Should I Forgive My Parents?

For some people, this uncertainty eventually becomes estrangement. Contact is reduced or stopped. For others, estrangement is considered but never fully enacted. There may be a long list of grievances, along with an equally uncomfortable question: What am I supposed to do with all of this?

The question of whether to forgive your parents can become particularly difficult when the things you are angry about happened twenty or thirty years ago. How much accountability should you expect from someone who may not recognize your version of the story? How much responsibility should you ask them to take for the person you became? And how much of your present relationship should be determined by an indictment of their parenting in the past?

There are no easy answers. There are, however, some useful pieces of context.

Your Parents Were Imperfect

Parenting is hard. If you are not yet a parent yourself, it may be even harder than your best guess.

This is not an argument that parents deserve a free pass. It is a reminder that parenting is an enormous undertaking performed by people who are simultaneously trying to manage their own marriages, careers, finances, identities, families, disappointments, responsibilities and limitations.

Your parents were also people outside their role as your parents. They had their own struggles for autonomy, freedom, intimacy, competence and meaning.

Their version of a successful life may have been different from yours. This is especially true across generations. Ideas about emotional openness, relational intelligence, vulnerability and psychological development have changed substantially. Things that seem obvious to a young adult today may simply have been outside the imaginative world of their parents.

The Goalposts Can Keep Moving

There is a strange treadmill that can develop when we evaluate our childhoods.

Once you identify something your parents failed to provide, it can become difficult to remember what they did provide. A safe and plentiful home becomes the bare minimum. Education, financial support, stability, opportunities, meals, transportation, protection and years of practical care become things they were simply supposed to do.

The evaluation moves to the next missing thing.

There is a difficult mathematical problem here. If the standard is that your parents should have provided everything that might have made your childhood better, almost every parent will fail.

That does not mean your grievances are imaginary. It means that evaluating a childhood requires some proportion. Otherwise, the absence of perfection can gradually become evidence of failure.

Your Parents Were Never Your Peers

Contemporary therapeutic culture places considerable value on vulnerability, transparency and emotional openness. These can be valuable qualities in relationships.

But the parent-child relationship has a different architecture from friendship or romantic partnership.

For parents, one of the most important qualities of the relationship is duration. They want to remain connected to their children for decades so they can provide, protect, help, care for and watch them.

That can create a particular kind of distance. Your parents may not have told you everything they were feeling. They may not have been particularly vulnerable with you. They may have believed that some adult problems belonged with adults.

There is something worth remembering about this when evaluating them through a contemporary therapeutic lens. The most intimate, emotionally transparent relationship is not necessarily the definition of a successful parent-child relationship.

In fact, some distance may have protected the relationship from the intensity that characterized your own high-school years.

Your Parents Had Parents

Your parents did not invent themselves.

They were raised by people who were themselves imperfect, working within the assumptions, limitations and circumstances of another generation. Some of what they gave you may have been an improvement on what they received. Some of it may have been inherited without much examination.

This creates a useful question when looking backward: What was actually happening here?

The answer may be more complicated than either “my parents did their best” or “my parents failed me.”

What Do You Do With a Real Grievance?

At Nightingale, we try to zoom both in and out.

We zoom in on the actual experience. What happened? What did you need? What did you understand at the time? What conclusions did you draw about yourself, your parents or the world? What still feels unresolved?

This allows us to examine an experience closely and make fresh meanings of it, rather than immediately deciding how it should fit into familiar cultural ideas about boundaries, vulnerability, emotional safety or attachment.

Sometimes, even with a generous eye, there were real misses.

Some parents were unavailable. Some were frightening. Some were neglectful. Some were consumed by their own problems. Some made choices that genuinely harmed their children.

A generous interpretation does not require pretending otherwise. Where a relationship involves longstanding harm or trauma, complex trauma counselling may be an important part of understanding what happened and protecting yourself now.

But sometimes a wider view changes the meaning of an old grievance. A parent's behaviour that once felt like rejection may begin to look more like incapacity, fear, confusion or the product of circumstances. More information becomes available. The story becomes larger.

And sometimes that is enough to begin melting a grievance that once felt immovable.

What Kind of Relationship Do You Want Now?

Adulthood introduces another question that can get lost when the focus remains on childhood: What kind of relationship do I want with my parents now?

How close do you want to be?

What do you want to share with them?

What do you expect from them?

Where do you need independence?

Where would more connection be welcome?

These questions have to be answered in the present. Your parents may have changed. You have certainly changed. The relationship is capable of changing with you.

Sometimes the appropriate relationship is close and warm. Sometimes it involves substantial boundaries. Sometimes a period of distance is necessary. Sometimes estrangement is the healthiest available arrangement.

The important thing is that the present relationship does not have to be a permanent referendum on the past.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness often sits underneath the larger developmental task of compassion.

Compassion allows you to see another person as a whole person, including their limitations, history, fears and failures. That does not require abandoning your own experience or surrendering accountability.

Sometimes we forgive for another person's benefit. Sometimes there are surprisingly concrete benefits to ourselves. We may become less preoccupied with an old injury. We may stop organizing our identity around what someone else did. We may become freer to decide what kind of relationship we actually want.

Sometimes the person is still alive and a relationship can change.

Sometimes they are dead, and the work is entirely internal.

And sometimes you are simply not ready to forgive.

Forgiveness does not need to be the first objective. Understanding may come first. So might anger. So might distance. So might a clearer sense of what happened and what you need now.

That freedom might lead toward reconciliation. It might lead toward distance. It might lead toward a relationship that looks completely different from the one you had as a child.

Either way, growing up eventually asks us to become something more complicated than either our parents' defenders or their prosecutors. We have to become adults who can look backward with enough honesty to see what happened, enough generosity to understand the people involved, and enough freedom to decide what comes next.