We Needed Our Parents — Insecure Attachment
As we come into the world as a child, we have a powerful natural inclination to be connected with our parent. We think the world of them, want to be seen by them and need to feel safe with them. We depend on them to guide us, have patience with us, care about how we feel and pay attention to correct themselves when they've hurt us. As children, we need the support and love from our parent in order to feel secure and have a sense of worth about who we are.
Parents, then, have an immense responsibility in caring for our lives. When we are little and under their guidance, we have next to no power to create a different world or circumstance for ourselves. The lives we live as children are directly impacted by the way our parents choose to speak to and treat us. The time that we spend with our parents and the ways they influence us alter our worlds forever.
And since they are our entire world, when they don’t see us, we often don’t feel seen at all and when they don’t love us well, we often don’t feel loved at all and even deem ourselves not worthy of it. Even if we’ve had the ability to have an endearing relationship with someone else – a sibling, a teacher or an uncle, for instance, there’s often still a sad and unyielding disconnected feeling we have for the parent that did not take the time to truly get to know us and take care enough to treat us as a whole human.
Such responsibility of being our caretaker, creates an inevitable power imbalance. And because we haven’t lived another life, as painful as our existence may be, there’s a sense of normal that we come to understand. We may have tried to appeal to their understanding and compassion, but may have been met with them being unsympathetic and denying our experience instead of the compassion we were seeking. So when we were abused and neglected, although we may have intuitively known that something was wrong, we had no power to do anything about it.
As a child, we were hopeful and incredibly forgiving, so even when they got it wrong, we kept hoping that they would get it right. We couldn’t choose our relationships or force our parents to be better parents, so we kept trying and hoping. We internalized the ways of our parents and kept wondering “why won’t they listen to me?”, “why don’t they care about what I’m feeling”, “why do they keep treating me like this?” and never quite getting good enough answers to those questions. Ultimately, believing that something about us was the problem - we weren’t loveable, we weren’t good enough, we weren’t worth the effort.
Childhood is vulnerable. In secure attachment, our vulnerability is safe and protected by parents who are imperfect, yet have genuine, patient interest in their child and open to repairing ruptures. In insecure attachment our childhoods were the first unconsented battles we fought. We couldn’t make them stop lying to us, yelling at us, leaving us behind, hitting us nor ignoring us. We couldn’t stop the sexual abuse nor them being complicit in it. We couldn’t make them leave their partner, stop drinking nor manage their money any better. We couldn’t make them stop blaming us nor make them wiser and more mature. We couldn’t make them be better to us. But we tried.
As adults, we’ve likely sacrificed ourselves over and over again still hoping that they will change, that they will finally get it. For us, our emotionally immature, neglectful and abusive parents are the reasons we’ve dealt with such emotional distress and unending yearning. There’s heavy grief in having the deeply saddening realization that our parent won’t be that loving, interested, accountable parent that we’ve so desperately needed them to be.
It’s okay that we care for ourselves now.
Here is gentle encouragement to allow your adult self to care for and soothe yourself in whatever ways make sense for you. Whether you decide to withdraw in some way or do nothing at all right now. Truly it’s a choice that you should never have to make. A sincerely unfair choice. There’s no good or leading answer. Remember that your response, after years of surviving them, is your own way of caring for yourself after you felt mostly worsened by your parent, not better; mostly harmed by your parent, not nourished.