Forgive Your Parents

Do you find it hard to forgive your parents for how they treated you? Have you had enough of having your present dictated by the painful past?

The child psychologist Donald Winnicott, recognizing there is no such thing as a 'perfect parent', came up with the concept of the 'good enough' parent. It's 'good enough', he said, for parents to provide an environment where a child's needs are met and their potential allowed to develop. This means putting the child's well-being ahead of their own, but no parent can meet all a child's needs all the time, and some struggle to meet them even some of the time.

Did you get 'good enough' parenting?

This concept, while acknowledging the need for 'good' parenting, leaves plenty of scope for the variety of circumstances and personalities that go into the makeup of any real life parent/child relationship. If you've got to adulthood in more or less one piece, and can function more or less successfully as an independent adult in the world, you have probably had 'good enough' parenting, in most respects.

But 'good enough' can still feel - and be - painfully emotionally inadequate. And what if you didn't get even the basic 'good enough' care, and had to somehow make your own way without that support? That's a mighty tough challenge.

Emotional scars can make it hard to forgive your parents

It can happen that the deep emotional scars left by such experiences can become a problem in themselves. Feelings of anger, bitterness, or grief can haunt your life, giving it a backward-looking focus and making it hard to get on with becoming who you really want to be as an adult. Forgiveness is often held up as the ideal way to deal with this - but isn't that just condoning what they did?

A more useful way to think about forgiveness is as a process of taking back power. When you were a child, your mom and dad had all the power, and perhaps, they misused that power and hurt you. It is enough to have been hurt then but letting those memories continue to hurt you and affect your life now, is to let your parents have power again.

But how do you take back that power without condoning what they did?

Hypnosis can help you take back your power

Forgive your parents is an audio hypnosis session developed by psychologists that takes you through a powerful process that will help you to free yourself from the past.