How To Release Resentment Towards Your Parents

Unhealed childhood resentment is like a cancer that can destroy your adult life. We unconsciously project resentment towards our parents that we continue to carry from our childhood, onto other people. Especially people of the same gender as the parent we still resent.

If deep down you are still angry with your mother, you’ll tend to resent any woman who acts even remotely like her. If you still have resentment towards your father, it’s likely to negatively effect the way you relate to other men and authority figures in general. This operates unconsciously so you may not even be consciously aware of it.

If you grew up in an environment where anger wasn’t handled well and you learned to suppress your own anger, you could have a truckload of resentment simmering away beneath the surface that you’re not even consciously aware of. Symptoms of this are feeling rage when other people violate your boundaries, either exploding out of proportion to what’s actually happening or seething internally instead of standing up for yourself.

Either of these two extreme reactions are unhelpful. The healthy response is to act assertively when other people act in ways that you don’t like. Healing repressed childhood resentment towards your parents eliminates the unconscious emotional trigger and makes a considered, assertive response possible even in challenging situations. This is the difference between unconsciously reacting in ways that escalate conflict and consciously responding so that you get what you want.

If your parents are relatively enlightened, emotionally mature people who you have a good relationship with, they will recognise that resolving past hurts is in everyone’s best interests. In this case you could try having a conversation with them where you describe your resentments as cleanly as possible while taking full responsibility for your feelings and casting as little blame as possible.

Mind you, if your parents are relatively enlightened, emotionally mature people who you have a good relationship with, you’re probably not visiting this site.

More likely if you’re reading this your parents are emotionally immature, narcissistic and just plain bad at communicating; especially in challenging conversations.

In this case it may be better not to engage them in this process at all. Even healthy expressions of resentment worded as cleanly and carefully as possible can lead to an eruption of shame and guilt from narcissistic parents. When their inner critic is triggered it can get projected back onto you as blame and defensive criticism, rather than the empathy and understanding that you need to help heal the emotional wound beneath the resentment you still carry.

It’s normal to resent parents over the times when they behaved badly

In this case I’d recommend a process similar the one described by Jordan Peterson in his January 2019 Q&A when answering a question from a follower experiencing this problem, with my additions:

• Make a list of everything you resent about your childhood, especially anything involving you parents.
• Separate out what actually happened from your emotional response to it. Write them both down.
• Take your time and allow yourself to really feel the impact on your childhood and the continuing impact on your adult life of all the ways they let you down.
• Don’t avoid doing any of this when painful feelings arise, unless you feel yourself getting completely overwhelmed.
• Avoid rationalisations like “they were only doing the best they could” or “they didn’t know any better” or “it wasn’t that bad”. Allow yourself to play the blame game for a while in order to access and heal the pain.
• See if you can connect to the sadness and grief underneath the resentment and anger.
• Really let yourself feel it. If you start to cry, don’t hold back. Get a box of tissues and let the tears flow. Remember: the healing is in the feeling.
• Move your body. Get a punching bag and start laying into it to help get the energy moving.
• Aim to let go of what happened by taking full responsibility for your emotional response to it and acknowledging your resentment about it.
• Keep going until you’re exhausted or have listed and felt the pain of every resentment you still carry.

It might take a few goes to really work through everything, especially if you have experienced childhood trauma, physical or emotional abuse, neglect or abandonment.

If you have a supportive friend or therapist, talk the list over with them to make sure all the emotional charge on everything is gone. Pause whenever you feel the pain again so your nervous system has time to process and release it.

Once the emotional pain of what has happened to you is dealt with, you will find that the resentment lifts and events that used to really bother you no longer do. You may not even remember them, and when you do the memories will be more objective because the emotional charge is gone.

This is what true forgiveness feels like.

You are now in a position to establish an adult-adult relationship with your parents, if you choose to have contact with them.

Cement the healing of past resentment by building a future life that you really love, unconstrained by pain from the past. Now that you are free of the damage that has been done to you by your parents, you are free to be the master of your own destiny with no excuses. Once you are living the life you love, you will feel nothing but gratitude towards your parents for their part in making it all possible.