The Unsent Letter: Expressing Unprocessed Feelings About Our Parents

There are many tools in the therapist’s toolbox to use as they work with clients. One of them is particularly effective when working with a client who has unresolved issues with their parents. Sometimes we don’t fully appreciate the effects our early childhood experiences with our parents have on the rest of our lives. In talk therapy, we might find ourselves thinking for the first time about how the things our parents did and said might be causes of the issues that have brought us to therapy. It can be an emotional experience to relate as an adult to the way our parents acted toward us when we were children. One way to help process these emotions is to write our parents a letter.

Unsaid Realizations

Here’s how it works: The client sits down to write a letter to a parent. What is the content of this letter? The content is all the things we’re starting to realize about our childhood and how it affects us today. It is the realizations and fears and unacknowledged feelings and events that have been left unsaid over the years. It’s the pain and trauma that we have glossed over, made excuses for, or rationalized, even the small things that we minimized but which might have had a stronger emotional impact than we thought.

Maybe your parents were absent from your life when you needed them the most. Maybe they dealt with addiction issues that you couldn’t understand at the time. Perhaps a divorce caused a great deal of unresolved emotional trauma at an early age. But let’s not minimize the fact that even without an identifiable traumatic event or pattern like divorce or addiction, we can still have experienced traumatic childhood events in the course of what we might consider our normal daily lives growing up. We each have our own specific issues with our parents, which can be unique to our particular story but universal in the fact that they affect our lives in the present.

When we start out on this emotional exercise of letter writing, sometimes the first question a client has is a practical one: paper or computer? Typed or handwritten? I encourage my clients to take the time and effort to write this letter out in their own handwriting. I think this letter-writing exercise is a special, emotional experience that can be better appreciated when we actually write the words out in our own handwriting. Oftentimes, the process can be so emotional that we might find ourselves crying as we write this letter, a teardrop falling onto the page, blurring the words, a powerful symbol of the process of emotional growth we are experiencing in these moments.

The Instinct to Protect Our Parents

The hardest part of this exercise for many clients is the idea that in expressing their honest feelings about their childhood, they might hurt their parents’ feelings. No matter how negatively the ways our parents raised us might have affected us, we often still love them and want to protect them from being hurt. We might seek to diminish their responsibility for their actions and instead take it upon ourselves to have acted or felt a different way in response to these actions. We make excuses for them. We take the blame. Part of the process of writing this letter is to free ourselves from the instinct to protect our parents and instead be honest with them (and ourselves).

Eventually, we reach the point where we discuss who this letter is really for. Is the letter really for the parent? It started out that way. But usually, the real result of writing the letter is a feeling of accomplishment in the client after having transformed all this powerful emotional material from feelings into words. Turning all these unspoken, unidentified feelings into a physical object can have a transformative effect. We’ve taken these unspoken, mysterious emotions and gotten them out of ourselves.

Often, the client feels so much better after having written this letter, they wonder if they even need to send it to the parent. And I usually agree! The letter isn’t really for the parent; it’s for ourselves. In writing this letter, we sometimes expect the parent to really understand us now, to see how the way they raised us might have affected us negatively, and, thus, for them to feel sorry and want to apologize. However, that’s taking the power to feel better about ourselves away from us and giving it to someone else. And it’s unrealistic to think that a lifetime of behavior might be flipped on its head by one letter.

Empowering Ourselves

The whole point of the unsent letter is to empower ourselves to understand how our childhood affects us today. Once we are aware of that, we can work on ways to help us live happier lives. Having a parent understand us better and apologize for their actions might feel good, but that is usually a fantasy. We imagine that this apology will make us feel better and will enable us to live happier lives, but truly, it is our newfound awareness of our adverse childhood experiences and how much they affect us in the present day that is going to make us feel better.

For that reason, many times the client chooses not to send the letter and instead they keep it, or burn it, or stick it in a box in the garage and forget about it. The letter becomes a symbol, a marker of the before and after, the before being a time when we felt powerless and confused about the ways we act and feel in life that made us unhappy, and the after being a time when we understand why we act and feel in ways that make us unhappy, and we can now develop clear goals based on this knowledge to help us live happier lives. The unsent letter represents a huge step we have taken in our own journey of personal growth, regardless of who reads it.

Therapy Essential Reads

The Moment You’re in Matters More Than the One You Remember

Therapy, Estrangement, and the Power to Shape Meaning

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