“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” CS Lewis
Not everybody has the capacity to love you the way they should. Sometimes in families there are people who cannot fulfil their roles in the ways you expect them to and that can be hard, because what is a mother for if not to love you. Unconditionally. However, what if she can’t? What if despite her best efforts she just does not have the capacity.
Maybe she does not have the lived life experience of ever truly being loved by a parent herself and therefore has no understanding of how to love a child. People like that still become parents, there is no rule or law of nature that says they cannot. So, they continue to populate the world with these children that lack the love they so desperately seek and they themselves may have children and the cycle continues.
So what happens now? If you are the child of one of these people then you have the power to decide what happens now. They may have had what seemed like the upper hand in your childhood, as how could you protect yourself from the person that was supposed to be protecting you? However, now as an adult, you don’t have to live in the past. You can move on in all the ways you want to.
You can move on so far that the memories become distant, but maybe your memories linger in your whole being because deep down there is a part of you that wants to break the cycle.
There is a part of you that sees the cycle and truly sees it for what it is. Just a cycle. It is not personal. You could have been anybody, belonging to any family, but you are in the one you are in and if you were in another family, you may be involved with a completely different cycle but a cycle none the less. The important bit I have found is recognising when you are in a cycle as you cannot break free from something you are not aware of and neither can they.
You can only be truly responsible for yourself and your reactions and how you deal with whatever cycle you are trying to free yourself from. Freeing yourself has everything to do with you and nothing to do with others who maybe spinning in the same cycle as you. The reality is, you may not get the apology or the acknowledgement you want and that matters less when you realise you do not need any of those things to heal. Healing is something you do for yourself and you are capable and able of healing everyday. Slowly, gently and maybe messily at times, but healing none the less.
Sometimes the lessons we learn in life are hard and leave us with scars and maybe even nightmares, but even those can end when we chose for ourselves that we want to move on. Moving on is not forgetting, it is growing. Allowing yourself to grow in a new space with deeper and more established roots.
After all, life is happening and events that we did not expect will occur, as not everything is in our control. So, whatever’s happened to you today, I hope you choose to move through it, gently and allow the layers of emotion to unfurl at their own time. Some days will be better than others, some days will feel like a set back, but the moment you choose the path of healing is the moment you choose yourself and the moment you realise you were all you ever needed all along.
By Tara James
