My brother and sister are very angry with my parents. They say we had a terrible childhood because my father was often away and my mother pitted us against each other to maintain control. There was a lot of controversy.
But that's only half the story. I know that my parents loved us all very much and tried to give us a good childhood. We always had home-cooked food and stories. Now my parents are trying to make amends, but my brother and sister just don't see it. They are so critical and, to be honest, I think they are a little ungrateful. I feel stuck in the middle. What can I do?
Eleanor says: Shouldn't one of us be wrong? I think this is an argument on both sides in such family disputes. One person says, “It was completely unacceptable,” another says, “It wasn’t”; we know we can't both be right, so disagreements are taken as an accusation that we are the ones who see things wrong.
Sometimes when you try to resolve this impasse with other people, they resort to the phrase, “All family things are subjective.” That's good, but it doesn't go too far. The whole problem is that you and your brothers and sisters think that you are telling the truth, a truth that you can hit with your knuckles. This may or may not have been acceptable parenting, just as it may or may not have rained yesterday. Facts from your childhood are important, which means it’s important to be wrong about them.
One thing that can help break this impasse is to ask whether you disagree with what happened or how to weigh these things morally.
For example, do you think parents should be judged on whether they tried their best or on what they actually did? Are we talking about degree of complexity or absolute performance? Yes, they screamed this terrible thing, but how many jobs did they work? What kind of support did they have, how hard was life for them, what kind of tangles in their heads did they inherit from their own parents?
Another big divide is whether we focus on what parents are like now or what they were like then. Some people look at memories from 20 years ago and see a hazy, sepia-toned moment, like an interaction between acquaintances we once knew. Others see it in high definition because the pain feels like it happened today.
And one really huge rift is how much you think you can do about judging your parents at all. For some people, this is what important patterns and problems are called. For others, it feels like hypocrisy or judgment.
Such macro-disputes may be why the conflict seems so intractable. Your brothers and sisters say, “Don’t you see, they hurt us a lot.” You say, “Don't you see, they tried.” Both of you are telling the truth, but neither of you feels heard; The gears rotate but do not converge.
You asked what you can do. One of the threats here is that you will run into each other again, by accident or not. To avoid becoming a mediator or conflict manager, you can choose phrases that you repeat like a broken record for each party.
To your brothers and sisters; a phrase that expresses “I disagree with you” but does not say “your memories are false.” Maybe something like, “I'm not asking you to forgive them, I'm just asking you to allow me to feel differently.”
And to your parents, something that expresses that you will not convey messages or interfere in conflicts, for example: “I love you, I don’t want to be the judge.” If you don't make any reaction other than these phrases when the topic comes up, you may get so stuck that everyone stops trying to engage you.
The truth of any family is so long and intricate that it is very difficult for any one person to see it all at once—if ever. You and your brothers and sisters may be telling the truth about the body parts you are looking at. If you want to maintain relationships with everyone here, the trick may not be to challenge events, but to say that you are allowed to evaluate them differently.
