Can You Forgive Your Parents?

Almost everyone asks this question at some point. Sometimes out loud, in a therapy room. More often quietly, at 2 a.m., after a phone call with your mother that went the way it always goes.

Can I forgive them? Should I? What if I can't?

You have probably heard two answers. I don't think either one is quite right. And I don't think they are opposites, either.

The two answers you've already heard

The first answer is: forgive them. For your own peace. They did their best. Holding on only hurts you.

The second answer is: you don't have to forgive them. Some things are not okay. You owe no one forgiveness, least of all the people who hurt you when you were small.

Both answers have truth in them. Both can also become a shortcut — a way to land somewhere quickly so you don't have to feel what's in between.

When forgiveness comes too early

Many of the people I work with forgave their parents a long time ago. Or they think they did.

They can explain everything. Dad was under so much pressure. Mom had no one to help her. They were immigrants, or poor, or grieving, or raised the same way themselves. All of it is true. And when they tell me this, their voice is calm, but their chest is tight and their breath is shallow.

For over-givers especially, early forgiveness can be one more way of taking care of the parent. You protect them from your anger the way you protected them from your needs. The understanding comes first, so the hurt never gets a turn.

That kind of forgiveness tends not to hold. It cracks at holidays. It cracks when you have children of your own. It cracks when your mother says the same small thing she has said for thirty years, and you are suddenly furious and don't know why.

When not forgiving becomes a place to live

The other side is real too.

Anger at a parent is often healthy. In the kind of therapy I practice, we think of anger as a core emotion — it tells you that something mattered and was crossed. For people who were never allowed to be angry, finding it can be a huge relief. It says: what happened to me was real.

And if a parent was abusive, or is still dangerous, you do not need to forgive them to heal. Protecting yourself comes first. Always.

But sometimes "I'll never forgive them" quietly turns into a place where we live. The anger keeps us organized around them. We are still, in a way, arguing with them every day. The relationship hasn't ended. It has just changed shape.

What actually moves

What I see in therapy is rarely a decision. It is more like a sequence.

First, the anger gets to be felt — fully, in the body, with someone safe beside you. Not explained. Felt. Often there is heat in the arms or the jaw, and a strength people didn't know they had.

Then, very often, something underneath the anger shows up: grief. For the parent you needed and didn't get. For the child who waited. This part is usually quieter, and heavier.

And after the grief has had some room, something sometimes softens. You may start to see your parents as people with their own history, their own wounds — not instead of your hurt, but next to it. That is the difference. Real understanding comes after your own feelings have been honored, not as a replacement for them.

Sometimes forgiveness grows out of that. Sometimes it doesn't, and what grows instead is peace with not forgiving. Both are okay. Neither is a failure.

Maybe the answer is "both, at different times"

My honest view is this: forgiving and not forgiving are not two verdicts to choose between. They are both part of a person growing up on the inside.

You may need to not forgive for a while, so that your own experience finally counts. You may later find that something has loosened without you trying. You may go back and forth for years. That is not being stuck. That is the process.

So instead of asking should I forgive them?, it may help to ask a gentler question:

Where am I right now? Have I let myself be angry yet? Have I let myself grieve? Or am I rushing to the end because the middle feels too much?

There is no deadline on this. You get to take the time it takes.

I'm Yuko Hanakawa, Ph.D., a licensed clinical psychologist offering online therapy throughout New York State, in English and Japanese. I work with over-givers, eldest daughters, and people living between two cultures — often people who aren't in crisis, but who keep arriving at the same place in their lives and are ready to look at it properly. If your relationship with your parents is part of that, here's how I work with over-givers.

Whether I'm currently taking new clients, and how to begin if I am, is on my appointment page. If you'd like new posts as they come, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.

— Yuko Hanakawa, Ph.D.