For a long time, I thought I’d already faced my childhood. My father was an alcoholic. There was chaos, unpredictability, and some violence. I witnessed things no child should have to witness. My mother and father were both emotionally remote, unavailable in ways I didn’t yet know how to name. Those were the obvious wounds — the ones you can point to and say, “That wasn’t okay.”

But the hardest part wasn’t naming the obvious. The hardest part was recognizing how much damage came from what seemed normal. The things that didn’t look like trauma at all. The subtle withdrawal of warmth. The tension that filled the room without words. The constant sense of walking on eggshells, never knowing when something might explode. The small ways love was conditional. The quiet moments that should have felt safe but didn’t.

Those were the injuries I had the hardest time seeing, because they were the air I breathed. When something is normal, it doesn’t register as harm — until later, when you begin to notice the ways your body tenses around old ghosts, or how your adult life still organizes itself around avoiding the same old feelings.

And even when I began to see it, another barrier rose up:
I didn’t want to blame my parents.

Understanding Without Blame

That’s one of the biggest fears people have when they start to look closely at their past — the fear that seeing clearly means turning against the people who raised them. We’ve been taught that good children don’t question, that forgiveness means silence, that acknowledging pain is disloyal.

But understanding what happened isn’t the same as blaming anyone. It’s about seeing the pattern that shaped you. It’s about understanding the conditions that formed your nervous system, your beliefs, your survival strategies.

You can hold two truths at once:

My caregivers were doing the best they could — and their best still left me hurt.

That’s not blame. That’s reality.

The word caregiver itself can mean many things. For most of us, it means our parents. But for others it might be a grandparent, an older sibling, a teacher, a religious leader, or someone else who held authority in our early lives. Whoever shaped the emotional tone of your childhood was, in effect, a caregiver.

And most of them weren’t monsters. They were often wounded children themselves — repeating what was modeled for them, living from patterns they didn’t understand and couldn’t change. Seeing that doesn’t excuse the harm, but it does place it in context. Trauma moves through generations until someone has the courage to stop and look.

This work isn’t about finding someone to blame. It’s about breaking the cycle by finally telling the truth about what happened — and how it lives in you now.

Blame keeps us stuck in anger. Denial keeps us stuck in confusion.
Seeing clearly opens the way forward.

Making Space for Honest Seeing

If this brings up resistance, that’s okay. It’s normal. The heart protects what it still loves.

But honesty doesn’t cancel love. You can love your parents — or whoever raised you — and still acknowledge the harm. You can understand their struggles and still grieve what you didn’t receive.

Try asking yourself:

• What moments from childhood still make me uncomfortable to think about?
• Which of my caregivers’ behaviors felt normal then, but painful now?
• Can I hold compassion for them and honesty about their impact at the same time?

These aren’t easy questions. But they open the door to something real — not resentment, not blame, but truth.

Healing doesn’t start with hating anyone.
It starts with seeing what’s true, even when it’s uncomfortable.
You don’t have to hate anyone to tell the truth about what happened.