Forgiveness and family

[anileve]

This is one is particularly sensitive issue in the culture where the family is invaluable. Many of my friends as well as other people I have come across have difficulties with their family, a few have come from a family with one abusive parent and others have various difficulties in their homes. As someone to whom a family is very important I have been struggling with a question, with consideration of a moral side, a logical side and an emotional one.

Should we forgive our parents because “they are our blood, our parents?”

I have heard my share of stories in my lifetime, each one fracturing my sense of tolerance and shaking my belief in forgiveness. A parent may have given birth, but that doesn't necessarily place him/her in the frames of a “good parenthood”. We encounter parents who are verbal and physical abusive, alcoholics, junkies and just neglectful parents. Yet somehow knowing the harsh truth we still seek to find them, we seek connection. Perhaps it's that quest in search of our creators, similar to religious faith.

Many children suffer from the tyrant like upbringing and in the end emerge traumatized and emotionally scarred, often lacking confidence, self-esteem or self love. Most of our great pain was brought upon us by our parents, sometimes intentionally and other times accidentally, and all precisely because the greater portion of our love is delegated at birth to our parents, without our consent almost. Our friends often hurt us, yet we get over that pain, our children too but we understand, our relatives as well and we still get over them and often just distance ourselves without any serious detriment to our emotional condition.

This isn't so with our parents. We are in constant struggle to prove ourselves to them, to win their respect and approval and to maintain and increase their love. And it is our parents that haunt us until our dying day, anything can be put aside but not parents, they are that invisible connection that cannot be torn, it is not ours to keep or give away. With that being said, I don't understand how some parents mercilessly hurt their children over and over again, or leave them. A son, whose father was an alcoholic and a terror of a man in addition to which abandoned his son and his wife, still traces back to his past to find a grave of this tyrant who he vaguely remembers from listening to the screams under the table. Yet he still craves for the connection. That you cannot change, what you can change is your approach and your emotions, that I believe in.

So should we really forgive our parents simply because they are our blood? Or should we free ourselves from the burden of self imposed morality and judge our parents like regular people? If they are comfortable with hurting their children, we should be just as comfortable of throwing them out of our minds and our lives.

[Anonymouse]

The question is not so much should we forgive, but rather can we even live without the torture of this question? You forgive them. You move on, the thought still haunts you. Why did you? You don't forgive them, you move on, the thought still haunts you in the annals of your mind, why didn't you forgive them?

What I learned is that the people you love most arethe people who have the power to hurt you most deeply, even if it is a result of unintended consequences. Moreover we are imperfect beings and I doubt that I can point at any person who has come from a perfect family. We work with what we are given. We don't choose our parents, just like we don't choose our culture, nor our life, but it chooses us, and so the cycle continues in which we continue to burden the next generation with our pains, and they grow up with the same imperfections, and release on their children, and so forth. It is given to us. Your comparison of parents to God is indeed valid for they are somewhat of our microcreators in a world of creation. We grow up, we leave, but we are forever emotionally attached to them due to that.

We experience a bad family. We argue with our parents. We run away. Sometimes we don't even run away, but they choose to run away from us. The child cannot forgive the father for beating him when drunk, nor can the child ever understand why the mother left them. He is filled with anger and hate towards them, full of denial, unforgiveness, yet at the same time, if he would be given that one chance to trade all those years of denial and unforgiveness to understand why he would reach out towards his parents in a heartbeat.

[anileve]

Absolutely. What I mainly speak of are vicious acts by the parents, the pain that tarnishes your future. You feel the need to reverse the process to somehow believe that there is a valid reason behind their action. But the fact still stands, they've hurt you like no other. Your concept of love is also fractured, for you associate love with purity and your resort to comfort, understanding and respect. Yet with the pain continuously inflicted you fail to see its genuineness and in the end you automatically instill a certain sense of fear and reject any possibility of its entrance into you life. You associate love with pain and see no other definition, it murders your soul and your faith in humanity. Our parents are really the roads to the selection of our destiny, if one is pulled towards the wrong direction it is hard to waver from the course as time progresses and your feelings solidify, it takes years and an immense effort to compensate for the lack of proper parenthood as well as a severely long process of healing. Our parents can give us life and most instantly handicap us.

So the question still stands, should we forgive our parents just because they are, or release the need for a validity of our existence? Must we continue to subject ourselves to a further abuse of our parents just because they are our blood, or shall we view them as regular individuals and flaws that need to be isolated from our lives, and break down the walls of that sentimental attachment? And if so are we doomed to suffer the consequences and deal with the lemons of life, until our dying day? Perhaps the parents never express their regret or recognize their “fatal” mistakes, and simply continue their behavior, should we simply accept it? And why?

[Anonymouse]

Well, this is perhaps not an easy answer and I am to guess feelings will vary from person to person. It takes a lot of valiance to forgive, because it means letting go of part of your identity as a wounded person. Forgiving, then means it may feel like you’re abandoning a hard fought recognition of how you were wounded and what it cost you and more importantly how that wound helped shape your identity, your character, who you are, what your human actions are, what your virtues are and what you strive for. So in many cases one can argue that it is perhaps meant to be that way. It is perhaps meant to be imperfect, to wound us to only make ourselves know us.

I honestly do not know which to choose because I believe it depends on different circumstances. Obviously the dad that didn't allow you to play with other kids for whatever odd reason, or humiliated you, or constantly spoke to you angrily, and put you down, cannot be compared to a dad that not only did that, but abused you, and your mother, drank heavily, and left the family. If I had to choose I will forgive. Let it not imply that to forgive means to forget. I believe one can still use that wound to build thy character, and forgive, without tarnishing what you built yourself up to be.

[PASAMONSTER]

All in all its family!!!

No matter what they do, it is your obligation to forgive them.


Because no one can ever take their place, not the closest of friends and not the dearest of loves.

Family is family, and you're parents are Saints to you, no matter if they done the wrongest isht, they did one thing right and that makes up for it all... They gave you life.

[Anonymouse]

Originally posted by PASAMONSTER They gave you life.

I guess that would be my underlying reason for forgiveness, for some strange reason.

[patlajan]

It depends on how big the mess they made is. All screw ups no bigger than a medium mess can be forgiven with time. However the right to make hilarious jokes and sarcastic comments refering to the incident and thereby rubbing it in is a lifetime privilege.

[anileve]

None of you were able to give me a concrete answer, except for Pasamonster. And may I point out that is exactly what I am addressing. It is that common belief that forgiveness must be natural if it's parents we speak of. Please pay attention to the matter of the subject, the issue at hand is not petty things thrown around or an occasional smack on the butt, but more of an emotional scarring.

What do we consider forgiveness in the first place? When one says forgive but not forget, would it be possible to release the pain and continue dealing with the abuse of the parent who also brings negativity into the life and the mind of the child? Let me also add that where as anyone can bring a child into this world, but that doesn't automatically make one a saint nor a decent person.

Should a child remain in close contact with a parent that caused him pain or should that part of life be severed?

[Emil]

Originally posted by anileve
Should a child remain in close contact with a parent that caused him pain or should that part of life be severed?

Are you talking about physical or emotional pain?

[anileve]

Both, for both can be extremely influential factors in tarnishing an individuals soul and mind.