When your relationship with a parent is a source of pain

In all my years of getting to know people - personally, professionally, clinically - at some point, mum and dad enter the conversation. I have met people who feel safe and comforted by their parents, people whose parents took them on when their biological parents didn't, people who have ceased communication with their parents entirely, people who've lost them, people who've been physically and emotionally abused by them, those who are able to forgive, those who still chase an apology, those who don't know who their parents are, those who parent their parents, those who still live with them, and their parents' parents.

My aim in sharing my observations is not only to highlight how significant these relationships are, but to emphasise how vast, different and complex the familial landscape is - because one of the biggest challenges people face in troubled or estranged family relationships is shame.

Society imposes a particular obligation around parents. "Blood is thicker than water." "Yes, but they're still your family." That kind of language has the potential to silence those who are suffering inside dysfunctional family relationships - to make a person feel that naming the pain is somehow the betrayal, rather than the behaviour that caused it.

The assumption of safety

In the same way we assume a person has a mother and a father, we tend to assume those relationships should be intact, functional, a source of safety. When they are not - when behaviour is unpredictable, when trust has never been established or has been broken repeatedly - the impact can be profound and far-reaching.

Winnicott spoke of the "good enough" parent. The idea that a parent doesn't need to be perfect - that if they are appropriately attuned to their child enough of the time, the child will develop a secure enough foundation. But what happens when attunement is largely absent? When addiction enters the household. When there is adultery, violence, abandonment, dishonesty, abuse. When the parent is so consumed by their own needs, their own pain, their own limitations, that the child simply doesn't register as a separate person with needs of their own.

What happens, in short, when the person who is supposed to be the safe base is the source of the threat.

What this actually looks like

What I have come to notice, across many different family configurations and many different kinds of harm, is that the most consistently damaging thread is rarely the original wound itself. It is the absence of repair around it. The parent who could not or would not acknowledge what happened. Who met their child's pain with deflection, minimisation, or by turning it back on them entirely. The child who came to a parent with something real and left the conversation feeling responsible for it.

That pattern - the projection, the lack of accountability, the reality that is never quite validated - is what tends to compound the harm most. And it runs through cases of overt abuse and quieter emotional neglect alike.

A parent who is primarily oriented around their own needs is worth naming specifically, because the harm this behaviour can cause is less visible than overt abuse - and therefore harder to validate. They may be functional, even impressive, in the world. But at home, their needs colonise the space. Consequentially, the child learns to attune to the parent's emotional state rather than the other way around. They may become skilled readers of the room - monitoring mood, managing reactions, suppressing their own needs to keep the environment stable. They grow up, but the role doesn't change.

Where there is no identifiable incident or overt abuse to point to, the harm can be harder to legitimate - both internally and externally. The absence of a clear narrative often gives rise to minimisation; from others, but equally from within. A child who learned to contextualise the parent's behaviour - their history, their own wounds, their limitations - can spend years invalidating their own experience in the process.

The weight of a relationship that won't change

What brings people to therapy is rarely a single event. It is more often an exhaustion. Years of hoping that this time will be different. That the conversation will finally land. That the parent will hear them, acknowledge them, show up in the way that was always needed.

Lack of safety and trust - the absence of being able to relax in someone's presence, to be honest without consequence, to need something without it being used against you - is the thread I find running through almost every troubled parental relationship. It presents differently depending on the parent, the child, the dynamic. But underneath the specific story, that is almost always what is there.

This can go unnoticed for years, or take a backseat, because maintaining proximity to the parent has felt like the priority. In childhood that proximity is a matter of survival - we are dependent on the very person who may be causing harm, which is one of the most disorientating positions a human being can be in. But the patterns, roles and expectations formed in those early years have a long reach - you can read more about this in my article on relational trauma here. They don't dissolve when the child grows up and leaves. They tend to follow.

What therapy offers

Hoping for someone to change, while continuing to play the same role in the same dynamic, does not produce change. Relational dynamics require two people to move.

What a therapist can offer is not a replacement for the parent - that is not what therapy is, and it would be a disservice to suggest otherwise. But it can offer something that may never have been consistently present: attunement, empathy, care, integrity, and a predictable frame. A weekly space that belongs entirely to you. Where your reality is not questioned or minimised. Where repair, when ruptures occur, is modelled rather than avoided.

When the nervous system has been primed for vigilance - trained to expect unpredictability, to scan for threat, to distrust safety when it appears - that kind of consistent relational experience can be profoundly settling. It doesn't undo what happened. But it creates the conditions in which clarity can emerge. About what the relationship has cost. About what is and isn't possible within it. About how to move forward.

Written by Layla Eissa MBACP