Parental Forgiveness in the Age of Self-Enlightenment

The steps that helped me forgive my parents.

It's time to set them free.Layers/Pixabay

Trigger Warning: Sexual abuse, suicidal ideation

Preface: I was sexually abused as a child. This post isn’t about the abuse, but it’s an important piece of this story. Neither of my parents was the abuser.

I’ve seen many social media posts recently that give me hope for the future. There was a woman who was considering ending things and then received an outpouring of hundreds of strangers telling her that her life was worth living. A mom posted about how she was the worst mother ever, and dozens of other moms reached out to tell her she wasn’t terrible or alone in how she felt. A man posted about how worthless he felt. Tweets came flying in, telling him he shouldn’t listen to those voices in his head because they were wrong.

As many in the world become more attune to promoting good mental health, we hear more expressions like, “It’s okay to be a work in progress,” “Forgive yourself,” or “It’s not how many times you fall but how many times you get up.” We’re learning the value of forgiving ourselves. Forgiving ourselves makes it easier to forgive others, and many are taking the steps to do so.

One troubling trend I see, though, is that with all the forgiveness and acceptance of flaws, there seems to be one group that’s being left out — our parents.

The mindset seems to be that your parents’ mistakes are eternal. They made poor decisions, and those actions should lead to a lifetime of punishment. But I ask, why? Should you forgive your parents? If so, how can you do it? Here’s how I did it.

Some don’t deserve forgiveness

Let’s start by acknowledging that some parents don’t merit forgiveness. The parents who keep their kids in cages or locked in basements or punish them with cigarette burns, those parents don’t justify forgiveness. Some parents who purposely neglect their children, leaving them without food, clothing, or shelter, don’t deserve forgiveness either. And the parents who sexually harm their children, well, I don’t think there’s a place bad enough to send them.

Fortunately, most of us didn’t have those parents. Instead, we had parents just like us. One, two, three, or four imperfect people, trying their best in the circumstances they were in. Yet many people don’t want to forgive their parents for the mistakes they made.

Different rules for parents

Why is it okay for a stranger to say they are still a work in progress at eighty years old, but for you not to accept the mistakes of your father? Why can a character in a movie pull at your heartstrings as she tries to make amends, yet your mother remains forever punished? I know I was routing for Vivi in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, yet not offering the same grace to my mother.

I’m no stranger to the subject of forgiving your parents. I left home at twenty, largely because I didn’t think I could forgive my parents. My parents made a lot of mistakes. Perhaps the worst was being too trusting about where they let me spend the night. Those mistakes scarred me forever.

Around the time I turned twenty, memories of past abuse resurfaced. It made no sense. Something I couldn’t remember yesterday was now all-consuming today.

A friend described it this way. Children don’t have the capacity to deal with horrific events. To protect itself, their brain throws those experiences in a closet. As we get older and stronger, the closet door spills open and all those nightmares tumble out.

My closet burst open with such force that it rattled my entire life. As I remembered more of my nightmares, I became consumed with anger. My parents had failed me and allowed the worst to happen. My only option was to abandon my parents and never speak to them again.

With fight-or-flight in full-alert status, I ran away. I ran from my family, my home, and my childhood friends. I moved 900 miles, hoping to escape my memories.

Fixing me cleared my vision

In time, I found myself in therapy, an experience I strongly recommend. During those six years, I peeled back the many layers of me. Removing the layers helped me learn to forgive the parts of me I hated. Forgiving yourself is a long process, and my journey is far from over.

Therapy taught me to look at the terrible decisions I made in my life. There are a lot of them. My therapist helped me realize some of my worst decisions resulted from things that happened to or around me. I still made the choices, but there were prior thought patterns and behaviors that made each option look like the right one.

As I worked through therapy, my therapist pointed out the times I was deceiving myself. She kept telling me, “The only way past the pain is through it.” It was excruciating, but taught me to forgive myself. I was an imperfect being, an eternal work in progress. I couldn’t expect perfection from something that was imperfect.

It didn’t happen quickly, but I started to apply what I was learning about myself to my parents. The proverbial light slowly came on.

My parents weren’t a monstrous couple. They were two imperfect beings, fighting against their own histories and circumstances. Each of them made decisions, some of which harmed us as their children, but were based on what they felt was right. They had their own pasts that defined what seemed like the right steps forward.

As I learned to view my parents as people, my attitude toward them changed. I had been willing to offer more grace and mercy to strangers than to the two people who raised me. It was the start of real change.

How do you forgive them?Taras Lazer/Pixabay

Forgiving your parents

For most of us, the pain caused in childhood doesn’t go away. There are words your parents said and things they did that will always be with you. There’s no escaping that.

I had a right to be mad at my parents. They made some terrible decisions, and those choices hurt me.

You also may be justifiably angry about how you were hurt. But, just because you have a legitimate cause for complaint, it doesn’t mean you should continue to hold your parents’ mistakes against them.

So the question is, how do you forgive your parents? Here are three things that helped me.

1. Change your perspective

The first step in forgiving your parents is changing how you see them. A change in perspective can reveal very different people.

Take some time to look at your parents from a new angle. Rather than a palette filled with all your memories and emotions from the past, pull your parents out of your family picture. See them as if they were two human beings you didn’t know. What was their past? What events shaped them? How were they treated along the way? What hardships did they overcome?

As you look at your parents from outside of the family circle, you may find the seeds of forgiveness sprouting. Your mother was beautifully broken, and she passed some of her hurt on to you. Your father’s childhood damaged him and he treated you the only way he knew how.

Those imperfect beings with all their scars deserve a second look. They are worthy of mercy and redemption.

2. Let go of past

The second step in forgiving your parents is letting go of the past. This one will take some time, and you will slip backwards from time to time, but you can start again.

My parents’ poor choices lead to me being sexually abused. In their defense, they didn’t know. Had I told them the first time, it wouldn’t have happened again. I was a broken child and didn’t know how to tell anyone. Instead, they didn’t learn the details until I was twenty, and by then, I was too angry to talk about it. They couldn’t fix it.

In hindsight, they should have been wary of the places they let me go. However, what they saw then was a very different picture of what turned out to be reality.

I had to accept that what happened to me wasn’t my parents’ fault. Yes, they could have protected me better, but they didn’t know the danger. They weren’t the abuser.

I don’t have children of my own. It’s impossible for me to say how I would have acted in the same situation. I might have made the same decisions, especially based on what my parents knew then.

No matter how much pain I felt, my parents couldn’t do anything to change what happened. It’s no different from putting a valuable crystal vase on an unstable table. A careless person bumps the table. The vase crashes to the ground. The damage is irrevocable. Yet, the person who placed the vase had no intention of harming it.

That was my parents. They made a poor choice and placed me somewhere I wasn’t safe, but it didn’t look dangerous. Like the crystal vase, a careless person broke me. I can’t fault the person who put me there. Nothing can change the fact that I fell to the ground. Dwelling in the past was not helping anyone.

3. Appreciate the good

A third way to forgive your parents is to practice gratitude. Even parents who make lots of mistakes teach valuable lessons to their children. Most children receive food, clothing, and at least some love. You may not have had a perfect childhood, but there are reasons to be grateful. As I worked through my pain, I could see many reasons.

My parents were hard workers. My siblings and I always had a roof over our heads, clean clothes on our backs, and good food in our bellies. They did not leave us alone for days or deprive us of an education. Our parents did their best to teach us how to be respectable people, to be productive members of society, and to have faith to see us through the tough times.

The more I concentrated on the good things, the easier it was to forgive my parents. The more I looked, the more good I found.

I remembered how my mother read to me for hours when I was small. Her patient attention caused a love for books and writing to flourish inside me. That I’m a writer today is because of what she did.

My dad didn’t teach me all the things I wanted to learn. In fact, I’m still not confident in my ability to work on engines even though he could fix almost everything. Instead, he taught me a lot about doing hard work. He helped me understand that my word means something, and that “any job worth doing was worth doing right.” I have succeeded in every job I had because of the work ethic he taught me.

Best of all, my parents taught me about faith. If your faith is strong, you can face any trial successfully. For my parents, one of their worst trials was almost losing me. Not only did I flee from their home and move 900 miles cross-country, but a couple of years later, mental illness inspired a suicide attempt. Had I not survived, that pain would have crushed them.

My parents refused to give up. Although I never made it easy for them, we eventually reconciled. They are now my closest friends, and I spend part of every day caring for their daily needs.

I’m still here, writing these words for you to read. As God saw my parents through that trying time, he’s also seen us through everything since. Forgiveness brought us back together so we could love each other again.

Forgive

Forgiveness is vital for a happy life. Holding on to hurt feelings and painful memories will only harm you. By learning to let go of those things, you set yourself free. You can learn to forgive by changing your perspective, leaving the past behind, and looking for reasons to be grateful.

Whether your parents are still living or have already fallen asleep in death, set them free. They were works-in-progress, but likely did the best they could in their circumstances. Choose to see them as beautifully broken and be thankful for the good things they did. Freeing them will free you as well.

Until next time, keep fighting.