Seeing your parents as they really are: the loss of idealisation

“At thirty-four I realised that my father doesn’t know everything. And I was ashamed of how much that hurt.”

Plenty of people could say that sentence. It isn’t about a dramatic discovery, a secret or a great betrayal. It’s about something quieter: the moment you suddenly see a parent from the side. The way he cuts your mother off mid-sentence. The way she avoids a conversation she ought to have. The way he repeats the same mistake you explained away as a child with “he must have his reasons”. And then you realise there was no reason. That he was simply a person — tired, frightened, limited, sometimes unfair.

This moment is rarely talked about as a loss. Yet it is one. When you lose the idealised image of your parents, you don’t lose your parent — they are still sitting at the table on Sundays. You lose something else: the sense that somewhere above you there is someone who knows, who can cope and who will sort everything out. In this post I will write about why this loss hurts, why it is at the same time one of the more important developmental tasks of adulthood, and how you can get through it without blaming your parents or writing them off for good.

Why a child puts their parents on a pedestal

A small child sees their parents as giants. This isn’t naivety, it’s necessity. A child who is completely dependent on adults needs to believe that those adults are strong, wise and good. If a child could clearly see how unsure their father is, or how frightened their mother is, the world would feel unbearably dangerous. Idealisation is a kind of safety net: “Nothing bad can happen to me, because they are here.”

The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut described this as a child’s need to attach to an idealised image of the parent and to “borrow” a sense of safety from the parent’s strength and calm. In his view, idealisation is not a mistake but a healthy stage of development. The problem isn’t that a child idealises their parents. The problem is when that image never gets the chance to move gradually, in manageable steps, closer to reality. Kohut spoke of optimal frustration: small, bearable disappointments through which a child slowly takes over part of what they once attributed to the parent — the ability to calm down, to judge, to decide.

You will find a short explanation of the term in the knowledge base under idealisation. For this post, one thing matters most: idealisation was once a response to a real need. That is why you can’t simply “switch it off” once you realise it no longer holds.

What the attachment interview reveals

Attachment researchers came to the idealisation of parents from an unexpected angle. In the 1980s Mary Main and her colleagues developed the Adult Attachment Interview — a semi-structured conversation in which an adult describes their childhood and their relationship with their parents. In the analysis it isn’t only what a person says that matters, but also how they say it.

One of the recognisable patterns is idealisation itself. A person describes their parents with adjectives such as “wonderful”, “loving”, “the best mum in the world”, but when the interviewer asks for a concrete memory that illustrates this, they can’t find one. Or they tell a memory that contradicts the adjective — that their mother shouted at them when they broke their arm, because they were crying — and they don’t notice the contradiction. Such a narrative usually belongs to the avoidant (dismissing) pattern of attachment in adulthood.

Why does this matter? A 1995 meta-analysis by Marinus van IJzendoorn showed that the way a parent talks about their own childhood matches the security or insecurity of their child’s attachment in roughly three quarters of cases. So it isn’t only about what happened to us, but also about whether we have been able to think about it as a whole — the good and the difficult together. An idealised picture of our parents is often a sign that there is something we haven’t yet been allowed to come close to.

Disappointment as a developmental task

Peter Blos described adolescence as a “second individuation”: a period in which the adolescent emotionally steps back from their parents in order to become their own person. In research with adolescents, Laurence Steinberg and Susan Silverberg showed that part of this emotional autonomy is made up of de-idealisation — the realisation that parents don’t know everything and can be wrong. This process grows stronger in early adolescence.

But for many people it doesn’t happen in adolescence. Perhaps there was so much tension at home that rebellion simply wasn’t possible. Perhaps one parent was ill, absent or overwhelmed, and you had to protect them. Perhaps the family was so tightly interwoven that any doubt felt like betrayal. Then the disappointment is postponed into adulthood — to the moment you become a parent yourself, when things get difficult in your relationship, when you start therapy, or when your parent grows old and falls ill. I wrote about why the years between twenty and thirty-five are so important for stepping back from your parents in Between 20 and 35: why this is the key time for becoming independent from your parents.

In this sense, disappointment is an unpleasant but necessary task. Without it, part of you stays caught in a child’s position — waiting for your parent to finally become the person you needed.

Why it is a loss, even though nobody has died

When people first say out loud in therapy that their father was in fact very lonely and frightened, or that their mother never really knew how to listen, they are often surprised by how strongly they feel it. “I knew that already,” they say. Knew it, perhaps, but didn’t feel it. Between knowing and feeling there is a space in which grieving happens.

What exactly do you lose? First, an image that protected you. Then the hope that your parent will one day finally come, understand you, apologise, become the person you needed. That hope is often quiet and stubborn — at forty you still ring your mother with news you already know she won’t be able to take in, because maybe this time … When the hope dies, an emptiness remains that resembles grief. There is a short entry on this in the knowledge base under disappointment.

This loss is particular because the people around you don’t recognise it. There is no funeral, no condolences, no time off. Your parent is alive, the family lunches carry on and you sit at the same table feeling as though you have buried something. It is similar to the losses I wrote about in Grieving someone who is still alive: dementia, addiction, estrangement — except that here you aren’t grieving a person who has changed, but a person who, in reality, never existed.

And I keep it separate from the death of a parent. When a parent dies, you lose their presence; I wrote about that experience in The death of a parent in adulthood: the loss everyone underrates. When you lose idealisation, the parent stays, but the picture you carried of them changes. Sometimes the two losses meet — many people only face the real picture of a parent during their illness or after the funeral, while reading old letters.

Anger: the stop people are afraid of

When idealisation cracks, anger often follows. At the parent, for not being who they should have been. At yourself, for not seeing it sooner. At other family members, for pretending everything is fine. For many people this anger is frightening, especially if they grew up in a family where anger wasn’t allowed or was dangerous.

Anger at this point is not a sign that you are a bad son or daughter. It’s a sign that you have finally allowed yourself to see something that was locked away for a long time. Often it is the anger the child would have felt back then but wasn’t allowed to. That is why it is sometimes disproportionately large: an adult gets angry over a Sunday lunch, but what they are really feeling is the anger of an eight-year-old whom nobody asked how they were.

But anger is a stop, not a destination. People who get stuck in it often swap one unrealistic image for another: before, the parent was perfect; now they are to blame for everything. Both images are equally flat. Both keep a person in a child’s position — the first in waiting, the second in blaming. Relational family therapy, in which I am training, emphasises something that at first seems paradoxical: as long as we are angry at our parents with all our strength, we are still tightly bound to them. What no longer touches us doesn’t make us angry.

When you say it out loud

Often the first conversation about this doesn’t happen with the parent, but with a brother, a sister or a partner. And it often meets resistance. It might sound like this (composite, not a real person):

“Yesterday I saw it again — how Mum shuts Dad down whenever he starts talking about work. As if it doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t start. Mum did everything for us.”
“I know. She did an enormous amount. And at the same time she never listened to anyone all the way through. Both are true.”
“Why do you have to tear everything apart now?”
“I’m not tearing anything apart. I just don’t want to pretend I can’t see any more.”

This short exchange holds everything this loss brings. A sister who isn’t yet ready to see. The fear that the truth will “tear apart” the family. And the sentence at the heart of the whole process: both are true. Mum did an enormous amount. And Mum didn’t know how to listen. Not one or the other, but both at once.

Brothers and sisters often experience their parents very differently, even if they grew up in the same house. Each had their own role, their own time, their own share of their parents. So nobody else necessarily has to share your realisation. That doesn’t make it any less real.

Compassion that isn’t excusing

On the other side of anger something often waits that people don’t expect: compassion. When you see your parent as a person, you also begin to see their story. A mother who lost her own mother at seventeen. A father who grew up with a drunk father and swore he would be different — and was, but only up to a point. Compassion appears when you understand that your parents gave what they had, and that often there wasn’t much of it.

But it is important to separate two things. Compassion isn’t excusing. Understanding why your father shouted doesn’t mean the shouting didn’t hurt. Understanding your mother’s exhaustion doesn’t mean you didn’t miss her attention. People who take refuge in compassion too quickly often skip anger and sadness — and then wonder why understanding hasn’t brought them peace.

A mature relationship with your parents can hold both truths at once. In psychology we call this ambivalence: the ability to feel love and anger, gratitude and disappointment towards the same person without one having to erase the other. This isn’t indecision. It is maturity.

A new closeness on the other side

People often fear losing idealisation because they think the relationship will disappear with it. The experience is often exactly the opposite. When you no longer have to protect your parent from your own gaze, you can talk to them differently. You no longer expect them to know what you feel, so you tell them. You no longer wait for them to change what they can’t, so you take what they are able to give. The relationship becomes smaller, but more real.

In relational family therapy we call this process differentiation: the ability to stay in contact with your family while remaining yourself. A differentiated person doesn’t need their parents’ approval to know who they are. But nor do they need to reject them to prove it. They can go to Sunday lunch, notice the old patterns, smile at them and go home as an adult.

This shift also affects your other relationships. What we carry from our family of origin often repeats itself in our partnerships — idealising a partner, followed by painful disappointment, is often an old story with a new cast. I wrote more about this in Emotional baggage from your family of origin: what we carry into our relationships.

Whether the relationship with your parents can be repaired in adulthood is a question many people ask at this point. The answer isn’t always yes, but it is more often than we think. I wrote about what helps and what not to expect in Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?

Exercise: two letters you don’t send

This exercise doesn’t require you to talk to your parent. It is meant for you — for putting both truths on paper side by side. It takes about half an hour.

1. Write a letter to the idealised parent. Address it to the mother or father you imagined as a child. Write down what that image gave you — safety, pride, the sense that someone was above you. Thank it.
2. Write a letter to the real parent. This time be concrete: one memory of when they hurt you or weren’t there. Don’t soften it and don’t excuse it. Write down what you needed then and didn’t get.
3. Read both letters one after the other. Notice what happens in your body. Where do you feel tension, where softness, where resistance?
4. Add one sentence that begins “Both are true: …”. For example: “Both are true: my father taught me to swim, and my father never asked how I was.”
5. Don’t send the letters. Keep them or throw them away. If after a few days you feel you would like to say some of it out loud, you can decide how — but that is a different, separate decision.

If more pain comes up during the exercise than you expected, it isn’t a sign that you did something wrong. It is often a sign that something has been waiting a long time for space. Then it is good not to carry it alone.

Where this story doesn’t apply

I’d like to set out a few limits, because it is easy to write about this subject too generally.

This isn’t about blaming parents. The aim of de-idealisation isn’t to find someone to blame for everything that doesn’t work in your life. Parents are an important part of the story, but not the whole story. An adult is responsible for what they do with what they were given. If your disappointment in your parents mainly serves to explain why nothing can change, the process has stalled somewhere.

This isn’t about abuse and violence. When a parent was violent, abusive or seriously neglectful, we are talking about something else. That isn’t disappointment over ordinary human failings, but trauma, and idealisation was often a way of surviving. Such a story needs a different, more careful path — there is a little more on this in Disorganised attachment: when the same person is both comfort and fear. If you are living with violence today, the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence in Slovenia is available on 080 11 55; in an emergency call 112, or the police on 113.

You don’t have to confront anyone. You don’t have to tell your parents what you have realised. For some people the conversation is a relief, for others a repetition of an old wound. De-idealisation happens inside you, not in a conversation with them.

Not every parent is a hidden problem. Many people grow up with parents who were good enough — and their “loss of idealisation” is mild, almost tender. Don’t go looking for wounds that aren’t there just because so much is written about them now. And sometimes — with a parent who is dying, for example — it is right to leave idealisation alone for a while. Not every moment is the right one for the truth.

If this loss connects with the realisation that you had to grow up too fast because your parent was too vulnerable themselves, you may recognise another layer here; there is more on it in Loss of childhood: when you had to grow up too fast.

What to remember

• Idealising your parents was necessary in childhood — it gave you a sense of safety in a world where you were dependent.
• Disappointment in your parents is a developmental task that for many people happens not in adolescence but only in adulthood.
• It is a real loss — of an image and of hope — even though nobody has died and those around you don’t recognise it.
• Anger is a stop, not a destination; on the other side there can be compassion without excusing and the sentence “both are true”.
• A whole picture of a parent often brings a new, more real closeness — fewer expectations, more contact.