It can be an incredibly liberating experience to realize that you’re not to blame for your parents’ failure to show up for you in your childhood, and that you have the power to liberate yourself now from a past you did not create. Then, out of that liberation, you can begin taking responsibility for your behavior going forward, what we clinicians call agency. As one parent put it, “I’m not to blame for what happened to me. But I am responsible for what I do now.”
