If you grew up with a parent who was difficult, unpredictable, or emotionally unavailable, you’ll know the particular kind of pain that comes with that territory. It’s not just what happened. It’s the question underneath it: why wasn’t I enough?
That question can follow us for years. Sometimes decades. And one of the hardest and most quietly transformative things you can do is begin to find a different answer to it.
Forgiveness isn’t the starting point. Understanding is.
When we talk about moving past childhood hurt, the word “forgiveness” often comes up. And for many people, it lands like an impossibility. Forgive them? After everything?
So let’s set that word aside for now, because it puts too much pressure on too early. What’s more accessible, and often more powerful, is understanding. Coming to a place where you can see why someone behaved the way they did. Not to excuse it. Not to say it was okay. But to understand it.
And one of the most useful places to start is with a simple but radical idea: the adult in front of you may not be operating as an adult at all.
The child who got stuck
When we experience something serious and significant in childhood — trauma, neglect, instability, fear — and we don’t have the safety or support to process it, something in us gets locked at that age. Emotionally, we stop maturing past that point. We carry on growing up on the outside, but inside, a part of us stays right there, in that moment, waiting for something that never quite came.
This isn’t weakness. It isn’t a choice. It’s what happens when a child’s nervous system is overwhelmed without anyone to help them through it.
And here’s the thing: this doesn’t only happen to you. It happened to your parents too. And their parents before them.
So when your father erupts in anger at something small, or your mother withdraws in ways that feel like rejection, you may not be dealing with the adult you know. You may be dealing with a six-year-old. An eight-year-old. A ten-year-old, still locked in whatever happened to them, still reacting from that place, still without the emotional tools they never got to develop.
What shifts when you see it this way
This reframe doesn’t happen overnight. It can take therapy, self-reflection and real self-awareness — the kind that arrives slowly and then, sometimes, all at once in one of those oh moments that changes how you see everything.
But when it does start to land, something quietly remarkable happens.
The anger you’ve carried, the deep, personal hurt of feeling like you weren’t enough, begins to loosen its grip. Because it stops being about you. Their behaviour wasn’t a verdict on your worth. It was a traumatised person, trapped in their own unresolved pain, doing the only things they knew how to do.
You’re not required to like the behaviour. You don’t have to make peace with what happened or pretend it didn’t hurt. But you can begin to separate the behaviour from the person, and the person from the wound, and the wound from yourself.
And in that separation, there’s space. Space for compassion — for them, yes, but more importantly, for you.
Coming back to yourself
Here’s why this matters beyond just feeling better about your parents: when you can see the hurt child behind someone else’s difficult behaviour, you stop sending your own hurt child in to deal with it.
Instead of your wounded younger self reacting, getting pulled into conflict, taking things personally, feeling small again, you get to show up as the adult you’ve worked hard to become. Grounded. Clear. Able to give space to what’s happening without being consumed by it.
That’s not detachment. That’s freedom.
And it’s available to you — not because what happened was okay, but because you deserve to stop carrying it.