Have you heard the term, “heal your inner child?“

We hear it all the time in coaching circles and therapy. Once we heal our inner child and stop blaming our parents, we are able to fully and consciously go through life as evolved, enlightened human beings.

Our decisions become our decisions.

We’re no longer programmed by what our parents taught us to be.

Well…

It’s all, well, pretty much one big victim mentality.

Let me explain why.

I’m not denying the fact – nor have I talked to many people over the course of my coaching profession – that we all need to heal. We all need to basically heal from whatever we all went through as children, and we all went through something even if our parents were perfect Stepford parents. Trust me. 20 years of coaching has demonstrated that to me.

But I’d like to take a different approach in this whole matter.

We all like to have this perception that somehow or another, we deserved or needed to be treated in a certain way.

A lot of people say they would be happy today if it weren’t for their parents. I don’t believe that. You see, our parents did the best job they could possibly do. They treated us the only way they knew how to treat us.

You see, our parents were not the villains in our victim story.

The villains is actually our own thoughts.

Granted, my mom could have been more loving or actually more present, but I look at my mom as an adult. And if I were friends with my mom and dad, I could thoroughly understand what they went through as an adult and how it was passed down to me.

My brother passing away when I was three and a half.

My mom deciding to kill herself in a car wreck with me in the car.

My mother survived that, and she survived the death of my brother.

But in reality, it made her a shell of who she really was before. So in turn, it affected me on a lot of levels. Certainly, a lot of my decisions in life were based on the programming from my parents. But if you’ve noticed, I’m not blaming them for anything.

The decisions that I made in my life… maybe I made them unconsciously and maybe I was triggered, but they were obviously life lessons I needed to learn.

The relationships I had.

The business partnerships I had.

The friendships I had.

The things I could have avoided, the decisions I could have made better were obviously things I needed to experience as my soul evolved.

So stop blaming your parents.

You see, we can blame our parents all we want, but our parents were just adults. So imagine if you actually met your parents at the exact age they were screwing you up. Would you have blamed them for anything?

Let’s say you could have time traveled into the future and you actually got to see what it was like to take care of you under the life stress and under the stories your parents were living out in their own life.

Would you blame them?

Or would you just have compassion because they were just having a human experience and the human experience they were having was not only their own experience, but yours as well?

I have a daughter, and I can see how some of my actions will definitely be the cause of my daughter’s stories in the future.

Is it my daughter’s fault right now that she’s getting programmed that way? Absolutely not. She’s just an innocent victim in parents trying to figure out life because nobody has it together all the time.

As parents, we make mistakes because we are figuring out life on a day-to-day basis. So the mistakes we make or the things we do definitely affect our children and allow our children to go further on through life so they can blame us in the future.

But in reality…

There’s nobody to blame but yourself. You see, once you’ve figured out what your parents did to you, you make a conscious effort of whether to accept it, forgive them and move forward, or continue to be the victim and have your parents be the villain.

I choose not to blame my mom and dad any more. Both of them have passed. But if they were here, I’d look at them as just two old people that I can get together with, learn things from, and no longer expect them to treat me in the childhood story that I wish I had.

Time to drop the villain. Time to drop the ego. Time to just love and accept.