For many years, I carried a deep sense of resentment and sorrow about my childhood. I struggled with the emotional unavailability of my parents and the ways those early experiences shaped my relationships and choices well into adulthood.
I spent years revisiting these wounds, peeling back layer after layer, believing each time that perhaps I had finally reached the end.
Through Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, I came to know the many younger parts of myself that were still carrying those experiences. At one point, I imagined gathering all my little selves and taking them camping in the wilderness, where they could finally rest. It was a beautiful and comforting experience, and for a while, I thought the work was complete.
But familiar patterns continued to resurface.
Until one day, something shifted.
I began to see my parents through a different lens. Within the greater unfolding of my life, I came to recognize them as some of my most profound teachers.
The silencing and servitude I experienced as a child had left me with much to reclaim: my voice, my boundaries, my sovereignty and, perhaps most importantly, my capacity to love myself.
Without these foundations, I had found myself in many challenging relationships and situations. For much of my life, it felt as though life was happening to me, rather than being something I was consciously participating in and creating.
Yet these experiences also led me inward, into years of self-exploration, healing and the mystical realms, where my understanding of myself and my journey and life continued to deepen.
Only just recently, I felt compelled to pick up the telephone and call my parents.
I wanted to thank them for being my parents.
Not out of obligation, but from a place of sincere and heartfelt gratitude for the part they played in my life.
I’m not sure they fully understood why I was calling. But for me, something profound had come full circle.
I could finally recognize that the experiences I had once resented had also become catalysts for my awakening. They had brought me face to face with the very qualities I most needed to reclaim within myself.
This realization did not erase the pain of my childhood or make everything that happened acceptable. But it transformed my relationship with those experiences.
I no longer needed to remain defined by them.
Perhaps this is something of the alchemy of the human journey: allowing the light of awareness and compassion to illuminate even the most difficult corners of our lives, until what once held us in suffering can become a source of wisdom.
For me, this is the journey of the healer. Not a journey towards perfection, but a gradual remembering of our divine nature beneath the conditioning, wounds and stories we have carried.