It is my firm conviction that the number one reason people are unhappy in life is because they refuse to believe that when they were kids their parents either flat-out didn’t love them, or loved them in a way that was so deeply tweaked it amounted to the same thing as not loving them.
It’s also my belief that the reason people refuse to accept the truth that when they were kids their parents treated them awfully is grounded in the fact that as very young children they instinctively grasped how terribly vulnerable their parents not loving them made them.
We spend the first years of our lives utterly dependent upon our parents for virtually everything we need to survive. If they don’t choose to give us what we need, we perish. I think that’s a basic fact of life that all humans understand pretty early into the big game o’ life.
And so children born to crappy parents do virtually the only thing they can do, which is to immediately, absolutely and without question convince themselves that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, their parents really are good, caring people who really do love them.
Having parents who really do love you = an outstanding chance of you surviving.
Having parents who obviously don’t love you = you probably won’t make it.
That’s not much of a choice, is it? And so most (and I would even argue all) children “decide” that, come hell or high water, their parents, no matter how much information they’re getting to the contrary, really do love them. In the choice between what is true, and what needs to be true, what needs to be true inevitably wins.
And so children born into unhappy families begin to build their lives upon a lie.
And as surely as one day follows the next, children who are forced to build their lives upon a truth they can’t possibly face turn into adults whose lives are built upon a truth they can’t possibly face. And so as adults people who had unhappy childhoods continue their suffering: they’re angry; they’re forever imagining themselves victims; they’re easily upset; their relationships don’t work. In short, they have no idea who they are. They don’t know who they are, because the core truth of who they are was lost in the lie they had to live — which is to say, very often, in the person they were essentially forced to become — in order to as effectively as possible deal with the threatening dynamics of their dysfunctional family life.
Adults who are lost and unhappy in life have a simple, terrible choice to make. They must either accept the fact that their parents didn’t love them — which is tantamount to utterly and completely rejecting their parents — or they must continue to live lost and unhappy lives.
They either toss their parents off their shoulders, or they continue to sink with their parents strapped to their back. That’s the choice waiting to be made by every adult who was raised in a psychologically unhealthy family.
And what people almost always choose is continuing to go down with their parents strapped to their back. And they make that “choice” for a perfectly understandable reason: it’s still in their mind — it’s still in their heart; it still defines the psychological paradigm of the only life they’ve ever known — that rejecting their parents means they themselves must be rejected. They’re continuing to operate within the context of their initial, original paradigm — and all too dearly paying the price for it.
If you are unhappy in life — if no matter what you do, say, think, or believe, you’re still dogged by this feeling that something fundamental just isn’t right with you or your life — then do yourself a favor, and give some thought to the idea that you have or had Genuinely Lousy parents. That maybe it’s not you. That maybe it’s them. That maybe it’s always been them.
That maybe the reason you’re so burdened is that you’re carrying around weight that doesn’t, or shouldn’t, belong to you.
If you’re regularly dogged by a sense of unhappiness or anxiety, just try on the thought that your parents were awful, that they were in no way emotionally or psychologically prepared to have children.
Go ahead. Give it a shot. In the privacy of your own mind, really reject your parents. Scream at them. Blame them. See them for the sorry, ill-equipped losers they were.
Banish them from your heart.
Walk away from them.
Let ‘em die.
It won’t kill you. I promise.
As the one and only Jesus put it, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Just out: UNFAIR: Why the “Christian” View of Gays Doesn’t Work (softcover edition; Kindle edition; NookBook edition). Find me here and on my Facebook page.
![John Shore on The Huffington Post](http://johnshore.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/huffpost.jpg?w=120 "John Shore on The Huffington Post\")
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I’ve grappled with this issue since age 9, when I first attempted suicide to get away from my mother who used her children as a way to extract cash from our fathers. Her affection went to the sibling whose father made regular contributions. My father as luck would have it is extravagantly wealthy but didn’t acknowledge me so when I was 9 my mother tried to force me to do a press interview where I and I alone would say I was looking for my father. An uncle intervened to stop me talking in telly to the entire nation. She then said that I was the reason she lost her beauty and basically never even provided me with meals. I went to school without breakfast, had no money for lunch and had to ask for dinner. I am anorexic and bulimic now, because I didnt develop fully in puberty and had a distorted body image. I am not accustomed to looking “healthy” now that I can afford to eat. Relationships are impossible because I have no sex drive due to the eating disorders and refuse to talk about my parents and a decent man will want to know everything about me. I have no friends either. That’s the only way I can be happy: not sharing this crappy aspect of my existence with others. If you don’t want children, abort. Never put them through this. When she was pregnant with my sisters she never told me even when she was showing. An aunt visiting us was kind enough to tell me that my mother was actually married to the man living in the house for a year! I didnt know his name and I didnt know what to call him for a year!!! By the way, in an interesting twist of fate, I’m fully subsidizing my mother’s life now: she has a juicy pension investment plan, an investment portfolio, life insurance, comprehensive health insurance that I manage and her bills are fully paid. I’m the only one of her children who is employed! I look after her because otherwise she will tell everyone who will listen that I’m obliged to do so because my father is rich and I destroyed her body!!!!
I did what you did, John. At the age of 7, I asked my 1st grade teacher if I could live with her. I told her my parents did not care about me and that I loved her more. She tried to convince me that I loved my parents. “No, I love you.” I spent more time with her than I had ever spent with my parents. She had showed me more love and affection than they ever had. She asked me if I would miss my sisters and brother. That one brought out a yes….. So she told me I could not go home with her, but she loved me, and remember how much I loved and would have missed my sisters. It was the best she could do for me. It helped, for awhile. Amazing that as a little kid,I tried to get away from my parents. I knew they were not good for me. I would have left with her that day and never looked back. I survived by some miracle. Kids know if they are loved or not. I do not love my parents, and you are right about constructing a fantasy of parental love in order to survive. I did that for years until I finally admitted…..it was a fantasy of a child in order to survive the neglect and abuse. I am an adult and let the fantasy go around the age of 25 to 29. Hard as it is to face the truth, it helped me heal and build a better life for myself.
John, I came from a dysfunctional family: My father was a Southern Baptist preacher who ran our home like a drill sergeant. My mother was forever at his side, even if it meant abandoning me and my siblings. Both parents were ALWAYS at the church for meetings, so that gave my brother plenty of opportunities to sexually abuse me and my younger sister for years. And we ALL married and left home as teenagers because we couldn’t WAIT to get away from our SOB father.
All of us kids have suffered from one addiction or another. We’ve all been either divorced or in terribly unhappy marriages. We’ve all had problems finding careers in which we felt competent, appreciated and understood. And we’ve all had unimaginable emotional problems and estrangements from each other and/or our own kids.
And yet, in spite of all this, I do not blame my parents for any of it. Not one thing. It has nothing to do with my not wanting to accept that my parents didn’t love me, because my parents DID love me. Maybe they didn’t love me like YOU, John, think they should have loved me, but they loved and parented me the best way they knew how.
You see, my father was one of 13 kids who were the children of a moonshine still-operating alcoholic who abused their mother on a regular basis. They were poverty-stricken before there were such things as food stamps and welfare. My mother was a sweet, life-loving woman who truly believed her principle calling in life was to be her husband’s helpmate in carrying out his ministry. An outdated way of thinking, perhaps, but in those days women were taught to believe those kinds of things about themselves.
I haven’t always refused to blame my parents; in fact, I went through several years of placing the blame for my unhappiness on them, although it did me no good. But as the parents of grown children, I know now that my parents did the best they knew how to do, just like I did. My husband and I love our children dearly, and we tried our damndest not to make the same mistakes in raising them that our parents had made. But guess what? We made DIFFERENT mistakes, and they’ve all been angry as HELL at us at one time or the other. But they, too, will make mistakes in raising THEIR children, no matter how hard they try to be perfect parents.
In spite of its being the most important thing we’ll ever do, parents are not given any kind of formal education in raising children. The only training we get is on-the-job training and, of course, we often DO raise our children like we ourselves were raised, no matter how hard we try not to. How can we be expected not to make some really big mistakes raising our kids?
So, John, it is absolutely WRONG for you to encourage people to rid themselves of their parents, because as Christians, we are to forgive. There is no forgiveness whatsoever in casting people out of our lives because they are human and make mistakes. Thank GOD the people in my life still love me in spite of my not being perfect.
I ‘left home’ emotionally when I was about 6 years old. However I kept (sort of) trying. The last straw was when my bother over-dosed and I was calling mom every day to see how she was doing. The third day she told me she never wanted to talk to me again she would grieve for my brother until the day she died. Two years later she called to say she was thinking about me, I asked her why and reminded her of what she said. She has not contacted me since and my brothers widow is stuck.
I am successfully self-employed (I still laugh when my brother said “I forbid it…”) aviation entrepreneur AND software designer. I married someone like me and was able to tell him quickly (after counting my fingers between the wedding and the birth) that NO his father did not love him and it was only when the old guy was dying did he realize he screwed the pooch and how special his son really is.
Ok so it’s an old article, but you should dust it off every so often and maybe even so a seminar on it.
hey john,
i know this is an old one. but a number of times in my life i have said “you know, i’m not a christian, but i read this one christian writer/blogger, and he wrote this article and you really gotta read it” and i have sent them the url to this article.
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