Was your childhood difficult, and so was your parent's behavior?
Not appreciative, hurtful?
Very often, understandably, one remains stuck in resentment, despair, or paralysis throughout one's adult life.
44 percent of Germans have to cope with at least one stressful childhood experience.
These include divorce or separation of parents, alcohol use and substance abuse in the family, as well as emotional neglect and abuse
The American psychiatrist and psychotherapist Jeffrey Young has grouped the unfavorable behavior patterns or schemes that can result from such negative childhood experiences into categories.
In addition to mistrust, self-sacrifice and excessive demands on oneself and others, he names the feeling of abandonment and being excluded, the feeling of never being heard emotionally, and a lack of self-control as typical patterns.
Such schemes are a hindrance not only in everyday life, but also in therapy.
Accepting the past and accepting the things that cannot be changed as they were can be healing.
Various psychotherapeutic procedures employ imaginations to facilitate access to this posture.
Because images open up direct access to inner patterns that still have an impact on how one experiences one's real life situation and one's real behavior.
In this way you can check and change the patterns.
The following exercise works with such images.
Try to pick one of them up:
Exercise 1: holding the pain in your hand
In this coaching you have already undertaken several excursions into the emotions and experiences of your childhood.
Looking back is often painful.
Perhaps as a child you felt more often misunderstood, not seen, or little supported?
Now remember a - small - painful situation from the past.
Try to feel this pain first in moderation and then to accept it.
Imagine the following picture: You hold the pain in your hand like a delicate flower.
Or look at the pain like a special picture hanging on the wall.
Or you can embrace the pain like a child that has hurt itself and that you are now comforting.
Pick up an image that speaks to you and try to accept and appreciate the little pain from the past.
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This exercise gets by without dealing with your own parents.
If you were very hurt in childhood, or if you feel that the past is a difficult topic for you, it may be worthwhile to practice this type of acceptance more often.
If at some point you are at a point where you can and want to let go even more, it can be worth doing the second exercise as well.
This is especially true if you have a good relationship with your parents in many areas.
Exercise 2: Mail for the parents
Write a letter to your parents in which you tell them that you love them, but now write to them what you did not like, what hurt you, what you did not agree with and what was almost unbearable for you.
If it is easy for you, you can also try to put yourself in your parents' shoes and write down what you see today that you did not see then.
It could be that the parents themselves were under pressure or that they had a difficult childhood themselves.
Of course
, it is
important that this letter will
not be
sent because it is about the inner conflict.
Above all, pay attention to how you feel after you have written this letter.
And one more tip: if you have a great grudge against your parents or have been badly hurt, you can write an angry letter.
In the letter, you focus completely on what you disliked and what was terrible for you.
Even a letter like this, which of course is not sent, helps in the long run to gain some distance from the past.
Continue reading ...
Breaking away from the past also means breaking free from parents' expectations.
The philosopher Michael Bordt calls for disappointing parents if necessary.
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