Man, just a thought I had tonight, but is it ever hard to reparent yourself, and survive off of just your own validation when you live with a parent who is emotionally uninvolved and disinterested in your life, the things that you enjoy and make you happy, your troubles, e.t.c. My other parent, who I had to go no-contact with, AND my brother were and are emotionally disconnected, too. Anyone else trying mightily to thrive when what they’ve been needing for a long time is family love? (I recently bought the Parents’ Love audio because it seemed super valuable.)
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk. Always looking ahead, never giving up on dreams of better things.
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Maybe the love that your parents and family were supposed to give you is something you can give to yourself. This is a well-known method for healing the inner child. It includes meditations where you go back to the past—times when you needed love, support, pride, encouragement, kind words—but didn’t receive them.
Many of those parents didn’t receive such things from their own parents either, and they simply don’t know what to do, nor do they have those feelings within their system. And they may never develop them.
We can go back into our past, in our mind, and rewrite that story—taking care of our inner child by giving it what it needed at the time.
The next step, or perhaps a parallel one, is to start taking care of ourselves the way we would if we were our own parents. To choose the best for ourselves, to stand up for our rights, to give ourselves rest, time, and love. To raise ourselves from zero, regardless of how our childhood went.
That is what complete healing looks like.
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Yeah. I have to learn how to put myself first, to take care of myself emotionally, and really feel it and believe it.
I just wonder when I’ll stop grieving the relationships I didn’t have with people who are still alive.
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In my case, I stopped grieving when I truly understood my father’s story and stopped seeing him as a father and began to see him as a human being, someone who suffers, who has traumas and fears or perhaps unfinished dreams, simply a person. My father left when I was seven, and even if I didn’t realize it all the time, I was always trying to fill the void he left. My story with him was always full of anger, hate, sadness, deception, longing, and a perpetual sense of abandonment. But then someday I realized he really could not give me the love I wanted from him because he doesn’t know how to. His father was not the best paternal figure; my grandfather even tried to kill my grandmother, my father, and my uncles when they were children. At the end you can’t get blood from a stone; the sooner you understand it, the better.
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Thank you for sharing.
Logically speaking, I understand this entirely. For me, the issue is going from knowing something to living with that understanding on all levels, if that makes sense.
I understand you, because it is not an easy process, especially if it involves your parents, and it also requires time, a lot of patience, and compassion towards yourself. For me, the hardest part was starting to react differently, because to do that, you have to force yourself to stay present, here and now; otherwise, you don’t have the opportunity to choose one reaction over another when a triggering event occurs, and of course there are moments when no matter how hard you try, you can end up caught in that mix of difficult feelings, but like many things in life, you just need to train and train until it becomes a habit, and then you become a different person.
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