Parents.

“Parent” used to be my least favorite word. The word and it’s synonyms would activate a shutter through my body as waves of guilt, shame, worthlessness and abandonment.

My twins were born a few months after I turned 20 and I felt unprepared in every way. The financial pressures consumed most of my time and worrying, but beneath that was a fear that I had no idea how nurture them into normal humans who fit in. I knew I wasn’t going to raise them how my parents had raised me. I didn’t know what to do, just had some ideas of what not to do.

Their mother frequently told me that just in the way that there was something wrong with me that prevented me from giving her the love she needed, I was also not giving it to our children. When she divorced me a few years later she sought near total physical custody and continued to communicate that the only way I was qualified to support my kids was financially.

And I believed her. I wanted my kids to not grow up like me, I wanted them to fit in, to be able to love and be loved and be somewhat normal. I also had been rejected by kids my entire childhood and subconsciously believed my kids would reject me as they grew older. My ex wife had been a popular girl from a good family and I didn’t want my childhood experience of feeling unwanted and fitting in nowhere for them, even if that meant them leaving me behind. This was my mindset for the remainder of my 20s.

The story doesn’t end there and today I have very close and meaningful relationships with my kids. My adult kids are encouraged to talk about the traumatic moments in their childhood when I abandoned or abused them in various ways. Some of it has been really hard for me to face, but by allowing their pain and my pain and sitting with it until I could accept it, we’ve all been able to move through it.

It’s never good to act unconsciously from your wounding towards a child. But it will happen, your wounds are real and children have a way of activating wounds. But you can make repair when you do. Being good at repair goes a long way towards reversing any damage you may make in a difficult moment.

That’s half of why I’ve hated the word “Parent” for so long. The other half is my childhood experience. A few years back a therapist asked me “which parent did you go to for comfort as a child?” I sat with the question a moment and replied that I couldn’t remember once going to either. I later asked my brother the same question and he had the same answer. The part of me who needs emotional connection, to have it’s feelings acknowledged and reflected, who needed co-regulation from attuned caregivers, grew up in a void of emptiness.

The trope that therapists just teach us to blame everything on our parents isn’t without some basis in truth. Childhood wounding is inevitable. Parents are easy targets and we all have them.

Healing our wounds and stepping into our fully integrated adult selves requires being honest with ourselves about what got us hurt in the first place. While the biggest traumas may have happened much later in life, they always have roots in early childhood. There are no perfect parents and some are less perfect than others. Sometimes the healing journey is harder for those of us who had more nurturing parents because facing where they fell short feels more disloyal.

All parents are ultimately blameless. Their abusive acts and neglect are rooted in their own wound patterns and unaddressed trauma. I’m glad that’s true because I harmed my children through my unconsciousness. I spanked them occasionally, I yelled and shamed. I left them vulnerable to abuse from others. I was emotionally unavailable to them and behaved as if their feelings didn’t matter. No one cared how I felt as a child, I didn’t know how to feel my own feelings and I wasn’t aware of theirs.

We must resist the urge to settle into a victim mindset of blaming our parents. It’s also equally important to resist the pressure to rewrite history and adopt our parent’s narrative of what happened. There’s a place between the two where we can be painfully candid about exactly what did happen without living from a place of blame and resentment. Forgive, don’t forget.

When we rewrite history to get along with our families, we exile the part of us who paid the price back then. We will continue to act out it’s pain unconsciously and reperpetrate it’s history on those around us including our own kids.

My parents are dedicated, self sacrificing people with a very earnest desire to do good. They arrived at parenthood very young and traumatized and did the best they could. I did go through a phase of resentment towards them during my journey. I was later able to forgive them, and later still, I was able to see their authentic nature behind their extreme religious and suppressing parts. Finally, during a plant medicine ceremony, I came to embrace my childhood and parents and came to a place where I earnestly want my life as it is, and would choose this birth. I’m not saying I would choose my childhood despite the trauma, but rather that I want the life I was given, including the trauma, because it’s who I am, and I (finally) really like who I am.

My parents don’t talk about feelings, describe introspective work as “naval gazing” and shunt every nuanced concept into a formulaic religious framework that avoids any direct contact with the emotional nature of the subject. They share a set of curated stories about their childhood and protect a pretty basic and improbable narrative of their formative years. I’ve been able to glean some details from extended family members, but the family secrets are generally well protected. One thing is clear, their childhoods were a lot more traumatic than mine was, and I respect that they will likely never summon the courage to open those doors of suppression in their lifetimes.

I wish they were able to talk about their feelings and the experiences that shaped them, and that we could be close in that way. In a lot of ways, their childhoods were my childhood, and it would help me to feel more connected with them. When I was young I needed so much emotional support from them that they didn’t have access to. The parts of me who want emotionally available parents now get those needs met in other relationships and within myself. But there are still blank openings where my birth parents should be, and parts of me hold out hope that someday that position will be filled.

Throughout this website I talk candidly about my childhood as I recall it and how it shaped my journey. Parts of me feel guilty and imagine how hurt my parents would be to read the things I write here.

Ultimately, my healing and the healing of others is more important than avoiding upsetting them. They already have had all their dreams for me dashed, are mortified that I renounce their religion and believe I’ll go to hell.

In reality their religion is false and talking about our experiences and feelings is healthy and doesn’t have to be taken as blaming caregivers. Being honest about what happened doesn’t mean we haven’t forgiven. And it’s critical to allowing trapped parts of ourselves drop their shame and self blame and move into their authentic roles. If my parents transcended their religion, allowed their grief and re-parented their traumatized childhood parts, they would discover what life is all about and no longer live in fear and anxiety. I’m not helping them by pretending their narrative is real.

I’m grateful for the parents and childhood I was given. I’m a jack of most trades. I have an inner confidence around life situations and a quiet resourcefulness I’ve noticed many men my age lack. My home schooling was really “self schooling” and I was often learning subjects my parents didn’t understand, but I’d have to pass a test for which they had the answer key. It was a hard way to learn, and this was way before Youtube, but today I can generally teach myself anything.

My parents generally gave me a chores or schoolwork whenever they saw me, and the majority of my childhood consisted of farm labor and studying propaganda laden homeschool text books. Because they gave me work or criticism whenever they saw me, I generally avoided my parents which meant much of my childhood was spent in the crook of a tree with a book, wandering an orchard or tinkering with my hands. This solitude and yearning for emotional connection developed a deep and authentic spiritual core within me that is still strong today, and I’m very blessed to have that.

My childhood helped me become who I am today by providing contrast. I was very earnest and I carried an inner connection to spirit from a young age. The house I grew up in had a lot of yelling, discontent and constant AM conservative talk radio playing. The vibe in the house was polar opposite to what I was connecting with spiritually. The words coming out of the radio and my mom were opposite of what I read in the gospels or felt in my inner connection. The talk of punishment, justice, hell and “those people” who were arrogantly defying god out there, the constant “othering,” made me just want to get away from there as fast as I could.

The radio also featured parenting gurus like Dr Dobson who tutored parents like mine in the finer points of religious child abuse, lest they displease their distorted notion of god. Because fake spirituality is the language of my childhood abuse, I was inoculated against it early. It drove me further into an authentic spirituality. Had I grown up in a more balanced home, I might be more tolerant of the brand of religious extremism I grew up with and possibly taken in by the psychotic support of right wing extremism that inexplicably characterizes the majority of today’s evangelicals.

I credit my parents that my childhood doesn’t feature any “capital T” traumas. The physical and emotional abuse I experienced was at the high end of what was “normal” for the time. The most painful thing about my childhood was the loneliness, I was home schooled on a rural farm and my mother was sure I would get molested if I joined boy scouts or stayed over at other people’s houses too much. I was very isolated.

Lastly I want to speak for the part of me who wants them to be proud of me. I took a shit sandwich of a childhood and spun it into gold. I went a long, grueling journey. I risked it all when I left their religion, it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. I picked up my battered childhood parts and nursed and reparented them into confident, secure and highly effective mature aspects of my psyche. I worked extremely hard to repair the harm of the trauma cycles I had repeated on my kids when they were younger and before I began this journey. I broke generational cycles and became a healer along the way. They don’t see it that way, and so I tell my inner children that I am proud of them, and give them the parenting they need and deserve.

And so a vast chasm is fixed between us. They live in a world where feelings are suppressed and anxiety is denied even as it drives their every decision. Sounds like hell to me. I live in a world of connection and abundant love, and I’m not going to hide that.

I love you mom and dad. And I’m going to follow my path.