How to Stop Resenting Your Parents

Alexandra Cooper (0:00)

Welcome back to another Sunday session with your father, everyone. You know, I love Sundays, because they're just you and me, no distractions, no drama, just the girls chatting about life, right? Which I guess can actually inevitably cause a little bit of drama, but we always aim to leave feeling a little bit better at the end of these episodes, right? We dive in, we address things head on, sometimes they can be uncomfortable, and then we lift ourselves right back up, all on a Sunday. It's beautiful. So in the spirit of addressing things head on, something I always say we have to go back to on Call Her Daddy is our childhood, because, like it or not, so much of who we are, how we love, how we react, how we fight, how we cope, it's deeply impacted by what happened to us when we were younger, right? I think we all know that. And the truth is, I think, when you start actually reflecting on your past, it can be a total mixed bag, right? Sometimes it brings up really intense happiness and nostalgia, but a lot of the time, it more so brings up a lot of hurt and confusion or just raw emotion that maybe you've kind of swept under the rug years ago and continue to kind of sweep under the rug. And it's almost like as we grow up and we step into adulthood, it feels like the fog starts to clear. We start looking at life with a completely different perspective and something that heavily influences us in a way that so similar to our childhood yet totally different because now you're an adult with an adult brain is our parents.

Our relationship with our parents, with them now versus back then, how we feel about them when we look at them adult to adult now, how they showed up for us, or how they completely failed to do that, what their presence or their absolute lack thereof has done to our nervous systems as adults today and also back in our childhood. And parents are a lot.

This is a big boy topic to take on because I feel like as an adult, you suddenly realize your parents aren't invincible superheroes who have it all figured out, right? They are flawed, they're traumatized, they're messy human beings who made mistakes, will continue to make mistakes.

But I will say, knowing that logically, it doesn't automatically erase the damage. Like we can be like, no, no, no, I know.

I know my parents are just some randos that decide to have kids, but I'm still messed up. And it's like, yeah, no, that's actually so fair. Today, I want to talk about what I truly believe is the ultimate emotional mind, which is resenting your parents while desperately wanting to love and be close to them. How do we do that? Growing up, we're fed the Disney version of family where your parents are these perfect heroes. Then you hit your 20s and your 30s and you go to therapy and you spend a lot of money and you look back and you're like, wait a second, that was actually so messed up. Wait a second. Oh my God, that is not okay. What happened to me? And suddenly you're kind of like trapped in this exhausting tug of war, right? And so on one hand, understandably, you're angry and you resent the emotional neglect and the pressure and the projections or the boundaries that were constantly enforced on you as a kid. But on the other hand, it's like you love them and they're your parents. And you see them getting older and you remember the good times and you just want them to get it. You want them to understand where you're coming from. You want that warm, supportive relationship. But every single time it feels like you try, you then leave the conversation feeling drained and judged or just totally unseen. This tracking for anyone else? Okay, perfect.

And so yeah, the truth is, I think let's just call a spade a spade. Moving past childhood resentment is one of the hardest things that you will ever do. Because like I said, when you're a kid, your parents are your entire world. So you don't have context for life yet. And so when they fall short, whether that was, you know, screaming matches, emotional coldness, severe neglect, micro criticisms about your appearance, making you feel like a burden, any of it. You don't think when you're a child, oh, that's just my mom. That's just my mom. She's projecting her unhealed trauma on me. Classic. Like, no. When we're children, we innately are like, wait, what is, what's going on? Something's wrong with me. It can't be my parent. Something must be wrong with me.