Would you tell me I was wrong?
Would you help me understand?
Are you looking down upon me?
Are you proud of who I am?
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do
To have just one more chance

The problem with parents, IMHO, is that it’s so easy to mimic them, and then hate yourself for doing the same stupid things they did with their children. Emotional baggage is so costly.

Thanks again John.

Verry brave words to sing… especially coming from a homosexual…. Just thought you should hear that.

Out of the bitter, complaining people I meet, probably the one thing they all have in common is their response to “my life just didn’t turn out the way I thought it would.” It’s the ones who stubbornly insist that they really need their life to look like x-y-z who are the most miserable.

Fantastic post…yeah the last one gave me pause, but I get what you are saying and I totally agree.

But you’re still a bad Christian.

thereisnogray: Wow. Thanks for that. God’s loving you today, that’s for sure.

Dan: I think one of the great, weird, infinitely destructive myths we all somehow have convinced ourselves is true is that our emotional past somehow fades as we get older. It doesn’t. If anything, as we get older our childhoods tighten the grip they have on us: we grow more entrenched by our past, more challenged by it, more afraid of it. William Faulkner said it so well: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” A lie hidden only grows in power, and the lie so many of us tell ourselves is the one we HAD to tell ourselves in order to survive our childhood, which is that our parents were really GOOD people who really MEANT well and who REALLY loved us with all their might. For any of us for whom that’s basically not true at all, life sure can be one hard, long struggle, as we spend our lives and energy frantically running away from something which is permanently attached to us, and from which we can’t escape at all.

You have to go INTO that pain, not run from it. Nothing can stand before the power of the truth. It sounds like Matrix movie ad, or something–but it sure is true, isn’t it? It’s THE truth in life, I think.

I wouldn’t say this in a post, because I get enough grief just for saying the kinds of things I do, but the bottom line is that, for many of us, we can’t make it to health until we actually psychologically murder our parents. It sounds awful, but I don’t care. It’s true. Our parents must be utterly and irrevocably dead to us. It really does take that level of emotional intensity. I guess a less intense way of saying it is that you have to absolutely FIRE your parents, and take over their job as your parent. They’re out. They’re gone. They’re fired. You’re in. You’re here. You’re the new Boss of You. That’s it. They can have no significance in your heart, mind, or soul. None. Nothing. They can have no life within you. And, oddly enough, THAT’S when you can finally relax around them, and the memory of them. It’s really when you have no hope for them whatsoever that you can make peace with them. They never changed. They never will. They’re always going to be the exact same pain-in-the-ass people they always were. Once you give up all hope for them, you’re … done with them, basically. Then you can move on.

When it comes to our parents, it’s hope that’s the enemy. Hope they’ll affirm you. Hope they’ll treat you right. Hope you’ll have a good relationship with them. Hope they really DO love you.

Hang on to that sort of stuff, wait for that kind of stuff, think you can’t be happy until you get that kind of stuff, and you basically waste your life waiting for something that will never exist, and never has. That’s how you end up wasting and sacrificing your life for a cause that barely gives a crap about you at all. No good.

I think the best way most people can look at their parents–and the way I think virtually everyone can greatly benefit from understanding their parents–is as nothing more than egg and sperm donors.

This isn’t about hating our parents. It’s about claiming our autonomy from them, which, in one way or another, MUST be done in order to establish our own identity, which we must do if we’re going to fulfill our potential.

Anyway, I typed this all too fast, but I hope it’s made at least some sense.

And Morse: What I’m saying is at the core of all great religions–or philosophies, for that matter. It’s not particularly Buddhist (though, actually, I know what you mean by claiming it is). It’s not Christian. It’s not Muslim, or Jewish. It’s all of them. It’s HUMAN, is what it is. That’s what I like about it. One truth for all people. It’s gold that way.

How very Buddhist of you.

And remember, I’m 63, not exactly a teenager. And the crappy part of this whole state of mind, is that Dad passed away in 2003 and my Mom is in hospice, so I wonder what I can do to resolve these feelings at this point in my life anyway.

How many generations will be afflicted by these same issues before someone breaks free of the curse, as we seem to become our parents as we age, with all their imperfections and none of their virtues.

I looked up attachment disorders a few months ago, and it seemed to just add more fuel to my misery.

Great job, John, now if you could recommend a really good shrink…..