How does it happen?

In a nutshell, you take your parents with you when you leave them. It’s about giving something up and finding something else at the same time.

When I, as an adult, give up all my inner and outer expectations of my father and mother, two things happen at once: I begin to realise my true freedom, and at the same time I realise that I am alone. I am completely with myself. I meet myself, I find myself, so to speak. There is no one left to tell me how to live. In this I find a freedom that has always been there, ever since I left home. Perhaps it has not yet been allowed to really reach me.

To ‘take one’s parents’ is the same as to ‘leave one’s parents’. One cannot exist without the other, and both describe the inner movements of adults towards their mothers and fathers. To leave one’s parents behind means to accept them as they are. And vice versa. I accept my parents by ceasing to demonise or idolise them, by ceasing to take things away from them or to blame them for things. I accept my parents by letting them be who they are and who they have been as human beings. I release them inwardly from everything I ever imagined ‘being my mother’ and ‘being my father’ to mean. I release this woman and this man into their own existence. I also release myself from all the demands and obligations associated with being a ‘child’.

This does not mean that I now have nothing to do with my father and mother. They remain my parents for life and I remain their child for life. No-one can ever change that, even if I never met them personally, because without them I would not be here. I am their connection made flesh, I came from their bodies, from their history. Accepting my parents as they are and involuntarily letting go of them inwardly means that I can now actually develop something like a relationship with them, a relationship that is voluntary on both sides because it is not based on dependence.

Only now can I get to know the woman and the man who were hidden from me behind my image of ‘mother’ and ‘father’. As long as I was dependent on them, i.e. in the womb, during childhood or during my long adolescence, there was no way for me to see these two people as they are or were, independent of their life-defining roles as father and mother. This is the nature of any dependent form of love. Dependent love is and remains blind. Only when it realises the end of dependence does it see. Then it is suddenly grown up, or more precisely, it realises that it is grown up.

However, there is no guarantee that I will find the people behind the labels ‘mother’ or ‘father’ particularly likeable. Perhaps it is better for me to keep my distance from my parents and to measure my encounters with them carefully, in a way that is good for me. The balance between closeness and distance always determines the quality of relationships, even those we choose. But perhaps, beyond my idealised image of my parents, there are people who interest me and whom I actually like to see.

For one’s own sense of life, accepting one’s parents or leaving them emotionally behind is equivalent to an inner birth. It is about coming into the world spiritually; it is literally a birth. Many things happen at the same time.
First, I am leaving the status of victim. I take the step from being a victim to being the protagonist of my life. I’m moving away from ‘I can’t do anything’ or ‘I’m at the mercy of others’ or ‘I need you or this or that’. At the same time I move towards ‘I let things happen’, ‘I feel’, ‘I am’. I move from powerless neediness to freely expressed need. This leads me out of my inner dependence on my environment, on other people, on circumstances. It leads me to trust in my own vitality, in my own existence.

Secondly, ‘taking’ or ‘leaving’ my parents brings me into my own power. By really allowing myself to sink physically, emotionally and mentally into the realisation that I am no longer dependent on my parents, I enter a ‘new world’. The world becomes new when we stay true to ourselves. Being true to oneself means no longer having one’s centre of gravity outside of oneself, as a child does because its centre of gravity is with its parents, or a teenager whose centre of gravity is with his peer group because he needs to get away from his parents. The “centre of gravity” is the place of attention, the place of the “self”, the place where the impulses for action come from.

The third thing: I learn to see myself. To see myself means to shift the focus away from the outside and more towards the inside. When I left my parents, this place or focus of my existence was less in my environment, i.e. with other people, and much more within myself. The clearer I can stay with myself, the more effortlessly and with greater power I become effective than in all the (inevitable) attempts to improve the world I made in my youth. I also become ungovernable and unfit for war, because I no longer confuse myself with others. I simply follow myself and take responsibility for everything that comes from me.

2. Possible consequences
What does all this mean and what are the consequences? Here are a few key words, this time in the ‘we’ form, because they describe something more general:
Taking or leaving one’s parents affects the possibilities and limits of developing a precise sense of self, of really feeling oneself. It affects our ability to relate, which comes from that sense of self, because adults’ ability to relate only goes so far as their sense of self.

It also affects the way we can be fathers and mothers ourselves. Everything we have not yet accepted about our own parents, everything we may still be struggling with, comes rushing back to us in our children. They feel it, show it to us in their behaviour and symptoms, and sometimes throw it in our faces until we are red in the face. When we were children, we did the same thing to our parents: our unconscious act of love for them. Now our children are doing the same to us with their dependent love, until they too leave us emotionally and, as adults, perhaps begin to get to know the man and woman we are beyond our roles as ‘father’ and ‘mother’. This is exciting for us too, because only then do we get to know the man or woman who is also my child, beyond their status as ‘my child’. When this happens, it is an indescribable joy.

Accepting or letting go of one’s parents also affects one’s relationship to one’s own gender, to masculinity or femininity, and thus to sexuality. This determines, for example, the extent to which one can experience a pleasurable and fulfilling erotic relationship with oneself and one’s partner, the extent to which one can move from the ‘need for security’ of childhood neediness to the ‘wanting with an uncertain outcome’ of adult desire. The way we take from our parents affects the extent to which we allow ourselves fulfilment, success, enjoyment, satisfaction, prosperity, etc., in other words, everything that could be called happiness in the broadest sense.

Ultimately, it touches on the background of most of our own symptoms, from merely ‘obstructive’ patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving, to illness and severe mental and physical suffering. Our symptoms almost always draw their energy from our unconsciously dependent love for our parents. They challenge us to leave our parents internally by ‘taking’ them.

Taking or leaving our parents affects our whole attitude to life. We often confuse our current relationship to life, for example: ‘it’s hard’, ‘it’s unfair’, ‘it’s a constant struggle’, ‘you don’t get anything for nothing’, ‘it’s dangerous’, or ‘I’m not really made for life’, with the relationship to life that made sense to us at a certain time in our earlier life when we were dependent on our parents, for example in the womb, in childhood or in adolescence. The freedom of an adult has a very different relationship to life and one’s own vitality than that of a dependent unborn child, child or teenager.

It also affects our relationship to the world, i.e. the circumstances that surround us, be they professional, political, cultural, etc. It therefore affects our relationship to our own effectiveness, for example in our work or in our participation in public life. The dependent child often experiences itself as ineffective in relation to its parents (its ‘world’). This corresponds exactly to their existentially dependent status. They are right to feel this way. Adults are self-effective per se, because in reality they are no longer dependent. When they feel powerless, they experience a memory of childhood.

How it continues
I summarise ‘I accept my parents’ in three sentences:
1. I accept my mother and father as they are, without expecting anything more from them as parents.
2. I accept everything I have experienced with them as part of myself, exactly as it was for me at the time and without wishing for anything different.
3. I accept myself as a child of these people, as I am now, without wanting to be different.
This is the first of four parts.