Why Can’t I Forgive My Mother for Abandoning Her Family?
Dear Unforgiven,
It sounds like you have tried to get help in so many ways, yet nothing has worked for you. That must be incredibly frustrating. There is no question that being left by a parent is painful. You are entitled to feel anger and hurt, though I hear you say that you don’t want to feel that way anymore, that you want to let it go. If you want to let it go, you will need to find a way to forgive your mother. When we forgive, we actually release ourselves, not the other person. Your mother is still responsible for the choices she made. Forgiveness does not mean that you are OK with her choices or that you condone them. You can’t change the facts of her choices, but you do have an opportunity to change what those choices mean to you.
There is no quick fix for these kinds of feelings, and the strategies that work will vary from person to person. Some people respond well to mindfulness work, whereas some people find cognitive behavioral approaches (REBT in particular) most impactful. I can offer you a couple of strategies to try, though in my experience, working through these strategies with the help of a professional is most effective.
The strategies I can suggest involve reframing how you tell your stories. Right now, you tell your story about how your mom left you when you were 16. My hunch is that each time you tell it, you may re-experience some of the emotions of loss, anger, confusion, or grief that you felt at the time. This can reinforce those feelings of hurt and keep them activated. The first step to making a shift is to start telling the story from the third person rather than first. Become a neutral observer watching the events. Instead of saying, “My mom left me …” you narrate the story, saying, “The mother left her daughter and the family …” By approaching your story this way, you start to get some emotional distance from the events and they aren’t quite as triggering. You may notice details that you didn’t pay attention to before. This is the first step.
When you are ready, you can try telling the story from the points of view of others—other people in your family, and eventually your mother. Consider what they were thinking and feeling, how they made the choices they made, how they saw events. By taking on the perspective of others, it can sometimes shift how we feel about a set of events. Again, I’d recommend that you do this with the support of a therapist who can help guide you through this process.
Another approach I’d like to mention is re-parenting work. Again, I strongly recommend doing this with therapeutic support. The main goal of re-parenting is to go back to the time when you felt abandoned, hurt, and let down, and to allow yourself to feel deeply while also becoming the loving parent to yourself you wish you’d had. Allowing yourself to fully experience and feel the pain of your abandonment is the key to healing here. You learn to offer yourself the unconditional love and support you wanted from your mom. You learn to nurture yourself and heal those deep, painful wounds which can ultimately allow you to release the anger you’ve been holding on to. This approach can be intense, and it is important to find a professional you trust to help guide you through the process.
Best of luck,
Erika
Erika Myers
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Pamela Harper, RN, CHT
August 30th, 2013 at 3:02 PMLetting go of anger frees up the energy to bring in more love in the moment. I use hypnotherapy in my practice to assist in the process and create new, positive neuropathways. We attract what we think about. You are love.
brody
September 1st, 2013 at 5:17 AMThe one thing that jumps out at me is the age where this happened. She left when you were 16, the age when many young women need their moms the most, and she left you without one, and in your eyes, for no very good reason. Of course you were angry then and her coming back is not going to just make all of that anger go away. I agree that working through that anger is the only thing that is eventually going to bring you through to the other side of that hurt but I think that this is probably going to take a lot of time in therapy on your own as well as doing sessions with her too. Maybe there is never going to be an answer that will satisfy you that will answer for you why she did what she did but you need to get some kind of closure otherwise there will never be any kind of real healing to this relationship for you.
Eva
September 3rd, 2013 at 3:52 AMIsn’t it funny how there are people who waltz in and out of our lives and even though they hurt us terribly when they left they think that it is this huge blessing to us when they return and that we just should accept that and move on? Obviously these are people who have faced very little in the way of complex emotions in their lives, or if they have they have run from them and have chosen to bury their feelings. Either way this is a hard situation for you because I know that this is your mom and you want to be able to move forward but life doesn’t always make things quite so easy for us. I guess if you really want her in your life then the two of you are going to have to seek out therapy together. I just think that this is probably too difficult of a situation to try to work thru on your own.
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