It is my firm conviction that the number one reason people are unhappy in life is because they refuse to believe that when they were kids their parents either flat-out didn’t love them, or loved them in a way that was so deeply tweaked it amounted to the same thing as not loving them.
It’s also my belief that the reason people refuse to accept the truth that when they were kids their parents treated them awfully is grounded in the fact that as very young children they instinctively grasped how terribly vulnerable their parents not loving them made them.
We spend the first years of our lives utterly dependent upon our parents for virtually everything we need to survive. If they don’t choose to give us what we need, we perish. I think that’s a basic fact of life that all humans understand pretty early into the big game o’ life.
And so children born to crappy parents do virtually the only thing they can do, which is to immediately, absolutely and without question convince themselves that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, their parents really are good, caring people who really do love them.
Having parents who really do love you = an outstanding chance of you surviving.
Having parents who obviously don’t love you = you probably won’t make it.
That’s not much of a choice, is it? And so most (and I would even argue all) children “decide” that, come hell or high water, their parents, no matter how much information they’re getting to the contrary, really do love them. In the choice between what is true, and what needs to be true, what needs to be true inevitably wins.
And so children born into unhappy families begin to build their lives upon a lie.
And as surely as one day follows the next, children who are forced to build their lives upon a truth they can’t possibly face turn into adults whose lives are built upon a truth they can’t possibly face. And so as adults people who had unhappy childhoods continue their suffering: they’re angry; they’re forever imagining themselves victims; they’re easily upset; their relationships don’t work. In short, they have no idea who they are. They don’t know who they are, because the core truth of who they are was lost in the lie they had to live — which is to say, very often, in the person they were essentially forced to become — in order to as effectively as possible deal with the threatening dynamics of their dysfunctional family life.
Adults who are lost and unhappy in life have a simple, terrible choice to make. They must either accept the fact that their parents didn’t love them — which is tantamount to utterly and completely rejecting their parents — or they must continue to live lost and unhappy lives.
They either toss their parents off their shoulders, or they continue to sink with their parents strapped to their back. That’s the choice waiting to be made by every adult who was raised in a psychologically unhealthy family.
And what people almost always choose is continuing to go down with their parents strapped to their back. And they make that “choice” for a perfectly understandable reason: it’s still in their mind — it’s still in their heart; it still defines the psychological paradigm of the only life they’ve ever known — that rejecting their parents means they themselves must be rejected. They’re continuing to operate within the context of their initial, original paradigm — and all too dearly paying the price for it.
If you are unhappy in life — if no matter what you do, say, think, or believe, you’re still dogged by this feeling that something fundamental just isn’t right with you or your life — then do yourself a favor, and give some thought to the idea that you have or had Genuinely Lousy parents. That maybe it’s not you. That maybe it’s them. That maybe it’s always been them.
That maybe the reason you’re so burdened is that you’re carrying around weight that doesn’t, or shouldn’t, belong to you.
If you’re regularly dogged by a sense of unhappiness or anxiety, just try on the thought that your parents were awful, that they were in no way emotionally or psychologically prepared to have children.
Go ahead. Give it a shot. In the privacy of your own mind, really reject your parents. Scream at them. Blame them. See them for the sorry, ill-equipped losers they were.
Banish them from your heart.
Walk away from them.
Let ‘em die.
It won’t kill you. I promise.
As the one and only Jesus put it, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
![John Shore on The Huffington Post](http://johnshore.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/huffpost.jpg?w=120 "John Shore on The Huffington Post\")
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I am still a little messed up freak at 25. I have gone through abandonment, abuse, abandonment, abuse, depression, madness and a whole lot of awful things most people only see on t.v
I keep blaming my parents for my unhappiness and it’s not getting me anywhere. I have talked to them about this, about how I have always felt. I really only want to hear one thing. I want them to apologize for everything they did and didn’t do. Is that too much to ask? Instead they keep denying and denying that they did anything wrong. And they had the nerve to blame it on my grandfather.
It sucks to know that you are not loved or wanted. I never felt warmth, affection, love. Still trying to move on from the past but every step takes me two steps back. How do I go on like this?
Mara, that’s just horrible. You keep going on because you must. Because God wants you here, and you want to be here enough you reached out instead of melting into a puddle of pain. You might get some solace from others like you here: http://johnshore.com/2013/05/11/mothers-day-raised-too-alone/. And you might heal yourself and learn tools to break the cycle here: http://johnshore.com/7-reasons-women-stay-in-abusive-relationships/. It’s written with marriages in mind, but it applies equally to relationships with toxic parents.
OMG thank you for writing this. XD Haha just had a crazy change in perspective. When I was little, my parents told me I was “a difficult child” and thus, they resorted to this shitty parenting method, taught in the book “Growing Kids God’s Way.” But now I’m thinking, maybe my parents were just too overwhelmed and stressed due to their own problematic relationship, depression, and loneliness, that they couldn’t take care of my siblings and I the way we needed. Perhaps it wasn’t… My fault at all. What if I was an awesome, bright kid, full of love and truth? Omg. Maybe.
I can say this without freaking out, because I’ve kind of processed everything my parents did to me at counselling, and somehow have managed to forgive them. But I think the first step to forgiveness is to acknowledge that something was actually wrong. They said they loved me, while hitting me, while ignoring me, while treating me in unloving ways. But they were wrong to do so, and were not showing me love at all.
Thanks again.
Have you seen Fireproof, the movie? “You can’t love her because you can’t give what you don’t have.” How many people marry and find that they cannot manifest what they know is possible – because they can’t give what they don’t have? Whether or not they walk away from the marriage, their children are also – in spite of their parents’ efforts to give what they don’t have – being raised in home devoid of active love.
John, you quoted Jesus: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” But in essence, your article promotes continuing the cycle of lovelessness. You neglect the fifth commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.” That this commandment is one of THE 10 commandments had baffled me for many years. I never thought of it this way, but, “it has been said that the fifth commandment is pivotal, for it is between the commandments teaching us to love our Creator, and those admonishing us to love our fellow man.”
I now understand this commandment as the “humanizing” commandment (I realize that for many of us, honoring our parents requires supernatural assistance). Most of us have parents who tried to love their children; that loved them from the well of their hearts and souls and minds. The ones who failed to give the love that children needed to feel known and loved and accepted: are they despicable losers who deserve banishment? Is THAT love? The child who grows up to realize that they grew up in a home devoid of true love: will he continue this legacy?
No, John, I think not. How many times did Jesus say we must forgive?
I’m gathering from your quoting from the King James Version of the Bible that you’re a fundamentalist?
Someone wiser than me, and with more credentials, said: “Forgiveness is a form of letting go, but they are not the same thing.” (Gordon Livingston, in “Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart”)
John has outlined a step on the path to recovery – acknowledging what is. Looking reality square in its painful beady eyes and calling it out and walking away from it so it can’t hurt us anymore: taking the monkey off our back.
You’ve jumped to expectations of completion…an unfortunate Christian counseling method. Forgive, or else be guilty of breaking #5 of THE BIG TEN. Because. It’s expected of you.
One cannot get to a place of compassion for those that have harmed or wronged us without first acknowledging what is true. This is the truth that sets us free. It may eventually lead to a place of compassion. To a place of forgiveness. To attaining a meaningful level of healing. But acknowledgement must come first. Surrendering to what is instead of fighting against reality in vain.
Forgiveness first doesn’t accomplish this. It ignores reality. It glosses over the truth. It more deeply suppresses what is. It is not a path to healing. It puts off true recovery, and often frosts that cupcake with a heavy layer of guilt.
Livingston writes: “Widely confused with forgetting or reconciliation, forgiveness is neither. It is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves. It exists, as does all true healing, at the intersection of love and justice. To acknowledge we have been harmed by another but choose to let go of our resentment or wishes for retribution requires a high order of emotional and ethical maturity. It is a way of liberating ourselves from a sense of oppression and a hopeful statement of our capacity for change. If we can relinquish the preoccupations and pseudo-explanations that are rooted in the past, we are free to choose the attitudes with which we confront the present and future. This involves an exercise of consciousness and determination that is a certain antidote to the feelings of helplessness and anxiety that underlie most of our unhappiness.”
Learning to let go of resentments requires first an acknowledgement of reality. Sometimes that reality is that parents were and are despicable losers. The (totally made up to make my point here) Urban Dictionary lists the definition for Despicable Losers as: Extremely flawed and broken people, likely the victims of harm and lovelessness themselves, who left in their wake a path of devastation and destruction.
When I was growing up, my mom was always watching some program on tv. I wanted her to talk with me and interact with me. If I wouldn’t be quiet during her stupid program, she would get up and grab her shoe and hit me repeatedly with the heel of it. I stopped going around her when she started doing that since she made it clear that her programs were more important than I was. When my dad got frustrated at me whenever I was about 5, he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me as hard as he could back and forth. Afterwards, I had huge headaches, and still felt strange, but I didn’t know how to put that into words. Also, when my parents would get mad at me, instead of talking to me about it and telling me right from wrong, my dad would go and get the strongest leather belt that he had and throw me down on the floor, and beat me over and over with it. My mom would stand by him watching as he did that. because of all this abuse, I have had seizures since I was about 9 due to the severe shaking back and forth whenever I was younger. When I got older, I mostly stayed to myself because of medical problems, and since I didn’t drink, smoke, or do illegal drugs, I turned to eating. I developed high blood pressure, sleep apnea, manic depression, acid reflux, and am now in the process to get gastric bypass surgery. I really had no idea that abuse like this could cause such problems that can last a lifetime and then lead to more and more…I feel like neither one of my parents like me, muchless love me from how they treated me and think that I don’t remember it. We don’t have any kind of a close relatonship, and I am trying to look for a new family through friends, but it’s very hard to tell them why I want to do this without having to explain my situation. I am still very hurt by this and have very little to do with them if anything. They really don’t talk to me and I have slowly tried to move on in my life without them in it. Sometimes I miss them and wish that things could have been more peaceful and loving with them, and we would actually have a relationship with each other now. But then other times, I can’t help reminding myself that I never want to see them again.
Savannah, this is horrifying that you endured such cruelty. You did not deserve to be treated so poorly. And yet I hear in your words and your frankness that you are owning your life and taking charge, in spite of all the pain. That is SO powerful and wise!
This is what survivors do– we face where we’ve come, we assess the lingering damage, we get the professional help to unburden our lives, and we take what miserable lessons we’ve learned to build a better way. Creating good out of bad (evil, horror)– this is true strength.
If I can drop 1 word of advice– put your ‘missing them’ energy into missing (& loving) yourself. Let YOU find yourself, and worry about relating to others after you’ve got the self-love thing figured out. Seriously, it’s the best thing I learned from my therapy. Game-changer.
My mother used to beat me with wooden sandals or a leather belt since I was about 4… I remember being beaten almost daily once I changed to a new skindergarden due to a teacher who rejected me at the one I used to go. My mother didn’t protect me, and didn’t accept my opinion, and let the teacher expell me from the kindergarden. I didn’t like the new one, but my mother forced me to stay, and afterwards I went a school where most children leaving that kindergarden used to go, just to be humiliated by other children until I was 13.
My father is a sex addict, and used to have sex with multiple women outside of marriage. My mother knew he was a sex addict when she got married to him. But even when she chose to have a guy with that kind of issue, she kept complaining and arguing with him every single day, until my father got tired and left home, when I was 7. My mother used me and my sister to control my father emotionally, and after he left she went on doing that, although without much result. Then she stayied 5 years unemployed, desperately crying about the loss of my father (for 5 years) and using me as a step, as her psychologist – a 7 years old boy – or, as I concluded recently, as her little husband – a solution to being an adult female loser unable to think and act as an adult, and unable to maintain a serious relationship, even though able t0 get new boyfriends/sex partners.
I was tormented and unhappy for years. And I still have a lot of pending issues in my mind. But I have been healing little by little after deciding to reject my parents.
I actually am now divorced. My ex-wife was too psychologicaly similar to my mother – although she hid that very well until after marriage.
I’d like to advise all people who have no perspective of a future to give up on having children, ever. If you are a loser, please live and/or die alone. Period. Don’t bring someone to life in order to get a receptacle for your bad karma.
Harry: YIKES! I’m so sorry you had such deplorable parents. That’s just … awful. But it’s inspiring what you’ve made–and are clearly making still–of all that’s happened to you.
All it takes for a parent to love a child for who they are (instead of who the parent want them to be) is for that person to lose a child. After that, a parent realizes he/she could love the child crying on an airplane, handicapped, deformed, a vegetable, anything just to be able to hold the child and love. I also think it helps us understand that our parents, really, did their best. This is the love the Father has for us. He gave up his only begotten son. He loves us with all his heart.
Sorry , but this is hardly true……many people are cold, unfeeling individuals who do not process loss unless it affects their material/ physical realm. They simply lack the capacity and there is no revelation or change possible for these kind. We all know people such as this who should not be parents just as we all know people such as this who should not be in relationships. Not everyone is worth saving or nor does everyone “do their best”.. Some people choose the darkness, and for those, it is, indeed, better that they remain where they are best suited. Some do not process”loss” as an opportunity to restore themsleves and their life choices, and that speaks volumes about their character and their choices.
Those are the ones we warn OUR children away from.
I’ve grappled with this issue since age 9, when I first attempted suicide to get away from my mother who used her children as a way to extract cash from our fathers. Her affection went to the sibling whose father made regular contributions. My father as luck would have it is extravagantly wealthy but didn’t acknowledge me so when I was 9 my mother tried to force me to do a press interview where I and I alone would say I was looking for my father. An uncle intervened to stop me talking in telly to the entire nation. She then said that I was the reason she lost her beauty and basically never even provided me with meals. I went to school without breakfast, had no money for lunch and had to ask for dinner. I am anorexic and bulimic now, because I didnt develop fully in puberty and had a distorted body image. I am not accustomed to looking “healthy” now that I can afford to eat. Relationships are impossible because I have no sex drive due to the eating disorders and refuse to talk about my parents and a decent man will want to know everything about me. I have no friends either. That’s the only way I can be happy: not sharing this crappy aspect of my existence with others. If you don’t want children, abort. Never put them through this. When she was pregnant with my sisters she never told me even when she was showing. An aunt visiting us was kind enough to tell me that my mother was actually married to the man living in the house for a year! I didnt know his name and I didnt know what to call him for a year!!! By the way, in an interesting twist of fate, I’m fully subsidizing my mother’s life now: she has a juicy pension investment plan, an investment portfolio, life insurance, comprehensive health insurance that I manage and her bills are fully paid. I’m the only one of her children who is employed! I look after her because otherwise she will tell everyone who will listen that I’m obliged to do so because my father is rich and I destroyed her body!!!!
Hi,
Thanks for the post. I really understand what you were saying about abortion. I never thought of it that way, though, until now. I always just wished they would have just killed me. I pray you can find happiness in this life. I can tell by your post you are a smart, sensitive woman who deserves to be loved in spite of being born to loser parents. God bless you, dear one.
I did what you did, John. At the age of 7, I asked my 1st grade teacher if I could live with her. I told her my parents did not care about me and that I loved her more. She tried to convince me that I loved my parents. “No, I love you.” I spent more time with her than I had ever spent with my parents. She had showed me more love and affection than they ever had. She asked me if I would miss my sisters and brother. That one brought out a yes….. So she told me I could not go home with her, but she loved me, and remember how much I loved and would have missed my sisters. It was the best she could do for me. It helped, for awhile. Amazing that as a little kid,I tried to get away from my parents. I knew they were not good for me. I would have left with her that day and never looked back. I survived by some miracle. Kids know if they are loved or not. I do not love my parents, and you are right about constructing a fantasy of parental love in order to survive. I did that for years until I finally admitted…..it was a fantasy of a child in order to survive the neglect and abuse. I am an adult and let the fantasy go around the age of 25 to 29. Hard as it is to face the truth, it helped me heal and build a better life for myself.
John, I came from a dysfunctional family: My father was a Southern Baptist preacher who ran our home like a drill sergeant. My mother was forever at his side, even if it meant abandoning me and my siblings. Both parents were ALWAYS at the church for meetings, so that gave my brother plenty of opportunities to sexually abuse me and my younger sister for years. And we ALL married and left home as teenagers because we couldn’t WAIT to get away from our SOB father.
All of us kids have suffered from one addiction or another. We’ve all been either divorced or in terribly unhappy marriages. We’ve all had problems finding careers in which we felt competent, appreciated and understood. And we’ve all had unimaginable emotional problems and estrangements from each other and/or our own kids.
And yet, in spite of all this, I do not blame my parents for any of it. Not one thing. It has nothing to do with my not wanting to accept that my parents didn’t love me, because my parents DID love me. Maybe they didn’t love me like YOU, John, think they should have loved me, but they loved and parented me the best way they knew how.
You see, my father was one of 13 kids who were the children of a moonshine still-operating alcoholic who abused their mother on a regular basis. They were poverty-stricken before there were such things as food stamps and welfare. My mother was a sweet, life-loving woman who truly believed her principle calling in life was to be her husband’s helpmate in carrying out his ministry. An outdated way of thinking, perhaps, but in those days women were taught to believe those kinds of things about themselves.
I haven’t always refused to blame my parents; in fact, I went through several years of placing the blame for my unhappiness on them, although it did me no good. But as the parents of grown children, I know now that my parents did the best they knew how to do, just like I did. My husband and I love our children dearly, and we tried our damndest not to make the same mistakes in raising them that our parents had made. But guess what? We made DIFFERENT mistakes, and they’ve all been angry as HELL at us at one time or the other. But they, too, will make mistakes in raising THEIR children, no matter how hard they try to be perfect parents.
In spite of its being the most important thing we’ll ever do, parents are not given any kind of formal education in raising children. The only training we get is on-the-job training and, of course, we often DO raise our children like we ourselves were raised, no matter how hard we try not to. How can we be expected not to make some really big mistakes raising our kids?
So, John, it is absolutely WRONG for you to encourage people to rid themselves of their parents, because as Christians, we are to forgive. There is no forgiveness whatsoever in casting people out of our lives because they are human and make mistakes. Thank GOD the people in my life still love me in spite of my not being perfect.
Except that for some wrongs, God may not so forgive. Punishment exists for a reason as does justice.
I ‘left home’ emotionally when I was about 6 years old. However I kept (sort of) trying. The last straw was when my bother over-dosed and I was calling mom every day to see how she was doing. The third day she told me she never wanted to talk to me again she would grieve for my brother until the day she died. Two years later she called to say she was thinking about me, I asked her why and reminded her of what she said. She has not contacted me since and my brothers widow is stuck.
I am successfully self-employed (I still laugh when my brother said “I forbid it…”) aviation entrepreneur AND software designer. I married someone like me and was able to tell him quickly (after counting my fingers between the wedding and the birth) that NO his father did not love him and it was only when the old guy was dying did he realize he screwed the pooch and how special his son really is.
Ok so it’s an old article, but you should dust it off every so often and maybe even so a seminar on it.
hey john,
i know this is an old one. but a number of times in my life i have said “you know, i’m not a christian, but i read this one christian writer/blogger, and he wrote this article and you really gotta read it” and i have sent them the url to this article.
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