24/03/2026
One of the most common things that stops people doing this work isn't fear of change.
It's loyalty.
If I look at this... am I saying my parents failed me?
They did their best. They loved me. Who am I to dig all this up?
And so the work doesn't happen. Not because they're not ready. Because it feels like a betrayal.
I see this come up in sessions too, sometimes right in the middle of a breakthrough. The guilt arrives and everything stops. The person pulls back, protects the parent, dismisses their own experience.
So I want to say something important before that happens for you.
Your parents were human beings. Complex, unfinished, carrying their own unprocessed pain from their own unprocessed childhoods.
They learned what they learned. They knew what they knew. And most of them did the very best they could with what they had.
But here's something that often gets missed:
A child doesn't need to experience obvious mistreatment to be affected.
A parent who was chronically stressed, emotionally unavailable, or simply too overwhelmed to be present, that registers in a child's nervous system as unmet need.
Not because anyone was cruel.
Because a child needs attunement, consistency, and felt safety, and when those things aren't reliably there, the nervous system adapts.
Neglect isn't always absence. Sometimes it's a parent who was physically present but emotionally somewhere else entirely.
A household that functioned but never felt quite connected. Needs that were practical but not emotional. Love that was real but not felt.
None of that makes your parents monsters.
And none of it was your fault.
Their behaviour, their capacity, their limitations, those were theirs.
The impact landed on you. But you were never the cause.
Doing this work isn't a betrayal.
It's the most loving thing you can do, for yourself, and for every relationship and generation that comes after you.
When the loyalty conflict softens, something unexpected happens.
People don't become angry at their parents.
They become free of them.
Free to respond rather than react. Free to parent differently. Free to stop carrying weight that was never theirs to carry.
If this resonates, my DMs are open.
