They did their best. It wasn’t enough. Both are true.
You’ve been forced to choose between two lies.
Either they were monsters — and you’re the kind of person who says that about their own parents. Or they did their best — and you’re ungrateful for still being affected by it.
Most people spend decades swinging between the two, and each swing costs something. Blame them and you feel guilty. Excuse them and you feel invisible, because if they did their best, what’s your pain even about? Neither position holds, because neither is the whole truth. And the whole truth, when I finally got there, was the most restful sentence I’ve ever thought.
They did the best they could. And it wasn’t enough. Both are true, at the same time, and you don’t have to pick.
The two lies
Let me describe each, because you’ll recognise where you spend your time.
The monster story. They were bad. What they did was unforgivable. Every problem I have traces back to them, and I’ll never be free until they admit it. This one has energy — anger is a warm thing to hold — but it’s a prison with the parents as the wardens. Nothing moves until they change, and they won’t.
The gratitude story. They did their best. They had it hard too. Nothing that happened was that bad, really — other people had it worse. This one is more socially acceptable, and it costs you your own experience. If nothing was wrong, then your dread, your tension, your voice in the head — those are just you being difficult. You’ve excused them by convicting yourself.
Both stories have a hidden assumption: that only one of the two things can be true. Either they were bad or you’re fine. That assumption is the whole trap.
The stages I went through
I’ll tell you the order, because it’s roughly the order most people go through, and knowing that saves some despair.
First there was anger. A lot of it, for a long time, once I stopped pretending there was nothing to be angry about. That stage is necessary. You can’t skip it — the anger is the feeling that was never allowed, finally being allowed — but you can’t live there either.
Then excusing. They had it hard. Their parents were worse. It was a different time. All true, and all a way of putting my own experience back in the box.
Then denial, for a while. It wasn’t that bad. I’m making it into something. The most comfortable stage and the most dishonest.
Then justification — the intellectual version of excusing, where I could explain exactly why they’d behaved as they had, in detail, and the explaining felt like resolution. It wasn’t. Understanding why someone did something doesn’t undo what it did to you.
And then, after years, the place I actually landed: they were doing the best they could, and it wasn’t good enough. It cost me. It made me very unwell for a long time. And they were doing their best. All of that, held together, without needing any part of it to cancel any other part.
Why both being true is the only rest
Here’s what happens when you finally hold both.
The anger has somewhere to go. It’s not denied — yes, it wasn’t enough, yes, it cost you — so it doesn’t have to keep shouting to be heard. It can be felt, fully, and then it can move.
And the compassion has somewhere to go too. You can see the frightened, stressed, unhealed people they were, wrapped in their own weather, doing what they knew. You can even feel for them. And feeling for them takes nothing from you, because you’re no longer required to say you were fine.
Both feelings in the same room, neither one winning. That’s not a compromise. It’s the truth, and the truth is restful in a way neither lie ever was.
“But I have to forgive them, don’t I?”
This comes up every time, and I want to answer it honestly.
No. You don’t have to forgive anyone to be free.
Forgiveness is a word that gets used to pressure people out of their anger before they’ve finished having it. And premature forgiveness — the kind you announce because you think you should — isn’t forgiveness. It’s the gratitude story wearing a nicer coat. I “truly forgave” once, years ago, and wrote about it, and I now know I’d done nothing of the kind. I’d skipped the anger and called the skip peace.
What actually frees you isn’t forgiving them. It’s letting yourself know what you know — the full weight of it — and then no longer needing anything from them. Not an apology. Not an acknowledgement. Not a change. Just the truth, held, and your life going on.
If forgiveness arrives after that, on its own, fine. If it doesn’t, you’re not failing at anything.
The apple tree
There’s an image I lean on when the old hope creeps back — the hope that they’ll finally see it, finally say it, finally be different.
Going to the apple tree every day and complaining that it isn’t giving you pears.
The tree isn’t withholding pears. It’s an apple tree. It has what it has, and it gives what it gives. Standing in front of it demanding something it doesn’t have isn’t hope; it’s a way of staying stuck at the tree. The only move that frees you is to accept what it is — apples, or fewer apples than you needed, or none — and go and find pears elsewhere.
That’s not bitterness. It’s accuracy. And accuracy is where the peace lives.
Why you keep hoping
There’s a reason the two lies are so hard to leave, and it’s tender.
Both of them keep a door open. The monster story keeps hoping they’ll finally admit it. The gratitude story keeps hoping that if you’re good enough, grateful enough, they’ll finally see you. Both are the child, still at the door, waiting for the adult to turn round.
Holding both truths closes that door — softly — and that’s a loss. It means accepting that the thing you needed isn’t coming from where you needed it. That’s real grief, and it deserves the name. Grief for a childhood you didn’t get. Grief for parents who couldn’t be what you needed, even while they tried.
Let it be grief. It’s the last of the honest feelings, and it’s the one that finally lets you stop waiting.
The children watching
If you have children of your own, there’s a version of this that runs the other way, and it’s the most hopeful thing I know.
You get to be the both-things parent. You’ll do your best and it won’t always be enough — you’ll snap, you’ll drift, you’ll get it wrong — and your children will feel it. And you can do the thing yours may never have done: notice, apologise, repair. I was short with you. That wasn’t fair. I’m sorry. Those sentences, said to a child, undo more than years of perfect behaviour would.
My children get apologies. I never did. That difference isn’t small. It may be the whole of what “both are true” was for.
What this means for contact
People assume “both are true” resolves into either reconciliation or cutting off. It doesn’t. It resolves into whatever is actually right for you, which is usually neither extreme.
For some, it’s a warmer relationship than before, because the resentment has gone. For some, it’s contact that’s real but limited — frequent enough, shallow by design, protected by boundaries that don’t need explaining. For some it’s distance. There’s no correct answer, only an honest one, and you get to decide it without their permission.
What changes is that the decision is yours now. Not a reaction to them. A choice about what you can hold, and what you can’t, and what you’re no longer willing to carry.
What it changes — and what it doesn’t
I’ll be honest about the limits, because I don’t want to sell you a resolution that isn’t there.
Holding both doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t give you the childhood you needed. It doesn’t make the tension in your body disappear on its own — that’s separate work, in the body, and it takes time.
What it changes is the fight. You stop swinging between the lies. You stop needing them to be different so you can be alright. And an enormous amount of energy that was going into the swinging — the anger, the guilt, the case-building, the excusing — comes back to you, to be used for your actual life.
The anger stage, properly
I skated over the anger above, and I shouldn’t, because it’s the stage people most want to skip and most need to have.
If you were taught that anger was bad — and most of us who struggle with this were — then anger at your parents will feel like a betrayal. Of them, and of the story that everything was fine. So you’ll want to rush past it to understanding. Don’t. The anger is the feeling that was never allowed in the house, finally being allowed. It has to have its turn, or it goes back into the stomach and waits.
Have it somewhere safe. Not at them — at a quiet room, with your eyes closed, letting the heat rise and pass. Write it, if that helps, and don’t send it. Let it be as big as it is. It will pass, and when it does, the compassion has somewhere to land that isn’t on top of a buried rage.
Excusing versus compassion
These look similar and they’re opposites. The difference is worth having precisely.
Excusing says: they had it hard, so it wasn’t really that bad. It shrinks your experience to protect theirs. It’s the gratitude lie doing its work.
Compassion says: they had it hard, AND it was that bad for me. It shrinks nothing. It holds their limits and your cost in the same hand.
You’ll know which one you’re doing by what happens to your own pain. If it gets smaller as you understand them, that’s excusing. If it stays its true size while you understand them, that’s compassion. Only the second one is restful.
Whether they’re here or gone
People ask if this changes when a parent has died, and it does — but not in the direction they expect.
If they’re gone, the fantasy of the conversation — the acknowledgement, the apology — is gone with them, and that can feel like a door closing. But the two lies were never about the conversation. They live in you, and they’re resolved in you, whether the other person can hear it or not. Holding both is entirely possible with someone who isn’t here. In some ways it’s simpler; there’s no one left to keep hoping will change.
If they’re still here, the work is the same, with one addition: you get to decide what kind of contact fits what you can hold. That’s not a punishment. It’s an honest answer.
A practice for holding both
Two minutes. Sit, breathe out longer than in.
Say the first half: they did the best they could. Notice what your body does — where it tightens, what it wants to argue. Stay a breath.
Say the second: and it wasn’t enough. Same — notice the reaction, the feeling that rises. Stay a breath.
Then both together, slowly. And just sit in the room with both true, for a minute, without resolving anything. It’ll feel odd the first few times, like holding two things that shouldn’t fit. They fit. That’s the point.
What “enough” would have looked like
It’s worth naming, because the word does a lot of work in that sentence. Enough wasn’t perfection. Enough was a child’s feelings being met more often than not; a house whose weather was mostly predictable; an adult who noticed. Small things, repeated. That they weren’t there isn’t a verdict on anyone’s character. It’s an accounting of what a child needed and didn’t get — and the accounting is yours to keep, whatever anyone else’s ledger says.
If you can only hold one half today
Some days you’ll only manage one of the two. That’s fine. Notice which one, and notice why.
If today you can only hold they did their best, the anger is probably tired, or frightened, and needs a rest. Let it rest. If today you can only hold it wasn’t enough, the compassion is probably being asked to arrive before you’ve finished feeling the cost. Don’t force it. The two halves come into balance over months, not sittings, and a day spent honestly in one half is still a day closer to holding both.
What I did with the anger
Since I’ve told you to have it, here’s where mine went, so you know it doesn’t have to go at anyone.
It went into a quiet room, on many afternoons, with my eyes closed and my breath out longer than in — heat in the chest, allowed to be there, allowed to be as big as it was. It went onto paper I never sent. It went into movement: walking hard, shaking it out, letting the body do what a body does with rage when it’s finally permitted. And it went, eventually, into tears, which is where anger often ends when it’s felt all the way through.
It never went at them. That’s not because I’m noble. It’s because the anger wasn’t really for them any more. It was for a child who’d never been allowed it, and he was the one who needed to feel it. Once he had, it was done.
The apology I stopped waiting for
For years there was a sentence I was waiting to hear. You’ll have yours. I’m sorry. I see what it did to you. I’d do it differently.
I stopped waiting the day I understood that the waiting was the last thing holding me at the door. The sentence wasn’t coming — not from unwillingness, necessarily, but because the person who’d need to say it wasn’t in a place to see it, and might never be. And I could either spend the rest of my life at the door or say the sentence to myself.
So I did. I’m sorry. I see what it did to you. I’ll do it differently. Said to the child I’d been, by the adult I’d become. It turned out he’d only ever needed it from one of us, and I was the one who was there.
Both true, in daily life
What does holding both look like on a Wednesday? Small things.
- You hear a story about them and feel the old flash of anger, and let it pass without building a case.
- You catch yourself excusing them and stop, and let your own experience be its actual size.
- You make a decision about contact based on what you can hold, not on guilt or revenge.
- You notice a habit of theirs in yourself, and instead of horror, something like understanding — and a quiet choice to do it differently.
- You feel grief, out of nowhere, for what you didn’t get, and you let it be grief.
None of it is dramatic. That’s how you know it’s the third position and not one of the lies. The lies are loud. The truth is quiet, and it holds.
Where to start
Not with them. With you.
Sit quietly and say the sentence, out loud if you can: they did the best they could, and it wasn’t enough. Notice which half your body argues with. That’s the half you’ve been denying. Let the feeling that comes with that half be there — the anger, or the grief, or the strange tenderness. Don’t resolve it. Just let both halves sit in the room.
Then do it again next week. This isn’t a decision you make once. It’s a position you return to, each time a little more settled, until one day it’s simply where you live.
If you’ve spent years trapped between blaming them and blaming yourself, none of that was weakness. You were handed a choice between two lies and told to pick, and it’s not your fault nobody said there was a third position. There is. It holds. And it’s the first place in this whole story where you get to rest.
That’s some of the deepest work inside The Way Home: weekly live guided journeys where the anger and the grief are allowed to move, meetings with the younger you who lived it, a library of practices for the hard days, short lessons on holding both, and a small community of people who’ve stopped swinging.
One line to keep, for the days the swinging starts again: both. At the same time. And I don’t have to pick. It’s the only sentence in this whole story that lets you rest, and it’s true.
It’s £27 a month. Cancel any month, in two clicks.
— Adam
This is guided practice for wellbeing. It is not therapy or medical care. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a doctor or a crisis line in your location today.