Blaming Your Parents Versus Holding Them Accountable

Picture this: You are in therapy, discussing the impact of your early life on your adult identity, and you stumble across a memory in which your mother scolded you for getting a “bad” grade.

Your therapist inquires into this memory and says, “Oh, wow, what a blow to get that kind of response from your mom. I can imagine how scared and sad you must have felt when she yelled at you at a moment when you needed support”.

Sounds pretty good, right? Only you hear this as, “She’s so mean and awful, and let’s blame her for everything,” so you respond to your therapist by saying, “Well, I did get a bad grade, and I know she was just trying to help me. I think I’m a highly sensitive person and probably over-dramatizing that situation. If she hadn’t pushed me so hard, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am today.”

What do you see here? It’s okay if you can’t identify it because I’ll outline my observations below. But take a minute to notice any reactions you have in reading that. Does it feel familiar?

This seemingly innocuous exchange is a pretty common one to me. A lot of the adult children of narcissists and emotionally invalidating parents I work with struggle to allow themselves to feel their emotions toward their parent for hurting them and will instead default to defending their parents' actions as a way to avoid “blaming them for all of my problems.”

I’d like to clarify: Experiencing your feelings toward someone who has hurt you is not the same as blaming them.

Blame vs. Accountability

Let’s create a distinction between blame and accountability: Blame is putting all of the responsibility onto someone for a particular outcome, whereas holding someone accountable is acknowledging that their actions have impacted us somehow. In holding someone accountable, we also take ownership of our feelings and reactions.

Put in action, the blame would be this: “If you weren’t such a horrible person, I would have turned out better!” whereas accountability would be this: “When you criticize and belittle me, I feel anger because I need understanding and support.” The former generalizes the problem to one person, whereas the latter specifies how a person has impacted our emotional well-being.

Individuals raised by narcissistic and emotionally invalidating parents have been told that their perceptions, feelings, needs, and beliefs are wrong, so they assume that whatever they feel towards their parents is probably overblown. And to add to this narrative, narcissistic parents often say things like, “I’m just trying to help” or “I’m doing this because I love you,” but the messaging is deeply incongruent with how it’s being delivered.

Narcissists are really good at slowly eroding an individual’s sense of autonomy, agency, and self-determination by eschewing dogma that supports only the narcissist's needs. This is why you might run into instances where you struggle to identify how you feel towards them because you’ve been conditioned to think that your feelings are signs of weakness or outright wrong.

When acknowledging your feelings towards a devaluing, insensitive, cruel, and egotistical parent, it’s important to remember that you are both holding them accountable for their actions and allowing yourself to experience the painful emotions that come up towards them.

You will not fall into a black hole of blame by making space for these emotions. What you may discover, however, is that you were woefully unsupported in your emotional development and that your parent was not adequately meeting your needs.

You’ll feel anger about this, then sadness, and it’s possible you’ll cycle between these two states for a while, which is nothing to be afraid of. You’re working through some feelings that have not been permitted for a long time, and they’re clamoring to get your attention.

You're Not Too Sensitive

Narcissistic and emotionally invalidating parents train their children to feel ashamed for what they feel. They insinuate that whatever feeling their child is having (as a result of their actions) is because of an innate “sensitivity” that is faulty. It’s kind of like if you got food poisoning from a restaurant, and the owner told you that you probably just have a sensitive stomach. You’d think that was the most ridiculous thing they could have said, and you’d be right!

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Food poisoning is not the same as having a sensitive stomach, just like feeling hurt, annoyed, outraged, or sad is not the result of faulty emotional sensitivity. We feel those things because of a stimulus, not weakness.

What’s important to recognize is that by exploring the ways in which a narcissistic parent has impacted you, you are facing a lot of reality that you had to deny. This can be really painful because you will undoubtedly be feeling many emotions that had to be suppressed to survive that relationship.

For most adult children of narcissists, they are still abiding by the conclusions they drew as children, such as, “It’s wrong for me to feel this way,” “I’m too sensitive and need to grow up,” “If my mom is displeased with me, it must be because I’m not good enough,” and the list goes on.

In therapy, you’ll be asked to upgrade those beliefs to match your awareness as a loving adult to your inner child. And yes, you will also be tasked with the challenge of allowing yourself to feel all of your emotions toward your parent(s) and trust that it is not the same thing as blaming them.

We want to get to a place where we can say, “This hurt me,” and not feel guilty or ashamed, but rather own it as part of our experience. When we can own our feelings, they stop owning us. We become like partners to these valuable forces inside.

To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.