My brother and sister are really angry at my parents. They say that we had a terrible childhood because my dad was absent a lot and my mum used to play us off against each other to keep control. There was a lot of arguing.
But this is just half the story. I know my parents loved us all a lot and tried to give us a good childhood. We always had home-cooked food and stories. Nowadays my parents are trying to make amends, but my brother and sister just don’t see it. They’re so critical and to be honest I think they’re a bit ungrateful. I feel caught in the middle. What can I do?
Eleanor says: Doesn’t one of us have to be wrong? is the plea on both sides of a family disagreement like this, I think. One person says “this was totally unacceptable”, the other says “it wasn’t”; we know we can’t both be right, so the disagreement feels like an accusation that we’re the one seeing things incorrectly.
Sometimes when you try to talk that impasse through with other people, they’ll fall back on “family things are all subjective”. That’s fine, but it doesn’t go very far. The whole problem is you and your siblings both feel as if you’re telling the truth, the rap-your-knuckles-on-it truth. This was or was not acceptable parenting, same as it was or was not raining yesterday. The facts of your childhood are important, which means getting them wrong is important too.
One thing that can help break that impasse is to ask whether you’re disagreeing about what happened or you’re disagreeing about how to weigh those things in the moral accounting.
For instance, do you think that parents ought to be judged by whether they tried their best or by what they actually did? Are we talking about degree of difficulty or absolute performance? Yes, they shouted that horrible thing, but how many jobs were they working? How much support did they have, how hard was life on them, what tangles in their heads did they inherit from their own parents?
Another big split is whether we focus on what parents are like now or what they were like then. Some people look at a memory from 20 years ago and see a hazy, sepia moment, like an interaction between acquaintances we used to know. Others see it in high resolution, because the pain feels as though it happened today.
And one really huge split is over how much you think you even get to be in the business of evaluating your parents. For some people, that’s how to name important patterns and problems. For others, it feels like hypocrisy or judgmentalism.
These kinds of macro disputes can be why the conflict feels so intractable. Your siblings say, “Don’t you see, they hurt us badly.” You say, “Don’t you see, they were trying.” Both of you are telling the truth, but neither feels heard; cogs are turning but not meeting up.
You asked what you can do. One threat here is you wind up being played off against each other again, whether by accident or not. To avoid becoming a middleman or a conflict manager, you might want to pick phrases to repeat like a broken record to either side.
To your siblings; a phrase that expresses “I disagree with you” without saying “your memories are false”. Maybe something like, “I’m not asking you to forgive them, I’m just asking you to allow that I feel differently.”
And to your parents, something that expresses that you won’t pass on messages or weigh in on conflicts, such as: “I love you, I don’t want to be the adjudicator.” If you don’t produce any reaction besides those phrases when the topic comes up, you might become enough of a dead-end that they all stop trying to involve you.
The truth of any family is so long and tangled that it’s very hard for any one person to see all of it at once – if ever. You and your siblings could each be telling the truth about the parts you’re looking at. If you want to maintain a relationship with everyone here, the trick might be not disputing the events, but saying you’re allowed to weigh them differently.
