When You Realize Your Parent Was Not Safe

Post in our ongoing daily series on the top concerns clients bring to Integrative Mind Body Psychiatry.

For some of the adults I see in my practice, healing does not begin with a diagnosis. It begins with an honest sentence they have never spoken out loud: 'My parent was not safe.'

This is one of the hardest realizations any adult can face. It shakes the story you were raised in. It shakes your sense of what happened, of what you deserved, of who you thought your family was. It is also, often, the doorway to real healing.

What This Realization Often Looks Like

• Understanding for the first time that your normal was not normal

• Grief for the childhood you did not have

• Anger at the family narrative that erased the truth

• Complicated feelings about the parent — love and clarity both

• A profound question: what now?

Five Whole-Person Steps

1. Get a therapist trained in complex trauma and family systems. This is not a general therapy question.

2. Grieve. Grief is proportional to what was lost — including a safe childhood.

3. Reparent yourself. The nurturing you did not receive can be given now.

4. Build safe relationships. Corrective attachment is where healing lives.

5. Consider psychiatric care for the depression, anxiety, and complex PTSD that often come with this realization.

The truth does not undo your love. It makes room for real healing. I see patients via telehealth in Utah at integrativemindbodypsychiatry.com.

Tomorrow: The Vagus Nerve — Your Built-In Reset Button.

Respectfully, Beth Makar, RN, Dual-MSN, PMHNP-BC · Integrative Mind Body Psychiatry · integrativemindbodypsychiatry.com