We Need to Stop Blaming Our Parents for Our Problems
- joannacheek
- May 8
- 6 min read
Compassion with boundaries is more effective than blame.
It’s so tempting to blame our parents when we acknowledge how persistently our past impacts our present. Psychiatry and psychology have inadvertently created so much harm in this practice with its history of crucifying parents with accusations of being “refrigerator” mothers or “helicopter” parents.
When my son saw a psychologist as a young child, and it became clear that his anxiety mimicked the themes of my own, the resultant tsunami of guilt I felt made me even less capable of helping him. The most crucial nuance I’ve learned in my own therapy and as a therapist to others is to both acknowledge how our past relationships profoundly impact our mental health and to see with compassion how others “lacked the capacity” to be more helpful because of their adaptations to threats and hurts. This is also true for ourselves as parents when we see that despite our best intentions, our exposures to adversity and trauma impact our kids.
We often think of the effects of direct violence when we speak of interpersonal harm and trauma, the physical injuries caused at the hands of a perpetrator. But as a trauma therapist, it’s not the physical harm that causes the most enduring impact; It’s the emotional harm.
And it’s not only our relational injuries to specific people that harm us but also our relationships to the larger communities and systems around us and our body’s learnings from the relational trauma of our ancestors (as I discussed here.)
Interpersonal injuries and trauma also aren’t only the result of harmful actions. So much of the time, it results from inaction, when both the individuals or societal structures that are supposed to take care of us neglect our fundamental rights and needs.
Intimately influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung identified structural violence as a more insidious yet impactful kind of harm. Having witnessed the effects of poverty, Gandhi and Galtung recognized how there was no one perpetrator to blame but the injustice and inequities embedded within the collective structure of society.
This is why I’m careful in how I present the last two decades of scientific studies strongly linking the trauma of adverse childhood experiences (known as ACEs) to our health. ACEs include physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, neglect, witnessing violence, substance abuse or mental illness in the home, or exposure to poverty or the divorce or incarceration of parents.
American epidemiologist and internist Robert Anda highlighted ACEs as a public health crisis in a landmark 1998 study linking childhood adversity to poor health outcomes. His follow-up study in 2009 warned that people with high ACE scores die nearly 20 years prematurely.
ACEs trigger a toxic stress response in our bodies that affects our nervous, inflammatory, and immune systems, a 2020 review in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported. The review links ACEs with numerous negative health outcomes, including a wide range of chronic diseases, such as cancer, stroke, respiratory illness, chronic pain, diabetes, heart disease, and mental health conditions.
But instead of blaming caregivers, we must instead look at the structural violence and historical trauma underlying these experiences. That’s why Matt Burkey, a Canadian child psychiatrist trained in public health at Johns Hopkins University, advocates for preventing ACEs through a societal lens. He asks,
“What are the underlying upstream factors like poverty, inequality, and education that are leading to such high rates of abuse, neglect, and other adversities?”
Instead of blaming the caregivers of people with high ACE scores, we need to see them also as victims of the inequitable systems and historical trauma that harm their children’s health, not the cause of it.
One of Galtung’s students, Otto Scharmer, identified another source of trauma that often lies hidden in the shadows of everyday experience, which he defines as attentional violence, of not being seen by others. This attentional violence explains the trauma responses we experience in the face of attachment injuries.
If a child’s caregivers are always preoccupied with safety or paying rent—or simply not around—rather than attending to their emotional needs, they will adapt by dismissing the need for attachment with others to help them survive this tougher world.
But if children get a taste of the rewards of the attentiveness of their caregivers, but only intermittently, they adapt by fixating on the precarious connection with others. They’re always anxious that others will leave, chasing that slot machine of the high of human connection.
Sometimes, a child’s caregiver is attentive in one moment, then harmful in another. This leads to a “disorganized” attachment style, where the child is drawn to a caregiver for support but also fears them. They fluctuate between moving towards and moving away in a confusing dance of conflicting needs: to be taken care of and safe from harm.
However, suppose a child’s caregivers appear calm and carefree, able to respond to their emotional needs most of the time consistently. In that case, they, too, get the privilege of feeling confident in their capacity to regulate their nervous systems and relate securely to others. This is because we learn how to self-soothe and regulate our emotions through repeated and consistent acts of co-regulation from caregivers.
Children are volcanos of emotional dysregulation, as our upstairs brain (the pre-frontal cortex) doesn’t complete its development until we’re 24 years old. Children need to dump their mess of overwhelming emotions into the bodies and minds of their caregivers, who receive it, make sense of it, and then relay it back in a more tolerable form. When we don’t receive this from others as a child, we don’t have the privilege of learning self-regulation.
We can struggle with emotional dysregulation as an adult, fluctuating between unbearable emotions and rigid defenses to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
Luckily, we can always learn this skill later in life, even if we miss our early window. We can achieve this through repeated experiences with people in healthy relationships or therapy who consistently attune to our emotional experiences. However, it takes more time to unlearn old habits as an adult. In this way, we can learn to trust and relate securely to others later in life, in what child psychiatrist Daniel Siegel calls “earned secure attachment.”
The attachment styles we adopt have nothing to do with how “good” our caregivers are as parents. We are only privileged with secure attachment styles when both parents and their ancestors had the luck of living in safe environments that were capable of meeting their physical and emotional needs. To be able to hold and process a child’s eruptions of emotion, the caregiver needs to have had the opportunity to learn self-regulation themselves.
This is where intergenerational learning and trauma come in. If the caregiver’s own nervous system is over-activated or shut down from their trauma or adversities, they can’t co-regulate their child. It’s not that they don’t want to; they simply can’t offer that support.
This is how trauma moves seamlessly through the generations, invisible to its owners, yet deeply impacting every cell of their bodies through dysregulation. Instead of blaming our caregivers, can we learn to extend the compassion to them that we must offer ourselves?
Our suffering is not about any personal failings but reflective of our position within an interconnected web of historical and intergenerational trauma and exposure to adversities and systemic inequities.
This is where transformational justice comes in. “Rather than punishing people for surface-level behavior or restoring conditions to where they were before the harm happened, we need to find the roots of the harm together and make the harm impossible in the future,” teaches American activist and social justice facilitator adrienne maree brown.[1]
This approach doesn’t negate the concurrent need for accountability and boundaries against behaviors that cause harm. We can only extend compassion when the harm is acknowledged and boundaries are in place to prevent it from happening again.
At the same time, we can’t just blame individuals as the source of our problems. We need to look deeper and disrupt and transform the ills of our social systems at their roots.
References
[1] APA. Brown, A. M. (2019). Pleasure activism. AK Press.
