Should I avoid exploring childhood pain?
It’s hard for me to mention my parents and childhood pain in the same sentence.
Is it insulting??
For a few years now I’ve invested a lot of energy reflecting on who I am and who I want to be. I’m learning that a big part of what shapes me as an adult are the experiences I had as a child. I’m also learning that it is important for me to be honestly thorough when I reflect on my childhood.
It’s not easy for me to take a deep, honest look at my childhood because I fear exploring emotional pain. I fear that if I find pain in my past that I will be guilty of blaming and shaming my parents. My thinking goes, “Yikes!! How can I blame my parents?!! My parents gave me so much! It would be an act of betrayal to bring up childhood pain in light of ALL that they did for me.”
Both Positive AND Negative Legacy
Although I can tend to feel guilty about it, I want to learn to accept that my parents are like me: they have issues. They passed on to me both positive legacy and negative legacy. They taught me some healthy AND some UNhealthy ways of coping with life.
It will be the same with my kids — I will pass on both good and bad.
Fostering Self-Compassion
I want to start believing that it is NOT a parent’s job to be perfect. I don’t have to protect my parents by avoiding the exploration of the painful parts of my childhood.
My parents didn’t need to be perfect for me. It wasn’t their job to fight my future emotional battles.
Their perfection wasn’t supposed to carve out a pain-free life for me.
I want to accept that life has joys and sorrows for everybody. Every person fights hard battles. So I can honestly reflect about childhood pain and at the same time have compassion for myself and others (including my parents).
Not everything is my parent’s fault.
For the record — I don’t have the belief that all of my childhood pain is my parents’ fault.
I wrote a post on this website about being a pastor’s kid. I mentioned that it made me feel pressure to be perfect. Even so…I don’t think that my dad should have avoided being a pastor. I also don’t think my dad was a bad pastor or a bad person.
My point is…there were some awesome and some NOT awesome parts of my childhood. And that’s okay and it’s NOT my parent’s fault. (hehe — there’s a ton that is actually MY fault. Yeah — I definitely made some choices that I regret.)
