Note: this is an updated version of an article originally published in December 2015.

A theme that often comes up in my healing work is the impact of our relationship with our parents on the way we love, live and parent our own kids. For some people, this is deeply uncomfortable terrain, because many of us are raised to respect our parents to the point where recognising their flaws can feel like a betrayal of sorts. It’s important to understand that healing is not about heaping blame on our parents and directing anger at them for the rest of your life, it’s simply about understanding the ways that the healing they didn’t do in their own lives has consequently been passed on to you. We can recognise the way our parents have let us down and love or like them anyway (or not, depending on the circumstances). You’re entitled to be angry at a parent if they failed you in some way, but eventually you’ll probably want to move past that anger into a space where you can hold two different truths in the same hand: the truth that the way you were treated should never have happened, and the truth that you can live in relative peace in spite of it.