In this episode, I respond to a listener who shared something I know many people quietly wrestle with: the guilt that can arise when you begin healing from your childhood while also deeply understanding the pain your parents carried themselves.
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I explore what it’s like to grow up around parents who were carrying a lot of pain themselves, parents who were overwhelmed, stressed, emotionally unavailable, or struggling with wounds they never really healed from. When you grow up in that kind of environment, you often become very aware of other people’s emotions from a young age. You learn to focus on keeping the peace, understanding everyone else, and making space for their feelings, while slowly losing touch with your own.
We talk about how this can follow you into adulthood too. The moment your own hurt, anger, sadness, or grief begins to surface, another part of you may quickly step in to defend your parents, explain their behaviour, or remind yourself how hard their lives were. And while that empathy is real and important, it can also pull you away from your own experience before you’ve really had the chance to sit with it.
We also talk about the guilt that so many people feel when they start healing, especially when they were raised to believe other people’s needs and emotions mattered more than their own. It can feel incredibly painful to acknowledge what hurt you when you can also see how much your parents suffered themselves.
Throughout the conversation, I talk about the importance of making space for your own feelings without immediately pushing them aside for someone else’s pain. It’s a gentle conversation about guilt, grief, emotional responsibility and self-abandonment.
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