What’s Helping Me Let Go of an Abusive Parent… (Patreon)

Good morning cutie,

With today being Father's Day, I want to validate those among us who have a fractured relationship with their parent(s). Even if you have a moderate-to-fine relationship with yours, there may still be tension around points of your identity, your sexuality, political views, or just your way of life.

Today, I'll share a bit about what helped me in various stages of healing from my relationship with my own parents. I'll include anecdotes where I feel they may be helpful. If anything doesn't resonate or doesn't apply, feel free to ignore it. But hopefully, some or all of these tools may be of service to you.

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1. Step Back

If possible, creating some physical distance from the parent can help us feel safe to examine the relationship with fewer consequences to our immediate safety. It frees us up to look at the abuse without fearing what will happen at Sunday dinner.

Sometimes, it's not possible to step back, and that's ok too. Maybe you live with a parent, or are their caregiver right now. Be sure there's a physical space in the home where you can retreat if you feel elevated. Maybe start a routine of solo walks around the neighborhood or drives around town, anything that can give you a sense of physical distance and autonomy.

Caveat: I do encourage you to not use stepping back as a punishing tool. You don't even have to let them know you're doing it, necessarily. While it's very tempting to assert power over our parent and hurt them, indulging on that impulse often keeps us trapped in very old cycles. Stepping back is a tool for restoration and reflection, not spite or revenge.

2. Express Pain with Community

We cannot heal from trauma alone, point blank period. It's not an intellectual recovery that gets resolved alone in our room with a book (though there are of course resources that can aid our healing). 

If accessible to you, working with a therapist to whom you relate can speed up the process a lot. I include the "to whom you relate" bit, because it's common to seek out authority figures who actually remind us of our parents. But we must feel totally safe to say everything, and really grieve the experiences we had in their household.

If therapy is not accessible to you, seek out peer support and community groups who get it, and can validate your lived experience. Partners can help us too, but since we often re-live parent/child dynamics with partners, I encourage people to not rely solely on romantic relationships for support.

3. Clarify their Harm

Our brains literally form around our parent/child relationships. For this reason, we can sometimes be unaware of abuse or neglect, especially if it's subtle. I can't tell you how many times in adulthood I've said, "wait, that wasn't normal?" about how my mom or dad acted. 

When we aren't clear on the specific ways they caused harm, then we may reenact that dynamic over and over in adulthood. This is why it's so vital to have safe support people from outside the family who can help us process the "normalcy" we knew.

4. Clarify their Love

I went back and forth on whether to include this, because if your parent was violent or sexually abusive, this won't necessarily apply to you. 

For myself, I found it very hard to name my parents' abuse because they weren't 2-dimensional monsters. My vision of an abusive parent was more like a cartoon villain. But if we see it as so binary, then we may risk ignoring our own pain because "they weren't all bad." Clarifying what we love about them can help us see them as full, complicated human beings. They sometimes did a great thing, and also should have apologized.

I do want to add that if you've got a narcissistic parent, you may have been taught that "love" was actually abuse. Like, "Oh I'm never around because I love you," or, "You should be grateful for this tough love." If you're finding that it's hard to distinguish genuine love from abuse or manipulation, check back in with your support system to unpack it.

5. Clarify your Values

You're the adult in charge of your life, now. You get to be your own parent. You can reassure the scared kid inside you that they're safe and valid and loved.

Clarify what's important to you, and how that may be different from what you saw your parents demonstrate. 

For example, I saw my dad demonstrate unethical non-monogamy. He always had multiple relationships going on non-consensually, while giving lip service to "monogamy." Yet when I came out about polyamory, he said it was immoral. It hurt! And, it gave me permission to finally stop wanting his approval. If I wouldn't ask him for advice on the topic, then why would I accept his criticism? He was actually failing my standards, and therefore his judgment of me was irrelevant. It was a total game changer for my self esteem.

6. Imagine Parental Fan-Fiction

Since you're the adult in charge now, you can treat yourself with love. However, it may be hard to shake some of those old messages. I remember my grandmother was still haunted by her dad's disapproval 40 years after the man died. At that point, continuing to dwell on it was very optional.

One tool I'm so grateful for is the practice of parental fan-fiction. Every time I imagine my dad shaking his head at my decisions, I try to imagine him instead smiling and saying "good job." Whenever my mom calls me a whore (in my mind or in real life), I try to imagine her saying, "I respect your healthy relationship to sex." It feels really awkward at first, I'm not going to lie. It can feel stupid and silly and pointless. But after a bit, I burst into tears because I was so hungry to hear those validating things. It also helped me grieve the reality of what I experienced, and comfort the little girl who didn't get what she needed.

It's not that we want to live in a fantasy world, and it's definitely not an excuse to skip over dealing with the pain. But when we find ourselves arguing with memories, and having the past dictate our present actions, this tool may be handier than you think.

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I hope some of these thoughts may be supportive for you today. If you're still struggling with your relationship with one or multiple parents, and are seeking a friendly face to listen to you, I've got your back.

Be good to yourself, and be good to the people in your life today.

With love,
Morgan