CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - "Your Parents Were Children Too" Has Been Weaponized

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

We have the cure for estrangement: just see your parents as children too. Easy. Case closed. [Read: sarcasm] In this episode, Whitney traces where this sometimes helpful and sometimes very unhelpful idea came from and shows how something genuinely useful got turned into a permanent exit ramp from accountability.In this episode, you'll learn:- How "your parents were children too" worked its way into self-help- Why unfinished business has to move upward or outward, never down to your own children- What defensiveness in a parent is usually protectingWhitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I come to you today to let you know that journalists, armchair psychologists, and even some licensed therapists have a cure for estrangement that they have discovered. I have seen this echoed in so many think pieces of differing varieties lately. And this is what they think you should try. You should try to understand and your parents, forgive them, and see them as children too. Now, I know what you're thinking, because I thought this, haven't we been doing this for hundreds of years. But yes, you guys, we have lost our way and we just need to try to do those things a little bit more. Now, obviously, I am being a little bit sarcastic and snarky here,

but this is literally what people are proposing. Left and right. More empathy, more seeing your parents as fragile children, more understanding, less labeling, more grace. And I want to walk you through the history of this idea. And the ways that it has gone through so many different metamorphoses and the ways it has been weaponized, actually mainly by therapists and the therapeutic community.

And what we're doing with it now and why there has been so much backlash as of late. You see, parents were children too is one of the kindest ideas in modern therapy. It seems kind on its face, I should say. It asks us to see the frightened child that is, still living inside the grown adult who raised you. And there's value in that. But if we stop there, I think it becomes actually one of the biggest reasons why a parent cannot repair things with their adult child. Because for roughly a century, the dominant message from both therapy, religion, and self-help has been the same. And we are really having to be. And we are really having to be.

this sort of like precipice that we're reaching right now. The messaging has been, your parents' failures will make more sense and hurt less once you understand the wounded, limited, once small people that they once were. And I think that this move is always framed as being for you, for you as the child and that it's something that will help you. Understanding them is your road to freedom. And recently, I would say over the last three years, there has been a pretty loud, and I've been a part of it, counter current pushing back against this and arguing that understanding over time has been weaponized into an obligation to excuse, reconcile, and stay in very harmful, destructive relationships.

And that the understanding usually stops at parents. We rarely encourage, especially parents of adults, to do the same for their children. Now, let's talk about the history here. I'm going to show you, like a long, winding road of therapy that has consistently been highly focused on the parent-child bond that has existed way before this moment. Because I think we are speaking about the, you know, when people talk about the quote-unquote estrangement crisis, it's like this modern-day problem that therapists just started blaming parents and filling adults' heads with like fake. news about their parents when we've been doing this in a way, way worse way, really since the

inception of psychotherapy. So Freud believed that our earliest bonds with our parents shaped our entire childhood. And he proposed that how we love, fear, and relate to our mothers and fathers as small children sets us up in like this blueprint for our future personality, morals, and romantic beliefs and romantic choices, I should say. And he believed that the majority or really all of adults suffering stems from childhood and the parental relationship. And he wasn't necessarily saying that you should empathize with your parents as much as he was telling people that you needed to use the word excavate your childhood for all of the issues that were caused by your parents and uncover them. And if you don't,

you will be doomed to repeat them. And this really planted the seed and began our obsession with understanding our parents as a way to understand ourselves. Now, in the 1970s, we see self-psychology come out. And this is Heinz Kohut. Hopefully I'm saying that, right? This is when empathy becomes the center of therapy. It is the instrument that therapists should be used.

using to create change in the therapeutic relationship. And Coahed's theory was that mental and emotional challenges were the results of a lack of empathy in childhood. And I believe that he talked a lot about narcissism and how a lack of empathy could lead to narcissism in children. But this led him to really focus his methods on empathizing with the patient. The clinician needs to demonstrate empathy for the patient in order to elicit change. And I think a lot of clinicians or people who are even in school to become therapist now will recognize this being a big part of your training.

I remember, you know, being taught about unconditional positive regard for the patient, always finding a way to relate to them and to have empathy for them. And I remember being taught a lot about empathy versus sympathy and how important it was to have empathy. and I think there's been a big pop psych emphasis on empathy as well. And so during this time, psychoanalysis was also deeply focused on empathy, you know, for the patient and exploring the role of how parents influenced the patient and what they might be repressing. There was a lot of emphasis on things being repressed within the patient. And then comes along Alice Miller. And I think Alice Miller, who is the author of the book,

The Drama of the Gifted Child in 1979, was a really influential articulation of your parents were children too. And she talks about her central thesis that parents who fail you were themselves once small, suppressed, unseen children repeating what was done to them. And that cruelty and families really travels down the generations because hurt people, hurt people, and you've probably heard some version of this. Miller argued that healing requires confronting repressed childhood memories, again, more of this focus on repression, acknowledging the grief of unmet needs and processing these buried emotions to break the cycle

of generational trauma. But in 2004, Alice Miller published another book called The Body Never Lies. And she argues in this book that forgiving parents who never acknowledge the harm doesn't heal you. She explicitly attacked the cultural and religious command to honor thy father and mother and calling it a mandate that pressures the child to honor the parent even when they dishonor you the child. Now, we see this focus in family systems theory as well, which is what I am a marriage and family therapist. I am trained in family systems therapy or family systems theories. And Murray Bowen made understanding your parents almost a technical requirement of growing up through two key concepts that you've probably heard me talk about on this podcast. The first one is the multi-generational transmission process, which is that patterns like anxiety and levels of maturity get passed down through the generations.

And your parents are one link in like. a long chain, you know, with your grandparents and great-grandparents above them continuing to pass things down. And he also talks about differentiation of the self, which proposed that you become a mature adult by staying connected to your family while defining yourself apart from its emotional reactivity. And Bowen notably talked about emotional cutoff, you know, as being like the immature move. He talks about how to keep. keep yourself fully intact or differentiated while still being connected to the family. And I would argue that, yes, this is a key part of quote unquote growing up and becoming an

individual adult and that some families, particularly those that are quite abusive and highly dysfunctional, maybe have high rates of addiction, different types of abuse, high level of control, differentiation, while. remaining connected to the family is not possible in all of these families. But yes, it is the ideal state. And therapists who are trained in Bowen's family systems often will even advise that their clients, you know, go back to their families of origin to observe and understand them. And there is this idea that you should study your parents as people. Okay. So we can see here, for decade on decade, way before this sort of modern moment that we're at,

where now we're talking about all of these young people being estranged and engaging in cutoffs and blaming their parents more than ever before. They were not even born when all of this was going on and was part of really the focus of therapy. Okay. In the 1980s and 90s, there was a big push for the reparenting or inner child movement. And that was teaching people to understand their parents' limits and then give themselves what their parents couldn't. And so understanding your parent was seen as a step towards repair for yourself.

I have kind of been a critic of some inner child work because I don't know that you can ever really give yourself everything that you are supposed to get from a parent. You can certainly get close. I also find that some inner child work is really like soft and not very rooted in what I would say is like actually evidence based parenting. And I'm proposing a new lens on this in my upcoming book, a new way of looking at inner child work. But then we move into the 1990s and the 2000s and this continues. There's a lot of focus on. forgiveness and reframing the offender by understanding their history and, you know,

building empathy and compassion for them. And this type of model has been applied in several studies to incest survivors, adult children of alcoholics and others. And they did report, you know, in some of these groups, reduced anxiety and depression. And in some of these models, there are stages where you are actively encouraged to generate empathy for the person who hurt you. And that is a therapeutic task. Now, in this era and in the 2000s, honestly, still until now, I think we enter this like, they did the best they could with what they had era. And this is like a defining self-help mantra of the 20th century that has been absorbed into recovery culture, 12-set models, adult children of alcoholics language, pop, psych,

and self-help books. And this has really lasted, and I think still exists up until this moment, where now we have entered this countercultural moment, okay, that I think I really started to feel kind of bubbling up 2023 to the present, where people are really voicing that they are frustrated with the pressure to understand, forgive, and reconcile with people in my world, particularly parents and family members who hurt them, especially with people who are continuing to harm them, which is the main focus of my work, is like, how can we deal with these relationships effectively in the present with people who will not change, who see nothing wrong, and who have no interest in changing.

Now, the current therapeutic consensus that I personally and professionally believe works best is a holding of both that you can understand your parent or your family system, where they came from, why they are the way they are, and still make different choices or limit contact in some cases. Understanding is not paired with obligation, right? So understanding why someone is the way they are is not the same thing as agreeing to continue participating in that dynamic when someone refuses to do anything about why they are the way they are. So today in this episode, we are not going to stop at, you know, they were children too. We're going to walk through this process of holding space for both seeing them as the wounded child, while also maintaining your authority as an adult. Okay?

And I want to think about the world that these parents grew up in. There was no language for this until much later on, you know, depending on how old your parent is and how old you are, thinking about kind of where you landed as an adult, a young adult, a parent during the life cycle of some of this mainstream, messaging around family relationships, parents, forgiveness, understanding one another, et cetera. Now, a lot of families during this time didn't really have language for emotional neglect, an overwhelmed nervous system.

You know, these kids were likely being told to toughen up. They were sent to their room or this stuff just wasn't even being noticed at all. And for a lot of people, you know, feelings were simply seen as inconvary. and you either needed to get rid of them or find a way to go manage it quietly by yourself. And I do believe that a huge number of parents, especially perpetually estranged parents today, were in fact traumatized, abused, or neglected children. They grew up in homes where their feelings were an inconvenience, like I said, speaking up got them punished or ignored.

You know, love came with conditions. No one ever helped them. And they were expected to grow up and move on. And a lot of them think that they did. And so when you think about your parent as a child who was also wounded and traumatized, you are being asked to look at them as a small child. You know, a kid who was scared once, a kid who wanted things and didn't get them. And yes, that's powerful.

But if they were children too sort of is the end of the sentence and becomes the excuse that in the present now is saying, because they were hurt, we cannot ask anything of them now. It turns that understanding into like a permanent exit ramp for them when asked to take accountability. And I don't think that we should do that for anyone. None of us should be saying I was harmed and so therefore I do not have to change, grow, or learn anything new. That's not effective. That's not helpful. That's not helpful for you. That's not helpful for your parent, your sibling. In fact, like, I think one of the kindest things that your family members or even a therapist or anyone who's helping you can do is believe in your ability to grow and change and

become someone new regardless of what you have been through. You can understand why someone hurt you and still expect them to stop. You know, you're allowed to feel like I can see the frightened kid inside of you and I still need you to change how you treat me. Because we also are dealing, I think sometimes with parents who are simply ignoring that they're, are even wounded. Like I've talked about these two different types of parents where there's one who, on one end of the extreme, overly identifies with what happened to them or really wants you to feel sorry for them and have empathy for them.

They want you to say, oh, you had such a hard childhood. I know what you went through. You didn't know better and to kind of infantilize them. On the other end, though, we often have a parent who actually did go through a lot of things, a lot of trauma, abuse, dysfunction, neglect. And they feel like that stuff made them who they are today. And that it was a good thing that happened to them. And they even would go as far as saying, like,

I didn't deal with anything bad in my childhood. It's very hard to empathize with a parent like that. And often with those parents, their denial of the wound is just being expressed, you know, in more covert ways. So like they're really angry. have a short temper, they can't connect, they're dismissive. And whether that parent or either of these parents know it or not, you know, all of us as parents have a need to be seen,

soothed, understood, told that we matter. And oftentimes we want our children to do that, right? The problem is, and this is a very hard truth for anyone listening here who is a parent of a child of any age myself included, is that the moment we become parents, the job of dealing with the wounds from our past, changes hands. It is now our problem. We have to solve it and do something about it

before we continue to pass it down, unknowingly or knowingly. And you have to do this whether your parent did it or not, and it's very unfair, and it's just the reality. You know, if you don't want, to continue perpetuating this stuff or making it worse. And so you may have not gotten the modeling. Nobody showed you.

And it still lands on you to be the one who stops it. And I don't want to sugarcoat that for you because I think it's important that all of us accept that. Nobody gets out of life without having to attend to the wounds that happened to them and try to repair with their children. We all do it. It's just some people are doing it a little bit every day. Some people have to do it for more.

And some people let the stuff really pile up and then they're having to do it a lot at once. But the thing that when we're thinking about how unfair this is, that you have to attend to this and your parents did this, I think that there's also something empowering in that because now it's that the job is yours, which means it's possible and it's within reach. You're not having to wait for your parent to finally understand.

You don't need their permission or their apology. The work is yours. You can do it. That is your adult power in all of this. And the biggest thing that I think we need to remember here when we're talking about parents being children is that the parent was a child once, yes, factual. But they are not their child's child.

the unfinished business with your own parents has to move up, like back towards them, inward towards yourself or outward toward other support. It cannot move down to be solved towards your children. When it does, you end up breeding more dysfunction. If you remember one thing from this episode, I wanted to be this, that your stuff, if it's with your parents, maybe it needs to go upward and it needs to be discussed and resolved with them. If you have your own stuff in your life you need to work on, it needs to be solved internally with you, or it needs to go outward to external support, like external resources, therapists, groups like we have at calling home, et cetera.

If you try to take it down to your children and have them be the ones to solve and fix that for you, it is not going to be good, okay? It's never supposed to go down because your son, your daughter, they cannot be the parent. They cannot be the parent that you needed. They did not play any role in this wounding and they cannot play a role in being the ones to fix it. Now, that's not to say that being a parent

and becoming a parent in raising your child can't be incredibly healing and rewarding. But that is different than putting a pressure on our child to show up for us in a specific way to fix things for us that were there before they even arrived. And the reason that it can be so tempting for this to flow down to the child is that dysfunction tends to flow down the family tree because it is the path of least resistance. You know, your child is bonded to you. They're obligated.

They're lower in the hierarchy. and they're less able to walk away. And so this stuff will just like run like water downhill. It is the path of least resistance. And often we're doing this, you know, as parents with no awareness. We're not doing it on purpose. You know, it's a parent will start by maybe trying to get from their child what they never got from their parents.

They're asking their child to soothe them in a way. And these are often, you know, parents that are looking to their children to be their best friends, they're confidant, the keeper of their moods, their happiness is the child's responsibility and the kid is learning that their job is to manage how their parent feels. You know, this parent is really looking to get all of their being seen and mattering from their child instead of having any other outside sources. and because children love their parents to a fault, even when their parents are harming them,

they will spend years trying to fix this wound if the parent is asking it of them. And it will never be enough because the child cannot repair this for the parent. Now, I think often what's happening here is that when parents are saying, you know, parents are kids too, I'm a parent, look at what happened to me,

you try to understand me, you know, they're often defending a terrible bargain that they also were forced to make as a child, where they swallowed everything, they said nothing, and they told themselves that that is just what you do in the family. And now they have this adult in front of them that is refusing to do the same thing. And I think that this is why when adults speak up about family dysfunction, especially in highly dysfunctional families, it detonates in this way because it is very, very hard for the parent to take in their child doing something that they thought was completely off limits in a family that they were never allowed to do. And now they didn't do it with their parent, but now they're having to deal

with it as the parent. And so when these parents get really defensive and they're saying things like, that's just how it is, that's just what you're supposed to do, I don't think that's really always necessarily coming from a lack of love. Most of the time it is self-protection. You know, the armor is going up around a wound that they were never allowed to feel and they are defensive because if their kids going to look at this and acknowledge it, then maybe they have to. And that sounds really painful and scary. But the other part of this is making your child repeat what you endured fixes nothing. It just allows you to keep avoiding maybe what has been painful for you. Your child cannot give you the childhood that you didn't have, and your child cannot become the good

parent that you need it. And becoming a parent doesn't erase the wounding that you experienced. It just hands you the responsibility, however fairly or unfairly, of working through it so that it can stop with you. And that's when you can make this really big choice that I think so many of our members at Calling Home make is that they're saying, you know, I'm going to take this and I'm going to work on it inward. I'm going to go outward to other resources. I'm going to try to resolve things with my parent so that I don't end up repeating this again, just because, you know, because I don't want to face it or don't want to feel the pain. And you don't have to be unwounded to be a good parent.

Nobody is. All of us carry our own things that we are experiencing and we are reactive to and hurt by. But you can be the place where you work through that. You experience it. You learn accountability, how to apologize, how to notice when you are falling short because you are absolutely going to. And then you can do something with that. The phrase parents were children too

should never be used to excuse harm in the present. It is meant to explain the past so that we finally stop handing these things down in the present. And parents were children too is not a verdict of guilt, and it's not a get out of jail free card. It is just an explanation. It's an explanation of why the pattern exists so that you can see it

and you can decide what you want to do about it. You can have that empathy, that understanding, and still say, I will not tolerate this behavior no matter what you have endured. I believe in your capacity to learn, change, and do better, and I want us to do that together. And I think that when families do that, they have a really good shot at having good, productive, enjoyable relationships in the present.

If you could relate to this episode, I really think that you will love what we are talking about inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home. That is our membership community where we focus on a different topic every month. and members get access to over 45 different topics with hundreds of worksheets, scripts, videos, articles, plus unlimited support groups with me and other licensed therapists. This is also how you get access to Q&As with me every month. We have private discussion boards where I share resources and you can also interact with other members at Calling Home and share what you're going through, get feedback on letters,

discuss different things. it's really, really helpful. This month, we are talking about radical acceptance at Calling Home and helping you accept who your family is and relate to them in the best way possible for you. You can join the Family Cycle Breakers Club at www.callinghome.com. Anytime we would love to have you. Thank you so much for listening today. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave a review, or comment on this episode.

every five-star review helps us reach new listeners and keeps this podcast free for everyone. Thank you so much and I will see you again on Thursday for another Q&A episode where I'll answer your questions. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Calling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes Terms of Service linked in the show notes below.