Live Your Life Be Free!

Some people hold anger against their parents . How can you blame them? It is almost a mantra in psychology – it is not your fault, it is your parent’s. In my opinion, influenced by my years of meditation, I believe this can be painful because anger at anyone has an adverse effect on you, not the person who you are angry at. Also, practically, it feels much better to have a good relationship with parents.

I am reading an excellent book by Vancouver Doctor Gabor Mate called When the Body Says No – The Cost of Hidden Stress. He calls the shortfalls of parents part of a "dance of the generations".

If a parent’s loving feelings are constricted, it is only because that parent has himself or herself suffered deep hurt. In my work with drug addicts in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, I treat many substance-dependent men and women. Hardened as they are – with their criminal records, their continued drug-seeking, their HIV infections and their harassed and socially marginal lives – the deepest pain they all have is about the children whom they have abandoned or who have been taken from them. Without exception, they themselves were abused or abandoned in childhood.*

So, basically he is saying that in the case of these Vancouver addicts, they were bad parents because they had bad parents and it goes on forever up the generations. He goes on:

Parenting, in short, is a dance of the generations. Whatever affected one generation but has not been resolved will be passed onto the next. Lance Morrow, a journalist and writer, succinctly expressed the the multigenerational nature of stress in his book Heart, a wrenching and beautiful account of his encounters with mortality, thrust upon him by near-fatal heart disease: "The generations are boxes within boxes: Inside my mother’s violence you find another box, which contains my gradfather’s violence, and inside of that box (I suspect, but do not know), you would find another box with some such black, secret energy – stories within stories receding in time."

Blame becomes a meaningless concept if one understands how family history stretches back through the generations. "Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as a villain." wrote John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist whose work threw scientific light on the decisive importance of attachment in infancy and childhood.**

I find this "dance of the generations" is a really good way to think of anger at parents and could bring a lot of people peace. Now let’s see more psychologists talking about it and diffusing the blame game.

* Pg. 211of this edition
** Pg 216