Hi there,

If I had a penny for every time someone in therapy has told me, "But my parents really loved me," or "They did the best they could," I would probably have a pretty impressive collection of pennies by now.

And I believe them. I'm sure many of their parents did love them, and I'm sure many were doing the best they could with the resources, awareness, and capacities they had at the time. But what interests me is how often these statements come up just as someone is beginning to acknowledge something painful about their childhood.

We might be talking about how a parent responded to their emotions, or how they learned to manage everyone else's needs, or why they feel so responsible for other people's happiness. And just as we get close to something important, there's this almost reflexive need to defend the parent, explain their behavior, or make sure I understand that they weren't bad people.

It's as though acknowledging the impact of what happened somehow threatens the love.

I find this fascinating, and also incredibly sad, because so many of us have learned that loving someone means protecting them from our experience of them. We may have learned very early that our anger was unacceptable, that our hurt feelings were inconvenient, or that questioning a parent's behavior was disrespectful. Sometimes we were explicitly told we were ungrateful or too sensitive. Other times, we simply noticed what happened when we expressed something that challenged the family narrative.

And so we learned to understand everyone else.

We understood that Mom was overwhelmed, that Dad had a difficult childhood, that our parents were struggling financially, that they were doing their best. We became compassionate toward their limitations, sometimes long before we had developed much compassion for our own experience.

Now, I don't think understanding our parents is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. I think being able to see them as complex human beings with their own histories and wounds can be an important part of healing. But there's a difference between understanding someone and using that understanding to dismiss what happened to us.

Their intentions and our experience are two different things. Both matter.

One of the things I find myself returning to in my work is the importance of being able to acknowledge what happened without immediately rushing to justify it. Not because we need to blame our parents or spend the rest of our lives angry with them, but because we need to be able to tell the truth about our own experience.

If you were frightened by someone's anger, that matters, even if they never intended to frighten you. If you felt responsible for your mother's emotional well-being, that matters, even if she was doing her very best. If you learned that your needs were too much, that matters, even if nobody ever explicitly told you so.

And sometimes there's a tremendous amount of grief, and anger, underneath all that understanding.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how frequently women, in particular, turn that anger toward themselves. Rather than recognizing that something was unfair, hurtful, or simply too much for a child to carry, we conclude that we're somehow the problem. We're too needy, too emotional, too demanding, too difficult to love. We become depressed, anxious, ashamed, or hopeless, and we may not even recognize that some of what we're feeling has to do with things we were never allowed to protest.

Of course, depression and anxiety are complicated, and I'm not suggesting that all of it is unexpressed anger. But I do think it's worth getting curious about what happens to our perfectly legitimate protests when we don't feel entitled to have them.

Where does that energy go? What happens to the part of us that knows something isn't right, but has learned that speaking up might threaten the relationship?

This is one reason I don't think healing is simply about changing our thoughts or learning better communication skills. Sometimes we can intellectually recognize that our feelings are valid, but our bodies still respond as though acknowledging them is dangerous. We may feel guilty, anxious, or even physically uncomfortable when we begin to question the roles we've played in our families.

And that makes sense. For a child, maintaining connection with caregivers is not some optional preference. It's fundamental to survival. If belonging required us to suppress certain feelings or parts of ourselves, those patterns can become deeply ingrained.

Part of the work, then, is gradually discovering that we can remain connected to ourselves even when what we feel is uncomfortable, complicated, or different from what someone else wants us to feel.

We can love our parents and be angry with them. We can appreciate what they gave us and grieve what we didn't receive. We can understand their limitations without continuing to organize our lives around those limitations.

And perhaps most importantly, we can begin to recognize that acknowledging our own pain is not an act of cruelty toward someone else.

It's an act of honesty toward ourselves.

I'm curious whether this resonates with you. Have you ever noticed yourself rushing to defend or explain someone else's behavior just as you were beginning to acknowledge how much it hurt you? If you feel comfortable sharing, I'd love to hear about it. Just hit reply.

Warmly,
Tanya