Reply to How to forgive parents when they've never apologized?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I let go of needing to find forgiveness. [b]What I developed instead was *understanding*.[/b]

I understand the challenges my mom went through in her life. I understand that she had many, many traumatic experiences. I understand that she had too many children at too young of an age due to outside pressures. These all explain her behavior, but they do not excuse it. I have empathy for her, but I also have tremendous empathy for myself and do what is best for me. And what was best was to give her an extremely limited presence in my life, not to seeep everything under the rug in the name of “forgiveness” and continue on as normal.

I also harnessed the power of my anger for good. Anger is a good, healthy emotion. It is our best signal that our boundaries are being violated. I channel that into good: I use that anger as a catalyst for working on myself, and being the best possible mom I can be for my own kids. [/quote]

To be clear, I understand that they had sh1t lives, too. Where understanding fails me is how could they not only not protect us from others, but how they could neglect and abuse us. Guess what? My childhood was straight sh1t, with no glimmer of hope and *yet* I've never hit the bottle as an adult, nor have I abused or neglected my child. Like another pp, if someone did even one of the things which was done to me to my child, I would actually kill them.[/quote]

PP. To clarify - I haven't spoken to my mom in 3 years. I don't forgive her, because in my mind, forgiveness means some form of "it's okay you did those things". When it wasn't okay at all.

BUT I understand that she went through some serious sh!t in a time where mental health services just weren't available and were frowned upon. I was very lucky that my generation encourages mental health treatment and healing. Her generation and family look down on it as weakness. I also understand that in reality, my mom just isn't smart and can't understand the impact her actions had.

It's a grieving process. I was angry for a very, very long time. But understanding the reality of generational trauma, addiction, etc and how difficult it is to overcome helped me a lot.[/quote]

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