Welcome back to the Heal With Affirmations podcast. Let’s talk about our parents. I've mentioned this topic a couple of times before and how important it is, so let’s focus on it with some depth today.
It would be an understatement to say that working through your relationship with your parents is a big part of your affirmations work, because for many of us, it's not just a big part, it’s a huge one.
In general though, I don’t support making things bigger or smaller than what they are, and in all cases, we can’t really measure these things. We just say “it’s a big deal” because it feels that it’s a lot to go through.
Focusing on our parents is critical for most of us because our parents are our first contact with life manifest. It should be no surprise that they have a very deep impact on our life and our being in just about every way.
As babies, we are very fragile and one hundred percent dependent on our parents and particularly our mother for survival.
This initial connection is the foundation of our existence. And beyond this basic level of survival, our relationship with our parents forms much of our personality and interaction with the world around us, and very importantly, it affects the deeper undercurrent of how we feel about life.
We tend to carry many issues from our childhood. These come from our relationship with our parents, the relationship they had with each other, and also with siblings and triangular dynamics that involve them.
So, this relationship and its dynamics can create a lot of good and/or a lot of suffering in our life.
Understanding your relationship with your parents, your early childhood experience, and the patterns that formed, is very valuable, if not necessary, for your growth and healing.
Releasing and forgiving issues in this area can unleash lots of energy and potential in your life. And you can dig out deep insights about your life and the patterns that drive it. You appreciate the role they played in your life, and you understand yourself better.
Much healing can come from looking at your relationship with your parents and affirming positive things about it. The sooner you do this, the sooner you become more conscious of it all, and can begin to turn around the patterns that no longer serve you today.
Needless to say, digging into this area can be very challenging for many of us. Maybe some people do not face big challenges when working through the issues with their parents, but that is pretty rare. And others may have grown up in different circumstances, or have had other influences. In all cases, our early years are formative in deep ways. No matter who was there for you exactly, take the time to examine the dynamics.
No one I have come across or worked with hasn't had issues and even deep ones when it comes to their parents. And I'm pretty sure you can make this same observation for yourself and for those around you.
This isn't to say that everything we got from our relationship with our parents is dysfunctional. And this isn’t to say that all our patterns, supportive or challenging, come from our childhood experience or our relationship with our parents.
There are many wonderful things we get from our parents. Love, care, fun, laughter, tears, going places, doing things, being there for us, pulling us through, and a million other ways parents love us and show us they care for us, are all wonderful experiences that we can look back to with love and gratitude.
With parents as with many other areas of life, it’s a mixed bag. There were some good times and some challenging times, which can result in some helpful patterns and some not so helpful patterns.
The idea is to become aware of the patterns in your life, where you got them from, and whether they are serving you today or not. If they are, great! If not, you can affirm a new thought to support what you want to see for yourself today.
Before we get into some of the in’s and out’s around our relationship with our parents, and how we can use affirmations to heal this area, it must be said that a single episode about this topic does not do it justice, and that we could revisit it several times again in the future.
This is also true of other topics we have covered so far in this podcast, including forgiveness and loving the self. These are big topics that can be approached from different angles and at different degrees of depth.
So get in touch to share with me your thoughts, experiences, or questions, as I could take them up for an episode. My contact and resources are in the description.
And another thing about a topic like parents is that there aren't really obvious starting and ending points with navigating this space. It has many entry points, and there are many different routes to understanding it.
So in this episode, I want to talk about how we might probe into this area, what kind of patterns we might get from our parents, different perspectives to understand what went on, and some affirmations to get going with the love and healing.
I also want to suggest that you listen to the episode on Forgiveness if you haven’t already so you know what we really mean by it.
GOING BACK IN TIME
It can be tricky and challenging to take a close look at your early life and your experience back then.
Where would you start?
It helps to think of your life and your past as an interesting landscape. How might you visualize it? What are its peaks and valleys? Its waterways and pathways? What were the main stops in your life journey? What are some important regions of the landscape of your life?
Usually, there are a few big memories that stand out. These are typically associated with a few big successes and a few big challenges. What are they for you? Write them down.
When you write things down, you start to take things out of your mind where they are usually hazy and fuzzy. It helps you see things more clearly and from a more grounded perspective.
Also when you write them down, you tend to spend more time thinking about them. Writing can open up a space that helps you relive the feelings, which can be a little scary. It is part of the reason we might avoid reconnecting with the past.
But getting a sense of the feelings you had back then is important. They help you connect with what was going on, not just through words and actions, but through the flavors and qualities that permeated that atmosphere. All these elements can imprint our psyche and from there create overt and not so obvious patterns.
So what is your relationship with your parents like? What was it like when you were a child? How did it change over time? What were your parents like? What was it like between them? Can you tell? Did they love each other? Were they happy together? Did they just put up with each other?
What are some of the issues you had with your parents? How did they make you feel back then? How do they make you feel now?
Tune into a past chapter or episode. What was happening exactly? What was your interaction with your parents like? How do you think they felt? How did you feel?
Are you able to identify a pattern that stuck with you from that time? How does it affect you today? Does it contribute to some of your experiences?
In the previous episode, I suggested that patterns may be dysfunctional in one way or another, but they often serve a purpose, like in a self-protection mechanism.
So think about how this and other patterns might have served a purpose. Does it still serve a purpose today?
There are many questions you can use to probe into these dynamics. They help you unlock your understanding of yourself and your parents. Come up with your own questions as well, so you take the lead of your thought process.
If you spend enough time connecting with all this and with the overall energy of that space, your sense of defensiveness, your fears, or nervousness, could start to dissolve, and you could start seeing through the dynamics of that incident with a clearer vision.
You can then think about how this and other situations impacted you over time and if they created an ongoing state of mind or some kind of underlying energy in you. And from there, think about how it stayed with you in your life moving forward.
One pass at such a contemplative exercise is probably not going to unravel everything, although much insight can come through from answering these questions honestly.
Like I said, this area is usually complex and layered, and we can approach it from different perspectives. Your affirmations help you open up to feelings and empower you with acceptance, which deepens your vision.
Another way we might go back to our childhood experiences is by starting with a present issue and tracing it back. We might discover its roots in our childhood, something with our parents, or something else.
We can then stop there and look at that area in the way we just described, meaning examining the interactions, the things that were said, that were done, the energy, the flavors, and how this whole thing affected us.
So whether you start with your childhood experiences, or trace an issue backwards, you can start making deep connections and identify patterns that underlie the experiences in your life.
Doing these contemplative exercises makes you smarter at connecting the different parts of your life, understanding how your patterns formed, and how they kept recycling themselves through your life.
Very importantly, this kind of analysis and thinking makes you aware of how your affirmations, meaning the things you believe, say, and do, create your experiences, and how people come together into a vortex of circumstance.
In the process, you understand yourself better and why you feel and behave the way you do. But you also become more aware of your own power and you could realize that you were in the driver’s seat all along. You also develop this special vision to look at your life a little differently and with more wisdom.
Many of the blockages that prevent us from receiving the good we say we want are likely rooted in an experience, an issue, or pattern that we picked up or that was formed earlier in life.
The issue or pattern typically continues to operate in our life until we consciously take charge of it by changing our thinking, and by replacing it with a new thought-pattern that supports what we want today.
But again, seeing is not necessarily healing. New thought patterns need to be practiced in order to replace the unwanted patterns, and this is where affirmations come in, unlike other practices that might stop at just seeing.
While understanding the root of an issue helps us redirect our thinking in a way that we want, with affirmations, we can manifest our good without necessarily getting to the bottom of everything, because our affirmations are focused on the outcome that we want.
Most of the time though, they lead us to deep insights, and then guide us to manifest our good. They can open big doors for understanding ourselves and our parents.
I appreciate that contemplating the past can be challenging and that we can't always examine these experiences from a detached point of view from the start.
That's why doing affirmations is so valuable. They help you kick off this process when you don't really know what to do. They shift your consciousness and open up possibilities. And soon enough what seemed inaccessible comes into view, and you begin to see that healing is possible and you can move past these issues. It is no different when it comes to affirmations for healing our relationship with our parents.
But it is a personal experience, and no amount of explanations on my part can substitute for your first hand knowledge about what happens to you when you do your affirmations.
PATTERNS FROM OUR PARENTS AND CHILDHOOD
So, what kind of patterns do we pick up from our parents and our childhood experiences?
Our relationship with our parents affects us in much deeper ways than our basic upbringing, what they did for us, what they were able to afford us, or our everyday childhood exposure. It imprints us with energies and patterns that can play out in all sorts of different ways in our life, and in subtle and not so subtle ways.
Things we pick up from our parents and our childhood experiences are broad ranging if they can even be enumerated.
Our attitude toward life, how we feel about life, our fears, our trust in life, how we trust ourselves and others, our suspicions, insecurities, optimism, our sense of confidence, our belief in possibilities, and many other attitudes, patterns, and underlying energies, can all come from our parents, the relationship we had and still have with them, as well as the relationship they had together, and other important influences on our early life experiences.
All of these patterns would have been formed at some earlier time in our life, and it is a good idea to have a square look at all of that, to become conscious of what drives us today. Not only does this enable us to take better charge of how we operate in life, but it also helps us deepen our understanding of ourselves, our parents, and their relationship. We also develop more compassion toward them and ourself.
Using contemplative exercises and asking ourselves questions like the ones we talked about earlier to probe into our feelings and attitudes, helps us understand ourself better and examine how the dynamics with our parents contributed to our present day attitudes and experiences, and continue to play out in these ways.
Doing affirmations for love and forgiveness, of yourself and your parents, can also guide you into a more specific area. The way the process unfolds is unique to you.
Another powerful way to delve into this area is by examining our relationships with other people.
Louise Hay teaches that our relationships with other people often mirror the relationship we had with either one of our parents, the relationship they had between them, or some aspects of these dynamics.
I invite you to examine how astute this observation is. As you examine your relationships with your parents, you will notice how much of that is carried forward into your relationships with others.
This idea rests on a very powerful concept that is a cornerstone of the affirmations practice:
Life is a mirror.
This is a very practical way to look at life with more vision and insight.
The idea is that just about everything in our life reflects back to us something about us or that is within us.
Think about this small but big statement for a few seconds: Life is a mirror. It is a pretty big topic and I will dedicate more to it at a later time.
It is wonderful to work with the idea that life is mirror because it makes it easier to begin the work of going within. So if we’re stuck, we can look outside, at our experiences and relationships, think about what we like and do not like about them, and then think about what about us might have contributed to them.
Often, it is not a direct copy-paste of the pattern, but an adjusted version of it. When you dig more deeply and ponder these things you can start developing your vision and see how what’s inside manifests outside, and what do some things have in common so they attract each other. You can discover how interesting all this is, even if it is painful or challenging at times.
When it comes to working with our parents, we can use the life-is-a-mirror tool, and think about the relationship we have with them, and consider how we mirror it in our own lives with other people.
This kind of insight builds our vision in deep ways, and we can get good at drawing relationships between the different areas of our life. We see what drives our behavior and other dynamics in our life, we see where it might come from, we get a sense of how it all connects.
Use this amazing tool to think about your parents, the relationship you had and still have with them, what you’ve taken from them or not, and how it plays around in your life, in your relationships, and other kinds of dynamics you might be interested in looking at.
Looking into these dynamics can be a deeply insightful exercise that helps us grow and become more conscious of who we are and why we attract our experiences and relationships in life.
Despite the fact that our relationships can feel like a loaded topic, we can look at them more easily than other areas, because they are externalized dynamics that tend to play a big part in our life and can take up a lot of our attention. In other words, they are loud and visible, so examining them can feel more tangible.
Our relationship with our boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, bosses, and other, usually important people in our life often mirror relationship aspects we had with our parents.
Areas like how we feel about interacting with others, being in a relationship, the kinds of expectations we have of others, how we respond to some things they do, why we are attracted to them in the first place, our sense of attachment, and many other elements that play out in relationships, can all come from relationship patterns we had or still have with our parents.
Dysfunctional patterns, codependence, neediness, abuse, manipulation, and many other issues, including tragic ones like abuse, are often the kinds of issues we pay attention to because they tend to be loud, and can be easily identified in our life. Other patterns may not be as easy to spot, but with a bit of attention, and a good dose of honesty, we can dig out many patterns that played out with our parents.
Communication is often good to dig into. Poor communication like shouting, swearing, demeaning words, criticism, ignoring, lack of interest, lack of attention, lack of sincerity, and many other attitudes might have all been the norm in our home.
Or there were positive patterns that we took away from our home, like sharing, caring, being there for one another, celebrating each others’ successes, getting help, teamwork, shouldering responsibilities, learning things together, and many more wonderful things that help a family bind together.
Think about all these patterns and any you come up with, and consider how these patterns from your home and your relationship with your parents might mirror other relationships you have in your life.
Again, there are many questions you can ask to probe into your relationships more deeply. Come up with your own questions and dig our own path.
When you become conscious of your patterns, and when you release them and create new patterns with the help of your affirmations, you can start creating different experiences in your relationships and in your life, and attract what is more genuinely aligned with what you want today.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR PARENTS
Now when you do this work and appreciate that your patterns have a history, you can appreciate that your parents also have patterns that they got from their parents and childhood experiences.
Understanding your parents, their own childhoods, their relationship with their parents, and with each other, is a major piece of work in your affirmations and life journey.
A very powerful exercise that Louise Hay and others suggest is to see your parents as little children in need of love and safety. You can visualize yourself being a loving parent to your parents, and taking them into your arms, to love them and protect them.
Such a visualization or any version of it can really melt your heart and help you feel compassionate toward your parents.
In the same way that you examined your upbringing, your experiences, your patterns, traced them back to earlier experiences, and examined how all these dynamics mirrored back to you and to other areas of your life and relationships, you can see how you can apply this whole thought process to your parents.
As you grow in your own self-knowledge and self-love, you become able to develop a deep compassion for your parents and see them as real people. You realize that they too have patterns that they have not been conscious of.
And because you are now taking charge of your own thoughts to create the life that you want, you will not be in a victim mode where you might blame your parents for your challenges. In fact, it is possible to turn around completely, and even be grateful for all the ups and downs because you now appreciate all of the awareness and experience you gained.
Affirm consistently for forgiveness and the willingness to let go, and you will soon dissolve the blockages that prevent you from being willing to look back at all this. You will soften up and release the anxiety, the dread, or the fear.
You will become more at ease with the memories, you will be able to see things with more equanimity, and in time, you will even want to go in there so you can dig out these gems that help you deepen your insights about all this, because it goes beyond healing patterns.
Your parents are literally your primary connection with life. Your love and compassion for them and for yourself makes you whole, loving, and in a deep connection with every passing moment. Everything becomes sweeter.
If you are lucky to have your parents today, I encourage you to sit down with them and ask them about your early life and what you were like as a baby, as a child, and as a teenager into adulthood and today.
If you are not ready for such a conversation, then start your affirmations process so you can release the past and bring yourself to a point where you can take advantage of the time to gather these gems and hopefully enjoy some wonderful moments together with your parents.
I appreciate it might not be possible for everyone, and I appreciate that this whole episode could have made you upset. But you are worth it, your life is worth it, and your parents are also worth it. I appreciate there are always some exceptions, but do what you can to bring yourself into the now.
Ask them about how they struggled with you and what they enjoyed about you growing up. As you mature about all this, they will pick up your open-mindedness and get comfortable with telling you these things.
Also ask them about their childhood. Ask them what it was like for them to grow up, what their parents were like, what kind of relationship they had with them, and how they went through their early and later years.
What are their vulnerabilities, their successes, challenges, and embarrassments? Ask them how they feel about themselves. Do they feel they’ve done a good job for themselves in this life? Do they have regrets? Are there things they long for today?
With more compassion and maturity you can start to examine your parents’ lives and understand the patterns that are behind what they are and do. You can acknowledge their shortcomings and appreciate their strengths.
You will be able to see how they messed up in some ways, and got other things right. You will be able to pass your own assessment on how they managed life.
Ask them about their marriage together, how they got along, how they really felt about each other, and if they wanted out of the marriage at any point.
You can also appreciate that when people marry and start a family, there is a lot in life that they leave behind, including hopes and dreams, adventures and experiences, that were all sacrificed to focus on this big project called a family.
And of course, if your parents divorced, then there's plenty to look into here as well. How it got to that point, how it got worked out, how you figured in all of it, and much more that you can examine and connect with.
Parents often have regrets about marriage and family but they guard this secret very closely out of guilt and out of fear that expressing anything in relation to what they would have preferred their lives to be, could suggest that they’re not happy and that they regret having gone down the family path.
Let me throw this curveball at you. Do you think you can get to a point where you can ask your parents, or either one of them, if they had a healthy physical life together, and get them to talk about how they really felt about this?
And let me say this, if the idea of having such a conversation causes you to cringe, I dare say you’re still a child at some level, and they’re still mom and dad. With healing and awareness, you can grow into someone who sees her parents with love and compassion, and who can understand them - whether you have such a frank conversation or not.
Your parents will feel that they can trust you like a real friend and open up to you about topics they might have never been able to share with anyone. But it is up to you to grow up to the conversation so you can hold them, like they’re your child.
These are very precious opportunities. I hope you have them and I hope you can bring yourself to the point where you can have them, wherever possible. Much love and forgiveness can come through, and you will be very grateful you did this work.
It can be pretty humbling to understand and accept your parents’ limitations, but it also opens your heart and enables you to have love, compassion, and gratitude for the people whom you now see did their best with what they knew, despite their shortcomings.
The passing of time, aging, and dying, are also important factors that can come into this picture and help you appreciate the time you have with your loved ones.
It is to your advantage to heal and forgive, and to cultivate compassion for your parents, to love them, and forgive them, because it will set you free from the limitations of the past and enable you to create your life experience consciously and with alignment with what you want in life.
And I appreciate that for some of us it can mean completely releasing the relationship.
AFFIRMATIONS FOR HEALING YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR PARENTS
So start affirming for forgiveness, healing, understanding, and compassion, for yourself and your parents. And affirm what you want your experience to be today.
When you begin doing affirmations to heal your relationship with your parents, all sorts of feelings can come up.
It could feel like one big mess, and you might not be able to make much sense of it, or how to begin to unravel your feelings, when you're first approaching this area. This can be very loaded and some of us can face up to a lot of resistance.
This is fine and normal. When you first step into a landscape, you need to orient yourself. You become familiar with it, and more comfortable in it, and then you can start looking around without feeling so overwhelmed by it. It's like moving to a new neighborhood.
Give yourself some space to ponder your memories so the feelings can come up. What matters is that you can sit with yourself long enough so you can connect more deeply than just passing thoughts. Just like we talked about in the beginning, when probing into this landscape.
You might want to avoid it or you might start feeling anger or other emotions. Take some notes mentally or on paper about what's happening or what you're thinking about if it helps. What you're doing is very valuable.
Your feelings and thoughts inspire you to think of a specific area or a specific affirmation. Go with it, and start repeating it. And if you’re not getting an idea, then forgiveness affirmations are always a great go-to, especially when it comes to regret or issues with other people.
So here are some affirmations you can use for forgiving your parents and healing your childhood:
All of us are doing the best we can, and all is well.
I chose my parents for this lifetime and I am very grateful for all the love and all the lessons.
I love my parents just as they are, and I love myself unconditionally.
I forgive everyone and I forgive myself. All is well.
Everything happens for my highest good.
I am willing to see and hear. I have compassion for myself and others.
I see my parents as little children. I love them and I love the child in them.
I give myself all the love and care that I need. Love is infinite.
I forgive my parents for all perceived wrongs. I love them and I love myself.
I am free and my parents are free. We are safe and we are loved.
And you can create your own affirmations or choose another one from my Guides and previous episodes.
It is important to spend enough time repeating your affirmations so they can replace the unwanted patterns. Your new affirmations need to outweigh them so they can take root and bear fruit, and the way to do this is with repetition.
Repetition is also what pokes at your hurts and traumas so they can be released. We often experience this as resistance and then as an outpouring of emotions. It can be difficult but that's how we flow! Welcome all your tears for they are the river of life.
And if you can do your affirmations in front of the mirror, then so much the better. It is a very powerful way to engage your affirmations. This can be more challenging, but once you're past the blockages you will find that your affirmations work more deeply and possibly more quickly when you do them in front of the mirror.
Remember to say "I love you" to yourself often and in front of the mirror, like we covered in the previous episode. And be a good friend to yourself.
I encourage you to do this work. It is so valuable to revisit it all to come into the present moment. You deserve it, and life is worth it.
And be grateful for your parents whatever they were, they got you here if nothing else.
Okay, friend. This was probably a handful, let’s fly away, and let’s reconnect in the next episode.