TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently asked me, is it necessary to confront your parents about the violations they did to you in order to move forward on your own healing process? And although I’ve talked a lot about various ways in which confronting parents can be useful, I would have to say no, it’s definitely not necessary that one confronts one’s own parents in order to heal. And actually, there can be a lot of dangers in confronting parents. I’ve talked about this in different ways, and I’ve written about it in my book, Breaking from Your Parents, but I believe it’s worth repeating.
So the main reason I say it’s not necessary that you confront your parents is that some people have parents who are already dead. And how can you confront people who are not even here? And yet you can still grow. If your parents are dead, you don’t need to confront them.
Also, I have seen it in my own life. I’ve seen it with others, but I think about it most poignantly in my own life that many of the confrontations I did with my parents had an unconscious motivation on my part to get them to love me. Really, I was confronting them to express my feelings, my long-buried feelings about the different ways in which they’d violated me. It was an expression of the anger that I was never allowed, the sadness and the sorrow I was never allowed from their violations, rejections, neglects, things like this. It was like, oh, this is my chance to finally say what I always felt and to have the people who did it to me hear it. But underneath it, I still had some motivation, really, to have them love me. So really, in a way, I was saying, “Mom, Dad, please, this is how badly you treated me. This is how bad it hurt. This is how much pain I carry inside. Change, love me.” And in a way, by confronting them in that way, I was putting myself back in the position of the little violated child that I once really was, and that under the surface, I at some level still remained many years, many decades later even.
And part of the reason I would say you don’t have to confront your parents is because, first of all, well, in my case, that didn’t work at all. My parents didn’t change at all. In fact, they became worse. They became less loving, more rejecting, more hateful toward me in many ways, more violating. And by and large, that’s what I’ve seen with most parents. When they get confronted, when they get critiqued, especially if they get confronted and critiqued correctly, they react more defensively. Less love happens. So it’s like the child’s unconscious need gets thwarted even more, and it can make life a lot more painful for the person who’s doing the confrontation. There can be a lot of negative consequences in all sorts of different ways.
And I’ve talked about this. Oh, people suddenly, the parents are spreading all this negative, nasty stuff about people to the greater family system, to the world, to the community. People can get labeled when they do a confrontation as being mentally ill, especially if they have a lot of anger. Anger is a very risky thing. A lot of times, people can feel very empowered when they’re angry. At the moment that they’re angry, but other people can take advantage of that and use it to disempower someone. I’ve known a lot of people who have done confrontations when they were angry, especially if they stepped over the line, broke things, or even could be physically violating in some ways of their past violators, get arrested for it, get put in jail, definitely get labeled. Oh, you’re bipolar. So-and-so is bipolar. So-and-so is schizophrenic. Or if they cry too much and express too much sadness, oh, you have major depression. People get put in psychiatric hospitals. These are all the reasons I say, well, it’s not definitely necessary that you confront your parents, especially when you consider the risks.
Yet I don’t want to say it’s all bad because I’m going to speak about myself, and I’ve seen this with other people too, so I know I’m not just an example of one. That by doing some of these confrontations, when I had immature motives, when I had unconscious motives, motives of parental rescue fantasy, “Mom, Dad, finally love me, care about me in the way that you never did,” by doing that confrontation, even though they didn’t change at all and they rejected me even worse, and I was putting myself in an overtly immature position begging for love, the advantage in that was that I got to watch myself do that. I got to watch myself behave in a way that before that I was less conscious of. It was basically a chance to study my motives.
So basically, by doing a confrontation that was not entirely emotionally mature, maybe even tilted somewhat toward emotional immaturity, it’s like I got more of a chance to see who I really was. So in that way, it’s like that was an advantage. That was a good thing, strangely enough, even though there were a lot of negative consequences.
So I think a lot of this with confrontation, there are pros and cons to it, and it’s a question of hopefully the pros are more because I’ve seen sometimes that the cons are more, especially immediately. Often the cons really can outweigh the pros. Sometimes if the person keeps self-studying, keeps observing themselves, keeps a journal, has other people in their life with whom they can reflect on what that experience was, people who are healthy, good friends, maybe, heaven forbid, even a good insightful therapist, people can turn the confrontation into fertilizer for growth.
But then I want to get into a different area of confrontation that I think actually is necessary, is absolutely necessary. So when someone says, is confrontation of my parents always necessary? In this one area, I will say yes. And the area is when we confront the parents, the bad parts of our parents who we have internalized into ourselves. Because that is one of the primary consequences of childhood trauma, of historical violations within our family system from our parents, is that to survive in our family systems, we had to internalize these bad parts of our parents. We had to introject these bad parts, these violating parts of our parents, and they became part of us. We became violators of ourselves. Whole parts of our characters learned that it was advantageous to hate ourselves, to violate ourselves, to disrespect ourselves, to keep ourselves disempowered. And those parts of our parents, literally our actual violating parents, live inside of us. And we need to confront those parts of ourselves. And that is the way that anybody at any time, whether one’s parents have been dead for 50 years or not, can confront their parents. And I see no way around this.
We have to. It’s like one could say, oh, we have to confront ourselves, but it’s not really those parts of quote us are not really ourselves. They are our false self. They are some parasite, in a way, that is embedded in us and living in us. And it’s like by confronting this parasite, in a way, it’s like we’re giving ourselves a psychic surgery, a long process to begin to remove it, to identify it, to identify the parts of our self that are really the truth within us and the parts of ourselves that are invaders, violators, things that aren’t us. And there’s no way around that.
I also think of all the different ways in which I have confronted my parents, that is, my parents and my parents that are in me, without my parents ever knowing anything about it. I’m talking about in my journal or in my relationship with my friends when I can talk about things that happened, and I can feel all the feelings and be angry, and I don’t have to put myself at risk of actually interacting with my parents, who I learned through many, many years and times of confronting them didn’t adjust at all, only made my life worse. By confronting them, eventually I realized there was no point. The only confrontations that at a certain point in my life, we’re going back now more than 10 years, the only confrontations that really bore fruit for me were the ones that I had in my own psyche. Much more useful, much more helpful to my growth, much more empowering to me, much less disempowering of me. So ultimately what I realized is my healing did not require them in any way. It did not require interaction with them.
It did not require their change. They never changed anyways. But let’s say even they had changed or had didn’t change, had the capacity to change, didn’t have the capacity to change. Just the idea that I was hoping that they would change or saying I can’t change unless they change, that was me fooling myself.
The real empowerment in myself was to realize that I could change regardless of them. I could change inside of myself. I could change my relationship with myself. I could heal my traumas. I could feel my feelings. I could unbury. I could exhume my past. I could learn what happened to me. I could learn about my feelings. I could recall my memories. I could unblock my blocked feelings, and I could grieve you.