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CHAPTER 10

Parent from Wholeness Instead of Your Wounds

hen parents are so wrapped up in their own pain that they
can’t respond to their children’s needs in the way each child
deserves, children grow up feeling not just empty within but
split in pieces. This is because their essential self isn’t something that
once existed and became lost, but is something that was never developed.
Consequently, they forage the Earth looking for a mirror of their true
being, seeking anything that holds out the promise of completing them.
Because it’s so incredibly hard to create an internal mirror of our true
being once the parenting relationship has failed to provide such a mirror,
we are likely to feel not only lost, but even severely depressed. This
depression tends to manifest itself either as a dark withdrawal or through
an addiction of some sort. Because our substance of choice temporarily
soothes our heart’s pain, we may be seduced into believing it provides us
with our lost mirror and feel we are receiving the validation we missed
out on long ago.
I think of Samantha, a woman in her mid-fifties who is intellectually
brilliant, holds a doctorate, and is a nurse at a local hospital. Since her
dream of becoming a mother is connected to finding a spouse, which
hasn’t panned out, neither has her hope of motherhood.
From a broken home, Samantha never knew what it meant to have
parents who were stable and present. Her mother, a doctor with a busy
practice, was mostly unavailable, and she never knew her father. This