At what point should you stop blaming your parents for a shitty upbringing?

[DarlingDuck]

I am curious about this. When does it become a persons own responsibility to take control of their lives or is it understanable for a difficult upbrining to negativly impact on a persons life throughout?

Yes, we are all victims of victims. What stops the cycle is accepting it, not simply blaming others.

Accepting that we were damaged.
Accepting that others were to blame.
Accepting that we were not to blame.
Learning a way of living that we were never taught and that we need to learn in order to stop another generation being adversely effected.

Blame is not enough to stop hurting or perpetuating the pain.
Accepting that we were not to blame is a huge thing. It requires exploration and growth of who we are without that "if it is wrong, it is my fault* feeling that is so much a part of us.

People have to learn what is and is not their fault.
We have to learn another way of living. It is one thing to accept that that way was wrong, but we need to learn what is right.
All this takes time, understanding and bloody hard work.

I have no problem with blaming the parents for a shitty upbringing, but just as we are victims, they were victims. At some point we become the parents that are blamed: If blame is where you stop.

I guess what I am saying is that the OP should be broken down into two questions:

1. At what point (if any) should one stop blaming their parents for their life? and
2. At what point do we accept responsibility for the damage we cause to the lives of others?

''sounding like an immature tit with no control.''

Like you Gay?

gay40 are you as pompous in RL as you come across in your post ''immature tit''?
And are you speaking from personal experience, or is it just guesswork on your part?

Oh, and I do blame my parents. Not content with abandoning one child, she goes on to have SIXTEEN more- every single one ended up in care, except one. She died alone.

Regarding the question in the thread title, I think the point at which you stop "blaming" your parents for a shitty upbringing is the point at which you have vented and are thus able to let go of your anger at them, and can focus instead on your own responsibility in fixing the damage they did to you.

ie. when you are able to say : "They made me the way I am, and I can make myself better."

I think the "blame" becomes less red-hot when responsibility is thus assigned where it belongs: to the parents for their parenting mistakes, and to the adult child for their actions and choices as an adult.

Love this thread and everyone's thoughtful responses, btw.

I had an "interesting" childhood which was basically one seriously (for many years) ill parent and the other holding the family together. Three kids. No money. Emotional neglect of the kids, who were lumped together as "the kids" while said parent was being tended to, visited in hospital etc. No hugs, kisses etc, reassuring talks etc.

My Mum is still like this. On the death of my OH, she stayed away on holiday for another 10 days and wouldn't pop over to see me when she got back as she was "too tired". She hardly saw my daughter for the first few months of her life.

The bottom line is - my Mum has let me down badly. Having had a bad upbringing herself, she is emotionally stunted. My Dad had a brutal, Victorian upbringing himself. His mother was a shocker. My father's parenting of us kids was well, very authoritarian and distant when we were younger - he spent several weeks/months on a couple of occasions having serious surgery and then was in a convalescence home. Since I was hitting my teens, he read self-help books and really worked on himself, and was battling debilitating ill-health. He wasn't perfect, by any means, but had come to a point of realisation about things and what his input could achieve.

The result of this is that I have had very low self-esteem for many years. I have helped myself by reading lots of Phil McGrath, Louise Hay, some Maxwell Malz (Psycho Cybernetics) and Charles Whitfield (Healing the Child Within).

I now have a higher self-esteem than I did a long time ago; I know I'm a worthwhile person; I try very hard to be a good parent to both my children (although admittedly, my teenage son presses my buttons a little too often). I have said before on threads like this that my Mum wasn't the kind of mum I needed when I was younger, and now I'm older, she's not the kind of mum I want. I have compassion for her, and have been helping her through a serious health issue - I won't step away from helping her, but I protect myself emotionally.

SAF's post about your parents dying brings a whole lot of other issues with it - in the natural order of things, the buffer between you and death has gone - it's your turn next. The process shift I guess, would be making peace with yourself if that's at all possible.

One of the reasons I am unable and unwilling to forgive both my mother and the nuns is I had a letter from my mother a few months before she died. She had heard about the class action of adult survivors suing the Catholic church for historical institutional abuse. She reproached me in the letter about this and said that ''the good nuns had given me a roof over my head and I was ungrateful''. The silly cow didn't get it that if she hadn't been so neglectful we would never have been in care in the first place and have never suffered the way we did.
I know many here will think I'm hard to say such things, but I'm glad she's dead- at least I'll never have to come face to face with her and feel tempted to slap her one!

I think that is the hardest part of all this, when your parents don't acknowledge the abuse and instead seem to blame you. My mother would never ever say sorry and even now she whines "What have I done?" I've reeled off a list of things she has done, as has my brother, but she still doesn't get it and thinks that we should be asking her for forgiveness for being ungrateful, selfish and spiteful.

When parents are incapable of seeing the damage they've caused then just what do you do?

I have to wait for her to die before I will get any closure but even then she has turned my brother and sister against me so I will probably never see them again. And would I go to the funeral? Would I be invited?

I think the only way forward is to sever all contact and concentrate on being the best mum and wife you can. It's so easy to get caught up in a negative spiral and think that you are to blame, that you are worthless and a horrible human being, but you've got to look around you and give yourself a huge pat on the back for being a survivor. Because that's what we are, not victims but survivors.

When parents are incapable of seeing the damage they've caused then just what do you do?

That's one I struggle with too Rhubarb. And the sad truth is that I don't think (m)any inadequate parents are able to shoulder the responsibility for their own actions, so closure will probably not come from that source. Nor do I think death necessarily brings closure, since their unacknowledged responsibility for past actions remains the same whether they are alive or dead.

My feeling is that closure, if it doesn't come from the parent accepting responsibility, can only come from us accepting that what happened, happened. That it was wrong, that it wasn't our fault, and that we can't change the past, but can change our present an future.

When ACOA choose to forgive, or to go no contact, or to remain in contact but detach emotionally, I think each of them is choosing their own from of closure.

It's the best we're going to get, and so it's got to be good enough.

gah, so many typos.

change our present and future
choosing their own form of closure

Hmm I've been pondering this thread quite a lot...I'm always pondering...so here are some more thoughts...

If we take the word 'blame' as in giving our parents the sole responsibility for our lives then I stopped 'blaming' my parents when I was about 14 y/o...the first time I ran away and stopped the abuse.

That was the day I started to take responsibility for my own welfare by NOT allowing my father to wallop me again that night.

It took until I was 17 and one week old for me to take complete responsibility for my life. I had to wait until I was sure legally that I wouldn't be sent back home before leaving for good...the consequences for running away and being sent back were just too awful to contemplate at the time.

There have been 'blips' along the way...bad choices in men...which were a direct result of my childhood teachings about what a 'man' should be...but these bad choices, I have always just put down to 'learning experiences'...so although I recognise the parental input into my choices...I don't 'blame' them in a being responsible sense...but I don't 'blame' myself either...they were events and experiences in my life...they are not the sum total of my life.

That said, if I have interaction with my parents now and my father did wallop me for any reason (very unlikely but am just using it an example)...then who is to 'blame' for him walloping me?

He is, just as he was for walloping me as a child...so even though I am totally responsible for my own life now, there is still the capacity for parental blame depending on the circumstances.

so although I recognise the parental input into my choices...I don't 'blame' them in a being responsible sense...but I don't 'blame' myself either...they were events and experiences in my life...they are not the sum total of my life.

Thanks MizzyTizzy. I am dealing with the aftermath of an abusive marraige, and feeling of anger that I was "groomed" to it by my parents, and what you said above is very helpful to me right now.

TheOriginalFAB "It is totally 100% my parents fault that my childhood was shite but 100% down to me that I have turned out okay, if damaged."

What you said.

My DH had a crappy upbringing that has impacted on him in a million different ways, but he has taken responsibility for his own life and actions and every little good thing about him is 100% down to him and his innate wonderfulness. It's how I can forgive him for the few damaged bits that he's still working through and that occasionally impact on me/us.

We are all like machines. Our parents programmed us a certain way, partly through genetics, partly through nurture. If you think about a computer programme that is programmed to produce red dots, it can't spontaneously start producing blue squares. At some point, a computer programmer decides red spots aren't that great really. They look a bit aggressive and off putting. Blue squares are much more harmonious. So the computer programmer needs to reprogram the computer to make blue squares. This may take some time. The software needs to be rewritten. In the meantime, the computer can't stop producing the red spots, because that's all it's programmed to do.

I know that's a bit simplistic, but I'm guessing the "get over it" lobby just don't understand the impact that aggression/abuse has on a child's mind. If we can "programme" our children to eat broccoli and use the toilet, through whatever parenting methods we subscribe to, we can also "programme" them - albeit unconsciously and not deliberately - to eg, not expect affection and praise, even when they have done a good thing, to expect to be screamed at and blamed for things they have no control over. Because a 1,2,3 etc year old knows nothing different than the reality its parents create for them. Unless there are other "programmers" having a counter effect, then the child is programmed thus and knows no different.

I am a 40 year old and I blame my parents for the way I turned out. This does not mean I sit around doing nothing all day and using them as an excuse to do nothing, or whatever notion people have in their heads about us survivors of abuse. For me, it only really hit home to me what my childhood meant when I had children (the first at age 36). That's 36 years of programming I have to rewrite. it doesn't happen overnight.

Hi Puppy

I think if you treat people with kindness and respect and they poop all over you then...it just HAS to be the pooper who's at fault. x

Sorry about the rather muddled reply Puppy but I hope you get the gist.

Iam trying to iron, post here and referee three teen boys...my multi tasking skills obliviously need honing a bit!

I've been pondering Gay40's response and that is the kind of response that an outsider would give. I know that there are a lot of people who are unable to move on from their childhoods. Who are unable to take responsibilty and 'grow up' if you like, to take control of their own lives.

Then there are those who just harp on about it over and over again and can never let go of the anger and resentment.

I think I'm certainly a little bit guilty of harping on about it and my dh got pretty sick of hearing about my mum and what she'd done next. Whenever my brother and sister speak to me now sooner or later the conversation comes round to mum and I do often wonder if they are obsessed with her. They analyse everything she says and does, sometimes to the point of paranoia. That's not letting go, that's letting the situation eat you alive.

Itsmeandmypuppynow had it bang on when she said about acceptance. We need to be able to say "this happened to me, it was awful but I'm moving on from that now". Accept your childhood for all that it was and leave it behind.

In a way I'm actually grateful for some of it because it made me a much more considerate person. I'm stronger as a result of it. I've had to grow up quickly and the things I've achieved I've had to fight for, but as a result I am stronger and wiser and I need to be grateful for that.

But we do need to put it behind us now and move on. We've lived more years without them than we have with them so it's time to look forward now and try not to let our obsession with our pasts ruin our futures.