Hi jfad2010
I feel for you so much, given your frustration, disappointment and so many more tormenting emotions. I think while hindsight can be brilliant at times (when it comes to how people may have negatively influenced us in our life), it definitely doesn't help if we just don't know how to manage and make greater sense of those revelations and the way forward.
Parents are certainly interesting creatures. Being one myself, a mum to a 21yo gal and 19yo guy, it's not always obvious when it comes to the way we can be impacting our kids. In an ideal world, parents would be masters and their children apprentices. So, the ideal parent teaches their child life skills in preparation for adulthood. In reality though and maybe due to trauma, genetics, a lack of life skills, a lack of consciousness and so many other factors, some parents will teach their kids certain idiosyncrasies, emotional suppression, problematic behaviours and belief systems and the list goes on when it comes to what creates a list of things to struggle through, as opposed to a list of skills to achieve through. So, while ideally, we'd travel through life with a trusty backpack of skills, tools and abilities to reach for at any given time under a variety of challenges, for some people they can find they're largely carrying their parents' baggage. There's little in there of any help. Just one way to look at it. Btw, I'm not poo pooing parents, simply finding reasons for our struggles at times. Often parents can be doing the best they can, based on their own upbringing. It all kinda gets passed on down the line, through generations, until someone changes the contents of the backpack.
Epigenetics is such a hopeful field of research. It's suggested that while we may have been born with a certain undesirable gene that gets switched on at some point for whatever reason, we have the ability to switch off that gene's expression. So, if that gene no longer expresses itself, we're free from its side effects. How to switch it off is a whole other matter. It can be like a recipe for success or successfully switching it off. Just some of a long list of ingredients may include eating well (the right kinds of chemistry found in certain foods), keeping fit and exercising chemistry and cellular energy, developing consciousness (taking note/keeping records or diaries). What if our challenge is to discover the rest of the list. Then it becomes a quest, with a lot of questions. What if, on that quest, part of our challenge involves gathering tools, skills and abilities to put into our backpack. This comes with one key condition: For each tool, skill or ability gained, something detrimental our parents put in there has to be sacrificed. When everything heavy is eventually replaced with various forms of enlightenment, could that be what flicks the switch?
