LISTEN TO PARENTS IT CAN HELP YOU HEAL!

Practice listening to parents

To have completed such a rich personal forgiveness with my mum over three years was such a healing for me. I love you, Mum!

Listening to my mother’s story was so healing for many of the hurts that I carried. I cannot urge you enough to sit with at least one of your parents and ask what his or her life was like growing up. Just listen and appreciate him or her for being as honest as possible. So many of my clients have done this, and it truly has helped them. If the parents have died, I often suggest a “gestalt” chair technique to assist in putting together the pieces of a picture or puzzle of your life. The client first sits in the chair of the child and asks, “What happened in your childhood?” Then the client switches chairs and plays the part of the parent and provides an empathetic response. Careful facilitation of this exercise has brought floods of tears and such huge healings. It’s amazing how pain can be transformed and healing insights come.

Dive a little deeper to the fear of being abandoned by someone who is supposed to love you! Long-held deep secrets around abuse often lead to extreme jealousy and mistrust in later intimate relationships.

I believe the root of my mother’s jealousy, and the reason she became such a bitter woman, was that her own mother knew her daughter was being abused and did nothing. My mother’s mother was so terrified to tell anyone, and she died young from breast cancer. I am sure her mother’s guilt for not putting a stop to what she knew was going on between her daughter and her husband contributed to her cancer. (From listening to many women’s abuse stories—and sometimes those of men—I learned that the mother or someone in the family often knows about the abuse, yet stays in denial!)

This scenario is played out in so many ways. It comes down to being abandoned by those who are supposed to love you. If, as you read this, you are aware of always feeling abandoned, I suggest seeing an experienced counselor, because there are so many good ways of healing that nightmare! Family therapist Virginia Satir works with a therapeutic method known as Family Constellation; it is a wonderful and insightful way of working things out as a family. Plus, I recommend the rebirthing work of Sondra Ray. In her book Pele’s Wish: Secrets of the Hawaiian Masters and Eternal Life, she lists spiritual writer Leonard Orr’s “Five Biggies in Life”:

1.     The birth trauma

2.     The parental disapproval syndrome

3.     Specific negatives

4.     The unconscious death urge

5.     Other lifetime work