Don’t forgive your parents for emotional neglect. Try this instead.
Photo by Simon HUMLER on Unsplash
A lot of people will tell you that forgiving your parents after emotional neglect is the only way to heal. They will tell you that staying angry with your parents hurts you, not them. That your parents are human and make mistakes too. That letting it go and moving on with your life will make you feel better.
It’s not that any of this is wrong, really. But honestly, when I was just starting to heal, I would hear messages like this and all they did was piss me off and make me want to forgive less, not more. I felt like these messages buried my experience, made me more unsure that my feelings were valid, and filled me with guilt that could not forgive right away.
Here is what did help
Understanding that…
Forgiveness is a process, not an indication of character.
Forgiveness does not equal trust.
Forgiveness is a Process
Too often, forgiveness is defined as something that you do if you are a good person. People who don’t forgive are mean spirited and selfish. If you are a woman coping with emotional neglect, you probably already feel like you are being selfish by feeling that you did not receive the care growing up that you needed.
So let’s start by getting rid of the idea of forgiveness as an act of altruism, and define it more concretely. I recently read an article (cited below) with this definition:
Forgiveness is the readiness process to relinquish the right to blame, demean, or seek revenge against the person causing harm, while simultaneously developing compassion and empathy towards them.
I like this definition because it specifies that forgiveness requires both a change in behavior towards others, and a change inside oneself. If you are reading this, you likely already know how to give your parents the benefit of the doubt. What you need is to give yourself the gift of allowing the process of forgiveness to unfold inside yourself, without feeling any obligation to forgive your parents, ever.
The 4 stages of forgiveness
Uncovering phase
At the beginning, you need to take time to identify and understand hurtful events and interactions, go through layers of pain, and often have your worldview questioned. It’s important to take the time that you need at this stage and not rush through or gloss over uncomfortable truths. You also may get through this stage and then come back to it, as you grow and learn more about yourself.
In my experience, women who are learning about emotional neglect have to stay in this phase for at least a year. I say this because I have heard from a lot of women that they feel the need to move on from this phase, either because they are getting pressure to forgive, or because discovering all of this information puts them into such a state of pain that they are eager to get out of it.
If you are in this phase, here are a few tips to cope:
Give yourself some grace. In many ways this is the most difficult stage, for a few reasons. You are learning how to trust yourself enough to believe that you were indeed emotionally neglected as a child. Your whole worldview may be torn apart. You may also be reckoning with the fact that your intuition was right all along, but it still brought you pain.
Take the time that you need: If you are learning about emotional neglect and feeling like, holy shit, that’s me! Take plenty of time to learn about emotional neglect and emotionally immature parents, as well as the details of your own experience. Resist any pressure from others to move on before you are ready.
Take breaks. I mean it. Emotional neglect journeys are marathons, not sprints. You won’t be able to fix everything and everyone all at once. It’s imperative to forget about it all from time to time and recharge.
2. Decision phase
The task here is in gaining a true understanding of the meaning of forgiveness and committing to forgive based on this understanding.
What does forgiveness mean to you? As I wrote above, to me, any definition of forgiveness needs to include outward behavior pivots as well as inward understanding shifts. Forgiveness also does not rely on the other person’s behavior changing at all.
You can make a decision to forgive someone, and know that you are not ready to yet. Maybe it is a goal for you. It’s also ok if forgiveness is not a goal for you. It does not mean you are selfish, or wrong, or a bad person. On the contrary, you are being honest. Honesty is the most basic and necessary building block for any relationship. Forgiving your parents when you don’t want to, or are not yet ready, is not altruism. It’s perpetuating a cycle of obligation over true relationship.
Forgiveness ≠ Trust
But for me, the most important part of understanding forgiveness is that forgiveness and trust are not the same. You can forgive someone and still not trust them. You can forgive them and still have strict boundaries around how much interaction you have with them.
Forgiveness can be given, trust must be earned.
3. Working phase
In the literature, this phase is about reframing how you see your parents. Usually, this involves seeing them as a flawed human rather than only ignorant or immature. Expanding how you see your parents usually makes forgiveness more accessible.
for emotionally neglected women, this phase is different.
In my experience, emotionally neglected women are usually incredibly good at understanding why their parents are the way they are. They are acutely aware of a parent’s past trauma and the good reasons they act the way they do. So for emotionally neglected women, this stage actually involves getting more critical of your parents.
Remember how back in phase 1 (the Uncovering Phase) I advised taking all the time that you need? This is because women have a tendency to downplay it when others treat them poorly. They don’t trust their own instincts that tell them that they were mistreated. For emotionally neglected women, being able to forgive your parents means reframing how you see yourself.
Specifically, it means truly, madly, deeply trusting yourself that the pain you went through as a child was real. That you deserve to feel the pain that you do. That your instincts were not wrong.
And then forgiving yourself for abandoning yourself. Because you were absolutely doing the best that you could at the time.
You won’t be able to forgive your parents for their behavior, until you forgive yourself for not trusting your own gut.
Part 2
The second part of this phase is where the hard conversations with your parents come in. If you choose, this is the time to sit down with your parents and ask questions about their behavior through a more informed lens. Having these conversations may help you clarify your understanding of your past, and it will give you more information about where your parents are in their understanding of their behavior. Which will give you good information about how much to trust them and which boundaries you may need to set. Read my post for tips on having hard conversations.
4. Deepening phase
This final phase is where the real fruit of this process comes in. At this point, you have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of emotional neglect and how you were affected by it. More importantly, you can start to identify what you learned from coping with emotional neglect, and the good things that came from it. Yes, there are always gifts that come from struggles like these.
If you get to the point where you can see the value of what you have learned from going through this process, forgiveness is effortless. Even if you still do not trust your parents. Even if you have a low contact relationship with them.
Because when you get to this phase, you trust yourself. That is the only way to heal.