This is the perfect start of a processing letter. A letter to my mother, for example, to find her after so many years after her death and after so many years of working on me.
I remember the first letters composed and full of lilies of the valley when I was just starting to write. For Mother’s Day, the teacher told us wonderful things. It would never have been possible to question anything, and rightly so. Parents are our role models and our precious roots. Instead, then there comes a time in life when brutal resistance develops. Acerb protests to affirm identity, autonomy. Respect to authority, respect to family institutions. So much triggering, so much distance occur…
I was very inspired by the splendid documentary by Alina Marazzi, a courageous testimony of love and healing from a great wound. The director tells the story of her mother with a painful beauty and tender nostalgia. Alina, who has found the courage to open a large closet of hidden things, tells her mother’s depression and honor her troubled life with a splendid story in pictures. I often look at and about this masterpiece, ‘I would like you for one hour only’ which brings me back with a cruel beauty to the nuances of an era of past happiness in which being a mother was lived just like a mission of perfection. Competing with that model was impossible for the protagonist of the documentary and for many women of her generation. Magical, this tale takes me back to many carefree summers, winters on the sled, and certain heavy knitted sweaters. This brings me back to her. The best mother for me.
Many times, I have thought about how to repay my debt of gratitude with my parents, for whom I also felt so many emotions of anger and frustration.
I then started writing them an elaboration letter and this path helped me to really let them go and free ourselves in this great act of love.
With many of you in recent years, we have made a very profound journey, working on relationships, especially the primary ones with parents and on numerous issues related to them.
What I propose to you now is a further step in the path of awareness of children (and some, in turn, parents) that concerns the writing of the processing letters to mom and dad.
Are we truly light, free and grateful in love? Is something still binding us in pain? Do we still have resentment, nostalgia, or an inexplicable feeling of perennial inadequacy? Maybe we think we don’t deserve happiness? Maybe we still have to prove something to them?
The letter of elaboration in our intent heals with a renewed attitude of love, sincere gratitude and absolute liberation with respect to mutual expectations. A letter of elaboration may require several drafts until the most subtle resistances are dissolved; the act of bringing this message to completion can take several months / sessions. We will go to work on the knots that still bind us, to untie them and transform them definitively.
Letter for mom and letter for dad. Whether they are still alive, or whether they are no longer with us. A gesture of freedom that we grant to ourselves and to future generations and an act of beauty that we owe to our loved ones for the life and love they have given us. As we all know, being a parent is the hardest job in the world; any parent, even with the best of intentions, stumbles. Thanks to these ‘educational imperfections’ we are today on a research path and now we have the wonderful opportunity to transform knots of pain into pure energy, precious and necessary to design a bright future for us and the new generations.
I wait for you with paper, pen, old photos, and many memories: to honor, forgive, let go.