The other day, I was talking with someone in his 50s who was still carrying quite a bit of frustration toward his mother.
As he shared his experiences, I could hear something beneath the anger that I’ve encountered many times in my work: the longing to be acknowledged, understood, and for a parent to finally take responsibility for the ways they caused hurt.
It reminded me how deeply our relationships with our parents can shape us, and how those experiences can continue affecting our lives long after childhood has ended.
Maybe your parents expected too much of you, dismissed your emotions, or struggled to provide the support and reassurance you needed. Perhaps they were neglectful, controlling, or even abusive.
Sometimes the wounds are less obvious. You might have grown up in a family that appeared perfectly functional from the outside, yet still learned that your needs were inconvenient, your emotions were too much, or that love and approval had to be earned.
Whatever your experience, you don’t have to minimize what happened because someone else had a more difficult childhood.
The emotional impact of your experiences matters, regardless of how your childhood compares to anyone else’s.
Healing those wounds doesn’t require you to excuse harmful behavior, reconcile with a parent, or maintain a relationship that isn’t safe or healthy. It means recognizing how those early experiences shaped your unconscious programming and beginning to change the patterns that are still influencing your life today.
My Story: The Parentified Daughter
From a young age, I was the capable one. At five years old, I would come home from school, sit down at the table, and do my homework without anyone having to ask.
I was the dependable daughter, the one who paid attention to where my parents were, how they were doing, and whether they needed anything from me. A great deal was expected of me, but I received relatively little support in return.
There were several reasons for that, but one of the biggest was that I was considered smart and mature for my age. The adults around me assumed that because I was capable of handling so much on my own, I didn’t need the same attention or guidance as other children.
My relationship with my mother was particularly complicated. She leaned on me emotionally, and our relationship developed codependent patterns. At the same time, she was largely emotionally and physically absent for much of my childhood, which was deeply painful.
When she eventually moved across the country, I only saw her a handful of times between the ages of 11 and 17.
We were able to work through some of our difficulties while she was alive, but it wasn’t until after she passed away from stage 4 breast cancer in 2021 that I began to fully understand the depth of her influence on me.
My father was very different. He was strong, gruff, and demanding. He held me to high standards, and I often walked away from our interactions feeling like I would never be enough and carried a persistent sense that I needed to be better, do more, and prove myself.
As I began exploring these experiences more deeply, I could see how both relationships had influenced the way I understood myself, my worth, and the roles I felt compelled to play in my adult relationships.
They had also shaped my relationship with masculine and feminine energy. Without healthy examples of how those energies could be expressed, I had developed patterns connected to their wounded forms.
My father wound showed up through hyper-independence, a constant need to be productive, and discomfort with resting or allowing myself to receive support.
I had become so accustomed to being capable and self-sufficient that slowing down or relying on someone else could feel uncomfortable.
My mother wound was connected to overgiving, people-pleasing, and a tendency to abandon my own needs in an effort to maintain connection and feel loved.
I could recognize these patterns in my friendships, romantic relationships, and even the expectations I placed on myself.
For a long time, I thought these tendencies were just parts of my personality. It took deeper unconscious work to recognize how much of what I considered normal had developed through the painful emotional experiences of my childhood.
Masculine and Feminine Energy (and How They Get Wounded)
We all carry both masculine and feminine energy, regardless of gender. These energies represent different but complementary aspects of how we experience and engage with life.
Healthy masculine energy provides structure, protection, direction, and the capacity to take action with confidence and discernment. Wounded masculine energy can show up through excessive control, rigidity, aggression, emotional detachment, or a constant need to prove our strength and capability.
Healthy feminine energy is receptive, nurturing, creative, intuitive, and comfortable allowing life to unfold without needing to control every outcome. Wounded feminine energy may express itself through people-pleasing, overgiving, self-abandonment, emotional overwhelm, or difficulty maintaining healthy boundaries.
When we grow up without healthy examples of these energies, we can develop unconscious associations that influence how we express them in adulthood.
For example, someone who grew up with a demanding or emotionally unavailable father might associate masculine energy with criticism, pressure, or the need to constantly achieve. They may become highly independent and productive, but struggle to rest, receive support, or feel worthy when they aren’t accomplishing something.
Someone who experienced emotional inconsistency, neglect, or enmeshment with their mother might develop unconscious associations between feminine energy and self-sacrifice, emotional responsibility, or the need to earn love through caretaking.
These patterns aren’t determined exclusively by the gender of a parent. They develop through the emotional experiences, roles, and examples we encounter while growing up.
The terms mother wound and father wound can help us explore those experiences and the ways they influence our relationship with ourselves. A father wound may involve difficulties with trust, safety, structure, self-confidence, or authority. A mother wound may involve unmet needs for nurturing, emotional connection, belonging, or the freedom to express ourselves authentically.
The experiences associated with either wound can overlap, and everyone’s family dynamics are different. What matters is recognizing the emotional associations and unconscious patterns that developed through those relationships.
For someone who learned that love required constant self-sacrifice, receiving care may feel unfamiliar. For someone who learned that mistakes led to criticism, taking a risk or trying something new may activate an intense fear of failure. These early associations can continue shaping our behavior even when we consciously recognize that we want something different.
The Role of the Unconscious Mind
Our unconscious mind develops associations based on the experiences we’ve had and the emotional meaning we’ve assigned to them. Its primary directive is safety, so it often relies on familiar responses that helped us navigate difficult circumstances in the past.
For example, imagine growing up with a parent who became angry or withdrawn whenever you expressed disappointment. You might have learned that keeping your feelings to yourself was the safest way to maintain connection and avoid conflict. As an adult, you may consciously understand that expressing your needs is a healthy part of relationships.
But when you try to tell someone you’re upset, you feel anxious, guilty, or afraid of how they’ll respond. The unconscious association between expressing your emotions and risking rejection is still influencing your behavior.
The same thing can happen with perfectionism, people-pleasing, hyper-independence, and many of the other patterns connected to parent wounds.
Maybe you learned that being useful earned you attention, so you became the person everyone could depend on. Or maybe you discovered that being exceptionally capable helped you avoid criticism, so you developed an unconscious need to perform at a high level.
Or you might have learned that asking for help led to disappointment, so you became uncomfortable relying on anyone but yourself.
These patterns often began as ways of adapting to your environment, but they can continue operating long after the circumstances that created them have changed.
This is where the gap between conscious understanding and unconscious programming gets more obvious. You might know that you deserve rest, but still feel guilty whenever you stop working. You may recognize that your needs matter, but struggle to prioritize them when someone else wants something from you.
You might even understand exactly how your childhood experiences contributed to these patterns, yet find yourself repeating them anyway.
Awareness helps us recognize what’s happening, but changing deeply ingrained unconscious defaults often requires working with the emotional associations beneath them.
And that work can happen at any age because whether you’re 25, 45, or 75, you can begin developing a different relationship with yourself and changing the patterns you learned growing up.
You Don’t Need Your Parent’s Apology to Heal
It’s natural to want your parents to acknowledge the ways they hurt you. Sometimes we just want an apology, an honest conversation, or the reassurance that our experiences mattered. We want them to understand what happened and take responsibility for their part in it.
That desire is so valid, especially when we spent most of our childhood feeling unseen, dismissed, or misunderstood.
But what happens when the apology never comes? What if your parent refuses to acknowledge your experience, continues behaving in the same ways, or is no longer alive? For a long time, we can find ourselves returning to the same frustration, wishing they would finally understand something we’ve been trying to communicate for years.
Meanwhile, the emotional patterns connected to those experiences are continuing to influence our lives.
Your parent’s willingness to acknowledge what happened and your ability to heal from it are two separate things.
When a parent is open to honest conversation and accountability, working through those experiences together can be very healing. But some parents are unwilling or unable to take responsibility for their behavior. Others have passed away, and for some of us, maintaining contact would only do further damage.
The wonderful thing is that healing can still happen without their participation. In my work with clients, one of the techniques I sometimes use (alongside the broader work of identifying and releasing the repressed emotions and unconscious defaults connected to their earlier experiences) is called Perceptual Positions.
This guided process allows someone to explore a difficult relationship from different perspectives, including their own and the other person’s, without requiring the other person to be physically present. It helps clients gain insight into the dynamics they experienced, express emotions that were never fully processed, and develop a different understanding of the relationship.
And as that understanding changes, clients often find that they can remember what happened without experiencing the same emotional charge around it.
They can still recognize that a parent behaved in hurtful or inappropriate ways, but they don’t feel compelled to keep revisiting the experience in search of an outcome they can’t control. They can decide what kind of relationship, if any, they want to maintain with that parent from a place of greater clarity and self-trust.
The past remains part of their story, but it no longer has to determine how they experience themselves or their relationships today.
How I Moved Forward
For years, I carried the emotional impact of my relationships with both of my parents into other areas of my life. I had a hard time using my voice, faced the pain of abandonment and not feeling chosen, and found myself repeating patterns of overgiving and self-abandonment. Those experiences influenced my friendships, romantic relationships, professional life, and the expectations I placed on myself.
I had plenty of reasons to feel hurt or frustrated about what happened during my childhood, but I eventually recognized that continuing to carry those emotional wounds was affecting the life I wanted to create.
I could understand why my parents had behaved the way they did and still see that the patterns I’d developed in response were actually hurting me.
The path to my personal transformation eventually led me to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and hypnotherapy, which gave me tools to work directly with my unconscious mind.
Through that work, I released repressed emotions and reprogrammed the unconscious defaults that had kept me connected to those earlier experiences. Over time, my relationship with myself began to change.
I became more comfortable recognizing my needs, expressing my emotions, and allowing myself to receive support. I questioned the expectations I’d carried for so long and recognized that I didn’t need to keep proving my worth through how much I accomplished or how much I did for other people. I also developed a deeper understanding of my parents.
As cliche as it sounds, I realized that they had done the best they could with the awareness and resources they had at the time.
Their own wounds had shaped how they parented, just as their parents’ experiences had shaped them, and that understanding helped me develop compassion for the circumstances that influenced their behavior while still acknowledging the ways their choices had affected me.
I could recognize their humanity without dismissing my own experiences. My mother was no longer alive to participate in that process, but I could still change my relationship with the memories and emotional patterns connected to her.
With my father, I spent several years trying to build a healthier relationship, but ultimately came to recognize that maintaining that connection wasn’t in my best interest. Choosing to step away was part of honoring the growth I’d worked so hard to achieve.
Through both experiences, I came to understand that I no longer needed either of my parents to become different people in order to continue growing into the person I wanted to be.
Ending the Cycle
The patterns we develop through our childhood experiences don’t just stop at our relationships with our parents. They influence how we approach romantic relationships, friendships, careers, parenting, and the relationship we have with ourselves.
Someone who grew up feeling responsible for a parent’s emotional well-being can become an adult who struggles to let other people manage their own feelings. A child who learned that love was conditional can grow into someone who continually seeks approval or feels the pressure to prove their worth. A person who was never allowed to express anger or disappointment can find themselves avoiding difficult conversations, even when speaking up would be in their best interest.
Without awareness, those same patterns can influence how we respond to our own children or the people closest to us. But we have the opportunity to develop something different.
We can recognize the unconscious programming we inherited, release the emotional patterns that don’t support who we’re becoming, and begin responding to ourselves and others with greater awareness.
Part of that process involves learning to become the grounded, compassionate adult that our younger selves needed.
We can acknowledge our emotions without judging them, establish boundaries that protect our well-being, and provide ourselves with the reassurance and support we may not have received growing up. We can also learn to recognize when an old protective response is influencing our behavior and choose how we want to respond instead.
That might mean allowing ourselves to rest without guilt, expressing a need without apologizing for having it, or recognizing that someone else’s disappointment doesn’t mean we’ve done something wrong.
Over time, those changes influence the way we participate in relationships and the examples we provide to the people around us.
The bottom line is that the patterns we inherited don’t have to become the patterns we pass on.
Your Next Step
If you’re still carrying anger, grief, or unmet emotional needs connected to your parents, it isn’t too late to change your relationship with those experiences.
You may have spent decades trying to understand why your parents behaved the way they did, wishing they would acknowledge what happened, or working to become someone who could finally earn the love and approval you needed.
But your life doesn’t have to remain organized around those old emotional patterns because you can create a relationship with yourself now that includes the care, compassion, support, and emotional freedom you didn’t get growing up.
You can start recognizing your own needs, trusting your perceptions, and making choices that reflect who you are today rather than the roles you learned to play years ago.
In my private 12-week program, The Reclaimed Mind, I guide clients through the process of releasing repressed emotions and reprogramming the unconscious defaults that have been influencing their experiences.
Together, we work to change the patterns beneath the surface so you can develop greater self-trust, emotional freedom, and a deeper sense of belonging within yourself.
If you’re ready to explore how your childhood experiences may still be shaping your life, I invite you to book a Discovery Call. Let’s talk about what you’ve been experiencing, what you’d like to change, and how The Reclaimed Mind can support you in moving forward with greater clarity and freedom.