The Empowered Therapist

TL;DR: Most adult children can hold complexity about their parents and their childhood. What makes that complexity difficult to access is when validation is missing. Acknowledgment creates the safety that allows nuance to exist.

One of the most common things I hear from parents when conversations about childhood wounds arise is some version of, “I did the best I could with what I had.” And in many cases, that statement is at least partially true. Most parents are navigating circumstances they never anticipated, and we all carry our own histories, limitations, stressors, and unmet needs that impact how we show up for ourselves and others. And sadly, many people are parenting without the support, resources, or emotional tools they deeply need. And of course, these sorts of struggles can feel heavy, and deserve to be acknowledged. 

The issue is, it is not the responsibility of the child to validate their parent, since they were the one impacted by their caregivers’ parenting.

When we share pain from our childhood, we are often hoping to feel understood. We want someone to stay with our experience long enough to appreciate what it was like for us. We want space for our hurt to be acknowledged before the conversation expands to include everything else that was happening at the time.

What many parents miss is that many of us have spent years considering their side of the story. We have thought about the divorce, the financial stress, the mental health struggles, the difficult marriage, the grief, the trauma, or the impossible circumstances they were navigating. In fact, many of us become quite skilled at understanding everyone else’s perspective, since that is something we’re often expected to do at such an early age..

One of the things I have observed repeatedly in my work is that many of us carry far more compassion for our parents than anyone realizes. We understand the sacrifices that were made. We understand the limitations that existed. We understand that parenting is difficult and that every parent brings their own history into the relationship.

In some cases, we become so practiced at understanding everyone else’s experience that we rarely allow ourselves to fully explore our own. By the time we arrive at conversations about childhood wounds, we have often spent years holding nuance for the people who raised us.

What many of us are still waiting for is someone to hold that same space for us.

This is part of why validation can feel so important. Validation creates space for a person’s experience to exist without immediately competing with someone else’s. It communicates, “I hear you. I believe your experience was real. Your feelings make sense.” Only after that acknowledgment has landed can most people genuinely access nuance. When validation is absent, the body may remain braced, protective, or frozen,  thus leaving the caregiver and their child in a power struggle wherein one person is seeking understanding and the other is focused on context. However, when validation comes first, when the caregiver can be available to their child in their pain, something different becomes possible. The adult child no longer has to fight for their reality or convince someone that their experience mattered. Once we feel understood, we can soften, drop our armor, and we become a lot more available and flexible to the complexity of the larger picture.

When we feel understood, our nervous systems no longer have to work as hard to defend the reality of our experience. Energy that was being used to explain, justify, or prove can begin to soften. This is one of the reasons validation can create such a profound shift in difficult conversations. The facts may not change, but the experience of being seen changes everything.

Ironically, the very nuance parents often want their children to hold becomes easier to access after validation has occurred.

Many of us are capable of recognizing that our parents were human. We understand that people parent from within their own limitations. We understand that good intentions and painful outcomes can exist simultaneously. We understand that love and unintentional harm can sometimes coexist in the same relationship.

What tends to make those conversations difficult is when the parent’s explanation arrives before the child’s experience has been acknowledged. A parent’s struggle is valid and a child’s pain is valid, but these are not equal in the caregiver/child relationship, since there is a power differential. Children should never be expected to provide emotional support to their caregivers at the cost of themselves, and sadly, this is the dynamic that forms when caregivers are resistant, or incapable of seeking support outside of their relationships with their kids, and being accountable for any pain they caused.

When parents immediately shift the conversation towards their own limitations, their adult child may experience that moment as another version of what happened in childhood. Once again, their needs are moved to the side to make room for someone else’s emotions. The current conversation begins to feel intertwined with older experiences, and the hurt becomes larger than the moment itself. Most of us are hoping for something much simpler.

We want to hear, “I can understand why that hurt.”

We want to hear, “I didn’t realize you were holding all of this.”

We want to hear, “Thank you for telling me.”

We want to know that our feelings make sense, and even more importantly, that they matter.

There is still room for differing memories, personal context, and the realities each person was carrying at the time, because we are all allowed to hold onto the truth as we experienced it. And, we can’t lose perspective on the child/caregiver relationship, and who needs to be available for what. When a child of any age takes the risk to share with their caregiver about pain they caused, the very best thing a caregiver can do is start with listening, believing, and validating the emotions the child is carrying, even if they experienced different ones themself.

Dear one, a family’s story can hold tremendous complexity. Validation creates the space where that complexity becomes easier to access. When we feel seen, understanding often becomes more available. Curiosity becomes easier. And repair becomes an option.

Thank you for letting me see you,