What are your thoughts and feelings in relation to your parents?

Often, when we become parents ourselves, and especially when we’re aiming to do things differently from how we were brought up, our own unexpressed feelings to our parents can come up.

This can happen even if they aren’t around any more.

And if they aren’t around any more, when they come to visit, or we visit them, we can have big feelings when we see how they respond to our child/ren.

For example, perhaps you’re avoiding saying things like “good girl” and your mother says that to your daughter.

Or perhaps you’re really wanting your child’s feelings to be heard and validated, and your dad tells your son to “stop making a fuss.”

It can be really hard to see our children being treated in ways that we were treated, and in ways that we know are still affecting us now, or perhaps took us years of inner work to help heal and shift.

And perhaps they are still responding in those ways to you now.

Perhaps you phone up when you’re upset and overwhelmed, and instead of receiving empathy, your Mom/Mum tells you that it’s because of the parenting you’re doing.

I’ve found in my own journey, and in the journeys of many other women I’ve worked with, that the time comes when we come to a place of realising that our parents aren’t doing these things deliberately to hurt us.

We realise that they love us as much as we love our children.

We understand that they are doing those things because of their own internal world.

If they don’t listen to our child’s feelings or our feelings, it isn’t because they don’t care about us.

It’s much more likely to be about their own internalised relationship with their feelings.

If their feelings weren’t ever heard with loving compassion and empathy, they didn’t ever learn to listen to their own feelings with loving compassion, and thus they just don’t know how to listen to our feelings or our child’s feelings with loving compassion and empathy.

I also often find it helpful to put ourselves in our parents’ shoes.

If, in 20 or 30 years, your child/ren are now parents, and there are a whole load of new discoveries in developmental psychology, and they ask you why you didn’t do those things to them.

How would you want to be treated?

Would you want compassion and understanding for how much you were WANTING to do what was most helpful for them?

Would you want compassion for how hard it can be at times to do things for our own children that we didn’t receive ourselves?

The other thing that can be so hard, is that because most of our parents were brought up in a time of punishments, good and bad, shame and guilt, that if we try to explain these newer ways of parenting that we are aiming to practice, their own internalised self-judgments are likely to come in, and even if we aren’t judging them, they might very easily hear us as judging them.

It can take a lot of courage to see how our actions have impacted on our children, and to acknowledge that without judging ourselves, feeling guilty or ashamed, or getting angry in response to the person who is pointing out these things.

And it’s the same for our parents. Many of them were brought up in a time of harsher judgments. To acknowledge that, despite their huge love for us, the way they responded to us has led to pain for us, can take a lot for them.

And that’s why I think that a lot of this healing needs to be an inside job.

AND this isn’t the case for all of our parents.

For example, a lovely mother who is in some of my courses has a mother who can hear how it was for her daughter in the past, and is able to help her heal from those experiences by listening to her feelings, and saying to her now what she needed to her then.

It IS possible for our parents to change.

And yet, if they are not on their own inner journey, it can be a very hard thing.

Listening to our feelings will also invite them to listen to their own painful things.

The most wonderful thing is, that we CAN express all those things that we didn’t get to express to them on all those occasions when they didn’t hear us or understand us or where they acted in ways that were painful with us.

But we don’t need to express that to them for healing to happen.

That’s why I created the Inner Loving Presence Process.

It’s something that we can do ourselves, or with the help of another person.

It’s where we get to express the things that we didn’t get to express at the time.

The unmet needs, the unheard feelings, the things that we wanted to say and wanted to hear.

And the amazing thing is, I’ve found, that the more we get to express those things and have them heard with absolute unconditional love (either from our Inner Loving Crew or our Outer Loving Crew), the more a deep compassion arrives for our own parents.

The more we get to heal our own hurt from the past, the more we can naturally feel a sense of compassion for our own parents.

We realise that they weren’t doing, or not doing, any of those things deliberately.

We see them as human beings with their own pain, their own internal dialogue, doing all that they could do.

We see that they loved us, and were only acting out of their own pain.

That sense of compassion isn’t a forced thing, nor is it ‘forgiveness’.

It’s simply the natural state of our soul.

AND it deeply values, honours and validates our own feelings from the past.

But it’s not something that we can rush.

A true inner sense of compassion often only can come after we get to express at least some of the hurt and pain.

And I’ve also found that we often need to go through a process of letting go of our outer parents being able to hear us, or give us empathy, or understand us in the way we want to be understood.

And that can be painful, and can involve us feeling grief and going through mourning.

Letting go of the hope that they will be able to see us in the way we’ve been longing to be seen.

Letting go of the hope that they will be able to really hear us with unconditional empathy.

Letting go of the hope that they will take responsibility, without judging themselves, for the effects of their actions on us.

And yet, when we let go, we can also find that WE can give ourselves what we have been longing to receive from them.

We can see ourselves in the way we’ve been longing to be seen.

We can hear ourselves with unconditional empathy.

We can acknowledge and validate the effects of their actions.

And for me, that’s been through getting to know my Inner Loving Crew.

The more I’ve had my Inner Loving Mother, Inner Loving Father, Inner Best Friend and Inner Beloved by my site, listening to me, loving me, hearing me, understanding me, celebrating me, and helping me heal from past hurts, the more I’ve been able to free myself from the painful effects of the past.

I’m able to love myself the way I’ve been wanting to be loved.

I’m able to care for myself the way I’ve been wanting someone else to care for me.

I’m able to acknowledged and celebrate myself the way I’ve been wanting others to acknowledge and celebrate myself.

And the paradox is, that the more my Inner Loving Crew love me, care for me, listen to me, acknowledge me, celebrate me, and give to me, the more I’ve been able to receive love, care, empathy, acknowledgment and celebration from others too.

I wonder whether this resonates with you?

If so, I’d love to hear from you!

And I’m doing another live round of the Inner Loving Presence Process Course, starting next Tuesday, the 13th of June.

You can find out more by clicking HERE or on the meme below.

Love,

Marion

xxx