About Your Parents

I have been talking about our relationship with our parents so much these days because in actual fact, how good a parent we are and very importantly, how much we enjoy parenthood is really dependent on how good our relationship with our parents is.

If we have alot of judgment against our parents, we will never feel we are good parents or even if we did all the good things that good parents do, we will never really enjoy parenthood ;)

Alot of times, when we complain about our parents.. because they are our parents, we let them win. We let them scold us, hit us or treat us bad so that we could win them. We play a victim role and then we complain, "See, my parents are so lousy and they treat me so bad..."

But victims are in actual fact full of attack, anger and violence. In actual fact, there is no difference whether you are the prey or the predator.

Victims want things to go their way and want to prove that they are right and the other person is wrong.

Victims let other people win over them (eg, they let them hit them or scold them or treat them nasty) but will end up playing on this guilt the other party has for the rest of their life. And I think most children I know, including myself play this game.

See, you din do this.. that is why I am like that. See, you didn't do that, that is why I am like that. See, you didn't treat me well, that is why I have lack of self worth and am not successful in life. See, you were bad to me, that is why I am poor now.

Mostly, when we dun lead successful, abundant, happy lives (which is actually a NATURAL part of our human lives), we are just revenging on our parents because "THEY WERE BAD!"

But until we really forgive the other person, we will also not stop feeling guilty for treating them so badly.

What we do to others, we are in fact, doing to ourselves.

Understand your parents
Here is a good way you could use to get rid of all the unfinished business you had with your parents. You could give it a try, or you could call it fluff. If you did and improved your relationship with your parents, I am happy for you. If not, you could just treat this as additional reading material.. hahaha ;) For me, I just wanted to share with you what I learnt because I felt it was so important for me...

First, think of the three biggest grieviances that you have about your parents.

Secondly, identify how you felt when your parents did that to you. Were you a victim or victimizer?
When you have a victim and a victimizer, how the victim felt after that is exactly how the victimizer felt when he was inflicting the pain on the victim. Everyone in the same situation will feel exactly the same way.

And most importantly, after that the victim will either stay in the victim role and wait for other people to victimize them or they will do unto others what has been done to them.

Eg, if a person felt abandoned by parents when she is young, she will grow up to have her business partners or partners abandoning her OR she will abandon them before they abandon her.

But alot of times we need to track what that person was feeling then and we would know what the parents was feeling. They were probably feeling unloved and abandoned too. A person with happy life and caring parents wouldn't abandon their own children, would they?

Or if your parents belted you... think of it this way, if your parents were happy and well loved children when they were young and always had alot of love around them, would they become parents who belt their own children?

(Just FYI, if we believed that our parents abandoned us, it means we believed that god has abandoned us.)

Third step is to make a choice: LOVE and FORGIVENESS
But actually, there is a simple way out.. especially in the case of victim and victimizer between parents and children... and that is love. All you need to do is choose love.

When we think of our parents in that particular situation then, what were they feeling and how could we help her? We will realize we just need to love them. Most 'lousy' parents act that way because they never felt like anyone has ever known them.

That is because when we really know someone, we cannot help but love them and look past their mistakes, their body and when we really do know them, we will love them.

If we feel our parents do not understand us, that is because we never really took time to understand them. So the way out is to try to understand them and don't stop until we really knew them because if we knew them, we would love them.

All we need to do is to forgive them, forgive ourselves and love them.

It is not possible for others to make us feel what we do not already feel. It is impossible for anyone to abandon or reject you. Neither is it possible for anyone to make you feel upset or hurt etc.

So when you feel that way, what is actually happening is that you are actually abandoning or rejecting them. When you stop concentrating on abandoning and hurting people you will stop feeling that your life is meaningless because you will feel their love.

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