Family

How Do I Gain Forgiveness From My Parents?

by: Matthew Ferry

As a life coach, I help my clients get into harmony with everyone in their life as soon as possible. Once you have achieved harmony with all the people in your life, everything you do is easier and comes together faster. So here it is.

To gain forgiveness with your parents is very simple and yet 99% of all people will never do what I’m about to ask you to do.

5 Step Forgiveness Process

1. Forgive your parents. To empower yourself in this situation, you must surrender your fears and resentments. What is holding you and your parents in this negative loop is an unconscious commitment to being right. You want to be right about what you did, and you want to be right about how wrong they are, for not accepting your behavior.

Your parents are stinky, farting, pooping, crazy people just like you. They are doing the best they can. They don’t think, they react. You don’t think, you react. They simply want the best for you. They have been conditioned by their tribe to believe what they believe. What they believe is not true. What they believe is what they were conditioned to believe. Your parents are not forgiving you because they are holding you accountable to the beliefs they have about the world.

You must forgive them for being conditioned, non-thinking zombies who in the end are just trying to protect you, love you and support you in having a great life. Their definition of a great life is not the same as yours, but they are not conscious enough to know that. That doesn’t make them wrong. That just makes them normal. Forgive them for holding you accountable to rules and agreements that you never accepted. Know that they are just trying to love you and help you live an amazing life.

2. Ask your parents for forgiveness. You broke their expectations. What you did was not bad in actuality. It was bad in their reality. Therefore, to gain their respect back, you must honor that they are stuck in this reality with very little hope of every getting out. Honor this thought by admitting to them that what you did was wrong. Not that it was actually wrong, that it was wrong to them.

Here is the key to asking for forgiveness. Acknowledge the negative impact your actions and beliefs have had on them and on you. Acknowledge the hurt that you have created and ask for forgiveness around your actions plus the impact your actions had.

3. Ask your parents, “What have you been trying to tell me that I haven’t been letting you say?” Don’t argue. Don’t resist. Don’t defend. Just sit, listen and realize that from their perspective, what they are saying is the truth. Just acknowledge them and appreciate their point of view.

4. Acknowledge, appreciate and thank your parents for everything you are, everything you have become and everything you have in your life because of them. This often involves acknowledging that you have what you have because of your disagreement with them and the beliefs you rebelled against. I often say to my dad, “Thank you father. You were the fire that forged the steal of my blade”. I acknowledge that our hard core disagreements about life and how to live it were incredibly valuable in creating my perspective today.

5. Make a new declaration. Now that you see the world from this new perspective, what are you committed to?