The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

by Pete Walker

Dysfunctional parents customarily crush their children’s instinct to blame unfair parenting practices – and by extension all bad behavior – as soon as it appears. In our culture the most extreme consequences are meted out to children who challenge their parents.

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VERBAL NURTURANCE Children require a great deal of verbal engagement to develop self-esteem and good communication skills. Parents are the pivotal players in their acquisition of verbal skills. If a child’s confidence and self-esteem are to solidify, he needs to experience his parents as readily available to hear what he has to say. Parents who are not neglectful, willingly and enthusiastically listen to their child. They do it not only out of duty, but also out of gratitude, for exposure to a child’s naturally vibrant curiosity and thirst for understanding can be healthily infectious. Participating in the miraculously rapid unfoldment and expansion of a fully welcomed new mind is a truly inspiring experience. Parents enhance the growth of a child’s verbal skills by eliciting her speech. Elicitation is the art of encouraging a child to speak fully and uninhibitedly about her experience. Elicitation allows the child’s self-expression to blossom and enhances his capacity to find the joy and love that comes so naturally out of shame-free communication. Elicitation is enhanced by nonjudgmental listening and open-ended questioning. Questioning is helpful to the degree that it is free from hidden agendas and motivated by a sincere desire to understand. Nurturing questions make it easy for the child to share. They are typically easy to answer and do not feel intrusive or manipulative to the child.

HEALING VERBAL NEGLECT The newly won capacity to accept his feelings frees the way for the patient’s long repressed needs and wishes . . . Among these is every human being’s central need to express himself – to show himself to the world as he really is – in word, in gesture, in behavior, in every genuine utterance from the baby’s cry to the artist’s creation. – Alice Miller If we have suffered prolonged verbal neglect in childhood, we may still be in need of the types of verbal nurturance described in the previous section. Some survivors are fortunate to have received this kind of nurturance through the loving interest of people outside their family. Considerable healing can happen when we have at least one friend or ally who consistently encourages our verbal self-expression, and easily notices and points out what is good and special about us. I