Change Your Parents

First, the bad news: you can’t change your parents, either in the sense of swapping them for others, or in the sense of getting them finally to see the light, apologise for past misdeeds, or starting to behave like reasonable human beings. It’s not going to happen.

And now, the good news: it doesn’t matter as much as you think. You can get most of what you need without bothering them. Even if they’re dead, or too ill or unwilling to talk to you about the past, this is no barrier to working things through (the same applies to other family members, friends, work colleagues, children and so on). You don’t need to rely on someone else suddenly  changing to improve matters for yourself.

This is because the parents that need to be changed are not the people who created you, but the versions of them that you carry around inside you – your internalized parents.

These were created long ago, when you were a very young child. When you find yourself raging at your actual parents now, have a listen: you might hear the voice of that child in your anger.  When your Mum’s casual remark or facial expression throws you into misery, that’s not the adult ‘you’, it’s the child. And the Dad that you’re flinching from or raging at isn’t the old geezer next to you (who your partner inexplicably finds funny and charming) but the awe-inspiring, wonderful, terrifying, godlike man that you once – quite literally – looked up to.

Just as challenging your parents won’t help, neither will trying to forgive them. You can’t find peace while you’re full of unexpressed anger, and you can’t love while you’re full of fear, hate and pain. You can’t get around these emotions by shutting them out, or by ‘positive thinking’, which will at best postpone the problem, and postpone healing.

If your Dad abandoned you, the pain of that runs very deep. You need to acknowledge how deep, how hurtful it is, and that you carry with you an abandoned child.  Perhaps you abandon that inner child yourself on a daily basis. Listening to its pain is the first step. Ask the child what it needs now, and you are beginning the work of re-parenting yourself. This is one of the most powerful and moving tasks of adult life, and the source of deep and lasting healing.

This is all easier to state than it is to do, of course. You may be able to do it yourself, but the task can be made much easier by working with a therapist that you feel able to trust.