Misplaced Loyalty Towards Hurtful Parents

by Marcia Sirota

Our feelings about our parents can be very complicated. Some of what we feel depends on how they treated us when we were growing up as well as how they treat us today. Sometimes, we just go along with what our culture or society tells us we should feel.

If we have loving, supportive parents, the issue is quite simple: we love them back and appreciate everything they did for us. It gets more complicated when our parents were less-than-ideal. If they neglected, rejected or even abused us, we grow up to believe that it was due to our own inadequacies. Children typically blame themselves for what goes wrong in the parent-child relationship.

Rather than holding our parents accountable for how they treated us, we take responsibility for what happened and then try to change ourselves in order to finally win the love they’ve been withholding. What we don’t realize is that when our parents hurt or reject us it has nothing to do with what’s lacking in us and everything to do with their inability to love and accept their children.

Because it’s about them, no matter how hard we try to ingratiate ourselves to our parents, their feelings toward us won’t change. When we fail to win their approval we might feel hurt or even angry, but many of us also believe that we haven’t tried hard enough to please them. The truth is, love is not a commodity to be bought and sold. Our parents will love us if they are able to, and for no other reason.

Still, it’s easier for us to keep blaming ourselves because it’s preferable to facing the unthinkable: the fact that our parents don’t love us. This is an extremely painful realization to come to terms with. Most people would rather do anything than accept this as the truth. Not only is it painful; it’s humiliating.

Even when we recognize that it’s not about our own failings, we don’t like the idea of admitting to our friends or loved ones that we grew up with parents who were hurtful or rejecting. There’s always the fear that others will wonder what we might have done to deserve it. It’s also hard to silence the voice of the “inner critic” which continually tells us that it really is our fault.

Paradoxically, those of us who were loved and accepted while growing up have a much easier time separating from our parents than those of us who were neglected, rejected or abused. A secure, loving attachment during childhood leads to a healthy ability to detach as an adult. Those of us from the former group are able to see our parents clearly as the decent but imperfect human beings that they are and can live rich, fulfilling independent lives.

OM Times Magazine » syndicated