Hi Matt,

You’re already way ahead of most people by recognizing that your emptiness or numbness is actually repressed emotions. It’s great you are able to identify that. I didn’t mean to suggest that forgiveness wouldn’t help, only that if you find you have forgiven them and you still feel angry, or anxious in your home, it’s pretty normal and not something to be alarmed about.

Regarding forgiveness in general, here’s a little more of my story that might be useful. Both my parents abused us, but my dad would apologize. My mom did not – or, her apology would really just be about how bad you were and how you made her do what she did. I understood why my dad was violent – he had a bad childhood, his dad was terrible – but my mom seemed strange to me. Her childhood had been good, I didn’t get why she would treat us like that.

It wasn’t until I got older and I was able to learn more about her family that I realized that underneath a veneer of normalcy there’s definitely some problems that helped explain why she had such poor coping mechanisms for stress (which is what using your children as an outlet for your negative emotions is). Perfectionism and anxiety run in her family. She was never taught healthy ways to cope with stress.

It’s easy to excuse someone for hitting you when they themselves were hit even worse as a kid, but hard to explain why someone who by all accounts had a great life would treat you so horribly. The few times I’ve tried to get her to admit some of the things that happened I was met with flat-out denial.

So, I decided I had to make my peace with her without getting anything resembling acknowledgment or apology.

The first thing was to validate my own experiences, because she was never going to validate them for me. I stopped saying stuff like “other people have it worse” or “stop feeling sorry for yourself, nothing that bad happened to you” and let myself feel all the pain I felt without judgment. It is what it is.

The second thing was to try to extend empathy to her. Even if I’ll never know what she was thinking or why she did what she did, I know that it didn’t make her happy to hurt us. She probably, on some level, feels a lot of shame and self-loathing for hurting us.

I tell myself: she did the best with what she had. If she had better tools, she would have used them. She just didn’t know how.

This helps me feel empathy for her without justifying how she treated us. She certainly was in a lot of pain – no one who hurts defenseless children feels good about themselves inside. It let me move on without needing her to admit what she did or take responsibility; if I was waiting for that I’d be waiting forever.

Nowadays we have a pleasant relationship, although it does make me sad we’re missing the intimacy that we’d have if there was more honesty between us. I focus on the good things and the nice times we have together, and try to let go of the things that make me sad still, like her perfectionism that still ruins parts of her life, ability to relax or have any fun. I can’t fix those things for her, but I can love her anyway, and that helps.