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The other day the comedian, Louis CK, opened up on National Public Radio about the weekly LSD trips he had as a teenager, starting at age thirteen. He talked about the fact that he was numbing out the pain of his parents’ divorce. His mother had been busy working and his father hadn’t been present in his childhood and teenage years. “You kind of have to raise yourself,” he said. “Not all kids get a great set of parents. Sometimes they get one who puts in about 50% and one puts in about 20%. So they’ve got to make up that 30% for themselves or find it in other people, in friends, in teachers.”
It got me thinking, how often do people really get great parents? Is it actually more normal to get incomplete parents than it is to get parents beyond reproach? In my line of work I see a lot of people who can point to many things their parents did wrong or didn’t do right. We have moms who drank all day. We have fathers who never really asked us what we wanted or supported us in who we wanted to be. The people who should have loved us may have abused us instead. This is also true of many people I know outside of my therapy practice. So many of us are still trying to overcome parental shortcomings and related resentment and pain. We feel our parents should have been different than they were.
But what if those expectations are surreptitiously adding to the problem? It’s bad enough that we didn’t get what we needed or that we were hurt in some way. But if we add the idea that we should have had a different childhood, that things were not as they should have been, we create even more unhappiness. The risk we face is that our minds will build stories upon stories. You might, for example, think there’s something wrong with you that made your parents do what they did. We risk taking it personally or stewing in resentment.
If you think about the people in your own life, how many do you know who got what they needed from both parents? Perhaps rather than seeing our parents as wrong somehow we might see them as typical, a reflection of the way things are in nature, of which we are a part. What would happen if we accepted that parents are imperfect in their ability to nurture, protect, or set a good example?
Imperfection is all around us. What do we do with it? Mindfulness and the Buddhist tradition from which it springs often get a bad rap for encouraging complacency. But acceptance is different than complacency. I’m not saying we should ignore the fact that many children don’t get the parenting they need. I’m not saying we should ignore abuse and neglect. On the contrary, we need to do everything in our power as communities and as a society to assure that every child is raised with love and opportunity. But at the same time, as we look back on our childhoods, we can also ask a few questions; “Do I believe that great parents are the norm? If so, how is that belief affecting me? How does it impact my pain? Does it serve my relationship with my parents now?" Perhaps what we really need is to focus on getting what we didn’t get elsewhere. Maybe Louis is really on to something.
© 2015 Christa Smith
