And change your life.

A useful way to change your life.

Let’s say you had a bad childhood. I’m sorry.

Maybe one or both parents were truly bad people. Criminals, psychos, abusive. That’s really terrible.

More likely your parental problems came from a misalignment. Maybe your mom thought you’d be a certain type of person. Let’s say she thought you’d be a lawyer, and you’re an artist instead. And while she claims to be happy with your choice, you know she’s not.

Or your dad thought you’d be the athlete he never was. And you don’t like sports.

Whatever your reasons, you don’t get along with your parents. Sometimes people imagine that the problem is with one parent. It’s usually both. Because we try to make one parent the good guy when we perceive the other as bad. But it’s not usually that simple.

But that’s not something we can ultimately change. We can abandon our parents. We can ignore them. But we cannot make them not our parents.

And how do we change our lives since we can’t change our parents? Or our history. Or our mistakes.

A big component of the problems is that we carry a memory around with us 24/7. And that memory dogs us.

Change the memory.

I’m not suggesting deceiving yourself. Assuming that’s possible. And I’m not suggesting that you deceive anyone else.

And all of this is predicated on forgiveness. Forgiving your parents is not letting them – or you – off the hook. And while I think and act and write from a Christian standpoint, this is not a necessarily religious forgiveness I’m talking about. It’s about letting go of the beast you’ve carried around for many years.

Dropping off that burden. Forgiving your parents doesn’t mean they didn’t do wrong. What it means is that you will no longer make their wrongdoing the determining part of your life. And if you can’t or don’t forgive them, that aspect of your life will continue to haunt you.

Having taken care of that not small issue, give yourself a new memory of childhood and growing up. Again, not to deceive yourself, but to let yourself mentally grow again.

Were there other adults you secretly wished were your parents? Maybe another relative or a friend’s parents? If so, mentally adopt them. Imagine them being your parents and allow that trajectory to go in a different direction.

Didn’t have any such adults? Fine. Imagine your perfect parents, even though such beings do not exist, but again do a mental reset with such an image.

Having done that, use imaging to set up how a different world might have happened for you. The human imagination is an amazing thing, and if you spend some time daily pondering this new family structure, it can do an astonishing amount of change on your psyche – especially when nagging thoughts of anger or irritation come up against the parents who raised you.

Don’t use an exercise like this to let yourself off the hook for the very real adult responsibility you have to make peace with those around you. It is easy to cut off contact and emotional engagement with someone you are unhappy with. But doing the imaging can give you mental space to work with while you seek to do what you can to retrieve the love you deserved as a child, and now.