Attachment to old suffering, which I wrote about last time, often has roots deeper than our adult experiences. Much of what we carry as a burden came with us from childhood, from the families in which we grew up, from the expectations, explicit or implicit, of the people who formed us. And even if those people are no longer present in the same form in our lives, their voice remained, sometimes stronger than our own.
Today's subject is one of the most delicate and most necessary: unburdening ourselves of the parental expectations we have internalised and transformed into our own inner voice.
What are internalised parental expectations? It is not about what your parents explicitly asked of you, but about the messages absorbed from their behaviours, from their reactions to what you did, from what was rewarded and what was penalised, from what was considered success and what was considered failure in their value system.
These messages transformed, over time, into convictions of our own. Be serious. Do not fail. Do not disappoint. Be responsible. Do not think about your feelings more than necessary. Achieve something visible. Do not be too different. Work harder. Everything is fine.
The problem is not that these messages are entirely wrong. Sometimes they contain genuine wisdom. The problem is that we adopted them without passing them through the filter of our own personality, our own values, our own specific life.
How do you recognise that you are living under internalised parental expectations? A few signs.
You make important decisions and the first thought is not what do I want, but what would they think. Even if they are no longer alive or you no longer communicate, their voice is present in the evaluation you make of your own choices.
You feel guilt when you choose something different from what was expected of you, whether it is a professional path, a lifestyle, a relationship, or a value. Guilt is the clearest indicator that you are following an internalised norm, not a value of your own.
You have an internal dialogue that sounds suspiciously like them: critical, worried, demanding, or conversely, approving in ways that do not come from you.
Your major life choices, career, partner, where you live, how you raise your children, reflect their value system more than your own.
Why is it so difficult to unburden ourselves of these expectations? For a few reasons that deserve to be named with gentleness.
The first is love. We love our parents, even those who have hurt us, and adopting their expectations is sometimes an unconscious form of connecting with them, of loyalty to what they represented.
The second is the fear of being alone in one's own choices. As long as you follow someone else's expectations, you are not completely responsible for the results. If you choose truly for yourself and make a mistake, it is entirely yours. Complete responsibility is frightening.
The third is that these expectations have come to seem like our own. We have carried them so long we no longer know clearly what is theirs and what is ours.
Unburdening does not mean rejecting parents or negating their values. It means the process of consciously examining what you have taken on, deciding what remains because it resonates with you, and what leaves because it no longer serves the person you are now.
Some parental expectations contain wisdom you have integrated and which is genuinely yours now. These remain. Others are their limitations, projections of their fears, or products of their cultural and generational context, which do not suit you. These can be released.
In relationships, internalised parental expectations produce direct and visible effects. The choice of partners who resemble the dynamics of the family of origin, the repetition of childhood roles in the couple relationship, expectations of the partner that are actually expectations transferred from parental figures. All of these can be understood and deactivated, but not before recognising them.
And in intimate life, unburdening yourself of the parental voice means being able to be present in your own pleasure without the sense that someone is judging you from the shadows. That you can choose and live without constantly seeking the internalised approval of a value system that may never have been yours.
What is the parental expectation you still carry that most influences your choices today? And if you examined it with the eyes of the person you are now, not of the child who took it on, would you still choose it?
