The dual parent-child relationship

Here’s more by Pamela Kribbe about breaking the negative bonds of dependency on our parents:

“To be really free and to regain your mastership as an independent spiritual being, you have to let go of your birth family.

You have to let go of them, not only as their child but also as their parent.

Let me explain this double bind. The child in you needs to let go of the hope that your parents will offer you unconditional love and safety. It has to turn to you for this and you have to help it let go of the angry, sad and disappointed part of the child that feels betrayed by your parents. This is the child part.

However you also need to let go of the part of you that wants to be your parents’ parent. It is typical of lightworker souls that at some point when they grow up, they start to feel like they are the parents of their parents. Because of their inborn desire to teach and heal and their developed spiritual awareness, they often see their parents’ fears and illusions clearly and they want to heal them. This may get you into a lot of struggle with your parents because your desire to help them is often intertwined with an unconscious need to be recognized for who you really are.

In other words, the wounded child speaks through you when you try to help your parents, and it is a recipe for disaster when you try to help others through the wounded parts of you. You will end up more wounded and your parents will likely end up upset or confused.”

Pamela Kribbe, “The Channelings of Yeshua”

I really like how Pamela Kribbe writes, her language is deeply psychological and wise. That’s exactly right – the child-parent relationship is not just the interaction between people with certain social/biological roles in the family. It is also a relationship between different internal parts – between our inner child and our inner parent. When we can see these roles as symbols of inner psychic parts, we mature. And we look to the only place where changes are possible – our inner space.

“To let go of your parents means to let go of any desire to change them.

You have to understand that it is not your task to lead them anywhere. Your mission is to deal with your own path – that is all. After you have truly parted with your parents, letting go of the double bind, you will find that a new space opens up between you and them, much more free and open. If they are still alive, the relationship with your parents may become less strained, as the energies of reproach and guilt will have left the scene.

On the other hand, you may feel you do not want to visit them so often anymore. There may simply be a lack of common interests. In any case you will feel more free in this relationship, setting your own course through life without the need for approval by them or the tendency to get angry and upset if they do not agree with you.”

Pamela Kribbe

So, it’s the knowledge that helps to get rid of the double parent-child bind. The first thing to do is to turn the external roles of a child and a parent into internal figures. We do this by “splitting” ourselves in two:

  • One part we will call our inner child – this will be our feelings, emotions and desires.
  • The other part we will call our inner parent – this would be our mind that notices our emotions (sees our inner child), finds a way to take care of the needs behind them and most of all never, ever, judges us.

Once we have turned the external roles into internal parts of us, we begin to change the way they interact. This is the good news – what the parent inside us will say and how they will react is now entirely within our control. It is the inner parent who needs to change, because our inner child is just the way it is. Emotions, even the most vicious, are innocent as children. It is our mind that we can develop so that it can begin to understand and not judge our inner child. Until it becomes the perfect parent we have always dreamed about!

Psychology would call this “a development of emotional intelligence”. Unlike cognitive intelligence, it can be developed during the whole life.

Psychologist and psychotherapist, founder of espirited.com.
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