring revering 'dear old Mom' when the reality was actually very different.

When I went to Catholic school, I was taught that God would forgive my sins if I genuinely repented in my heart and tried to fix my mistakes. My adopted mother has never owned up to doing anything wrong. I don't see why I should hold myself to a higher standard than the one I had for God. I think the onus is on her to come to her children and ask for forgiveness. I wanted very badly to be a good daughter to her, but she kept causing chaos in both our lives, while leaving me to cope with it, alone. If I forgave her, I'd once again be doing the heavy lifting for a cruel, manipulative, pathetic old woman, all alone.