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Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves: The Definitive Guide
Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves: The Definitive Guide
Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves: The Definitive Guide
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Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves: The Definitive Guide

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For more than 15 years, people who grew up in dysfunctional families have found hope, healing, and the power to move forward with their lives in the classic Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves. Now, in this revised and updated edition--which includes new stories, statistics, and more practical help--a new generation can move beyond failure to forgiveness by understanding the roots of their pain.

Readers will explore family patterns that perpetuate dysfunction by constructing a "psychological family tree" that will uncover family secrets and habits that have shaped their adult identity. As they develop a greater understanding of their family of origin, they will be able to take the essential step of forgiveness, releasing themselves from the chains of the past to live in freedom and wholeness. Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves gives readers the power to become "unstuck" from behaviors that hurt themselves and those they love, changing their hearts so they can change their lives forever.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 21, 2011
ISBN9781441225924
Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves: The Definitive Guide
Author

Dr. David Stoop

Dr. David Stoop (1937-2021) was the founder and director of the Center for Family Therapy and cohost of the nationally syndicated New Life Live! radio and TV program. The author of more than 30 books, including Forgiving What You'll Never Forget and Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, David coauthored several books with his wife, Jan, and led seminars and retreats on topics such as marital relationships, parenting, men's issues, fathering, and forgiveness. Learn more at www.DrStoop.com.

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    Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves - Dr. David Stoop

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    PART ONE

    Unpacking Family

    Baggage

    1

    Family: Ties that Bind?

    The pain and heartache you may have suffered in your family may tempt you to put your family behind you once and for all. But leaving home is not that easy and may not be the healthiest course of action, anyway.

    Brian was clearly in a bad way. By the time he came to see me, he had been hospitalized four separate times for the same set of problems: severe depression, alienation and thoughts of suicide. The hospital programs had all done their best, applying every conceivable form of individual treatment and therapy. Brian would get better and improve enough to be released from the hospital and sent home. But before long his symptoms would reappear and he would be right back where he started.

    We talked for a long time. I asked him a lot of questions about himself, his feelings, his problems. I also asked him about his family. Much experience has taught me that family patterns can sometimes unlock mysteries that have yielded to no other attempts at understanding. One of the things he told me was that several years before—just prior to his first hospitalization—his cousin Sheila had tried to commit suicide. Her father was a police officer, and she had taken his gun and gone to an open field and shot herself.

    The attempt had failed, and she was left permanently handicapped as a result. Brian spoke bitterly about the way his family blamed him for what had happened to his cousin. It seems that a week before she tried to kill herself, Sheila had talked to Brian about how hopeless she felt, how alone and depressed. Brian had been alarmed. He had asked her if she was contemplating suicide. She had insisted vehemently that she was not. Then, a week later, she made her futile but destructive attempt.

    When the family heard about Brian’s conversation with Sheila, they were outraged. Surely he should have seen what was coming! Surely he should have insisted that Sheila seek help! Surely he should have told someone what was going on! The fact that Sheila had specifically denied that she was thinking of suicide meant nothing. It was all his fault—or so the family seemed to think. And so, in time, did Brian. No one ever seemed to blame her father for leaving his gun carelessly available for her to take.

    Brian was only 15 years old at the time and could not possibly have been expected to recognize his cousin’s cry for help, but he felt responsible for what had happened. His parents, his aunts and uncles—they were right. It was his fault. He was to blame for Sheila’s tragic condition. The feelings of remorse and guilt were almost enough to—quite literally—drive him crazy.

    During the course of our time together, I was able to point out to Brian the pattern that seemed to have developed regarding his problems. When he went into the hospital where, of course, he was away from his family, he got better. But when he got out and went back home to live, it was only a matter of months until his family’s attitudes toward him pushed him back into despair and depression.

    I talked to Brian about dysfunctional family systems—generational patterns— of behaviors and relationships within families that work to make us unhealthy rather than healthy. I talked to him about the roles that members of such families take on, and the effects those roles can have on them. In particular, I talked to him about the role of scapegoat—the one onto whom all the others project their own feelings of guilt and shame. The more we talked, the clearer it became to Brian and to me that his problems stemmed, for the most part, from some very unhealthy behaviors and attitudes in his family. In time we were able to identify a number of these family patterns and dynamics. Brian had to change the way he responded to these patterns if he was to remain healthy. There were other factors, of course: the treatment and therapy provided in the hospital played an important role. But in Brian’s case, family issues were the key. As we worked to resolve them, his other problems became more manageable and his life more stable.

    Children don’t know what causes their misery. In fact, children don’t realize their dysfunctional home is abnormal. Even physically abused kids don’t realize, while young, that normal parents don’t beat their kids; they think that there is no other way to live.

    NANCY CURTIS, BEYOND SURVIVAL ¹

    Julie came from what most people would consider a perfectly normal family. On the outside, her parents looked like the classic Ozzie and Harriet couple. Her mother and father were still faithfully married to each other. Her father provided well for the family. Her mother never worked, preferring to stay home and care for the children. But on the inside, there were subtle dynamics at work in Julie’s family that made it a difficult place to live.

    One day, Julie poured out her pain over one especially vivid memory. She was about four years old, and she was walking somewhere with her parents. They were arguing about something—Julie never knew about what—and all at once her mother simply started walking away. Julie’s father suddenly turned and yelled at Julie. He grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her and threw her down on the sidewalk. Then he stomped away.

    Julie’s mother froze in her tracks. For what seemed like forever, she simply stood there, staring at Julie, then at Julie’s father. Finally she motioned for Julie to come to her. Julie ran to her mother in tears and clung to her, sobbing.

    A few minutes later, Julie and her mother came around a corner and found her father standing there, about 20 feet away, his hands in his pockets, his head down, shuffling his feet awkwardly. He looked like a hurt little boy, Julie said, like a little boy who knew he had done a bad thing and didn’t know what to do about it.

    Neither Julie’s mother nor her father said a word. They just silently fell in and started walking again. Julie remembers her father reaching out to tousle her hair. She drew back, still trembling with fear from his recent outburst. But her mother seemed to have forgotten all about it. The three of them walked along together, her mother holding hands with Julie’s father on one side and with Julie on the other. Years later, Julie could still remember the confusion she felt, the empty, hurt feeling inside. How could her father treat her like that? How could her mother let him? And how could both of them simply go on as if nothing had happened?

    As I listened to Julie talk, I wondered to myself how many other times that scene had been played out. How many times was she angrily shoved aside, bearing the brunt of a parent’s pent-up anger? How many times, I wondered, had her father been similarly shoved aside, his fears and hurts ignored, when he was a child? Julie had described him as looking like a hurt little boy. I suspected there was more truth to that characterization than she knew.

    And what about Julie’s mother? What did her behavior say about the way she had learned to deal with conflict? Evidently she had learned not to confront, but to simply stand back, stay silent and wait for the storm to pass. Julie described her as literally caught between the two people who were the most important to her, silently enduring their crises, hoping for the best.

    In time Julie and I were able to learn more about both her own family and about her parents’ families. We could see how patterns of behavior had been passed cross-generationally to both parents, and then on to her. She came to understand how her mother’s peacemaker role prevented clean, clear resolution of problems. She came to recognize how unspoken rules in her family prevented everyone from talking about what they were experiencing, and from dealing with unpleasant realities. As Julie worked through the pain of her new awareness, she gradually discovered a wonderful freedom from unhealthy self-concepts and destructive emotions that had plagued her all her life.

    Mary’s story was more traumatic. Her depression was so severe and so long-standing that it was hard for her to dig through the layers of emotional calluses she had built up and come to grips with her family background.

    That background was a nightmare. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother was physically abusive; Mary told how she had once beaten her with a metal towel rack. Both parents were verbally abusive. Mary told of the relief she felt when they would go out and leave her and her older brother home alone. But even that soon led to other problems.

    When Mary was eight years old, her brother raped her. Later, when her mother came home, Mary sobbed as she told her what had happened. Her mother never even checked Mary’s physical condition. When the brother denied having done anything wrong, Mary’s mother called her a liar and sent her to her room. Both Mary and her brother learned the lesson of this incident: that the sexual abuse could continue and that Mary would endure in silence. Once this issue came to light, however, it was easy for Mary to see how the law of silence had held her prisoner all her life.

    Lydia, by contrast, came to counseling knowing full well that she needed to deal with issues of sexual abuse. Her stepfather had molested her from the time she was 12 until she left home at age 16. Her mother knew what was happening but did nothing about it. She simply waited in another room until it was over. Sometimes she even watched it occur.

    After spending several months working through this issue, Lydia’s therapist arranged for her mother and stepfather to come to a combined session with their daughter. Lydia had written down what she wanted to say to them. She had practiced with her counselor how she would say it. There would be no hysterical namecalling or exaggerated accusation, just a straightforward recitation of what had happened and how it had made her feel. Lydia and her therapist felt that taking this step was important if Lydia was to let go of her bitterness and get free of her past.

    Lydia’s parents sat silently through her presentation. When she finished, they stoically denied everything—both of them! They were quite calm and matter-of-fact about it. The only emotion they showed was irritation that Lydia had accused them of such terrible things in front of a stranger. In some ways, Lydia had run into a brick wall. She went back to the group and talked through her disappointment at her parents’ denial. As she worked through her feelings, she was also able to see why she had been held hostage by her past for so long.

    Larry spent most of the first five years of his life waiting. Usually, he was sitting in the backseat of a car, waiting for his parents to emerge, thoroughly drunk, from some bar. He became accustomed to being left behind. One day he stood on his aunt’s front porch and watched his parents drive away and leave him yet again. But this time was different: this time they never came back.

    As bad as those first five years had been, they were overshadowed by the questions that haunted him into adulthood. Where did his parents go? Why did they leave him? Where were they now? No one in Larry’s family knows the answer to those questions. Larry has had to learn how to deal with the gaping hole left by his parents’ abandonment of him. When he came to counseling he was burned out from trying so hard to win everyone’s approval. Slowly he started to see that his present lifestyle was directly connected to his fear of being abandoned and the experiences of his childhood.

    Generational Patterns

    The people we have just described, and many others whose stories we could recount, are unique individuals with distinctly different backgrounds and life circumstances. No two are alike in every respect. But they are all alike in one very important respect: They are all products of families whose dynamics and relational patterns were sufficiently disordered that they can be considered unhealthy and dysfunctional.

    They are grown men and women who, after years of struggling with a variety of emotional, psychological and relational problems, have come to realize that part of the reason they are the way they are is because something in their family background made them that way. Usually there are additional factors involved as well. But in all these cases, and in many others besides, family dynamics wound up holding the key to recovery. As these men and women have come to understand more clearly the way these dynamics have affected them, they have been able to cut themselves loose from their effect and go on to live happier, more fruitful lives.

    The stories I have cited are drawn from my experience as a professional counselor. Some are obviously more dramatic and traumatic than others. But some—like the story of Julie, the little girl whose father shoved her in a fit of anger—do not seem dramatic at all. There the family dysfunction was less extreme, less outwardly visible. But it was no less real. I am convinced that a great many of us, once we know what to look for and how to interpret it, can gain from understanding the dysfunctional dynamics of our own family—whether or not our past has been scarred by such obvious forms of dysfunction as physical and sexual abuse, divorce and the like.

    However, to say that families are dysfunctional is redundant. Every family is dysfunctional to some degree because everything that human beings touch is to some degree dysfunctional. Dysfunctional means that something doesn’t work the way it was intended. Each of us, because of Adam’s sin, doesn’t work quite the way God designed us to work. Our families, our work, even our play is less than perfect because of sin.

    The problem, of course, is that we live in an imperfect world. We were all raised by imperfect parents in imperfect families. And, if we are honest, we recognize that we have all grown up to be imperfect adults. There is thus a sense in which we can all justifiably see ourselves as adult children of dysfunctional families.

    I often say that I grew up in a dysfunctional family and that when I married and had children, I created a new dysfunctional family. Now I watch my sons create their own dysfunctional families. Our goal is not to stop being dysfunctional—that we cannot do. Our goal is to become more and more healthy in the ways we function as a family. I have worked hard to make my family healthier than the family I grew up in, and I trust my sons are working to make their families healthier than what they experienced growing up.

    Therefore, it is probably more helpful to say that some families are healthier in the way they operate than other families. And some are unhealthier than others. So if you are having a problem with whether or not your family was dysfunctional, assume that it was and is. Then look to see how healthy or how unhealthy your family was and probably still is.

    You may feel that your family of origin wasn’t dysfunctional since your father wasn’t an alcoholic.… The truth is, however, that, due to the fallen nature of all parents (and children), all families are flawed and therefore dysfunctional to a certain degree. Addictive and compulsive behaviors (addictions to food, sex, work, and so on) are extremely common in even the best of families, and such behavior is almost always linked to some form of dysfunctional family background.

    DAVE CARDER, ET AL., SECRETS OF YOUR FAMILY TREE²

    A definition that includes everything and excludes nothing is not a very helpful definition. Let’s recognize, then, that I am describing a condition with a range of expressions. You may consider yourself a product of what one man calls your basic, everyday, garden-variety dysfunctional family. You recognize that your parents had their flaws and your family its weaknesses, but you have never felt that they have negatively affected your adult life in a major way. Most people who place themselves in this category are surprised when they discover how big were the little hurts they endured and how they affected their life. If you place yourself in this category, I encourage you to read this book for the insights you can gain into how to make your own life even more fruitful, and how to make your family life even more satisfying.

    Others have already recognized that this is a book about them. As you read the stories of Brian, Mary, Lydia and the others, you heard bells go off inside your head, and something inside you said, That’s me he’s talking about. That’s my life he’s describing. If you are in this category, I believe this book can help you begin a wonderful process of growth and recovery.

    Still others will be unsure at this point. You may never have heard the phrase dysfunctional family before, let alone understand what it means or how it may apply to you. All you know is that something is not right in your life. It may be anything from a lingering depression, to a problem with anger, to bouts of extreme anxiety, to inexplicable difficulties trusting others and getting close to them in relationships. You may have tried a number of things to deal with your problem, with varying degrees of success. You may be a deeply religious person whose commitment to spiritual truth has provided a great deal of comfort, but still you find yourself groping for the key to some personal difficulties that continues to elude you. If you place yourself in this category, I urge you to read this book carefully. It may well mark the beginning of an exciting time of self-discovery and growth for you.

    Family: Who Needs It?

    Let’s get back to the men and women whose stories opened this chapter. Given the amount of pain and anguish their parents caused them, why don’t they just put it all behind them? That’s really the big question. Many of us, when we look at the problems we continue to experience because of our imperfect backgrounds, are tempted to feel this way. Aren’t we grown-ups now? Aren’t we able to think and act and decide for ourselves? Why not just leave our family of origin behind? Why not just forget about it and get on with life? We don’t want to open up problem areas, so why think about them?

    I often work with people who have moved from the east coast to the west coast just to get away from their parents and their family. What they don’t realize is that when they moved, part of the baggage they brought with them was their family. Their parents are like a committee that lives inside their head. Moving away geographically doesn’t change anything—the committee is still active. Distance doesn’t really change anything.

    We can’t just walk away and pretend that our family never happened. (Indeed, as we go on, we will see that trying to walk away and pretend it never happened is one of the worst things we can do.) Every person I have met from an unhealthy family system goes through a period when they are so grieved and angry about what has happened to them that they feel they never want anything to do with their parents again. Yet they constantly find themselves drawn back. Deep inside, they find they still want something, still need something from their families. The question is, why? Why does our family still exert such a strong grip on us even as adults?

    To answer that question, we need to look back on our original experience of family. In the beginning of our life, family is indispensable for two reasons: first, for our sheer survival; second, for our early development and socialization.

    It takes only a brief glance at an infant to recognize the survival aspect. Unlike most species in the animal kingdom, which shove their offspring out of the nest within a matter of weeks or months, human beings are so created that they are dependent on their parents (or some other adult member of the species) for their survival for many years.

    But even as we grow older, our family ties continue. Because we are so needy at such a young age, we develop extraordinarily tight bonds to our family, even in those cases when it was harmful to us. Our neediness continues when we become adults, even though it usually takes different forms. This is a constant reminder of our original dependence on our family.

    As hard as we may try to deny our neediness as adults, it is still there, exerting its tug on our psyche, always drawing us back to our original tie to the family. Consider the familiar case of the young adult who cannot wait to get away from his parents but who, once he has done so, is forever coming back for home-cooked meals, for money and (though he would never admit it) for parenting.

    The longing for family is incredibly powerful, even in those cases where it might seem least warranted. Lydia, for example, knew full well what her mother and stepfather were like. She knew the pain she had experienced at their hands. Deep down, I think she knew how unlikely it was that they would ever acknowledge the damage done to her, let alone take any responsibility for it. Yet she longed for their love and affection. The longing never went away, even after the disastrous session in which they blandly denied the shocking behavior she knew to be true.

    Many of us left home, defiantly vowing, I’ll never do it like my parents. Unfortunately, we are what we learn, and eventually, somehow, our parents manage to take up residence inside us. Only later as adults do we discover that we have never truly left home. In fact, in many ways we are just like our parents, who played the same

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