Why understanding your trauma may be only half the healing

Many of my clients have to unpack their childhoods.

Some come in already aware of their childhood trauma, carrying anger and resentment toward their parents. Others understand what happened intellectually, but have yet to process it emotionally. And then there are those who insist they had a wonderful childhood, only to discover, as we dig deeper, that things were perhaps not quite as wonderful as they remember.

These discussions are delicate and potentially polarizing.

There are generally two camps of thought when it comes to healing childhood trauma.

The first is the trauma-centered approach. It helps us acknowledge and process trauma by witnessing it closely, which often brings pain and anger toward those who hurt us. It emphasizes validating our experiences, recognizing the damage, and establishing necessary boundaries.

The second is the compassion-centered approach. It emphasizes understanding that our parents were shaped by their own trauma, upbringing, and circumstances. They often didn’t have access to therapy, emotional support, or the knowledge we have today. Their love, while it may have hurt us and wasn’t enough to create safety and unconditional acceptance, may have been the best they knew how to offer.

These two camps fight in real life. They fight inside our minds.

So who’s right?

The trauma-centered approach risks creating a split between victims and villains, while the compassion-centered approach risks minimizing or even gaslighting our experiences, making it difficult to process trauma and establish boundaries.

As with most things in life, neither perspective tells the whole truth, and both contain something important.

Depending on the stage of your healing, it may be more helpful to lean one way or the other.

If a client hasn’t yet processed the extent of their trauma or understood its impact, I lean toward the trauma-centered approach. After all, all truth must be witnessed and accepted.

But if someone has already done significant work on themselves, yet remains organized around anger and resentment, and their other relationships continue to suffer, I begin to explore whether they’ve become stuck in the victim/villain narrative. This is when I introduce the compassion-centered approach, inviting them to see a larger truth.

This is what I call halfway healing.

Halfway healing happens when we stop after the first stage of healing, without realizing there may be more. Sometimes therapists inadvertently collude with their clients’ anger, either because they don’t recognize this possibility or because they’re reluctant to gently challenge them.

So what is this larger truth?

We have to lift our gaze to a bird’s-eye view. We have to elevate our consciousness beyond ourselves, remaining firmly planted in our truth while allowing other perspectives in.

And here’s the truth about your parents.

They also needed to survive.

They also needed to adapt to their harsh reality.

Drop into it.

I know that you know ABOUT it, but have you witnessed it the way you’ve witnessed your own?

Have you WATCHED your mom being judged for her appearance, or your dad for not being good enough? Have you watched your mom being told she had to wear a certain dress or clean the house just right, or else? Have you witnessed your dad desperately trying to avoid the poverty breathing down his neck?

Have you considered the beliefs they developed around survival and happiness?

Could their lack of acceptance of you have been an attempt to fix you, to protect you from being rejected, miserable, poor, or even dead?

Because those were very real possibilities for gay people back then, or those who married interracially, or those who didn’t work hard enough, dress right, or follow the rules.

It’s fear dressed as control that you’re witnessing.

It’s fear dressed as judgment that you’re witnessing.

Fear for their little boys and girls who, according to their subconscious beliefs, were heading down a dangerous path.

Their dysregulation, immaturity, and inability to control their anger or frustration may reflect their own stressful upbringings, during which they never had the chance to develop a regulated nervous system.

They couldn’t give you what they never received.

“But I went to therapy!” you’ll say. “I dedicated years to healing, and so could they!”

Could they?

Was open-mindedness helpful during their formative years? Or did they have to be tough and disconnected from their feelings because of wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the relentless pressure to survive, survive, survive?

Would getting in touch with their feelings have made them better soldiers? Better single mothers? Better providers when money was scarce?

Many had to disconnect. They had to say no to art, love, family, and joy.

They sacrificed so that we could survive.

It’s now our job to take what we got, transform it, and thrive.

Consider this: if your father hadn’t become a workaholic (perhaps even an alcoholic), or your mother hadn’t become an oppressed, depressed housewife, you might not have had the opportunities you have today. Perhaps not even the opportunity to be here, physically or financially.

Yes, you’re fucked up.

But perhaps less so than your parents.

And for that, let’s consider saying thank you, not fuck you.

Thank you for carrying some of the burdens of your trauma, your upbringing, and your culture, and working hard to ensure that I might have more than you did.

And I GET to work through our generational trauma because you were trying to survive under circumstances that may have been even harder than mine.

Now, before you jump on me and tell me about your awful parents, how I’m gaslighting you, and how people like me kept you from healing for decades, let me pause you.

This essay is not about defending your parents or excusing what they did.

It’s not about minimizing your trauma or its impact on your life.

This essay is about stopping the war.

The war in your psyche and the war between generations.

It’s about saying:

“Your parents damaged you, and your pain is real. AND they may not have meant to do so. They may have been doing the best they knew how.”

It’s about allowing compassion alongside rightful anger and hurt.

It’s about grace. It’s about forgiveness.

And forgiveness — not fake forgiveness, but the kind where you’ve acknowledged everything they did, allowed yourself to be angry, grieved what happened, and eventually become able to see their truth, too — can free us.

It can free us from carrying resentment, from holding ourselves to impossible parenting standards because we’ve vowed never to be like our parents, and from constantly worrying about being triggered by them.

Now, if your parent continues to be abusive toward you, let me be clear: there is no need for continued re-traumatization. You can understand them, have compassion for them, and even forgive them while choosing not to expose yourself to further harm.

But here’s where I want to challenge you: there is a difference between an abusive person and a difficult person.

Not every uncomfortable interaction is abuse. Not every disagreement violates your boundaries. Not every emotionally immature or frustrating parent is dangerous to your well-being.

Protect yourself from abuse, absolutely. But when dealing with an imperfect, difficult human being, see if you can find the wisdom and compassion to meet them where they are without abandoning yourself.

And perhaps the most important shift isn’t even in how we treat our parents. It’s in how we SEE them.

We begin to move beyond the labels we’ve assigned them: selfish, narcissistic, controlling, emotionally immature, even abusive. Not because these descriptions are necessarily inaccurate, but because they don’t capture the entirety of who they are.

We begin to see human beings who, like us, were shaped by their wounds, fears, unconscious beliefs, and survival strategies. Human beings who may have become stuck at a certain level of emotional development and consciousness.

And we can see all of that without denying a single thing they did to us.

We no longer need to make them villains in order to validate our pain.

This kind of healing can help us become the people we admire most: kind, compassionate, and understanding.

It doesn’t mean we need to restore harmful relationships, abandon our boundaries, or pretend the past didn’t happen.

But it might mean there’s a little less hatred and anger in the world.

And maybe your parents will be granted forgiveness without ever fully understanding what they’ve done or why they hurt you.

Not because what they did was right.

But because they, too, were unconscious human beings, doing what they knew to survive.

Maybe the question was never whether our parents were good or bad, whether they loved us or damaged us, whether we should blame them or forgive them.

Maybe the real work is learning to hold the unbearable truth that they could have loved us and damaged us. That they could have tried their best and still failed us. That we can grieve what they couldn’t give us while understanding why they couldn’t give it.

And perhaps healing isn’t about finally choosing a side.

Perhaps it’s about becoming conscious enough that we no longer need to.