An Unhealed Parent is a Child’s first Enemy

Picture Credit: Lakshmi Ambady

Much before we are wounded by the world around us, we are wounded by our own family. Before we are misunderstood by strangers, we are misrecognized by our parents. This is a harsh truth. And we deny it. Because it’s not easy to think of our parents as people who would harm us. But they do. Because of their own traumatic childhood. Because of their own unfinished stories with their own parents. And because they have not healed. An unhealed parent is not a bad parent. It means a parent is still carrying wounds, unmet needs, unresolved grief and unintegrated pain from their ancestry into their adulthood. When the inner child remains unseen, the wound unintentionally and unconsciously leaks out in adult parenting. The child then becomes a container for the parents’ unprocessed emotions- absorbing anger, shame, fear, neglect, sadness, guilt- all emotions that never belonged to the child in the first place. The parents, who should be a child’s first sanctuary can become their first enemy. Not out of malice, but because of an unresolved history repeating itself through them. We all carry memories in our bodies passed down through generations. And when a body is overwhelmed with it, it leads to internal conflict first and then projection at those around. This reading is deep and may trigger certain feelings. It may be shocking even. And unbelievable but its science and its true. Breathe into it.

Every child comes into the world as a pulse of innocence—open, curious, sensing, sensitive and unguarded. A child’s brain picks up all that it can between ages 0-7 years. During this time the brain undergoes rapid growth, and fundamental neural circuitry is established as the brain is extremely open to outside stimuli that shapes its architecture and lays a foundation for teenage and adulthood. Between the age of 0-3 years, the brain forms one million neural connections every second. Hence a parent’s body, tone, and breath are the first language the child learns. But what happens when the parent has not healed? When they carry into the life of their child a lifetime of unprocessed grief, anger, fear, or shame?

The parent becomes the child’s first battlefield. The home becomes the first ground where the child’s essence meets resistance. And an unhealed mother or father is still a child themselves - deep down inside. An unhealed parent is not a villain. They are simply a child who never got the chance to complete their own story. A father who was never seen by his own parents may fail to see his own child. A father who never felt safe may have a raised voice or have anger issues. A mother who never learnt to rest teaches her daughter vigilance. A mother who was never soothed may struggle to soothe her baby. What is unhealed in them insists on repetition, spilling unconsciously into how they hold, speak to, or withdraw from their children. Thus, the one who should be the child’s first safety net becomes their first enemy—not through intention, but through inheritance. The child becomes the repository of their parents’ disintegrated grief, thus bearing the weight of their parent’s exile from wholeness and aliveness.

This is trauma, as an unfinished story. In families, those unfinished stories are passed forward in breath, posture, and silence or harsh words and abuse – the body becomes the text of transmission. This is how depression, anxiety and trauma can root itself in a lineage: the stillness of the parent’s unexpressed grief freezes into the child’s nervous system. What was not spoken becomes embodied. And what is spoken is violent, explosive and scary.

To see your parent as your first enemy is painful, but necessary. Only then can you understand that their enmity was the echo of their own wounds. They were at war long before you arrived, and you were born into the residue of their battle. The tragedy is not in intention but in legacy. Few parents intend harm. But what is not healed insist on reiteration. The body remembers what the mind forgets and that memory spills into words, moods, gestures and behaviour. When the child says- “I am.” The voice of the unhealed parent says- “No, you are what I need you to be.”

To move forward in life, we need to forgive and let go. Forgiveness does not mean excusing the harm. It means releasing yourself from continuing it. It means remembering who you were before you became their extension, their hurt limb, their ragged breath and their correction. And herein lies a blessing. Through your wound, you can learn about the power to heal. Your power. The scar left behind by a parent can become the first initiation for you. That safety can be cultivated in the body and only through the body. It is like an inner engineering.

To heal is to stop fighting your parent inside your own body. To notice how your shoulders, your gait, your gaze, your interactions with your own children, your experiences with the outside world, your breath, your tone still carries their absence or their rage. To soften where they stiffened. To grieve where they denied. To speak kindly when they were harsh and to hug and hold when they could not naturally. The sacred stillness of depression is often the silence of a child who had no space to speak. The torture of anxiety is the uncertainty in a child who does not know what predictable behaviour from a parent feels like. The fury of anger is the rage a child is exposed to because a parent is angry at himself deep inside. Healing is all about giving these turbulent emotions a voice. When you choose to feel what your parent could not, you end the repetition. You become the first ancestor in your line to break the pattern. With the help of Family Constellations, you can choose to end this cycle. You have the power to say- “My children will not meet the enemy I once met. They will meet me.”

Somatic Experiencing® meets you exactly where you need to be. In the present. So, you can heal the past. Combined with Family Constellations, both the child- adult- body and the ancestral field are given a voice. When woven, they gently allow both the sacred stillness of the body and the sacred order of the family to be restored. You heal yourself and through you, and what could not be healed earlier finds a release.  Healing yourself is a choice. This power belongs to you alone. Choose.