The Betrayal Of Absent Parents
Your primary caregivers should be there for you.
Out of all the people in the world that could show up for you and make you feel like they are on your side, surely your parents should be at the top of that list?
They physically made you for goodness sake!
And one of them literally brought your physical presence into the world.
And yet… so often they simply weren’t.
So their continued bouts of absence - emotional or physical - not only became more permanently etched onto your developing mind with each, new lacuna experienced but these also contributed to the calcification of self-limiting beliefs: that you weren’t enough to be showed up for, to be made an effort for, to be valued or connected with.
This loss is a form of betrayal by the people who should have loved you the most.
The reasonable demands of an emotionally-dependent child placed too great a burden on a love that was either too hard for them to access or not there in sufficient quantity to share.
And so you were left to stew in a cauldron of unprocessable feelings that now taint what you expect of and how you are able to connect to others.
Such as:
a longing to be seen, heard and understood
aching resentment towards parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t make the effort to learn to give you what you needed
disappointment that they chose not to become self-aware enough to take responsibility for the effects of their behaviour and work towards changing it
sadness for what now seems like a dreadful waste of potential, a terrible missed opportunity
The good news is, the toxic cocktail of feelings that now fills the gaping hole that was left when you needed them - someone, anyone, but especially them - to be there for you but they weren’t, is the portal to healing.
Because it is through prioritising making time and space to release these old, stuck emotions that you simultaneously become the advocate for those parts of you that suffered.
You become for yourself what you needed your parents to be: an enthusiastic cheerleader, compassionate friend, kind support, motivating team-leader, wise guide.
This doesn’t cancel out the betrayal - nothing does. You are not a robot. You will always have the capacity to feel the imprint of the pain your parents created. But that pain dulls. It moves into the far distance. It is not longer so raw and alive in your daily life.
Not because you have successfully made the mental effort to put it behind you (that’s not how it works). But because the unprocessed feelings that you were carrying are now no longer there to be fed.
They have been held space for, aired, paid attention to and sympathised with, by you. Which gently removes them from your present and places them in the past.
And the dying embers of that wounded fire that once burnt you from the inside out, become the fuel for you to do better and be better than what you yourself experienced.
To springboard off that waste of potential and re-create the opportunity that was missed.
It reminds you, with loving attention, that you can never be a perfect parent.
But it also reminds you that you now have the worthiest reason to make the greatest effort possible not to parent like your parents.
(Art by Christian Schloe)