How Do I Forgive My Abusive Parents?

The second installment of "Ask a Banner Carrier," an advice column

Banner Carrier,

My question is this: My parents are unrepentant of the violence and mental hardships that they inflicted on me as a child and young person. However, these days, they are fine, if not a bit awkward. My wife and I have a decent relationship with them on the limited occasions that we are around them. The problem is that I cannot unsee them as the people who used to sit on my chest and grind bars of soap into my teeth or spank me with more and more “creative” (destructive) implements each time.

My parents want to see us all the time and get to know my wife better, but my wife and I are happy with the boundaries we have now. How can I explain to them that their past actions have determined the relationship they’re allowed to have with me now?

Yours,

No Longer A Child

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Dear No Longer,

Thanks for writing to me with such an intimate question, and such a difficult one. One of the great challenges of adulthood is shifting one’s relationships with one’s parents—from omnipotent beings who you are driven to please above all else, to flawed humans who blundered their way through raising you when you were a small thing full of needs.

One of the truths you have had to encounter is that your parents abused the trust created in you when you were born. They used that trust to punish you, and used escalating violence to do so, until you were no longer in their power. That is a very difficult thing to bear, and an even more difficult thing to divorce yourself from—to no longer justify it to yourself, and argue that you must have deserved it, since the people who loved you most inflicted such pain on you. From your letter, it’s clear that in your adulthood you have dismantled those protective illusions, and I congratulate you on that work.

A few things remain unclear from your letter. You say your parents are “unrepentant” of the harm they caused you, but you also ask how you can explain the consequences of that harm. I wonder: what sort of conversations have you had with them about it? Were you as honest with them, in reciting back to them your litany of pain, as you were with me? You say that you spend limited time with them, and they are “awkward,” but that the relationship is “decent.” Yet you also say that when you see them, you see only the violence they did. Is the politeness and decency you describe just a thin bridge over a gulf of pain? (And, incidentally, what does your wife feel about all this? Does she want to get to know your parents better? Does she know the depth of the violence done to you?)

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I think you should speak to your wife, first of all, about her feelings about all this. And then I think you should speak to your parents, and fully unburden yourself of this pain and this rage, which was inflicted on you so unjustly when you were unable to protect yourself. You can, if you wish, explain that the rigidity and relative shallowness of your current relationship is a direct consequence of that cruelty.

But you should also be aware that, if the conversation is truly as honest as you would like it to be, and they are as unrepentant as you say they are—if they refuse cognizance and acknowledgement and do not seek to repair the harm they have done—then it is most likely that even the limited relationship you currently have will not survive it. Very few things can survive such burning truths, and the precarious bridges you’ve built with them—contingent on your silence—seem dry as kindling.

I think you should talk to them, though, still. Perhaps in the hope that they will see what they have done, and something deeper and more painful and truer can be built between you. Or that those hopes will be gone for good, and the charade ended. I do not advise you to let them go lightly. But I think it would not be so bad a thing if their actions, finally, had consequences for them, and not just you.

Yours truly,

The Banner Carrier