When Healing Feels One-Sided: Staying Rooted When Our Parents or Primary Attachment Figures Can’t Meet Us There

Danielle Morran
6 days ago
4 min read

Many of our parents or primary attachment figures were raised by caregivers who survived war, poverty, and emotional drought. They grew up learning that love meant provision, that emotions were best left unspoken, that survival came before softness. They learned to build sturdy shells and deep roots — but rarely learned how to tend to their own inner landscapes.

When we, their adult children, come forward with language like attachment wounds, emotional neglect, or trauma, we’re not just asking them to look at us — we’re asking them to turn toward the soil they grew from.

And for many, that feels like too much. To acknowledge our pain would mean digging into their own — soil compacted by decades of silence, loss, and unprocessed hurt. So they protect themselves the only way they know how: by minimizing, turning away, or insisting that we’re overreacting.

It’s often not a lack of love, but a systemically imposed lack of capacity. Their roots were nourished by survival, not necessarily emotional safety, which is the nourishment we now seek.

A Broader, Non-Judgmental Perspective

When we look at the patterns our parents or primary attachment figures inherited — the silence, the striving, the fear of getting it wrong — it’s important to remember that these ways of coping didn’t start with them. Many were shaped by cultural and economic systems that valued productivity over presence, control over connection, and compliance over emotional truth.

These systems, which often prioritize control and achievement, taught generations to suppress feeling, to see vulnerability as weakness, and to believe safety comes from obedience or achievement. Our caregivers often internalized these beliefs as truth, not realizing how they might fracture relationships or disconnect them from their own tenderness.

As the healing generation, many of us are trying to return to something older and wiser — a way of being in relationship that honors interdependence, reciprocity, and emotional truth. In some ways, this healing isn’t about becoming “better” than our parents or attachment figures, but about remembering what was forgotten through ways of relating focused purely on survival: the wisdom of repair, slowness, and shared humanity.

Whether we stay in relationship or need distance to feel safe, this remembering can become an act of reclamation — one that holds both grief and reverence for all that was lost and all that is possible now.

This Isn’t an Excuse — It’s Context

Understanding this doesn’t make the ache vanish. It doesn’t make the distance less lonely. But sometimes, understanding can soften the edges of our pain — the way rain softens hardened ground.

When we recognize that our parents or primary attachment figures’ defensiveness may be a form of self-protection — not disregard — we can begin to grieve the apology or acknowledgment that may never come.

And from that grief, something alive can grow. We begin to see that our healing doesn’t have to wait for their permission. We can root into the truth that they couldn’t see us and still choose to see ourselves now. We can stop waiting for them to water the relationship and start tending to our own growth.

Sometimes our bodies know before our minds do when we’ve reached the limit of what feels safe — and that knowing deserves our trust. Listening to those cues is part of how we heal, not away from our families, but within ourselves.

Different Paths, Same Forest

For some of us, healing means learning how to stay in relationship — pruning what’s overgrown, shaping it gently so both sides can still survive. For others, healing means stepping back entirely — creating distance or going no contact to allow new growth to emerge in peace.

Both are acts of love — one directed outward, the other inward. Both honor what was and protect what’s still unfolding.

Whether you remain close, hold cautious distance, or choose complete separation, your decision is a reflection of care: care for your own nervous system, care for your peace, and care for what you hope will grow from here.

Each path is a valid expression of healing from emotionally unavailable or systemically shaped caregivers. There’s no one right way to break intergenerational trauma cycles — only the way that helps you feel safe enough to grow.

Staying in Relationship (When It’s Safe to Do So)

For those who stay in relationship, it may mean accepting that certain branches just won’t grow the way we wish they would — and that’s okay. We can still sit in the same shade, even if the canopy isn’t what we dreamed.

It might mean connecting where it’s safe — over a meal, a memory, a shared story — while keeping quiet boundaries around where it’s not. It might mean allowing things to be as they are, imperfect and uneven, yet still part of our forest.

Honoring the harm that was caused doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t happen; it means quietly acknowledging it as part of our landscape. We can hold that truth without needing to convince anyone else. It’s a gentle reclamation: I see what grew here. I see what didn’t. And I get to decide what I plant next.

The Work We’re Doing Matters

Breaking intergenerational cycles isn’t about uprooting everything that came before us; it’s about cultivating something new within it. Each time we pause before reacting, each time we offer presence instead of protection, each time we create safety for those we love — we are rewilding our lineage.

Our parents or primary attachment figures may never meet us in that new growth, and that will always ache a little. But healing doesn’t require them to look back. It asks us to keep growing forward — gently, patiently, like a forest learning to trust the light again.

Final Thoughts + Call to Action

If you’ve needed to create distance or go no contact, you’re not failing at healing — you’re honoring your nervous system’s wisdom. If you’ve chosen to stay in connection, you’re tending to what still feels possible. Both are ways of protecting life and love. Both take courage. Both are healing.

Ways to continue your growth: