Honour What Is Honourable

Frequently, while I am being “caught up” with a client’s life story and the elements which constitute their reason for seeking out counseling, I hear their account of how influential their early caregivers have been. This is not always experienced positively, usually for good reason. What I observe, however, is that despite the obvious reasons for assigning blame, most children (of all ages) hesitate to go so far as to cut off the parents or others who reared them. It seems to me we have a basic need to see those people as having loved us, even if in a limited way, since that would tend to establish that we are worthy of love.

Also, children are aware of the implied contract with adults around them, especially at the ages when they are most dependent – “you’re supposed to take care of me”. If the story is visceral and dramatic enough, the teller can become emotionally and developmentally “stuck” at the age when that contract was finally seen to be broken.

I am aware that there are therapeutic approaches that counsel some form of “cut-off”, to promote the well-being of the client and subsequent generations, or for some other justification. Being infused with Family Systems thinking early in my professional education, cut-off is not an instinctive response for me in my practice. I struggled to know how to acknowledge abuse, neglect and injustice yet honour most clients’ apparent need to stay connected with those who had wronged them. I was fortunate to have one or two clients who had already confronted this issue and made life-affirming choices other than cut-off. Their stories became distilled into a phrase I find myself repeating almost daily – “honour what is honourable, learn from the rest”.

What I mean by that is simple in concept, but can be complex to process and implement in one’s life. If we become willing to “honour what is honourable”, even though it may be “small” - “Dad had a place for everything, and everything in its place” or, “Mom had a great laugh” – we set ourselves free to not just list the failures and shortcomings, but to learn from them. To say “I would never do that to my child” is a start, but probably not the whole lesson, since a reactive posture is not conducive to learning that lasts. Keeping ourselves in the family stew, seeing the connections between stories of the past and our present day reactions to life events provides a context and framework for integrating new learning about self.

This is not intended as a blind defense of bad parenting, a denial of abuse or whitewash of injustice: it is a response to a seemingly innate need for us to have been loved and parented, which persists despite what others may judge to be a tremendous weight of evidence to the contrary. Satisfy the need to honour, make it rational, honest, and then “learning from the rest” (the parts that were less than honourable) becomes a more do-able task. I have had an image of the multigenerational family which flows out of the era of the “Space Race” – a family can be likened to a multi-stage rocket, each stage (generation) responsible for pushing the progress of the family (a group of individuals in relationship) as far as it is able, falling away and letting the next generation push on. This image may impress you as sad, or hopeful, or misguided, but why we respond to it as we do is worth thinking about. If nothing else, we can honour the effort of our predecessors, while committing to being honourable ourselves.