Our feelings for our parents can be very complicated. Some of how we feel depends on how we were treated when we were growing up and how we are treated today. Sometimes we simply agree with what our culture or society tells us to feel.

If we have caring and supportive parents, the question is quite simple: we love them and appreciate everything they did for us. It gets more complicated when our parents weren’t ideal. If we were neglected, rejected, or even abused, we grow to believe that it is due to our own shortcomings. Children generally blame themselves for what goes wrong in the parent-child relationship.

Instead of holding our parents accountable for how they treated us, we take responsibility for what happened and then try to change ourselves to finally earn the love they have been holding back. What we do not realize is that when our parents hurt or reject us it has nothing to do with what we lack and it has nothing to do with their inability to love and accept their children.

Because it is about them, no matter how hard we try to ingratiate ourselves with our parents, their feelings for us will not change. When we don’t get their approval, we can feel hurt or even angry, but many of us also think that we haven’t tried hard enough to please them. The truth is that love is not a commodity that can be bought and sold. Our parents will love us if they can and for no other reason.

Still, it is easier for us to keep blaming ourselves because it is preferable to face the unthinkable: the fact that our parents do not love us. This is an extremely painful understanding to accept. Most people would rather do anything than accept this as the truth. It is not only painful; It is humiliating.

Even when we acknowledge that it is not our own faults, we do not like the idea of ​​admitting to our friends or loved ones that we grew up with parents who hurt or rejected us. There is always the fear that others will wonder what we could have done to deserve it. It is also difficult to silence the voice of the “inner critic” who continually tells us that it is really our fault.

Paradoxically, those of us who were loved and accepted growing up find it much easier to separate from our parents than those of us who were abandoned, rejected, or abused. A secure and loving attachment during childhood leads to a healthy ability to detach in adulthood. Those of us in the first group are able to see our parents clearly as decent but imperfect human beings who are and can live rich and fulfilling independent lives.

Those of us who belong to the latter group find it much more difficult to let our parents go. We tend to get quite tangled up with them in adulthood as we continue to try to earn their elusive approval. Even though we might be angry with them and even have ongoing conflicts, we continue to spend a lot of time and energy on this frustrating and unsatisfying relationship.

Sadly, the worse we were treated, the more we end up doing for our parents as adults, and the more disrespect we tolerate. Loving parents create confident adults who will not accept abuse from anyone. Bad parents raise their children plagued with doubts and feelings of inadequacy. This group accepts being abused as a matter of course.

Loving parents never make their children feel guilty for the love and care they receive, and they never make their children feel responsible for meeting the emotional or physical needs of their parents. Bad parents, on the other hand, talk endlessly about how burdened they are for their children and how many sacrifices they have had to make to raise them.

Children who were loved do not feel indebted to their parents and guilt does not prompt them to tend to their needs after leaving home. The unloved group has been brainwashed into believing, incorrectly, that it is the continuing role of a child to care for their parents. These people are driven by a powerful sense of obligation.

Beloved children grow into adults who love their parents and are happy to be there for them when there is a valid need. On the other hand, loving parents are reluctant to impose themselves on their adult children; not wanting to be a burden to them. Unloved children grow into adults who may resent their selfish and hurtful parents, but who cannot reject their demands. Parents who do not love see children as if they have been put on the ground to satisfy the needs of the parents and therefore have no difficulty in imposing them.

Sadly, those of us who were unlucky enough to have been raised by bad parents are also burdened as adults by their demands. Even though they have done very little for us and have always put their needs before ours, we maintain a sense of loyalty out of place. It is partly because our society insists that we should respect our parents and partly because we still expect their love.

We need to put aside our feelings of obligation and acknowledge that if they had loved us, we would be happy to return the feeling. In loving families, guilt and obligation never enter the equation. We want to believe that we belong to a united and happy family, and for those of us who have this, we should be grateful. However, for those of us who don’t, it’s time to face the truth.

We need to see that caring for hurtful parents will not make them love us and it won’t even make them happy. People who are so emotionally damaged that they cannot love their children are not really capable of being happy either. They try to use us to satisfy some deep unmet needs within them, but nothing we do could heal the emotional wounds that render them incapable of loving or caring for us.

We are better off facing the truth about our parents; give up our futile attempts to win his love and focus our attention instead on the pursuit of more achievable and satisfying goals. We can start by working to develop the self-esteem and self-confidence that our childhood deprived us of. Then we can build relationships with people who are able to love and accept us, just as we are.

(C) Marcia Sirota MD 2010