Principle 5: Letting Go of Blame

Today’s parents often find themselves in codependent relationships with their children, which may start out rather close and comfortable, but typically become distant and/or conflictual as time goes on. This principle discusses how this pattern plays out at a multigenerational level–how parents themselves have come from codependent relationships with their own parents, and continue this cycle with their own children. 

The basic pattern is that parents start the relationship out with their newborn infants in a symbiotic state–a very close relationship that benefits both people involved. The child benefits because the parent cares for their needs and the parent benefits because the closeness with the child feels good and meets their needs for connection. This happy, close feeling tends to linger for the most part until adolescence for many parents and children–and then it can fall apart into distance or conflict. 

Most people just remember the conflict or distance of adolescence, and therefore, believe that that is when the problems started. With this view of things, they are likely to feel unloved by their parents and will want to do better with their own children, believing they will be able to give their children the “love” they didn’t receive. They don’t realize that their parents likely did give them plenty of love, but the relationship could not stay connected because it lacked balance. 

Of course, this would be difficult to know because people are very young when they are in the comfortable type of codependency with their parents. That is why many people end up assuming their parents never loved them and go on to try to give their children plenty of “love,” only to end up in the same mess their parents fell into with them. They can end up bewildered, wondering how their relationships with their kids also ended up disconnected or even conflictual, when all they wanted to do was shower their child with love and make them happy.

Balance Through Boundaries

Bowen family systems theory, a main family therapy theory, has a helpful answer–it discusses the need for a balance of individuality and togetherness in order to ensure that relationship can stay connected even amidst the inevitable ups and downs of life. Particularly in parent-child relationships, when parents shower children with excessive amounts of their attention, involvement and support, beyond what is realistically needed for the child, the child can become relationship-dependent. This limits their ability to form a strong identity of their own and leads them to develop emotional immaturities and sensitivites that make their relationships more susceptible to falling into distance or conflict. 

With a high level of relationship-dependence comes an inability to self-regulate and respect others’ boundaries–it comes with excessive expectations of others to make one happy. So when parents enter into codependent, boundary-less relationships with their kids, they may have the best of intentions and only want to make their children happy, but they often find that they get the opposite result. Their relationships with the kids lack mutual respect, leading them to become anxious and distant. Additionally, the children come to have a high level of dependence on others to always make them feel happy and confident, much makes them more susceptible to becoming anxious and insecure. 

Generational Transmission of Codependency

When the codependency stops being comfortable and starts to be uncomfortable, teens tend to turn away from their parents and turn toward their peers for acceptance. When they go off on their own as adults, they often distance from their families and replicate the original symbiosis, creating a new codependent relationship with a romantic partner. This unit then goes on to experience the honeymoon period, and then due to the codependency, the relationship eventually becomes distant–at which point people typically have children and then fall into an over-focus on children, trying to give the children the “love” they didn’t receive. 

At this point, the cycle comes full circle. The parents have not resolved their own overt dependencies that they learned growing up, so they repeated the same codependent pattern in their romantic relationships and with their kids. Their kids are likely to judge their parents’ marriage for being distant and for their parents for not “loving” them enough as well, and to continue the cycle. 

Changing the Pattern

Fortunately, it is possible to reverse the pattern–and it starts with learning about the pattern. If parents recognize the ways that they have fallen into the generaitonal pattern of codependency and cutoff, they can learn to let go of blaming their parents for their unhappiness, working on growing beyond their own learned dependencies, and establishing more balanced relationships with their kids. They can still seek to give their children a better life, but they can do so informed by the root of the issue.

Informed by this pattern, parents can come to see their parents more realistically because it points to the inherent complexity of human nature. The vast majority of parents love their children and have the very best of intentions. They also get a benefit from the close bond of symbiosis with their newborn babies, and this can go on to influence the relationship for some time, leading parents to feel calmed and comforted by a close bond with their children. So it doesn’t really make much sense to see parents as unloving, cold, and rejecting–at least not entirely. Most people are a mixture of good and bad, capable of acting extremely loving and extremely hateful. Usually, the more emotionally immature a person is, the more extremely they oscillate between these behaviors. This can be very eye-opening and lessen some of the intensity of blame we place on parents.

Another eye-opening idea about this pattern is that it shows that parent-child relationships are not unidirectional. Parents don’t just influence children, but children influence parents. Children come to play an active role in the codependent relationship with their parents, and especially as they are older, they can reject their parents just as much as parents reject them. There is a relationship process that transpires between them, with each person’s immature emotional reactions fueling the immature emotional reactions of the other. This doesn’t mean that the child should be the one to lead the relationship to a higher level of functioning, but it does change the way one views one’s relationship with one’s parents. Rather than seeing parents as cruel, cold and rejecting, it begins to make a bit more sense why they acted the way they did. They were human beings, probably struggling with an immature teenager that knew how to push their buttons. 

When Codependency Becomes Abuse

Letting go of blaming one’s parents can be difficult still, even with learning about this pattern, because codependent relationships–especially very intensely codependent relationships, often result in trauma or abuse. What starts as an intense connection can turn into intense hatred. Letting go of blaming one’s parents doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to forgive your parents, rather, it means that you see them as they really are. Dysfunction doesn’t ever start with just one generation. 

Our parents had their own parents who also had their own parents–each generation builds upon the hand of cards they inherited from the generation before. Because of this, it doesn’t make sense to blame one’s parents entirely for their emotional immaturity. This can help lessen some of the intense emotions that one may feel toward their parent–which is useful because it lessens the emotional reactivity that often fuels the need to take responsibility for one’s children’s happiness. 

Letting Go of Blame

This may seem odd but it really is at the crux of all of this. The intense, blaming emotional energy that we often feel toward our own parents for their emotional immaturies often gets redirected into an intense need to make up for their failures with our own parenting of the next generation. But if you can let go of some of this blame by seeing things more accurately–seeing your parents less as villains and more as human beings–it changes things. 

You feel calmer, and you don’t need to work out your own unresolved issues through the way you parent your kids. You have already worked them out by seeing the situation more clearly and accurately and letting go of blame. This gives you a clean slate so that you can parent from a calm, non-anxious place, promoting a balanced relationship with your kids that can help them to grow to be healthy and mature, and which can stay connected amidst the ups and downs of life. And this of course helps reverse the cycle of codependency and cutoff (even of abuse and trauma) and promotes lasting connection, health, and love across the generations.