Parent wounds are emotional injuries inflicted by our caregivers, often during our formative years.
These wounds can manifest as feelings of inadequacy, neglect, or unmet needs, impacting our self-esteem and relationships well into adulthood.
Healing from such wounds is a crucial step toward emotional well-being and personal growth. Here’s a guide to help navigate this complex journey toward restoration.
First, we begin to identify the relationships in our lives that are really broken or missing and acknowledge that a parent wound exists and its impact.
This involves recognizing and accepting the impact this person’s behavior or absence has had on your emotional health. Reflect on specific instances or patterns that contributed to your wound.
Explore how your parent wound influences your self-perception, relationships, and behavior. Notice patterns in your relationships, such as seeking validation or avoiding intimacy, which may be linked to unresolved issues with your parents.
Journaling can be a helpful tool in this process, allowing you to articulate your feelings and experiences.
Next, we want to notice how we are trying to fill that void with other people, as in “this person is going to take the place of that person.”
So what I want to offer you today is that our goal needs to be instead, to acknowledge and be present to what the people in our lives are giving us, but to recognize that it's not going to fill any particular gap that's been left there by another person.
So imagine it like this:
You have like this father shaped space, and let's just say it's shaped like a triangle. Now your father maybe was an absent father or was an abuser, and so this space is not filled with the love or the nurturing or the compassion or the care that we would have wanted you to have gained or had from a father.
Now, the people in your life who might be giving you love or nurturing in the present day, their love is shaped like a circle, so it is love or nurturing or care, and it feels good, but we can't take it and try to shove it into this father shaped space, because when we do that, two things happen.
First, you actually feel unfulfilled, and second, you miss out on the love you're actually receiving.
So at the end of the day, it's about allowing the desire to be loved to be fulfilled in other ways, instead of trying to replace the love or whatever it might be, nurturing, compassion, understanding that was missed, even protection.
So the next step then is to make our peace with the space. It is just a space.
Here's the spot where the dad's love, the mother's compassion, the sisters support was supposed to be.
So it's about letting the space be there. And this doesn't mean we have to like it, and that we won't be sad sometimes because of the space, but there's actually nothing bad or wrong with it being there.
For example, one of my clients had a father shaped space, a space in which he didn't receive any nurturing from his father, and in his relationship with his girlfriend, he was constantly making her responsible for replacing that nurturing. And so he was on the watch all the time for any signs that she wasn't being nurturing, and that would cause a big trigger, because she was responsible for that, and if she was anything less than that, that was a problem.
And then, of course, it was exhausting, because no matter how much nurturing she would give to him, it was never going to be enough to fill that space because it didn't fit; because she's not his father.
So bottom line, we want to be really careful to not make other people in our lives responsible for filling the spaces that are there because of other people in our lives who abdicated that responsibility or didn't show up, and instead, we want to focus on receiving what they are offering and taking at it as its own thing.
So take some time and check and notice, is there any way that you're doing this in your life? Is there anyone you're making responsible to fill the space that you have you?
Want to learn more about healing the parent wound? Be sure to check out this upcoming summit!
To healing!
P.S. If you're ready to take the next step in healing from abuse and would like to explore enrolling in the Beyond Surviving program, start by applying for a Discover Your Genuine Self session.
UPCOMING EVENTS
