The Importance of Forgiving Your Parents

Most parents love their children desperately. There is not much that a mother or father is not willing to do in an effort to love, nurture and protect their children. However, because parents are human beings and, thus, are subject to human frailties, parents do sometimes emotionally scar their children. Without forgiving their parents, these same children then grow up and encounter difficulties in their adult love relationships. Sometimes the hurt inflicted by a parent is indirect an unintentional, such as may be the case in parents who divorce or parents who remain together, but model unhappy marriages for their children. Other times, a parent's harm is more direct, as is evidenced in cases of child abuse or neglect. Whether intentional or unintentional, however, being hurt by a parent can cause a person to grown up with bitter feelings and resentments that affect daily life and their relationships with others.

Beginning a Journey of Forgiveness

As many divorced women can attest, such bitterness fuels the blame often placed on parents for the failure of a marriage, or general feelings about the current state of a woman's life if she is unhappy after a divorce. These are among the reasons that a woman must work at forgiving her parents, however.

In order to move forward to a better life, past hurts and disappointments have to be forgiven. This does not mean that the hurt will immediately cease or that actions will be forgotten. However, forgiving parents involves coming to grips with what has taken place, fully accepting whatever has happened and the fact that one cannot go back and change events, and recognizing that releasing bad feelings about the person and/or events is necessary in order to move forward.

Forgiving Abusive or Neglectful Parents

For many, forgiving parents will undoubtedly be difficult; particularly in cases where a parent was unapologetically abusive. However, it is in these cases that a woman must be even more diligent about practicing forgiveness. To not do so and to choose to continue to live in the grip of what happened means that a part of one's self must still mentally dwell upon the abuse. In doing so, the exact same feelings created by the abuse are allowed to continue to batter a woman in the present, as she must relive these horrible events in order to keep those feelings fresh and alive.

So then, even when a parent never apologizes or takes responsibility for her or his actions, consciously releasing the bitterness associated with their memory and endeavoring to forgive them, instead, allows a woman the freedom to overcome the abuse and stops its control over her life.

The Consequences of Refusing to Forgive

Not to be taken lightly, holding on to ill feelings against another individual can affect a person in a variety of ways, such as poor physical health, unstable emotional health and the ways in which she or he interacts with others.

In his best-selling book, "Getting the Love You Want", Dr. Harville Hendrix offers the compelling theory that the difficulties encountered in marriage are largely due to the likelihood of adults to select partners according to the unresolved issues from childhood that they harbor with people like their parents. With this in mind, a divorced woman who doesn't work to forgive her parents is more likely to attract a future mate with qualities similar to those she despises in her parents.