"But I Don't Want to Blame My Parents!" (2024)

As a therapist, when a client and I begin to explore their personality, their identity, and the way the client thinks, feels, and behaves, we often begin to wander into the past and they begin to tell me about the wounds of their childhood. Somewhere in that early discussion, I often hear the client say, “But I don’t want to blame them….”

We often feel very guilty about talking about our parents. We may feel that we are somehow betraying them. We want to be loyal children. We have unconscious fantasies that they are somehow watching as we talk, and they are getting their feelings hurt. We love them and we think that having problems with how they treated us means that maybe we don’t love them like we thought we did—and how can we live with that?

We also often feel a great deal of shame in talking about our parents. Not only do the above thoughts make us feel guilty, but we feel that we are weak for needing to talk about them. I mean, how many years ago was that? Shouldn’t I be over it by now?

The guilt and shame together often make it impossible to talk about them, and so we just don’t. But it turns out that rather than being weak, talking about our difficult histories is one of the bravest things we can do. Why? Because our histories have become the foundation for the roles we play and the identifications we have made with those roles. And that is why we need to talk about our parents. Not to blame them, but to discover more about ourselves.

We should know, however, that there is often a seeming betrayal happening when we begin to process our histories in our families of origin. We are often breaking the silent rules that have controlled the family dynamics for years, possibly even for generations. We often live years of our lives hypnotized by these quiet but very powerful rules. Here are some of them:

• We don’t talk about our feelings here.
• If you are punished, that means you deserved it.
• You have to think the thoughts and have the beliefs that we have, or you are not really a member of this family.
• You should be ashamed of yourself for telling family secrets.
• Be invisible—that way no one will get mad at you.
• You should always be pleasant and serve others or you are not a good person.
• Don’t get too close to people, you can’t trust anyone.
• We don’t call that abuse—this is the way we teach you. It shows that we love you.

We call these rules silent because they are mostly unspoken, but everyone in the family knows that they should abide by these rules. There’s an inner voice that secretly informs your mind, body, and heart that these are the things you should utterly believe. These are the things that are true—truer than anything else.

So, when we first begin to reveal the wounds of our childhoods, we often feel very guilty for breaking these rules. And we know, of course, that breaking rules is wrong. And so, we say, “But I don’t want to blame my parents.” “They loved me, and I know it.” “They tried hard.” “They had their own burdens to carry.”

But the question always hangs in the air: “How do I know they loved me?” Doesn’t love have to look like love? Do we have to treat people badly just because we have our own burdens to carry? And yet, these questions can’t be answered, or even asked, because they feel like blame.

Okay then, let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about what you did with the wounds of your childhood. Did you pretend them away? Did you become a caretaker, always taking care of your parents and siblings? Did you become tough and hard because you didn’t think you could survive any other way? Did you become a super-person, outworking, outperforming, out-achieving everyone in your life so that you could rise above it and never have to feel the pain? Did you become a bully so that you would never again have to be bullied?

Now we are on to something. Because really, this is all that matters. What your parents did is done. Unfortunately, we can’t go back and undo that. But we can figure out how it affected us and begin to peel the onion skins of that effect. We can figure out and process through the emotions we never allowed ourselves to feel because it was both too painful and too much of a betrayal of the family rules.

Why would we want to do that? Because underneath all of the roles you have played and all of the identifications with those roles, there is an authentic Self that has not been allowed entry into your conscious living experience. And that person, that Self can give you the peace and the fulfillment you have been, perhaps secretly or even unconsciously, longing for.

We have chosen jobs and relationships out of the roles we play and our identifications with those roles. For example, if I’ve become a bully in order to avoid the powerless feeling that comes from being bullied, then I will make choices over and over again that keep me in a position of seeming safety, because I will always choose to be bigger and badder than anyone else. I will choose jobs, relationships, and activities that allow me to keep bullying.

If I have identified with the caretaker role, then I am likely to find myself in careers and relationships in which I end up taking care of everyone and everything. I may even find that I am being abused by others for whom I am caring because I fear that if I stop taking care of them, I will find myself to be an unworthy person.

Real healing can come from exploring and processing the ways in which what our parents did affected us. It would, indeed, be tempting to blame them at this point. And we may even indulge in that for a short while. But that is likely to take us down a rabbit hole we can’t get out of, because that focus keeps us stuck in ways that disallow real work on ourselves.

Ultimately, finding the authentic Self starts us on a new path. One in which we get to be present with our own choices. We are no longer making choices unconsciously. We are not just doing what we have always done looking for different results. We are no longer finding ourselves back in the same old place again. We can begin to have a life that belongs to us—not the parents who still reside in our heads, controlling us from there.