This is a very good response and I wholeheartedly agree with what you are getting at. I actually don’t blame my parents, and for what I do blame them for I forgive them. But I see how they slot into the jig-saw puzzle of explaining the complexities of my family dynamics. I’m actively going through this investigative process at the moment and trying to see with clear eyes the true nature of so many past actions and words, and up to today really. They were simply continuing the chain, the domino effect of how their parents treated them and their parents before them and so on and so forth. I’ve done a fair amount of work with ayahuasca and during one of my sessions I travelled back to heal previous generations on my mum’s side, my mum, her parents, and back generations and generations, weeping for the pain and heart-ache that seeps the very soil in Northern Ireland. So much difficulty, poverty, resentment and grief. I don’t want to carry those parts forward any more, it’s a very bitter heritage many aspects of it.

It’s up to each individual whether or not they will continue their family chain of pathologies. It’s their own responsibility to be self-aware and decide what route they will take. If someone is a son of an abuser, are they destined to be abusive? Obviously not, some will make a point of not replicating their parent’s behaviour, others will slip into the perpetuating cycle, deluding themselves that they are different from their parent when all the while they become more and more like them. But sometimes to get to that point of conscious decision-making we need to rip the scab away to analyse and prod where we came from.