Are You Reliving Your Parents' Marriage?

Somewhere along the line, we all have to relive our parents’ marriage, mostly the marriage we saw before the age of five.  During those early formative years, our minds were like sponges soaking up everything we heard and saw.  Reliving your parents’ marriage can be good news, if your parents had a happy, healthy, and loving relationship.  On the flip side, if your parents’ marriage was a train wreck, this can be very bad news.

Even the village idiot can figure out why we would want to duplicate our parents’ marriage, if it had been a good one.  It can be a little harder to figure out why in the world we would want to duplicate a bad one.  If we accept the premise that we are here on earth school to learn, evolve, and grow, the reasons are not all that complicated after all.

When we’re young children, we tend to be very judgmental.  We watch our parents’ bickering and think, “If I were married, I’d never speak to my husband that way.”  Or, “If I had a wife, I’d never treat her like that.”  The universe registers those early-on thoughts, and when we grow-up, it throws them back in our face saying, “Okay, little know-it-all, let me see you do better.” 

Of course, when we’re young, we have no idea how difficult it is to scratch a living out of the earth or how stressful life can be for grown-ups, even under the best of circumstances.  So, we sat in judgment of our parents, all the while lacking the wisdom and knowledge we needed to see the situation from a more compassionate viewpoint.  Only later on, after we find ourselves doing the same destructive song and dance that our parents did -- and shockingly -- sometimes doing even worse, do we begin to realize just how difficult love and life can be.  

What lessons do you think the universe is trying to teach us via this painful experience?  Basically, we’re asked to stop being judgmental of others, and to forgive our parents for they knew not what they did.

If we are to move away from these destructive relationship patterns, we must first forgive our parents.  Have you forgiven your parents for the sin of being all-too-human?  Until you forgive them, you will be doomed to repeat their marriage over and over again. This may well be the reason why your relationships always seem to start out great, and then end in disaster. 

After we’ve forgiven our parents, we then need to forgive ourselves.  Learning to forgive ourselves can prove to be the hardest forgiveness lesson of all. We have to stop beating ourselves up for messing up our relationship(s), and we have to vow from this day forward to learn to do better.  If we learn from our mistakes, we then begin to live in a world where, “It’s all good.” 

If we’re to have happy and healthy relationships, and show our children how to do the same, we need to learn to monitor our words and deeds on an every day basis.  We have to learn to say what we mean and mean what we say, without being mean about it.  We need to catch ourselves when we see that we are falling back into our old, destructive patterns.  After a while, these healthy patterns of interacting with others will become a natural way for us to behave and react.  Soon, you will find that all your relationships, both the romantic ones and the platonic ones, are flourishing and growing.

Award-winning playwright, Cindi Sansone-Braff has a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Connecticut. She is also the author of the spiritual, self-help book Grant Me a Higher Love: How to Go from the Relationship from Hell to One that’s Heaven Sent by Scaling The Ladder of Love.  She lectures, teaches workshops, and gives private consultations throughout the United States and around the world.  Visit her website at: www.grantmeahigherlove.com.