How To Avoid Repeating Your Parents’ Mistakes?

Understanding childhood wounds

Let’s face it, there’s no such thing as perfect parents 🤧! We all make mistakes one day or another, and it’s often unconscious. Nevertheless, you need to pay attention, some of them can create a universal wound that your child could suffer from for the rest of their life. They’re at the root of fears because a need for security hasn’t been met.

Generally speaking, there are 5 universal wounds that we encounter in childhood, born out of traumatic mistakes: injustice, rejection, fear of abandonment, betrayal and humiliation. It’s important to take care not to reproduce our own wounds. Unfortunately, many people suffer from this without realizing it.

If we want to avoid repeating our parents’ mistakes, it means we’re aware of the problem, and that’s a good thing. In fact, as psychologist Robin Zasio says, the key to breaking unhealthy patterns is to become aware of them, that’s what will allow you to take a different path. But that doesn’t mean we won’t make other mistakes. For example, if you’ve had absent parents, you mustn’t go the other way and be too invasive and smothering. So how do you go about it?

>>> Read; Do we have to love our parents?

Making peace with your past

If you’ve had a toxic family, you can’t forgive everything. However, for your own well-being, you need to identify the wounds and speak about what went wrong. Communicating openly about family problems is difficult, but it’s essential for healing and moving forward, as psychologist John Gottman said. However, sometimes it isn’t possible to do this face to face, because the dialogue has broken down, or our parents have died. In this case, we might consider writing a letter to our parents or even starting therapy.

What’s more, when you’ve had a traumatic past, and it’s your turn to be a parent, it’s important to talk to your children about it. But don’t do this when they’re young. You need to wait until they’re old enough to understand your story and your wounds. You can apologize and tell your story, while emphasizing that it’s not theirs. We alone are responsible for the way we behave towards our children, and under no circumstances should we make them bear this burden. That’s why we need to talk to them when they’re old enough to understand.

🙅‍♀️ Freeing yourself from what’s left unsaid also means releasing family secrets. Keeping things buried is harmful, both for parents and for children, who can sense very well when something’s up.

Separating yourself from your children

To make sure we’re meeting all our child’s needs, we need to listen to them! For example, if our child tells us about their day, we need to pay attention to what they say. We may miss the fact that they’ve had a row with a classmate and that they’re upset. Active listening allows us to concentrate on what the other person is saying, and that applies to our children too. It’s complicated to concentrate all the time, but we have to at least open up a dialogue to be totally connected to our children.

• 👉 Being a good listener enables us to identify needs such as security, love, communication, recognition, and fulfillment.
• 👉 Listening also means not anticipating based on our traumas and emotional shocks.

We need to dissociate ourselves from our children: they’re not us! They’re personalities in their own right who depend on us. We have to raise them, but not project our desires onto them. We need to be there to support them in their passions and projects. To achieve this, we need to get rid of our limiting beliefs and get out of our comfort zone. These are generally inherited from our family, our entourage and social environment.

💪 We need to be able to encourage our children to explore the field of possibilities, to discover, to learn, to be curious, etc.

Be sure to check out these articles too;

• Why does my family see me as a child?
• Can you really cut ties with your family?
• I was a victim of parental bullying... Here's how I dealt with it