#008 - You aren't actually angry at your parents...

It's easier to blame your parents than it is to take responsibility for your life. That doesn't mean your pain isn't real. That doesn't mean they didn't hurt you. But I think too many people are knowingly building identities around unresolved resentment. And eventually, the blame that once protected you now becomes the very thing that's keeping you stuck. I think it's really important that healing at some point stops being about what happened to you and more about what are you choosing to do about it. This is a difficult one for me because I say this is someone whose parents deeply wounded him. My mother has heavily narcissistic tendencies. My dad has tendencies to gaslight and to lie and to evade the truth. And that made growing up as a boy very confusing. If I could dissect my process of understanding and navigating the relationship I have in hold in my parents, I'd break it down into four steps. The first was denial of the hurt they caused, in other words, seeing them as the gods of my universe. Then realizing that they weren't that and the gods fell from their throne. And that led me into a process of violently villainizing them for years. Then the third step was recognizing that that process was actually keeping me stuck in an over-identification with the very wounds that they caused, and I was perpetuating them. And then the fourth step being the ability to have emotional flexibility to the point that I now understand that my parents messed up, that my parents gave me trauma and at the very same time they are humans themselves that were wounded. And I can love them and keep my heart open in the process of understanding the pain that was caused. It is the most potent conversation of our time in which people tend to fall on one of two sides. They had the best childhood ever and their parents caused them no pain and in many ways they're in denial of the wounds that are present. And on the other side, my parents fucked me up and there's no nuance to be able to see an honor, the gratitude for what they created. And I really want to dissect this and break this down in this episode to a place in which we can find an equilibrium. My therapist described this to me as the sign of a healthy brain and a healthy psyche is the ability to have emotional flexibility. To understand that someone can love you deeply and have hurt you deeply. And I think we have a tendency as human beings to live very black and white and we look at what someone's done and we take the behavior and we shame the human. There's a great quote that says that most people are in relationships but they're not actually in relationship. Why? Because they're holding someone in the light of an old view. They're holding someone in the light of the perspective that is based in an experience they had of that person in the past. What's the best way that I could put this? Many of you are in relationships but you're not in relationship. Why? Because you're not in relationship to the person, you're in relationship to the conversation you have about the person. And this is where many of us get stuck with our parents. We've developed a narrative about them and as a result we're constantly looking for evidence that fulfills on that narrative and we aren't giving them the opportunity to be a new human. We aren't meeting our parents with fresh eyes and as a result we're holding them in the light of a moment or a series of moments that caused us pain. And here's the truth. You aren't actually mad at them. You're mad at the fact that you're still affected by them. And that was a really eye-opening distinction for me. It's not that I haven't forgiven them. It's that I haven't forgiven myself for the role that I've played in relationship to them. And so no matter how many times I continue to forgive them I keep getting hurt. Why? Because I haven't actually forgiven me. And if you're finding it a delicate dance right now your relationship with your parents I would encourage you to really look closely at is the challenge that you haven't forgiven them or is the challenge that you haven't forgiven yourself for hoping it might change. For continuing to put yourself in environments in which the wound could be reopened for holding the eyes of the child who wished that it could be different and as a result trying and trying and trying again and continuing to get hurt is the anger you're holding actually towards them or is it towards the you that was holding onto the hope. That they might change and that the relationship could be different. Is the anger actually towards them or is it towards you and the part of you that was holding onto an idealized version of what the relationship could be. Are you actually angry at them or is the anger what you're using to avoid feeling the grief of a relationship that can't become what you are secretly wishing it might still become. I know this for myself with both of my parents but many men hold this haven't hold this with their fathers in particular. That we use anger as a way to protect ourselves from the grief of the dying of the relationship that we are holding in our minds eye. Many of us wish it would be deeper. Many of us wish it could be more fulfilling. Many of us wish that our father might reach out and plan a trip for just the two of us. Many of us wish that our father might reach out and be able to have and hold the emotional capacity to just hear us. Many of us wish we could go there with our dad. Talk about things that have been left unsaid. Many of us wish we could have the honest conversations. Many of us wish we could go to places that maybe our father has never been able to go to and we're holding on to a subtle but potent hope that one day there will be a vision of a relationship that is filled with such abundant love and depth and fulfillment. And for many of us the anger we have is actually the covering up of the grief that we would have to feel about the death of that vision, about the very knowing or the acceptance that we can't change him or her. And at some point I think that the next phase in the journey for many of us is the acceptance of the fact that we can't change our parents. We have to accept them as they are and that's going to require that we grieve the loss of the vision that we had for the relationship that might be. Hard truth. Your parents aren't going to ever be who you hope they will be and that relationship that you're holding that the vulnerable child in you still has that is holding on to the Godlike view that you've had of them subtly. I think one of the hardest truths to hear is that by perpetuating that God image you're actually preventing yourself from having a real relationship with them. And many of us are actually in relationship to our parents because we haven't let go of the idea that they're not God. And I think it's only when you actually let the idea die that they are meant to be the person who never hurt you that never wounded you that never caused you pain that is there to fix every problem you've ever been through that is and has the emotional capacity and flexibility to never be activated that is this idealized human that you can actually start to be in a relationship to them. It's only when you accept that they are a human flawed and all with their own wounds that has inherited their own generational trauma that is walking through the world doing the very best they can with the resources they have that you can be in relationship to them because you aren't seeing them through the eyes of this Godlike parental figure that has to have it all figured out. The moment that you accept that they aren't that is when you give the relationship the opportunity to really go where it's meant to go and to have the depth that it's been through. meant to have. And there's a few things that I want to read to you here that I think are really profound that have touched me in really deep ways. And again, I really need to be honest about something here. I'm not speaking about this as someone who had perfect parents. Fall from it. I was physically hurt. I was emotionally hurt. I was shamed and embarrassed. In fact, my therapist once said to me, "You were an early wounded child who's walking around the world carrying complex trauma." And for years, that trauma shaped everything for me, shaped my relationships, how I held myself, the view I had of myself, my nervous system, my sense of self worth. My deepest patterning was shame. We are navigating the delicate dance between authenticity and attachment. And as a child, attachment is more important than authenticity. Why? Because we are quite literally dependent on our caregivers to keep us alive. And so attachment is a higher value than authenticity. And so when being authentic puts your attachment relationships at risk, a child will sacrifice authenticity in order to maintain connection. And if not resolved, that child grows up into an adult that perpetuates a cycle of self abandonment. Many of us as humans, myself included for a large portion of my life, would deny my own authentic expression in order to maintain connection. That was an early childhood wounding pattern that I was fulfilling upon in my adult relationships because I was still living in the psyche of a 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11-year-old boy, that inside of his nervous system, quite literally had the experience of being hurt as a result of his authentic expression when it put in conflict or forced his caregivers to face themselves. And they weren't able to do that. They didn't have the emotional maturity to be able to do that. So he was blamed and shamed. I internalized everything as my fault because somewhere inside me, I believed that keeping the family system intact was safer than telling the truth. And in fact, it was for the boy. But that pattern can't serve the adult in building healthy, potent, powerful, strong, intact, authentic relationships. And so when I finally woke up to how deeply I'd been hurt, my first response was this level of violent, furious anger. Honestly, I needed to go through that process because before the anger that had been denial, I think many of us go through this process with our parents. There's denial and then there's anger and then there's grief and then there's forgiveness and then we can actually be in a human relationship with our parents. So long as we're in denial, we're holding them as gods. That's not a real relationship. So long as we are in the phase of anger, we are pushing them away. And that's not a real relationship because we're holding them in the light of their past choices, not their current self. So long as there is grief, we are in the process of healing and that might be the start of a real relationship with our parents because there's the opportunity for things to be brought to light. And finally, there's forgiveness of self, there's forgiveness of other, there's acceptance of flaw and that is where we begin to see both them and ourselves in relationship to them more clearly. And now we have the opportunity to be in right, congruent, adult, clean, pure relationship with them, not because it's perfect and not because they don't have their own dysfunction, but because you can see that they as much as you are human, flaws and all. And that gives you the opportunity to not condone certain behavior, but to love them through their wounding. There's a great quote that says that true enlightenment is accepting that you're human. And I think that might be the most profound statement that could free all of us, is that the true experience of enlightenment is accepting that you're not enlightened. When you realize that you're a human being, that they're a human being, that every single person you encounter, especially those closest to you, your parental figures, are humans. You have the opportunity to accept them, understanding that you don't fully understand the fullness of their experience. And that gives you the opportunity to be free. The first stage of my process was anger. And for years, I protected my parents in my mind because as children, we need our parents to feel like gods so that we can trust them fully. I need you to understand this and I had to understand this. As a child, in order to surrender fully to the trust that your parents will protect you, nurture you, feed you, keep you safe, that you're going to survive in this world, you have to hold your parents as gods. But at some point, that God image has to die for you to have a real relationship with them. And most of us get stuck because we are adults holding our parents in the view of the child parent relationship. And we have to evolve out of that in order to be in right relationship with them. At some point in my journey, it went from denial into seeing clearly. And suddenly, I could only see the pain. I could only see the being shouted at. I could only see the being shamed for the things that were not mine to carry. I could only see the abuse, although I don't really like to use that word and I'm careful and cautious in using that word. I could only see them in the light of what they'd done to me. And so in my own conversation, in my head, what I did was I turned them into villains. Not because I was evil, but because it was easier. I felt as though maybe anger gave me this sense of structure to the grief that I didn't yet know how to feel. And I think like many of us, for years I wore the cloak of how badly they'd hurt me. I bonded with partners, girlfriends, intimate relationships, friends, everything about how we could bond over our shared pain. Oh, I think I love her because she also had a fucked up mother. Oh, I think I were connecting because she has the same dysfunction as me. And I realized at some point that if all you do is connect with people over shared wounding, you never have the chance to discover whether someone's actually going to the same place as you. And most people get stuck because they're in relationships that have been built over past hurt, not future vision. And I was in too many intimate relationships, platonic relationships, business relationships that had been founded on a foundational principle that we're like each other because of where we've been, not where we're going. And I got stuck in my past hurt, lost in the spiral of a remembrance of what once was, not what could be. And those relationships were inevitably and eventually deeply disempowering because the moment I started to talk about where I was going, I realized we don't have much in common. All we have in common is that we've been hurt. That's not a recipe for a powerful relationship. So you don't actually hate your parents. You hate that you're still affected by them. That no matter how many times you try to forgive them, you still get activated because you haven't forgiven yourself. You haven't forgiven yourself for being a vulnerable child, a needy child, a sensitive child, a hopeful child. You haven't forgiven the part of you that kept reaching for love even after getting hurt. You haven't forgiven yourself for returning to environments that burned you repeatedly, hoping that this time it might feel different. And that's where many people stay trapped because it's easier to remain angry at others than to grieve how deeply you simply wanted to be loved. Many people are not only grieving [BLANK_AUDIO] parents did to them, they're grieving how long they abandoned themselves trying to receive love from people who could not give it in the way that they needed. And that grief is unbearable for the ego. Because anger feels powerful. But grief, grief is honest. grief is vulnerable. Grief admits I kept hoping, I kept waiting, I kept returning. I kept translating scraps of love into signs that maybe this time would be different. And eventually resentment becomes easier than the truth. Because as long as your parents remain villains, you never have to confront the deeper heartbreak, that they were never gods. Just wounded human beings that carry fears, limitations, survival patterns, and pain that they never fully healed themselves. And the hardest part of adulthood is realizing that your parents may have loved you deeply, and still lack the capacity to love you in the way that you needed. And that truth alone can break you open, but it can also set you free. Because the moment that you stop demanding that imperfect humans repair every wound they gave you is the moment you begin to finally reclaim your life. There's a great quote from Gabbo Marta, he says, "When authenticity threatens attachment, attachment always wins. Children will preserve attachment at all costs." That's why many of us will abandon our authentic selves to remain in connection with other people. Think about when you're getting into new relationships, and instead of being who you are, your first thought is, "How can I be what I think they need me to be so that I can remain attached to them?" And then eventually and inevitably, we find ourselves in relationships that are not serving us. Why? Because at the beginning of that relationship, we weren't being ourselves. We'd left ourselves to be what we think they needed us to be so that we could secure love. That's an early childhood wound that many of us are still operating within that has to die in order for us to be healthy, whole humans that can attract potent, powerful relationships. You cannot have a healthy adult relationship with your parents until the God image you hold them as dies. A child needs their parent to be gods, but an adult must learn how to love them after discovering that they're not. This is where most of us get stuck. We spend our whole lives holding on to the anger at what they've done, instead of accepting that they simply aren't gods. And the initiation is to learn how to love them after discovering that they're not. And the pain for many people is not simply that your parents hurt you. It's that the people you thought were all knowing were actually wounded, limited, frightened human beings. And that realization alone can completely destabilize the psyche, especially as you're learning how to become a healthy, whole adult. Because when the God image collapses, people usually go in one of two directions. They go into idealization or they go into resentment. But there is a third path. And that third path, I think is why I'm recording this today is because I've arrived at the place or I'm beginning to arrive at the place in which I'm realizing that the third path is maturity. It's understanding the reality while keeping your heart open and remain and keeping love intact. And that I think is the ability to hold the nuance. That my parents weren't hurting me intentionally. That they were doing the best they could with the resources that they had. And the moment that I forgive myself, I actually can see them through current and fresh eyes. Because forgiving myself does not mean that I'm going to put myself in that environment again. It means accepting that I didn't know any better. And this time I do. And that I now can parent myself the way they never did. I think the main insight here is that until the God image you have of your parents dies, the adult relationship can't begin. Because as long as someone is unconsciously expecting their parents to be emotionally omniscient, perfectly safe, endlessly attuned or capable of repairing every wound, they are still relating to them as a child. And the relationship keeps hitting a ceiling because you're holding them in the light of the God that they never were. And I think it was a powerful realization for me was that this relationship can't evolve into what I want it to be, not because they won't change, but because I haven't let go of the hope that they will. And when I let go of the hope that they will, I can actually grieve that they will never be who I wish that they would be. And as a result, I can finally now see them as the human that they are, which is clarity, which is reality, which gives me the opportunity to actually be in relationship to them. And that's powerful. It's powerful. When you can finally see your parents for who they are, not through the lens of the vision that you have for who they could be, you can actually have a relationship with them. And so I think what I'm learning, even just by sharing this in this conversation, is that the thing that's keeping you from having the relationship you dream of with your parents is the dream itself. I'll say it again. The thing that's keeping you from having the relationship you want with your parents is the dream itself. And when you let go of the dream, you can see them as they are, which will give you the opportunity to be here now with them in relationship to them now. Not in relationship to the conversation you have about either how they hurt you or who you wish they would be. You're the one that's actually not meeting them with fresh eyes, not them to you. And so the perpetual lie is that one, you can change them to that they'll change. And three, that they're the only ones that are in the way of this relationship being what it could be. No, it's actually you too. And I think that was the stage of my journey was the ability to be able to own the hurt and to recognize that I'm responsible for letting go of the image of them that I wish they would be so that I can see them as they are. And the ability for me to forgive myself and then inevitably forgive them so that I can move on and move forward. Let's move on. An adult relationship with your parent can actually begin when you stop asking, why weren't you perfect and start asking, who were you before you became my parent? That question can change everything, the complete shift, 360 shift of the lens in which you view your parent because suddenly your father becomes a boy who never had the space to feel. Your mother becomes a woman who is still trying to be seen because she never was. Your parents now become people who were shaped by histories that you inherited but never witnessed. And paradoxically, seeing them as human often allows you to love them more deeply than seeing them as gods ever did. I'm going to say that again. Paradoxically, seeing them as human often allows you to love them more deeply than seeing them as gods ever did because gods are expected to never fail. Yet humans can be forgiven. Now let's go into how this relates to you and the part about self forgiveness. I've come to realize that unresolved resentment is often actually unresolved self abandonment. What do I mean by that? By continuing to resent my parents, what I was not affording myself, the space to look at, what I was protecting myself from, was having to see all the times that I abandoned myself in relationship to them. That I sacrificed my own authentic desires, that I let go of my own needs, that I manipulated, distorted and changed myself to be what I thought they needed me to be so that I wouldn't get shouted at or hurt or hit or by holding onto my resentment of them. didn't actually have to look at and feel the guilt and the shame that I felt for all the times that I'd left myself. And so unresolved resentment is actually often unresolved self-abandonment. And if I can resolve and forgive myself for all the times that I've abandoned myself, then the resentment itself can actually dissipate too. His one, some people are more committed to proving they were hurt than actually becoming free. I think we often get stuck in the awareness stage of our development and that awareness stage perpetuates for so long that we actually start to become more interested in identifying with our wounds than we do moving beyond them. We're so aware of how much our parents fucked us up. We're so aware of the trauma they caused and the dysfunction they caused. That we actually start to introduce ourselves through that lens. Because I think it's easier to, and this maybe covers the premise of how I even began this episode itself, which is it is easier for us to hold onto resentment than it is to take responsibility for healing the wounds that were handed to us. It takes work to change your behaviors. It takes work to break free from patterns that have laced your life. It takes work to stop repeating the inherited generational past down pain that has been placed upon you. It takes work to get in a healthy relationship when all you've witnessed, all that was ever modeled to you as dysfunction. It takes work to change and part of true responsibility, part of becoming a victor over your life, part of taking ownership over where you want to go is to also take ownership over the fact that you are going to have to take responsibility for the things that you never caused, the things that weren't your fault, the things that hurt you, and so many of us, we just, we're actually remaining victim to our life by perpetuating the narrative that the reason we can't be who we want to be is because of our parents, that the reason we can't have a healthy relationship is because of our parents, that the reason we can't make all the money we want is because of the scarcity that they placed upon us, that the reason we can't go out and showcase ourselves is because of the childhood upbringing that we had, that the reason we can't become who were meant to become is because of them. That is, and I'm saying this to those of you who listen to this because I know that my audience is more interested in their future than they are their feelings in this current moment, that is the ultimate victim, the ultimate victim cannot get beyond the fact or the narrative that I can't heal because of you, the ultimate victim is in a constant state of blaming other people for the reason that they can't be who they wish to be, the reason that they can't live life the way they want to live life, the reason that they can't have what they came for and true responsibility is accepting, owning that yes you were hurt and you're going to have to fucking do something about it if you want your life to be different. You're going to have to take ownership of all the pain that was done to you, you're going to have to reparent the child in you that was never parented the way you needed, you're going to have to learn how and go to therapy and go to coaching and go and sit in environments and probably spend hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions of dollars to heal from the things your parents placed upon you. And until you accept that that's part of the process, you're going to get stuck in the narrative that you can't live and lead a powerful life because of them and that it's not them that's costing you, it's your conversation about them that's costing you. I'm going to say that again, your parents aren't the reason you can't live your life the way you want. It's that very narrative that's the reason you can't live your life the way you want and until you let go of the narrative that it's your parents fault that you can't make money, that you can't be in a healthy relationship, that you can't have everything that you came here for, until you let go of that narrative, you can't take responsibility for your life. And until you take responsibility for your life, you can't have all the things you say you want. And so one of two things has to happen and this is a this is a harsh reality check for many of you that are listening to this either shrink your vision or let go of the resentment. Either shrink your vision or learn to forgive them and forgive your role in relationship to them. Either shrink your vision or begin to choose differently because we are most affected in life not by what's done to us but by what we make it mean. And the greatest challenge for most of humans in the world is not what has happened to them but that they are perpetuating the narrative that is that because of what happened to me I can't be who I meant to be. And I have the utmost compassion I know that there is horrific events in the world. I know that some people have gone through some horrific things in their life but until you shift the narrative that you have around it you can't become empowered enough to create the life that you desire. And true empowerment is recognizing that there are no problems in circumstance only in perspective. And until you shift the perspective that you have in this case over your parents but really anyone who may have hurt you for that matter you can't take responsibility for a new outcome. Here's a great quote that I'm going to share to close this part out. As long as your parents remain the villains of your story you never have to confront the terrifying responsibility of becoming the author of your life. So long as you hold your parents in the light of villainhood you never have to take responsibility for writing a new story. And it is way easier, it's way simpler, it's way more comfortable to keep holding them in the light of the villain than it is for you to grab the pen, rip out a few pages, sit in ritual and ceremony in which you burn a few chapters that are no longer serving where you're intending to go and to write a few new chapters for yourself, to write a new story for yourself, to reclaim your life. This is what people mean when they tell you to choose your hard. The perpetual narrative that your parents are villains that's hard because it keeps you stuck going nowhere, not taking responsibility. Or you choose the hard which is to change it, to accept that you were hurt, to accept that your parents gave you trauma, to accept that it was exactly what you needed to become, who you're meant to become, to alchemize, to turn into magic and gift it to the world. Because the people that I love spending time with the most, the people that I have the utmost respect for, the people that I'm the most inspired by, are not those that haven't been hurt. It's those that have taken their pain and they've made it fucking sacred. They've alchemized it. They've put a nice red bow on it, packaged it beautifully, and they give it to the world in a way that touches those that are coming after them. They have not let it own them. They've taken ownership over it. And as a result, it has become the very thing that has allowed them to be of service to the world. Isn't that magical? That when you take your pain and you give it power, the very thing that hurt you is the same thing that you now use to become a vessel of love for the world. And you're sat here right now watching this and there may be ways in which you are sat and remaining in the light of your own victimhood and you have a massive opportunity to take your pain and to turn it into you, the very thing that God's source universe wants to use you for as a vessel of love, to bring more love, healing, power, connection in a world that is increasingly divided, in a world that is more lost and lonely than it's ever been, we need troops. I could go to war, not for my pain, but for the person that I could become. It brings up this quote that is, so many people never get where they're going because they're fighting so hard for the reasons why they can't get there. So many people never get where they're going because they're fighting so hard for all the reasons why they can't get there. Fighting so hard for your limitations, and as you will know, when you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. But when you fight for your life, the life that you're committed to building an excellence, when you fight for the overcoming, when you fight for a reclaiming, when you fight to be whole, when you fight to accept your humanity, when you fight for this vision that you have for your relationships and that your bank account and your body and your relationship with God and your connection to source and where you want to go in the world and how you want to serve and how you want to lead. Why not fight for that? You can't fight for what you're lacking and fight for a new life at the same time. You must choose. You must choose. Final act, reverence and freedom, let's set ourselves free here. Refusing is not pretending that your parents didn't hurt you. It is refusing to spend the rest of your life emotionally chained to wounded human beings. Healing is not pretending that your parents didn't hurt you. Here we go. The greatest thing that has freed me with my parents is a couple of things. The recognition that if I don't take responsibility for getting power over this, I'm going to pass it on and there are too many men and women in the world that are playing hot potato with their pain. I have always been someone and I know that my audience of listeners are people and I could get emotional talking about this are people that want to stand out in the world. A mentor and I once said to me, "Billy, if you want to stand out, you must first be willing to stand up." Those that are remaining stuck in the light of their pain aren't stood up for a new way of being. They aren't standing up for a new life. They aren't standing up for, you aren't actually even standing up for the child inside of you who needs a protector, who needs and still has and holds the dream that he has for his or her life. True empowerment is not realizing that your parents hurt you. True empowerment is realizing that your parents hurt you and you have the opportunity still to heal from it. The second part of that sentence I think is the most powerful. This is called the prison of hope. You don't actually hate your parents. That's why no matter how many times you try to forgive them, you still get activated because you haven't forgiven yourself. You haven't forgiven yourself for returning to environments that burned you repeatedly, hoping this time it might finally feel different. And that is where many people stay trapped. Because it's easier to remain angry at others than to grieve how deeply you simply wanted to be loved. Many people are not only grieving what their parents did to them. They are grieving how long they abandoned themselves, trying to receive love from people who could not give it to them in the way they needed. As anger feels powerful, but grief, grief is honest. Grief admits I kept hoping, I kept waiting, I kept returning, I kept translating scraps of love into signs that maybe this time would be different. And eventually resentment becomes easier than truth. Because as long as your parents remain villains, you never have to confront the deeper heartbreak, but they were never gods. Just wounded human beings carrying fears, limitations, survival patterns and pain, they never fully healed themselves. And the hardest part of adulthood is realizing that your parents may have loved you deeply and still lacked the capacity to love you in the way you needed. That truth might break you open. And breaking open might be the thing you need to set you free. Because the moment you stopped demanding the imperfect humans repair every wound they gave you is the moment you finally began to reclaim your life. As I was thinking about where we often get stuck in this suspended blame game with our parents, I wrote something down and I combined it with Chachi Beatty's support and it pumped out this. This is called the ritualization of resentment. We are living in a time where people are quicker to blame their parents than they are to forgive themselves. We speak endlessly about who hurt us but rarely about the versions of ourselves we abandoned just to stay loved. Many people are not angry at what happened to them, they are angry that they kept returning to environments that made them feel small, unseen, unworthy, hoping this time they would finally receive the love they needed. And that is a painful thing to admit. Because blame feels powerful, but grief is vulnerable. Grief admits I loved people who could not love me in the way I needed. And somewhere along the way many people decided that staying angry felt safer than becoming free, but the moment that you forgive yourself for staying too long, for not knowing better, for coping imperfectly, for needing love, you stop needing to make villains out of imperfect humans and you finally see them clearly. Not as the gods you imagined as a child, not as the villains you made them into in your pain, but as ordinary human beings who suffered, sacrificed and survived long enough for your life to become possible. The fragility of false gods, a child needs their parents to be gods, an adult must learn how to love them after discovering they're not. That's the initiation. The pain for many people is not simply that my parents hurt me. It is the people I thought were all knowing, were actually wounded, limited, frightened human beings. That realization destabilizes the psyche. Because when the god image collapses, people usually go one of two directions, idealization or resentment, but maturity is the third path, reality with love intact, there's a powerful thesis here that until the god dies, the adult relationship cannot begin. Because as long as someone unconsciously expects their parents to be emotionally omniscient, perfectly safe, endlessly attuned or capable of repairing every wound, they are still relating to them as a child. What relationships begin when you stop asking why weren't you perfect and start asking who were you before you became my parent? That question changes everything, because suddenly your father becomes a boy who never had the space to feel, your mother becomes a woman who's carrying invisible grief, and your parents become people who were shaped by histories that you inherited but never witnessed. Because gods are expected to never fail, but humans, humans can be forgiven. In conclusion, I think what I want to share here is, everyone must walk the path. But at some point, and I think my audience is at the stage in which many of you will resonate with this, you realize that, and I realized that. It's not that my parents didn't hurt me. It's that I wasn't going anywhere by continuing to perpetuate the story that I can't be do and have what I want because of what they did. And that maybe I'm not angry at my parents, maybe I'm exhausted by how much power the wound still has over me. That reorient the entire journey, from placing the blame outside of me, to taking responsibility for what I can do to heal myself, to forgive myself, to accept myself for the role I played. I don't think healing is about pretending that your parents didn't hurt you. I think it's about refusing to spend the rest of your life emotionally chained to wounded human beings. And maybe adulthood is not about learning how to see your parents as perfect. Maybe it's learning how to see them clearly. And then choosing that your heart will remain open anyway.