If someone says, "I don't love my parents because they constantly humiliated me," she will immediately hear the same advice from all sides: She must change her attitude if she wants to become truly adult, she must not live with hatred bottled up inside herself if she wants to stay healthy, she can free herself of that hatred only if she forgives her parents, there is no such thing as ideal parents-- all parents sometimes make mistakes, and this is something we have to put up with, and we can learn to do so once we are truly adult.
[...] It is not true that forgiveness will free us from hatred. It merely helps to cover it up and hence to reinforce it (in our unconscious minds). It is not true that tolerance grows with age, On the contrary. Children will tolerate their parents' absurdities because they think they normal and have no way of defending themselves against them. Not until adulthood do we actively suffer from this lack of freedom and these constraints. [...] As adults, we will hate only if we remain trapped in a situation in which we cannot give free expression to our feelings. It is this dependency that makes us start to hate. - Alice Miller
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