Taken from Psychology Today

“In my last post, I described the differences between needs, which ensure your psychological and emotional survival and growth, and needs which arise from the neuroses, pathologies, and just plain whims of your parents and the environment and culture in which you are raised and have likely caused you considerable unhappiness and dysfunction in your life.

One of the most painful aspects of needs is that you may blame yourself for not getting your needs sufficiently met as a child, thus turning them into needs. You may have come to believe that you didn’t deserve having your life-affirming needs met by your parents in a healthy way: you didn’t feel that you deserved to be loved and valued, feel safe and secure, or see yourself as a competent person. These perceptions may have created in you a profound sense of inadequacy. Through your efforts to meet those needs in childhood and into adulthood, you have been attempting to prove your worth and demonstrate that you do, indeed, deserve to have your needs met.

Let me say something as emphatically as I can that I hope will lighten the load that you may have been carrying for so many years: It’s Not Your Fault. Why your needs as a child became needs had nothing to do with you. Do you know whose fault it really was? Your parents. It was their needs that caused them to not meet your needs and that led your needs to become needs. My gosh, you were just this helpless little child that only wanted to feel loved and safe and didn’t do anything to deserve such treatment.

So here is another thing I encourage you to do: Blame Your Parents for what they did to you.”

Jim Taylor, Ph.D., teaches at the University of San Francisco.

I have struggled with this for years saying my parents did the best they could with what they had. It is likely true, but it cannot stop there. Their best was catastrophic for their children. Most of their children hated and/or still hate them. I do not imagine many forgave them. Like most children, they and I took the mantle of guilt upon our own shoulders and got on the best we could. Sadly, we did not fair well with our own children. Again, we did the best we could with what we were given.

The definition of blame is to assign responsibility. Someone has to shoulder the responsibility. It makes no sense to keep burdening new generations with the responsibility for their own upbringing. The system requires them to try to fix something they did not break and have no power over. And the idea is ludicrous that once a child is 18 they are adults in charge of their own destiny when for so many millions of children early programming has already set the stage.

I did the best I could with what I had, it is true, but I left home to escape a brother who’d already molested and/or stalked 5 of my older sisters, another brother who took every opportunity to give me suggestive looks, and a dad that decided it was his turn. I escaped into a world I had no preparation for with a man who abandoned me and our children continually.

Those are reasons, not excuses for my behavior and I gladly shoulder my share of the responsibility for my children’s upbringing. But only my share. I am nobodies scapegoat any more.

There was a time when facing the harsh realities of my life was incomprehensible. I did not understand how I could be blamed when all I ever did was try to survive the best I was able. Wasn’t that enough?

No. And yes. Yes, because it was all I was capable of. No, because my children felt the sting of abandonment too many times thus passing on dysfuntion to a new generation.

My children are adults now, in charge of their own healing. The least I can do is take responsibility for my share. Our childhoods are not our fault.