Birthing yourself
“We are doing to ourselves within, what we hold people and adults responsible for having done to us.” --Iyanla VanZant
Haven’t forgiven your parents, yet? Or an ex-husband? A family member? A former best friend?
Then this is probably where you’re at: doing to yourself within, the very thing you accuse someone else of having done to you. That’s what we’re doing when we don’t forgive.
What people are really upset about–really, really; deep down really–is that people, and especially their parents, did not give them some form of unconditional love and acceptance. We feel the lack of that unfulfilled need. Un-peel it any way you wish, and it will come back again and again to a sense of not-enough, of not being loved, of not being accepted as-is.
This is why part of forgiveness involves birthing yourself—as in, birthing a new version of yourself.
Beliefs
The belief is: My parents should have given me the love that I needed.
That belief? True, yet…not totally.
The first time anyone told me that my parents were not responsible for fulfilling all of my needs, I thought they were crazy. But the more I considered this statement, the more I understood that it made far less sense to assume that anyone, anywhere, can meet all of our needs.
Our parents are different people than us. Of course there will be gaps. Of course there will be places where they might try to love us as we need to be loved, and will fail. And given that eventually we all go out into the world to find our way as adults, don’t we need to learn how to meet our own needs for love and nurturing and approval?
Once we are adults, we become responsible for meeting our own needs for love and nurturing and approval.
This is a hard task, and this is the privilege of a lifetime.
Other people who love us or try to fill those needs? Their contributions to our lives are the privilege on top of privilege—their love should not be the basis of our self-love.
The entire concept that someone else should meet our needs (through marriage or lifelong friendship, not to mention the hundreds of other ways we expect our needs to be met without even realizing it) starts with believing that our parents should have been overflowing with unconditional love and acceptance.
Based on that, many people believe that had their parents gotten them “started off right,” back then, the would be more okay, now. Endless amounts of analysis and projection go into ruminating on the Stories of what we didn’t get.
And yet, I don’t think that any parent ever gives their child everything that the child needs. Ever. Not even me. How could they? Even people who really, really work on this stuff—and I am one of those people who reads all the books and goes to the workshops and thinks deeply about the human experience and how to take radical responsibility for my behavior—even I am not overflowing with unconditional love and acceptance.
If even those of us who really really work on those things, and are privileged and honored to do so are not overflowing with unconditional love and acceptance, how on earth could we expect that of anyone else, like the people who raised us? How?
I imagine that you are the same: someone who tries very hard, who works her ass off to do what she can, and who still falls short of her own standards. And you know, even when we are overflowing with unconditional love and acceptance, there are still people who will say that you’re not doing enough.
Think about a time when you were giving it your absolute best to be enough for someone else and they told you that you still weren’t enough. In that moment, they’re not actually reflecting that you’re not doing enough. They’re reflecting that they aren’t feeling “enough,” within. They’re projecting it onto you. You could never give it to them. They can only ever give the experience of being “enough” to themselves.
They have to birth themselves. You have to birth yourself. We all have to birth ourselves anew, and give to ourselves the things that we didn’t get, back then.
Well, but–
“Well, but–I don’t expect that my parent should have fulfilled my every need,” someone might say. “Not every need.” Then usually this is followed by identifying exactly what needs “should” have been fulfilled.
But honestly, can we really pick and choose like that? Can we honestly say they should have fulfilled this need, but that this other one was less important? How can you know that whatever need you deemed less important was actually one that, given a different life with a different set of circumstances, you wouldn’t swear it was vital?
I don’t think we can pick and choose like that, and play this life game powerfully. My parents fulfilled certain needs that I had, that other parents didn’t fulfill for their children. When other people wish they’d gotten what my parents gave me, or when I wish I’d gotten what their parents gave them, no one is living in the present, not to mention practicing acceptance, compassion, or understanding.
Birthing Yourself
What if your job is to birth yourself?
It’s worth it to begin questioning the idea that it is anyone’s job to give us all the skills that we need.
Perhaps the point is for us to birth ourselves, to love ourselves, to speak to ourselves the way we always wished that others would speak to us, to hold ourselves gently, to practice ruthless compassion for ourselves, and to never again spend another moment (time that we can never get back) wishing that someone else could have done that for us.
If I walk the world with the belief that it’s my job to birth myself and care for myself the way I need to be cared for–oh, how the game changes. Oh, how much more compassion you can have for the people who raised you, or the great love who left, or the hurts that are so hard–especially when you see that it’s damned hard to give yourself the kind of all-encompassing love and compassion and care that you long for, from another.
The Cycle
“We are doing to ourselves within, what we hold people and adults responsible for having done to us.” –Iyanla VanZant
If we live in a space of what others “should have” done for us, we are doing the very damage to ourselves that we accuse our caregivers of doing.
Our caregivers, in those moments when they yelled or screamed or withheld their own love, are being replayed and re-lived through our own denial of self-love, our own inner screaming, our own incessant yelling that we could be better if only we tried harder or did more.
The same energy that we carry that others “should have done it better” is the same energy that we direct towards ourselves.
Do you see how this could be a cycle? How, with this “my parents should have done it differently” story, it might never end?
Stop Recycling The Story
Maybe we find more peace if we stop recycling the Story that it should have been better back then, and focus more on how we’re creating a better life for ourselves, right now.
Maybe we could try living life from the perspective that everything that has happened has happened for us, not to us. We could try that on, and see how it fits, and see if it feels just one inch better.
We could practice a little courageous forgiveness, or courageous acceptance, and drop the energy it takes to catalog whether or not so-and-so’s actions “deserve” forgiveness or if the conditions are right for acceptance.
Letting go, forgiving–it’s all within your reach, right now.
You choose who you are. You choose how you walk this world–and every life experience you’ve ever had has set you up to be exactly who you are, right now, reading this.
And thank goodness! What a beautiful thing that it has.
Thank god that you are here, right now, reading this–exactly as you are. Maybe a bit busted up, maybe a bit bruised, but–keeping on keeping on, and willing to take a deep breath as soon as you finish reading this, contemplate what it’s costing you to hold a space of resentment and non-forgiveness, and choose in this very second to live your life differently.