Similarly, because children cannot easily leave an offending situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix the broken person they so completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child’s responsibility to mend the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the work of decades to develop

You don’t have to tie yourself to the past by unsuccessfully trying to forgive them; instead, you learn all you can from the experience. Give them a nod for a hard lesson that helped raise your consciousness. In this way, you turn these aggressors into catalysts for your own maturation. Through their rough help, in the form of betrayals or harm,

Seeking reassurance during that first year of parenting two, I turned to the work of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He is perhaps best known for his concept of the “good-enough mother,” the caregiver who, through sometimes failing and frustrating their child, ultimately facilitates the development of the child’s ability to

Forgiveness Freud gave us permission to blame our parents for our upbringing. Science also tells us that we can blame our parents, but only for the genes they passed on to us. Neither has solved anything. So, either we blame our parents, and ultimately become them. Or we forgive them, and become our own selves.