TRANSCRIPT
Anybody who was abused by a parent has 100% of a right to be able to confront their parents. It’s a human right when someone does you wrong. You have a right to confront them on it and to blame them for it, to have your full range of feelings towards the person for what they’ve done to you. You have the right to be angry at them, to be sad, to want them to change their behavior, to demand an apology. Whatever you want. That’s all fair.
The problem is, what is the reality of confronting parents?
CONFRONTATION CAN BE RISKY
If it was just as simple as, “you have a right to confront your parents, it’s very simple: confront them, blame them, yell at them, scream at them, call them on exactly what they’ve done and it’ll all be okay,” then great, go for it. But what I’ve observed, the reality is, I’ve never seen it be all okay as the result of confronting parents. Watching other people do it and watching myself having done it, what I’ve observed instead is that the consequences can actually be devastating. And sometimes the consequences can be worse than if there is no confrontation at all. And sometimes it could be worse in some ways and it can be better in some ways.
PARENTS IN DENIAL
In my experience, the far, far majority of parents do not want to deal with the emotional reality of what they’ve done to you. It’s too painful for them. It’s too shameful, it’s too devastating, there’s too much guilt in them, and basically there’s often just too much denial. And they have too little empathy for you. They don’t really understand what they’ve done. They don’t feel your feelings well enough; they never did. If they were able to empathize with your feelings so well as a child, they wouldn’t have done those horrors to you.
And also then there’s just the one thing that part of the reason the average parent has a child is so they can act out on them in various ways. Of course, the parent rationalizes it and the average parent would totally deny that: “I don’t have kids so I could act out on them. That makes no sense.” But that’s because they’re very disconnected with their unconscious and deep down they did want to act out on the child, and it gave them a lot of deep satisfaction, pleasure, and comfort, and it kept their whole world in a comfortable order.
And most parents are not changing that much, even if it was 20, 30, or 40 years ago that you were a little child in their family. Because if they were the types who would have changed so much, first of all, they wouldn’t have had you, and second, they would have come to you before you confronted them, and that would have changed their lives dramatically to never replicate that, and they would have tried to work out their own traumas. And, pardon me, but I don’t know very many parents that make much effort trying to resolve their traumas. And I think actually there’s many reasons why parents don’t do that.
WHY ARE PARENTS SO STUCK?
Once a person becomes a parent, it’s very, very hard to look at this stuff honestly. For starters, the parent would have to look at the damage that he or she went through in his or her childhood, and they would have to confront their own parents. And very few parents feel comfortable confronting their own parents in a deep and profound way, because they realize that what comes around goes around, and if they confront their parents, that their kids have every right to turn around and confront them. And that’s enough to stop most parents deep down from doing much healing work in terms of their own childhood, because to really look at their own childhood they’ll also have to look at your childhood, and they’re gonna have to empathize with your inner child, and your real child that you once were.
And they don’t want to do that because then they’re going to get ripped apart because of what they’ve done, and they’re gonna feel guilty and rotten for realizing just how much they’ve replicated the horrors from their own childhood onto a person over whom they had complete authority and they had complete responsibility to guide and nurture in this world. What a terrible thing to realize that you’ve created an existence, brought them into this world to nurture and guide them, and you actually misused them.
PARENTS WHO HAVE CONFRONTED THEIR OWN PARENTS
Now, of course, I know some parents that actually have gone to great lengths at confronting their own parents and are trying to look at the horrors that they went through in their childhood, but what they usually do – I’ve heard many parents say this – they say, “Yeah, but what my parents did to me was totally different than what I did to my children. My parents were horrible, you know, vile, evil people in many ways. They were abusive and terrible. I wasn’t any of those things. I was a wonderful, loving, caring parent. I was a thousand times better than my parents. Yeah, I made my little errors, but what I was doing wasn’t that bad. I don’t feel any guilt at all.” And, they’re really in denial of the emotional reality of what they did to their children, and very, very often these parents have very little ability to empathize with their children still.
All they say is, “Yeah, my father sexually abused me – I never sexually abused my child. So how can you even say I’m in the same league as my father?” And it’s like, well, you may not be in the same league, but you’re playing the same game.
PARENTS WHO LACK EMPATHY
They don’t empathize with their child. They never really were able to feel the horrors that they did to their child. So they can feel very comfortable confronting their own parents, even in their mind, as their parents may be dead at this point. They say, “My parents were horrible, I feel rage at them, I hate them, they were horrible,” but they get absolutely no credibility to their child when their child comes to confront them, because they don’t empathize with the child.
By and large, what I’ve seen is that these parents are extremely narcissistic. Meaning, they’re very wounded children themselves. So as soon as they start feeling confronted in any way, they retreat into the position of being like a little child themselves and saying, “You’re hurting me by confronting me.” They don’t even go to the intellectual place of saying, “Is what my child saying valid? Is there emotional reality to what they’re saying?” They just bypass all that and say, “You’re hurting me! Stop that! I hate you for it!” And sadly, that’s very much how they were as parents all those years before when they were damaging the child. They justified and validated their own inappropriate behavior by at some primal unconscious level feeling like, “I’m an entitled little child, I can do whatever I want to my children because they’re my property.”
SOME ANALOGIES FOR PARENTAL ABUSE
Some people abuse their cars and their cars don’t complain, but the difference is, let them abuse their cars: that is their business! But a car doesn’t have a self. A car doesn’t have rights as a being. I know people that are very offended when people misuse their car: never change the oil and don’t wash it, drive it too fast and change gears too quickly and burn out the clutch and overheat the engine, and let leaves get underneath the hood… And actually, interestingly, I know people who say, “That person should never own a car! That’s totally inappropriate. That person makes me sick!”
They don’t care that they misused their children because these are people that identify and empathize with cars more than with people. Lots of people empathize much more with animals than with people. I sometimes wonder about people who spend their lives fighting for the rights of animals, which I can think is a wonderful thing, but at the same time mostly what it is is these people are extremely abused children. They’re pretty split off from the emotional reality of what they went through. They don’t really empathize with their inner child too much, and instead, they project their inner child onto animals, and they fight for the rights of animals.
HEALTHY VERSUS UNHEALTHY CONFRONTATION
I think the key to confronting a parent is confronting the parent in your own mind. That’s the first thing, regardless, because a lot of people would like to confront their parents and their parents may be dead. There are no parents anymore! So, are those people hopeless? They can never get…
Anywhere? The important thing is to feel all your feelings and to process your feelings. And often there’s no need at all to have your parents in the picture if you are going to confront them.
You have to confront them in your mind. You have to be able to verbalize, if only emotionally, what you really felt. Your job is to empathize with your child ultimately: the child that you were, the child that you still are, and to empathize with the hurt, the suffering, the anger, and the pain that he felt and still feels.
So, if confronting your parents in the actual flesh serves that purpose to help you better empathize with yourself, then it may be a worthwhile risk to try. But, in many cases, it actually may not help you empathize better with your inner child and can actually create a lot more problems.