Why Can't Problematic Parents Own Up to Their Mistakes?

My client and her mother had been at war for years. You name it, they fought over it. Clothes. Hair. Shoes. Bags. What school my client was going to, what school she wasn't going to. Everything between the two was a fight, and that was the only thing my client really knew their relationship to be…a fight. That's how she landed on me after hearing my story.

She was at a crossroads. My client, at the time, was 39 and pregnant with her 3rd child. Her husband had just accepted his dream job, and she was preparing for a move across the country. Her mother, of course, turned it into a fight.

"I can't believe you're going to leave your mother here. I can't believe you're going to abandon me. You're taking my grandchildren from me!"

It went on like this for weeks until, crying over a stack of boxes, my client finally snapped and told her mother it couldn't go on the way it was.

"This is hard for me too, mom. You think I want to move across the country, get a new doctor, put the kids in new schools when I'm 6 months pregnant?"

What exploded next was a back-and-forth that escalated into name-calling and my client's husband being forced to get involved and kick his mother-in-law out of the home. He banned her.

"You can't come back here until you two get this together. You can't scream at my pregnant wife like that."

"I'm not the problem, she is."

"I don't care who the problem is. All I know is that you can't stay here."

A couple of months later, the move was over and everything was calm again. With some distance, my client found a kind of tolerable middle with her mother and even decided to plan their first Thanksgiving with her in their new home. It was a disaster….

Although my client's mother had portrayed some degree of change, the pattern fell right back into place once she was back on physical turf with her daughter. Within 24 hours of her arrival, she was shaming my client for the state of her house, the way she was taking care of the children, and even the doctor and hospital chosen for her *very imminent* delivery.

The stress of the event caused a false labor in my client. Struck with sudden pain, she panicked and had her husband take her to the emergency room.

While she was in the triage being checked over by the nurses, her husband received a text. It was her mother.

"This is what she does. She ruins every holiday. You shouldn't have to put up with this kind of behavior. You're a good man who deserves more."

Some parents refuse to acknowledge the problems in front of them.

Stories like the one above aren't uncommon in my line of work as a narcissistic abuse recovery coach. Women like my client's mother are a dime-a-dozen, and they specialize in an extremely destructive kind of emotional abuse. Wreaking havoc everywhere they go, they are simultaneously incapable of taking any accountability or owning up to any of their mistakes.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets a good family. We act like parenthood is always noble, and that families are always rooted in love, but that's not the case. Some families have big problems, and it requires the parents to step up to the plate to put those issues to rest.

Some parents (like the one described above) aren't willing to do that.

Quick as they are to point out the flaws in their children, they aren't willing to take that same accountability for themselves. They want to point fingers and they want things to stay the same because anything else requires an ego death and a dissolving of the reality they built around their parenting image.

This is where many modern families are stumbling and coming up short.

In an age of healing, a whole generation of children is looking up to their parents and asking, "Why? Why can't you do better? Why can't you be better? Here's the information. Change like I did." With children of their own, they can see through the paper-thin egos their mothers and fathers have built their pedestals on.

Why is this the path so many parents have chosen? Why are some of them so unwilling to change for the better of themselves and their families? The answers can be as complex as the families who struggle with them.

Why is it so hard for parents to be a part of the resolution?

For my client, no contact was the only option left. As we dug deeper into her mother's inability to change we found a deeper pattern. Ego. Denial. Her mother didn't want to change because her mother didn't want to be accountable. Without accountability, there could be no positive resolution that benefitted them both. My client had to choose to walk away.

Figuring out why a parent refuses to address the problems can be the final sign you need to take the right protective action for yourself. Whether their hesitation comes from laziness or something else, it can reveal the deeper truths needed to heal and move on.

Unwilling to work

Being a parent is an impossibly difficult job, even for the parent who is doing the bare minimum. Children require an immense amount of focus, energy, and learning. They are constant work, and that work doesn't end at 18. When a parent becomes a parent they are a parent forever. The best parents accept that, and open themselves up to learning every step of the way.

Not true for problem parents. For them, the work of parenting is a burden they aren't willing to overstretch themselves for. They're not going to educate themselves, learn about the healthy development of their children, or about the states of life they are now responsible for moving through.

Parents like that are unwilling to do the work it takes to become a great parent. They aren't willing to meet their children where they are, and in that, they refuse to look at the problems created. What solution can there be in that state? Good parents are humble enough to do the work.

A battle of the ego

Try as we like to deny it, there's a major ego battle at play with some parents. They bring children into the world not because they want to foster, safely, a new generation. Parents who come from a place of ego primarily build families for the social credit it provides and the image it can create for them.

When a parent moves from a place of ego, it can make it hard for them to be humble and honest with themselves and their children. They don't face the problems confronting their families, because it triggers insecurities and denies the ego they have worked hard to cultivate.

It's painful, but the parent who comes from a place of ego is a parent who will always choose themselves over their children. The cost to the child is of little consequence, as long as the ego-parent feels they are on the pedestal they desire and painted in the "right".

The value-cost payoff

One of the more interesting aspects of human psychology is the value-cost payoff. We see this kind of "reasoning" commonly in members of cults and other high-control groups, but you can see it in any human being who is confronted with making a major, life-altering change.

It works like this.

Essentially, a person in a high-stress situation is faced with new information. That information completely defies their current reality and would require them to change the whole of their lives in order to accept the new information. At that point, the person may refuse, thinking, "I've come so far and suffered so much for where I am. To change is to lose that work, so I will stay uncomfortably the same."

This is a phenomenon that is happening in families around the country and around the world in this very moment.

Parents, being confronted by children who are scarred from decades of trauma and neglect, are being forced to acknowledge that their way of parenting was wrong. Their children, seeking peace, provide them with a new way of doing things, a new way of showing up for them as a parent.

A minority of parents will reject this opportunity, and in doing so reject their children.

They worked too hard to become the parents that they are, they'll claim. They fought for everything they provided that child, they worked late and sacrificed. In the mind of this type of parent, to change now is to invalidate all of that work. They can't hold space for both concepts and so they will refuse to acknowledge the problems facing their families.

Devastating understanding

With little doubt, there has been a certain "image" of parenting that is upheld through various levels of society, across the world. It's the idea that the family is some kind of hierarchical pyramid. At the top, is the "god" of the family, the absolute and unquestioned head - the parent. Below them, are the children and anyone else attached to the family.

Some parents can't move beyond this idea of being on top of the pyramid. In their minds, that's how they raise their children the right way. Authoritarian parents easily fall into this trap. By squeezing their families with an iron grip, they believe they will keep them safe or "do their job" well.

The issue is that this kind of hierarchical mindset has a tendency to crush the children down below. Parents who understand their job to be that of a dictator leave their children little room to experiment or express themselves (two necessary components of healthy childhood development).

When a parent puts themselves on a pedestal of a god, they leave themselves no room to show their children humanity. They have to be in a place above their children in order to raise them, and admitting wrong would make them "lesser" or questionable.

For the children who fall through the cracks…

Family issues, no matter who they center around or how serious they are, affect the children caught in the middle. It doesn't matter if those children are 10 years old or 40 years old. The choices their parents make, the words they use, and the conflicts they engage in, all pieces together to make a warped quilt that the children of the family carry forever.

Some children fall through the cracks, lost to their parents' egos and the choices they make from that egotistical standpoint.

You may be one of those children. You may have been sacrificed to your mother or father's ego. Like my client, it's a battle that you may be fighting to this very day. You may feel hurt, forgotten, lost, left out, or otherwise disrespected and rejected. That's what the chaos of a dysfunctional family does.

It wounds us in places we can't see. It leaves marks that can't be scrubbed out with years of therapy or depression and anxiety medication.

At some point, every child of this kind of family has to make a choice.

Whether at 18 years old or 68 years old, a new path has to be chosen. There's nothing else. You can either stay under the disappointing crush of the parent who won't address the problem, or you can go a different way. As my client did, you can go in a different direction in the name of preserving some type of self-respect and peace.

For the children who fall through the cracks, there's a lifetime of heartbreak and questioning ahead, but there's beauty too. Life can become a blank canvas full of opportunities to connect and fall in love with new life.

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Some parents are unwilling to admit their mistakes. Whether from a place of ego or outdated misunderstanding, the damage is the same. Their children are left picking up the pieces and wondering why they have to carry the burden of accountability when they're surrounded by people who claim to be above them.

There is no changing a parent like the ones described above. That's not the end of the story, however.

Though the grief may be heavy and hard to bear we, the children of these problematic parents, can make the choice to chart a path of change for ourselves. We can become the parents we deserve, we can build chosen families, and we can find beautiful experiences that ease the wounds our unwilling parents left behind.

What's important to remember is that, even if you were raised by someone like the parents described above, you have a choice. You have options. And you always have tomorrow to make a better day for yourself.

© E.B. Johnson 2024