Isn’t It Time We Stopped Blaming Our Parents For Everything?

I blame Freud.  It was that Sigmund dude, who famously proposed that our personal development is pretty much determined by events in our early childhood. Your childhood sucked, therefore your life was preordained to continue to suck. I get it – your Dad was mean, your mother wasn’t around much, you were the middle child, they didn’t even think to teach you to code……whatever it was – you are a by-product of your upbringing and so it’s clearly, Not-Your-Fault.

Except, it is not really that simple, is it?

Childhoods come in all shapes and sizes – one person’s slightly over-bearing mother, might be another’s whisky-soaked father. Some kids are truly unlucky enough to suffer some proper, high-level abuse and neglect, whilst others may have suffered little more than the horrid fate of never having been taken to Disneyland. Truth is, between the pushy aspirations and the mediocre packed lunches, few of us escape entirely unscathed.

However, by the time you are 25 years old or so, it might be advisable to start taking ownership of your own flaws and to begin seeing them as independent of your own upbringing. Mainly, because the blame game serves no real positive purpose and if you get your wellies stuck in the mud of the past, you are seriously robbing yourself of much of your future. I know, I know – easier said than done – but surely, this being your one life to lead and all that, it is worth giving it a bit of a push? Carl Pickhardt, a psychologist, who’s written piles of parenting books and is a man far wiser than I, agrees. He explains that blame, in the long run, only serves to victimise and dis-empower you. Nose, face, spited and all that. ‘At the moment it can feel emotionally satisfying, but it seems to be the enemy of what you actually need, which is acceptance and responsibility.’ Carl urges us to ‘take the energy you’re investing in blame and shift it to acceptance, and then take a look at what kinds of self-management choices you have.’

So, let’s break it down and see if we can find a more productive way to process those sticky, little f*ck-ups that we have grown up with along the way.

• Your Parents Are Only Human: We are, by the very nature of our humanity, inherently flawed. We mess up, we make mistakes, and even when we are trying our darndest, we can make an almightly cock up of the simplest of things. Having done it twice before, I am unquestionably biased, but raising a person is hard. The majority of parents are doing their best, but are doing so with the resources they have and within the framework of their own complicated upbringing. Maybe, if we can see them less as parents and more as people, we might find some room, somewhere amongst the resentment, for a little compassion. Ahhh – Compassion! Quite the super-hero of emotional change, with plenty of space for understanding, but very little for judgement. And if you can’t quite conjure up the required quota of compassion, let the research reassure you, that the continual blame, can actually be more dangerous for your mental health that the past experiences themselves.
• You Are the Captain Now: It’s easy to blame them for your inability to commit, how rubbish you are with your cash or your sub-par skills of communication. But, we also need to learn from our own life experiences. This may include recognising and being conscious of the fact that, Yes, my parents got divorced, and therefore I tend to run for the hills at the first sight of commitment. But, then asking yourself – how can I find a way to change this pattern? Essentially, re-parenting yourself through the process. Rewriting the script – 1 belief at a time – until you get more confident at the controls. YOU are the captain now and as some bloke called Travis Meadows once said, ‘Peace is not found in a calmer storm, it’s found in a better boat.’ Quite.
• Keep an Eye Out for Silver Linings: Being a glass-half-full kind of a girl, I like to find the crumbs of goodness, even in the cake of despair. Sure, your parents may be responsible for some of the crappy stuff – a temper shorter than you would like, a chest flatter than you might prefer, a thirst stronger than most. But, by virtue of that, aren’t they also equally responsible for some of the things – whether it be your aptitude for languages, your long-ish legs or your excellent sense of adventure – that you are actually rather proud of?

This Get Happier Post is brought to you by someone who agrees that life can be rather complicated. But whom also agrees with Freud that, ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’