Jasmin Lee Cori, M.S. - Author, Mind, Body & Spirit

I worked with an intelligent, eminently sane woman whose mother would often become a raging witch who did things she would be punished for if seen today and whose father was a passive bystander. The client thanked me for believing her. When her previous therapist said, “They did the best they could,” (referring to the parents) it was a signal to Donna (not her real name) that there was nothing more to say. Conversation closed. That was pretty much the end of their therapy, too.

I don’t know if it was the best they could do, but it certainly doesn’t look that way to an adult child who has grown up and has elected, through much effort, to do things differently.

The struggle for Donna and everyone who suffered from parental abuse as a child is to heal the self-blame that is both natural to a child’s self-centered view and which is reinforced every time someone minimizes or dismisses their experience.

To make things worse, if the parent denies responsibility or denies what happened, victims don’t know what to do with their experience. They are left to bury it in the unconscious, conceal it, or risk being labeled a problem. It is crazy-making. We need to place the blame where it belongs.

One of the worst things you can do to a person is to force them to disown part of their experience. It’s like creating a crack in their soul. Any time we minimize someone’s experience (telling them, “don’t feel that way” or “that’s not the way it was,” or “you have no cause for complaint”), we make that crack bigger.

What those who have gone through deep suffering need is someone who they feel is on their side, not someone shutting down their process.

Now I know some people think we’ve gone too far focusing on wounds, but I see too much of the alternative, where people leave the dirt piled up under the carpet and trip over it their whole lives. Or, worse yet, pass the injuries on.

Those who are healing from these kinds of injuries are often admonished to forgive, but it is usually premature and can impede the emergence of a more genuine and whole forgiveness. Forgiving at the beginning, before ever ‘opening the book’ makes it likely that any forgiveness is an imitation plastered on top of a mountain of denied feelings and experiences that you can’t get to because that book is closed.



Let’s not use “they did the best they could” to foreclose the pain in the room. Let’s allow people their experience and meet their pain when we can.