Welcome to the Mathias Sheeparker podcast. My name is Mathias. I'm a psychotherapist from Spokane, Washington

and this is podcast about mental health moving towards what's meaningful even despite hardship.

Today's episode is about forgiving your parents and I've gotten a lot of feedback on this episode

that it's helpful not just maybe in processing your own upbringing and your relationship with

your mom or dad but also like as a parent like as you're raising your own kids this gave

you know a pretty maybe expansive map for ways that you can actively work to give your child

a really great upbringing prepare them for what's coming on in life and so that was really

meaningful to get that feedback so I hope as you're listening today you're not just thinking about

maybe your own upbringing but what that could look like for the future and what these insights could

mean you know if they're integrated into who you are as a person too so if you enjoy this episode

you formulate our identity based off of what our parents thought about us

like the things that we saw and heard reflected back are the building blocks that we formulated

our own view of ourselves so maybe that was good if you got encouragement and positivity maybe it

was that you fundamentally learned that you were irritating in an interruption

you know this also has implications on how we saw our parents you know interacted the world

some of us had parents who saw the world as fundamentally kind of an arbitrary

place full of betrayal and suffering they were really cynical as that affected us deeply that

affected maybe our own sense of how we interact with the world and we're going in expecting

betrayal and suffering and failure and and we feel like there's nothing really that we can do to

mitigate any of that it's just futile some of us had parents who rose to the occasion and it's not

even necessarily maybe that they got better results out of it but they just kind of when

confrontation presented itself to them they rose to the occasion and they met it with nobility

...