TRANSCRIPT
If you are healing from childhood trauma from your parents, it’s very dangerous to empathize with them. Yet, at the same time, so many people do it. They empathize with their parents, and many people, even people who are in the psychology field, recommend empathizing with your parents, and I don’t. And here’s why.
For starters, if you’re healing from childhood trauma, and you empathize with your parents, it stunts your healing process. It returns you to a childlike position, the position you were as a child, because as a child, you had to empathize with your parents. You didn’t have a choice in the matter. You had to empathize with your parents to one degree or other, because you needed them. We all need our parents. And to the degree that our parents are not healthy, well, that’s the degree to which we’re not allowed to empathize with ourselves, and we have to side with them. It’s siding with the traumatizer.
And the reason that children do that is it’s a survival technique. They empathize with the traumatizer, they disassociate from their own feelings of being traumatized, they separate from fighting for themselves and feeling their own feelings and feeling their post-traumatic reactions. They bury their post-traumatic reactions, and that way they feel that they love their parents, their parents feel that the child loves them, and then the parent gives the child some crumbs of love. And those crumbs of love are what sustain the abused child in the family system.
Heaven forbid the little child doesn’t empathize with the parents, doesn’t take the side of the parents, doesn’t side with the traumatizer. Then it’s going to be worse for the abused child. Then the child can be kicked out of the system outright, hated, despised even more than they are already despised. And this is normal. This is what happens to children all the time, and it can be very subtle. Sometimes it’s very overt, but parents not loving their children, failing to empathize with the children, that being the parents’ basic job to empathize with their child’s feelings, to take the side of their child, to fight for the child, to defend the child at all costs, well, screwed-up parents, traumatized parents, confused parents, parents who themselves haven’t resolved their own childhood traumas, will to one degree or other play out their own unresolved dynamics on their children.
They will fail their children, and this is all unconscious. They don’t even realize they’re doing it a lot. I’ve seen this, I’ve seen this all over the place, parents really failing their children, neglecting their children, sometimes even outright abusing their children, and defending it in some way as being good, as being healthy, as being appropriate. And sometimes they have all of society’s backing for it. They have the backing of society that says, “You must spank the child. Spare the rod, spoil the child.” They have religions that say, “You must do this. If you don’t do this, you’re spoiling your child, you’re pampering them too much, they’re going to be soft.” Or psychology saying, “If you spoil your child too much, they’re just going to grow up and become narcissistic.” Yet the spoiling that these parents are trying not to do is actually often the love that the children desperately need to grow.
Again, it’s the job of the parent to deeply empathize with the situation and the feelings of the child. And because of the parents’ limitation at being able to do that, the child has to make up for it in some way. Otherwise, the child will have no connection with their parents. And so the child has to be the one who does the empathizing. And for this reason, the child can’t heal from their traumas, because in order to heal from their traumas, that child, or anyone, has to empathize with their own feelings, their rage, their sadness, their fury, their frustration, their sense of injustice.
They need to know the truth of how they feel, they need to know the truth of what happened, they need to know the truth of how inappropriate their traumas and abuses and violations were. And they have to, at an emotional level, and at a factual level, too, hold their abusers accountable. And of course, yes, this is difficult, if not outright impossible, for children to do when they are in the family system, because they are the less powerful ones, and their parents hold the power.
But it starts to become possible when the children grow older and start becoming independent, especially as they become adults, as they become more emotionally independent, and heaven forbid also if they become more financially independent. They don’t need to rely on their parents as much. And then they have the power much more to empathize with themselves, and empathize with the little hurt child that still lives within them.
Yet we live in a society that still doesn’t allow grown-up children, who are now adults, the liberty to do that, to empathize with themselves. And well, they can become alienated from society, and certainly alienated from their parents who are now much older people, if they don’t empathize with them. So that’s the way to be a good child, a good grown-up child in our crazy society, in our crazy world, ’cause I see it all over the world and cultures everywhere, that children who are grown-up are still expected to take the side of their parents, defend their parents.
My parents did a good job, they did a great job, they gave me everything, they sacrificed everything for me. Even when it’s obvious in small areas, or in huge areas, that they didn’t do this. I hear people say this also. They say, “I have achieved a certain level of maturity because I learned to empathize with what my parents went through. My parents went through so many very difficult things in their own childhoods that yes, they may have been limited in what they gave me, they may have failed me in all sorts of different ways, but it makes sense because they went through X, Y, Z that was similar to what they did to me, or even worse. Therefore, I let them off the hook. I feel empathy for them.” And when I hear people say that, what I think is, “Oh, you’re not growing anymore. You’re not healing. You are not feeling your feelings.”
Now, I think of my own story, my own history of healing from my childhood trauma, a process which is still ongoing after many decades. I did find it important to study my parents’ history, to understand where they came from. I wanted to know, I wanted to know, why did they do those things to me? But it was dangerous for me to get into that study. I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I mapped out the history of my parents’ traumas, and even some of my grandparents’ traumas. It was interesting to know this intergenerational pattern, but to get into empathizing with my parents, very, very dangerous for me. And I learned that the hard way.
Often, the empathy for my parents, when I would feel it, because sometimes I would study their history or find old photographs of my parents, and see how wounded they had been when they were little 30 years before they even created me, I would start to feel like, “Oh, what sad people they were, what abuse and brutality they went through.” And often it would pull me back to them and make me think, “Oh, I shouldn’t be so hard on them.” But actually, I needed to be hard on them. I needed to actually grow cold toward them in order to refocus my empathy on myself.
And that’s really the point of what I’m talking about here, that to heal from our traumas, any traumas in our life, we have to focus our healing energy on ourselves. We have to focus our energy within, and we have to love ourselves deeply. We have to honor all the feelings we have, all those post-traumatic feelings, all that sadness and sorrow and anger and hurt and resentment and bitterness and frustration, and all that longing.
And looking at our traumatizers, as valid as it might be to look at them and study them in light of what caused them to do what they did to us, it takes the focus off ourselves, and that’s what’s dangerous.
So, here’s the theory that I have. That there are two different stages of life where it is valid to empathize with our traumatizers. Two very different stages. And neither of those stages are part of the healing process. The healing from the trauma. The first stage is when we are a child, it is appropriate for the abused child in the family to empathize with the parents.
To one degree or other, to side with the traumatizers, because for that child it is strictly survival. That child is not healing from their traumas, but they are just flat-out surviving in the abusive family. As soon as it is appropriate for them to gain their independence, then they need to get out. They need to get away from their traumatizers and refocus their healing attention on themselves, refocus their empathy on themselves.
But while they’re in that abusive family and they’re under the power structure of their parents, it can be appropriate for them to empathize with their parents, as ugly as it is. The other stage where I think it can be appropriate for people to empathize with their parents is after they’ve healed all their traumas of their parents. The only problem is I’ve never seen anyone reach this stage. That’s why I say it’s kind of an intellectual thought that I have here, these two different stages. Because it’s like three different stages.
The first stage is the child in the abusive family system who needs to empathize with the parents and side with the parents just to survive, just to get any love in order to keep growing enough independence to be able to get out. That second stage, the big long stage of healing process in adulthood, that’s the stage where it’s like not appropriate to empathize with the parents ’cause it’ll turn the healing energy away from oneself and stunt the growth, cause more dissociation, stunt the process of healing. And that stage just lasts a long, long time. Might last a whole lifetime.
But then, again, after that, after the person has healed their traumas, after they’ve deeply reconnected with their true self, after they become a fully conscious being where there’s no more traumas in there, no more buried feelings, then I hypothesize that it might be okay to empathize with the parents.
Now, I have heard a lot of people out there who say they are in this place. Oh, yes, I’ve done all my healing. I’ve healed from all those, all those traumas and problems and conflicts. I’ve healed all my unresolved feelings. So, now I can love my parents again and be close with them. And I don’t believe it. I look at them, I study them, and I say, “No, they’re not really up here. Actually, they’re not in this healed state. Actually, I think what they’ve done is regressed down to the state of a dependent child again.”
And so often what I see is when people say, “Oh, I’ve forgiven my parents and” >> [sighs and gasps] >> “I empathize with them and I can see why they did what they did and I can feel it and I can forgive them for this reason.” Really, what they’ve done is they’ve dissociated from their feelings, and more often than not, that’s when people say, “Okay, now it’s okay for me to go and have children again.” And then they unconsciously, yes, replicate what their parents did to them onto their children.
And because they’re out of touch with and unaware, again, their traumatizing behavior, sometimes overt, sometimes subtle, is always there. And for that reason, I can’t support it.
And again, to conclude this video, I would have to say, it is dangerous for anyone who is healing from childhood trauma from their parents to empathize with their parents.
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