12/24/2023
As adult children, we can have grace and compassion for our parents. AND we can be honest about how we’ve been hurt by them.
As parents, we can have grace and compassion for ourselves. AND we can be accountable for the wounds we have caused.
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Posted • It’s normal for parents to be defensive when adult children approach them to tell them how they feel about what happened in their childhood and about the wounds they are working to heal in adulthood.
Parents may feel like their entire identity as a parent is threatened. It may be easy for them to say “I did the best I could”, “you are ungrateful, I gave you everything I could”, or “people are so sensitive these days, in my time children had it much worse”.
And the truth is that from the perspective of the parent, this may feel true to them.
They may have grown up in abusive environments, may have learned to numb their emotions not to feel, may have learned to be “strong” by not talking about how they felt, may have experienced things they tried to change with their own kids (i.e. extreme poverty, physical abuse, SA), and quite literally tried to do the best they knew coming from households where they weren’t taught anything.
What parents often fail to see is that what adult children often want is repair.
They know that they can’t go back and change what happened, but at least they want to talk about how they felt so they can feel seen. They want to know that what happened to them was real, that they aren’t too sensitive, that they are not exaggerating.
They want to be validated so they can move forward.
So many more powerful conversations would start if parents were more willing to listen instead of defend themselves. If they acknowledged their Immaturity or lack of tools. If they recognized their mistakes and attempted to repair.
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