parents

In my journey I have come to realize how much I need (or want to) look deeply into how I was molded by my parents. I think I cannot move on fully unless I can see how they affected how I deal with things emotionally.

I can feel how I react to various people now and trace the beginnings of that emotion back to my parents so I can see how my relationships now are still being dominated by my parents.

In my life I had attended Al-Anon for many years and had looked at and let go quite a lot of what happened when I was growing up and I did process a lot of the feelings I had then, but I can see now that I did not do a complete emotional release of those feelings. I developed an intellectual understanding but I hadn’t felt the emotion.

I do not blame or even place any responsibility onto my parents for what I feel now. To make anyone responsible for what I feel is to give up my power and to live in a murky place where I cannot be fully alive, as I am being restricted by emotions I felt long ago. So to release these demons I have been focusing closely on how my parents treated me and how I have carried this treatment all my life.

The biggest problem growing up in my family was the repression of feelings. We were not allowed to express any emotion we had so I learned to do this repression automatically after the initial influence so I feel this is what I carried in raising my own children as well.

This suppression of feelings is heralded as ‘love’ in our culture to a great degree. We are nor supposed to say anything that may hurt someone else’s feelings. We are always supposed to be wary of saying anything that someone else may take offense to. So feelings get suppressed in society and by most parents - (likely all parents).

Most parents want to relieve their children of strong feelings as if the expression of those feelings will be hurtful to the child. The parent is afraid of their own feelings because of the suppression they had so they are uncomfortable when feelings come up in them when their child expresses an emotion.

I have done very similar things to my sons that were done to me.

I am not at all pretending I parented better than my parents or that my children had it easier than I did growing up. I did not live with a separation of my parents as my sons did. My sons were 4 and 6 years old when my ex-wife and I broke up for the first time. I also have a daughter that I have never spoken to, so I certainly don’t think that I have always treated my children with love at all. I hope they will look deeply into what I did to them when they were children. I want for them to dissect what happened with me as I am dissecting what happened with my parents.

As I do not want to deny what my parents did I do not want my children to deny what I did.

I have protected the idea that my parents were mostly loving by minimizing and excusing their actions. I do not think that they were always unloving but to hold onto that and nothing else does not help me at all.

Both of my parents were unable to allow any of their children to express any emotion. They did not need to say anything for this suppression to happen it was just thick in the air and we knew from an early age that it was not okay to express any emotion.

I think this is the biggest shortcoming I had as a parent as well.

I remember once when our family was at the family cottage we always went to during the summer. My mother had us attend church functions at the time but for some reason I was able to not go to something at the church. I must have been 10 or 11.  We were in the cottage and a couple people from the church were to visit and when they came I went and hid in the bedroom so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about why I hadn’t gone to the church. When they left I came out and said to my mother that I didn’t remember what I went into the bedroom for. She answered that it was because, “You didn’t want to deal with talking to the guests”. Of course she was correct but I was stunned that she seemed to break our code of silence. She just never spoke the truth about these kinds of things before or after but always preferred to keep the water smooth. This was the only time I remember where she didn’t go along with our hiding of emotions, as I had been taught.

By acting as she did she was acting in a loving manner but as it was so different than all her other actions in my life I felt that she was letting me down. This is how upside down my understanding of love was.

As I was supposed to bury my emotions I couldn’t express myself well at all so a big part of what I gained in my childhood was the feeling that I was never heard. I have carried this feeling to my interactions with a number of people now so obviously I have not worked out these emotions from past.

I good illustration of a how this early influence happened with my dad is as follows.

My dad spoke very little in the home. He did talk about things outside the home but he rarely spoke one on one to any of us children. He was quite involved in a number of community projects; one of them was at the local rink where he took me to play hockey starting when I was five years old. He spoke little to me at home or on the way to the rink but as soon as he was inside the doors of the rink it seemed like he talked to everyone. It seemed to me that he couldn’t go 20 feet without getting into a conversation with someone else. I watched this happen week after week. So of course I thought that I was not worth talking to and that I must not have anything to say of any importance.

I now understand what he was doing. He felt so uncomfortable talking to children when he just didn’t know what to say but in a situation where there were many outside issues he was involved in he had lots to talk about and people would approach him to talk to him. He couldn’t approach us children and of course children can’t be responsible to lead their parent in conversation.

I understand what happened with him but that doesn’t mean that he was loving to me in those times. He wasn’t loving and as a result I carry the idea that I can’t be loved in that way.

There is no solution to this except for me to feel those emotions that were not safe for me to feel when the situation occurred. As a child I couldn’t start crying every time we entered the rink.

So I want to look at these things in as critical manner as I can and I wish to feel the emotion that I couldn’t allow myself then. That’s one reason for me to write about it. To not write about is to continue to hide it away as if it were a shameful thing to have happened.

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I wrote the preceding words a week or so ago and in that week I have been processing some of what went on in our home when I was young. I imagine how I felt in the home and imagined what my parents were doing that brought up these feelings. This was difficult to do at first but it is becoming easier for me to put myself back there.

When I was feeling my own pain in this experience this week I also started sensing how my parents were feeling as well. I could see that they had been suppressed in their childhood and they had not worked through the emotions. This gave me some compassion for them that I had not felt much of before. My intellectual understanding did not carry over into a feeling of compassion, so it was not until I felt the emotion that I developed compassion.