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Many of us baby boomers were borninto the age of therapy. We learned to bewell versed and articulate about our thoughts and feelings. Prior generationsmight have repressed the disagreeablefeelings they had about themselves andtheir families. The consequence of thisrepression was a lingering estrange-ment from our own experience. Part of what we baby boomers learned was todistinguish ourselves from our parents by learning about and expressing our anger instead of hiding these feelings.By consciously differentiating our-selves from our parents we aspired for greater freedom and this freedom became a hallmark of our generation. Now that the baby boomers are agingthey face the old age and ultimate deathof their parents. This painful timeremind us that our parents, like our planet, are not inexhaustible resources.We need to come to grips with our par-ents, their good and bad aspects. WhenI discussed forgiveness of parents withmy acupuncturist, he said that if youdon’t forgive your parents you don’tforgive yourself. Each parent, he said,is fifty percent of you.The problem is most of us do not knowhow to forgive. We have ideas aboutwhat forgiveness means that we havetaken from religion or the guidancefrom our early socialization period. Asmall group of researchers and psy-chotherapists have studied forgiveness based on The Stanford ForgivenessProject and have worked with Dr.Luskin to adapt this work into a“Forgiveness Therapy”. This approachwe have applied to help people dealwith aging parents and others who mayhave hurt us.Frank is a case example of how a manmired in a painful grievance was able tolearn to forgive. Frank, a baby boomer,had severed all contact with his wid-owed mother for at least ten years.Frank had declined all of his mother’sentreaties and demands over most of hisadult life because he felt his mother wasso toxic that he feared he would risk everything he had worked for (his mar-riage and career) if he interacted withher. Frank recalled a childhood inwhich his mother and her depressionand suicidal attempts all but engulfedhis sense of self. Frank felt as if hecould drown in his mother’s needs.“I’m not sure many people could under-stand it but I stayed away from mymother to protect my relationships withmy wife and children. I actually fearedthat if I had a relationship with mymother I would endanger my relation-ship with my immediate family,” Frank recounted in one of our earlier sessions.Frank remembers losing all of his self confidence when he spoke with hismother, as if his sense of self wouldsimply dissipate as he related to her.Despite his successful life, Frank was-n’t comfortable avoiding his mother.He dreaded how he would react whenhe learned of a serious illness or her death. One time Frank said “I knewdeep inside that when my mother died Iwould feel upset that I let her slip away,like I wasted an important relationship, but I didn’t know what else I could do.”Like many of Frank’s baby boomer col-leagues, Frank had learned in his previ-ous therapy about his anger, upset, inse-curity as a youngster growing up with amentally ill mother. Frank was articu-late and well versed in his thoughts andfeelings. Yet he had to admit that in allof his years with the most noted thera- pists, Frank had not learned of any wayto forgive his mother. Frank had no ideahow, but he asked for help with teach-ing him how to forgive.Frank was very busy in his early adult-hood trying to not be his mother. “Iremember freaking out if I noticed thatI laughed in a way that reminded me of my mother. Any subtle attribute that bore her influence threatened me,”Frank said. In trying to excise hismother from his life he not only ridhimself of the negative traits of hismother, he also rid himself of many of the positive aspects of his mother and asa result he remembered feeling a deep

By Fred Luskin, Ph.D., Jed Rosen, M.S.W. and Ken Silvestri, Ed.D.

FORGIVING OURPARENTS