You don’t owe your parents anything, anything at all

You don’t owe your parents anything, anything at all. Let me show you what I mean.

Even if they are the best parents in the world, you still don't owe them anything. Your parents chose to have you. Therefore, it’s their responsibility to raise you as best as they possibly can and be the best parents as they possibly can.

What’s going on when you have parents on one side, who are guilt-tripping extraordinaires?

They go to their kids, saying, “Why don’t you appreciate me enough? Do you know how much I sacrificed for you?” These are going to crush their kids. They think they would be able to get love from their kids by making their kids indebted. These are emotional hooks that get deeply ingrained into you, causing a lifetime pattern of self-doubt and insecurity.

If you don’t address this guilt tripping, this will keep showing in your life until you process it. You will second-guess yourself all the time, in everything that you do, until you start overcoming the anxiety you’ve always felt due to self-questioning and low self-esteem.

On the other side, you have parents who have never uttered any of those sentences in their entire lives.

Their kids feel completely in love with them, offering to care for their parents, without any manipulation during their childhood? Here, the kids’ feelings of love manifest into being in debt to their parents, a natural way. This is a result of good parenting, not the controlling type.

My story

I grew up in a culture marked by guilt-tripping, manipulation, and punishments, especially for children, who were expected to be “good” at all times. During my childhood, kids were supposed to be quiet, respectful, and stay put. I was constantly told I was lucky and that I needed to be grateful, because my parents were doing everything for us.

For them, parenting was a sacrifice. But I think their hardships during communism, along with overwhelming social expectations, shaped this approach to raising children.

I’m still unpacking many of my childhood experiences, working on being better myself, and healing those intergenerational traumas and inherited limiting beliefs.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my parents. I just want to love them for who they are, not solely for what they did for us, and not to such an extreme degree. Yet it’s all deeply ingrained in my consciousness: the need to call them every day, to always put them first, and so on. These patterns are embedded, always present, and I have to pay close attention to the inner dialogue in my mind so I can detach, identify triggers, and adjust behaviors that no longer serve me.

I’m doing my best to rewrite this paradigm because my kids deserve better, especially when it comes to emotional parenting.

Your turn:

- So, which type of love do you feel for your parents?

- Have you ever felt indebted in any way?

- Did you feel any toxic type of behaviour or just a natural flow of gratitude towards your parents?

Let me know in the comments, and if you like or want more personal stories, join my newsletter here.

Thank you so much for reading!

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