Caring for a parent you have a difficult history with

“Everyone tells me how lovely it is that I look after him so well. Nobody knows that every time I hand him a spoon, my hand shakes a little.”

Plenty of people could say that sentence. A daughter who takes her father out for Sunday lunch, though the same father spent years of her childhood propping up the bar. A son who sorts out his mother’s paperwork and medication, though she still humiliates him in front of the neighbours every time he visits. From the outside, people see a dutiful child. Inside, something is happening that we have no good words for: you are caring for the person who was once the source of your pain — and who now needs precisely you.

This article is about that gap. Not to tell you whether it is right to care for them or not. But to help you see more clearly what happens in this kind of care, why it is so much harder than the “ordinary” kind, and how you can remain an adult in it rather than becoming a child again.

A difficult history is not the exception

When we talk about caring for ageing parents, we often picture loving families in which children give back what they received. Reality is more varied. In the well-known American study of adverse childhood experiences, led in the 1990s by Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda, more than half of the adult participants reported at least one serious adversity in childhood — abuse, neglect, violence between parents, addiction or mental illness in the family — and about a quarter reported two or more. These were ordinary middle-class people with health insurance, not a particularly at-risk group.

This means that many of the people caring for their parents today grew up with those very parents in fear, loneliness or confusion. In 2015 the researchers Jooyoung Kong and Sara Moorman showed that adult children caring for a parent who had abused them in childhood have more depressive symptoms than other carers. So the burden is determined not only by how much work the care involves, but also by who you are doing it for.

If you are in that position, you don’t have to explain why it is so hard for you. It is hard because it is hard.

One person, two images

The most confusing thing about caring for a parent with a difficult history is that you have two people in front of you at once. One is a frail older man who can no longer get to the bathroom on his own and sometimes even smiles at you. The other is the father beside whom you learned as a child that you had to keep quiet when the door opened. But the body doesn’t distinguish between them. When you hear a certain tone of voice, your shoulders tense, even though your mind knows this person can no longer do anything to you.

This gap is not your weakness. It is the expected response of a nervous system that learned in childhood that this person was dangerous or unpredictable. It helps to acknowledge it: “My body is reacting to my father of forty years ago, but I am in the room with my father of today.” That sentence doesn’t remove the tension, but it gives you back some room to decide what you will do.

Old roles come back faster than you think

People who had a particular role in their family are often surprised by how quickly it returns when they go back home. One daughter was always the peacemaker, one son was always to blame for everything, and one child was the one nobody saw. When a parent falls ill, these roles don’t dissolve; they often get stronger.

People who already cared for their parents as children are especially likely to end up as carers — for a mother who was depressed, a father who drank, younger brothers and sisters when there were no adults around. The professional term for this is parentification. When such a person grows up, caring for a parent looks like a natural continuation. And it is a continuation — except that now they have something they didn’t have as a child: the possibility of asking themselves whether they still want it. I have written about what it means to grow up too soon in The loss of childhood: when you had to grow up too soon, and about the particular case of growing up around alcohol in Growing up with a parent’s drinking: what a child carries into adulthood.

Seen systemically, the same family often holds very different experiences of the same parent. A sister who was her father’s favourite has different memories of him from the brother he used to shout at. That is why siblings find it so hard to agree about care: they are not only arguing about who will do what, but also about who this person was. Each has their own truth, and both truths are real.

Loyalty and debt: what you owe and what you don’t

Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, one of the founders of family therapy, described the family as a kind of ledger recording who gave what to whom and who owes what to whom. Children owe their parents something simply because they were given life. That debt is real, and we feel it even when a parent gave almost nothing else. That is precisely why caring for a difficult parent is so complicated: loyalty doesn’t ask whether it was earned.

But Nagy also described the other side. A child who had to give more than they received acquires something he called entitlement — the right to have something given back. If it is never given back, this entitlement can become destructive: in relationships with others, often with their own partner and children, they start to demand what their parent never gave them. So the question of how much you will give your parent is not only your private matter. It also affects how much will be left for the people in your life today.

From this follows something that sounds simple but isn’t: you can be loyal and set boundaries at the same time. Loyalty doesn’t mean giving everything. It means not turning your back on your parent as a human being. How close you will be is a separate decision — and that one is yours.

What this sounds like in conversation

In therapy this tangle often shows itself in very small ways (a composite, not a real person):

“Yesterday he asked me again why I visit so rarely. In front of my sister.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. As always. Then I stayed two hours longer than I’d planned.”
“What would you have said if you were allowed to?”
“That I come twice a week and that’s all I can manage. That I’d like to be there more if things had been different from how they were.”
“Which part of that could you actually say?”
Silence. “The first. Not the second yet.”

And that is enough. You don’t have to tell your parent the whole history in order to be allowed a boundary. It is enough to say it — or even just to keep it without saying it. The boundary diary tool can help you keep track of what happens inside you as you do.

A scale of involvement

One of the biggest traps in caring for a difficult parent is the feeling that you only have two options: all or nothing. Either you care for them yourself and so step back into the relationship that hurt you, or you cut contact and carry the guilt. In reality there are many steps between these extremes.

Some people decide to care for their parent themselves, and they can, because they have already worked through part of the history. Others find they can manage the doctors and home help but cannot wash their parent — because touch is too close to what happened. Others again can manage only the paperwork and the phone. And some hand everything over to others and decide not to be in contact. Each of these choices can be a responsible one. The only irresponsible thing is not to decide and to let things decide for you.

For the practical side, whichever level you are at, the first ports of call are your parent’s GP, the community nursing service and the social work centre (in Slovenia, center za socialno delo), where they can explain what forms of help exist. Anything someone else can do, you don’t have to do yourself.

Guilt that doesn’t ask whether it is justified

Almost every carer knows the feeling of not doing enough. With a difficult parent this guilt has another layer: guilt that you don’t love them the way you think you should. Or guilt because, faced with their helplessness, you sometimes secretly feel relief — as if things had finally evened out. These thoughts are more common than people admit, and they don’t mean you are a bad person. They mean the relationship was wounded.

Guilt is useful when it warns you that you really have hurt someone. It isn’t useful when it keeps you in a relationship where you are permanently in a debt you can never repay. I have described how to tell the two apart in Healthy guilt and toxic guilt: how to tell them apart, and the particular guilt of carers is the subject of Caregiver guilt: when it never feels like enough. Love and anger at the same time has its own name in the knowledge base: ambivalence.

Many people hope that illness or old age will bring a moment when their parent finally admits what happened, or apologises. Sometimes that does happen. Often it doesn’t. Age doesn’t necessarily change a person — sometimes it only slows them down. So part of the work of caring for a difficult parent is also grieving for the parent you didn’t have and won’t have. I have written about what it means to see your parents as they really are in Seeing your parents as they really are: the loss of idealisation.

Forgiveness is not a condition

The people around you often expect you to “forgive while there’s still time”. This pressure can be very heavy, because forgiveness grows out of an inner process, not out of a calendar. Forgiveness also doesn’t mean that what happened wasn’t bad, or that you now have to be close. You’ll find more on this in the knowledge base under forgiveness.

Nagy described something else that is often closer to hand than forgiveness: exoneration. When you see where your parent came from — what kind of childhood they had, what they lived through, what they themselves never received — you may find that you don’t excuse them, but you stop seeing them as a monster. They are still responsible for what they did. But they become a person with a story, not only the source of your wound. This is not an obligation. It is a possibility that sometimes opens up by itself once you stop pushing yourself.

A genogram can help here — a drawing of the family across three or more generations that makes visible how violence, addiction, silence or neglect were passed down from one generation to the next. That is what the longer session A Look into the Past is for. Seeing a pattern doesn’t mean accepting it. It means you can break it more easily.

Exercise: two lists and one sentence

When you no longer know how much to give, take half an hour for yourself and do this:

1. Write down what your parent actually needs now. Concretely: lifts to the doctor, shopping, someone to arrange home help. Not what you would like, but what they need.
2. Next to each item, write who could do it. You, a sibling, a service, a neighbour. You’ll see that many things don’t have to be yours.
3. For the items left with you, check in with your body. Imagine doing them. Where does it tighten? What do you feel? Write one word next to each.
4. Choose what you will give and what you won’t. Whatever feels too heavy in that body check, try to hand on or limit — a visit with a set end time, for example.
5. Write one sentence for yourself. For example: “I help him with the doctors, but when he insults me I leave the room.” That is your boundary. You don’t have to explain it to anyone.

If you notice that you can’t separate yourself at all from what your parent expects — that your mood still rises and falls with theirs — that is something we call differentiation in therapy. It is slow work, but it can be done at forty or sixty too.

Where this view doesn’t apply

This whole article assumes that the worst is in the past and that your parent is now frail. Sometimes that isn’t so. If your parent is still violent — physically, or through constant humiliation and threats — or if the abuse was so severe that any contact puts you back into a state you can’t recover from for days, then the question isn’t how to care for them but how to protect yourself. In such cases cutting contact may be the most responsible decision, not selfishness. Care can be arranged through the social work centre and other services, without you.

Likewise, nothing I have written about exoneration and loyalty means you have to understand your parent before you yourself are safe. Safety first, understanding later — if at all.

And one more limit: not every hard caring situation is the result of a hard history. Sometimes care is simply too much for one person, whatever the relationship was like. Then you don’t need deep analysis, but more help and more rest.

When to seek help

If you notice that you can’t sleep after visits, that memories you thought were forgotten are coming back, that caring for your parent is pulling you away from your partner, or that you feel an anger inside that frightens you, it is time to find a space for yourself. In therapy you don’t have to decide whether or not you will care for them. But you can understand what is happening inside you and decide from an adult place, not from a child’s fear. I also work with English-speaking clients. What remains if a parent dies before anything between you is resolved is the subject of When a parent dies: what is left unfinished.

If things are hard right now, in the evenings and at night you can call the mental health crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (7 pm to 7 am), and at any time the Samaritan helpline on 116 123 in Slovenia. If anyone is in danger, call 112 or the police on 113 in Slovenia.

What to remember

• Caring for a parent who hurt you is harder than “ordinary” care — and research confirms it.
• Your body reacts to the parent from the past, but you can decide as an adult in the present.
• Loyalty and boundaries are not mutually exclusive. There are many levels of involvement between “everything” and “nothing”.
• Forgiveness is not a condition for care, nor for peace. Exoneration — seeing your parent as a person with a story — is sometimes closer.
• If your parent is still violent, safety comes first. Others can take care of the caring.