“We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.” – Rick Warren
Growing up, most of us didn’t get the parents we needed.
Some of us got the strict ones. Some got the absent ones. Some got the overly controlling ones. Some got parents who were themselves children, trying to survive their own worlds while raising us. And all of this left marks. Sometimes, very deep ones.
For a long time, I carried those marks like evidence. Evidence of why I was the way I was. Why I had certain fears. Why I shut down in conflict. Why I was anxious about love or success.
This evidence was comforting. Evidence that I was not crazy for being the way I am. That my flaws had reasons.
But childhood trauma can become a script we keep reading from, even when we want to write a new story. And I realized, at some point, that if I kept holding on to my parents’ mistakes, I would never get free of that script.
Forgiving our parents isn’t about pretending nothing happened. It’s not about saying what they did was okay. It’s about understanding. About seeing them as human beings who had their own traumas, their own brokenness, their own limitations. My father with his frustrations. My mother with her exhaustion. They weren’t gods but just normal people like me. And when I saw them that way, I could finally stop expecting them to give me everything I needed. That’s when I started learning to give it to myself.
I stopped holding myself back.
The truth is, forgiveness is less about them and more about us. Carrying resentment is like carrying a heavy bag everywhere you go. You get so used to it that you don’t realize how much it’s weighing you down until you put it down. Forgiveness is putting that bag down. Not for their sake, but for yours.
And the paradox is, when we forgive our parents, we actually open the door to grow into the kind of adults we always wanted to be. Because we’re no longer stuck trying to “fix” the past through anger, rebellion, or perfectionism. We are no longer repeating the same scripts. We can finally move forward. We can break the cycle. We can stop blaming and start creating.
I know it’s not easy. Some wounds go deep. Some stories are harder than others. But the work of forgiving is the work of healing. It’s the process of saying: What happened, happened. And I choose not to let it define me anymore.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean you have to be close to them. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with them. It simply means you stop letting their mistakes keep you from becoming yourself. And once you do that, once you free them, you also free yourself.
— Anushka & Vishnu🐾
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
