Mother's Day Feelings

Today is Mother's Day and many people will joyfully celebrate with their mother's or will lovingly and gratefully remember their mothers. But what about all the people who are angry with their mothers and unhappy and resentful about the way their mothers treated them or didn't treat them? One of the most difficult life lessons is accepting the things we cannot change, changing the things we can and having the wisdom to know the difference.
If you did not get along with your mother and have angry bitter feelings still, what can you do? Some of the things that people learn in therapy is that most parents tend to parent in the same way that they were parented. When people come into my office with painful mother-child relationships, I often ask them what they know about their own mother's childhood. Invariably it was abusive, neglectful and pretty awful too. Now of course, two wrongs don't make a right, right? But when humans have terrible childhoods and parenting, unless they get a lot of help themselves, many of these patterns are likely to be repeated.
Healing painful relationships with parents can be a lifelong task but things CAN get better. Forgiveness is done for the one feeling the pain. It helps you and does not "let the offender off the hook."
If you are having some feelings of pain around this, please let me know and we can talk about it this week! Happy Mother's Day to you!