Our parents, ourselves: Forgiving ourselves for how we coped

All of us come from imperfect parents. 

Even though we know this is true, most of us don’t want to believe our parents / caregivers are imperfect.

As children, it’s easier to take on the belief that we’re imperfect.

Why? The idea that our parents / caregivers aren’t capable of meeting all of our needs is too scary for most kids to contemplate.

However, if we grow up believing we’re responsible if anything upsetting happens at home—or in moments when we don’t get the emotional support we need—we gradually lose pieces of our sense of self-worth.

On top of that, We make up stories and false beliefs about ourselves to support the idea that there’s something wrong with us. And we tell ourselves this is why we’re not getting what we need emotionally not all of our emotional needs are met.

For example: “I’m not lovable” or “I’m not good / smart / talented enough.” Over time, we develop coping mechanisms to back up our false beliefs.

I’d like to share an example from my own life to show how these emotional patterns can play out.

“I’m not lovable, so I’ll learn to make myself lovable.”

Growing up, it wasn’t always easy for my parents to deal with my sensitivities, vulnerabilities, and fears. 

Since I couldn’t wrap my childhood brain around the idea that my parents weren’t always capable of meeting my emotional needs, I developed the (false) belief that I was unlovable.

My (negative) way of coping with that belief was to make myself lovable.

I learned to anticipate everyone else’s needs. I also learned how to take care of people, how to make them feel important—and how to make them love me in return.

The problem with seeking everyone else’s love was that I didn’t learn to love myself. As I got older, I sought out other relationships, searching for the love and security I felt was missing in my childhood. But over time I realized these relationships couldn’t give me what I needed. I needed to find it in myself.

All of us deal with our false beliefs in our own ways

Ultimately, we all have different ways of coping with the false beliefs we developed as children. 

Some of us get angry. Some of us cut ourselves. Some of us fall into addiction. Some of us learn to isolate ourselves emotionally. Some of us learn to give so much to others we forget to love ourselves. 

But here’s the good news: As we transition into adulthood, we can also learn to recognize our false beliefs—and the negative ways we learned to cope with them—and forgive ourselves for how we coped as children. 

Forgiving ourselves for how we coped

The process of letting go of our false beliefs and realigning our negative coping mechanisms starts with forgiving ourselves for developing them in the first place. 

When I work with clients who are struggling with this process, here’s what I tell them: 

“Your beliefs, and the negative coping mechanisms you developed to support them, were what helped you survive. They were the best way to deal with your situation at the time. 

But you don’t need to judge yourself for the way you coped.”

I speak from experience here: After one of my cousins committed suicide, I fluctuated between being unable to cry and feeling completely overwhelmed with grief. 

I had no place to put my pain. My body started to disassociate. I went numb. So I started to cut myself. 

Most people, including my first therapist, classified my behavior as crazy.

Then I met the therapist who changed my life. Instead of judging me for the way I was coping with my pain, she actually gave me credit for it: “That was smart, Jesse,” she said. “You figured out a way to deal with it. If you hadn’t figured that out, you wouldn’t have made it.”

My therapist recognized that I didn’t have other coping skills to deal with my pain at that time. Until that point, cutting had helped me stay sane and remain in my body. Once I understood that, I could see that cutting wasn’t serving me any longer—and I could start to look at other ways to cope.

In other words, as we uncover old patterns from childhood and decide we want to change them, it’s important to start by forgiving ourselves for adopting those patterns in the first place.

By giving ourselves credit for doing what we had to do to get our needs met as kids, we not only recover our self-worth. We also lay the groundwork for transforming what we believe about ourselves—and how we relate to the people we care about.

Do you want to learn more about how to recognize—and let go of—false beliefs and negative coping mechanisms? In my new book, Life Launch, I write about how to realign and release the emotional patterns you developed during childhood to help you build healthy relationships in adulthood. Download a sample chapter here.