When Love and Pain Come From the Same Place

Most of us were not raised by perfect people. Some of us had parents who did their best and still fell short. Others had parents who caused real damage — through neglect, anger, addiction, or simply being absent when we needed them most. If you carry wounds from your childhood, you are not alone, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

So what does it mean to “honor” a parent who hurt you? It doesn’t mean pretending the harm wasn’t real. It doesn’t mean going back for more punishment. And it doesn’t mean you owe anyone a relationship that keeps costing you your peace. What it does mean is something harder and more personal — finding a way to carry your history without being crushed by it, and deciding for yourself what kind of person you want to be going forward.

The Difference Between Honoring and Excusing

Honoring a parent is not the same as excusing what they did. This distinction matters. When people say “you should honor your parents,” they sometimes mean “you should act like nothing happened.” That’s not honor — that’s denial. Real honor is more demanding than that.

To honor someone is to acknowledge them honestly. It means seeing them as a full human being — broken, limited, shaped by their own wounds — without erasing what they put you through. You can say “my father was a hard man who never showed affection, and that cost me something real” and still choose not to let bitterness run your life. Both things can be true at once.

This is not easy work. It asks you to hold two uncomfortable truths at the same time: that the people who were supposed to protect you failed you, and that you still have to build a life. Neither truth cancels the other out.

What Forgiveness Actually Is — and Isn’t

Forgiveness gets misunderstood constantly. People assume it means telling someone that what they did was okay, or that you’re willing to keep taking the same treatment. Neither is true. Forgiveness is not a gift you give to the person who hurt you. It’s something you do for yourself.

Viktor Frankl, writing from the experience of surviving Nazi concentration camps, observed that the last of human freedoms is the ability to choose one’s response to any given set of circumstances. Holding onto rage at a parent who will never change — or who is already gone — keeps you chained to them. It gives them continued power over your present life, long after the original injury.

Forgiving someone doesn’t mean you trust them again, or that you open the door to more harm. It means you stop letting the past take up the seat next to you everywhere you go. Some people arrive at this slowly, over years. Some never fully get there. That’s honest. The point is to keep moving in that direction, not to pretend you’ve already arrived.

Setting Limits Without Losing Yourself

If a parent is still in your life and still causing harm, honoring them does not mean absorbing that harm indefinitely. You are allowed to put distance between yourself and someone who hurts you — even a parent. Deciding how much access someone has to your time, your home, and your heart is not a betrayal. It’s basic self-respect.

What that looks like is different for everyone. For some, it means limiting visits to holidays only. For others, it means keeping phone calls short and surface-level. For a few, it means no contact at all, at least for a season. None of these choices are easy, and none of them come without grief. You may mourn the parent you needed and never had. That grief is real and it deserves space.

The goal is not to punish your parent or to win some old argument. The goal is to protect your own ability to function — as a son or daughter, yes, but also as a spouse, a parent yourself, a friend, a person. You cannot pour from an empty vessel. Whatever limits you set, set them calmly, consistently, and without cruelty.

Breaking the Chain

One of the most meaningful things you can do to honor your parents — even ones who failed you — is to refuse to pass their failures down. Many people who grew up with harsh, absent, or troubled parents eventually find themselves repeating those same patterns without meaning to. Not because they are bad people, but because it’s what they learned.

Stopping that cycle is hard, deliberate work. It means paying attention to your own behavior under pressure. It means asking, honestly, whether you’re becoming the kind of person your younger self needed. Whether you’re raising young kids or mentoring someone in your community, the way you show up for the people counting on you is a form of honor that speaks louder than any ceremony or obligation.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations that we should concern ourselves with what is in our control. You cannot go back and fix your childhood. You cannot force a parent to be who you needed. But you can choose, day by day, what kind of person you bring into the world.

Grieving What You Deserved

Before you can move forward, you may need to grieve. Not just the specific incidents, but the larger loss — the encouragement you didn’t get, the stability that wasn’t there, the apology that never came and may never come. That loss is real. Glossing over it with forced optimism doesn’t make you stronger. It just delays the reckoning.

Grief, when you actually let it move through you, has a way of loosening its grip. Many people find it helpful to speak with a counselor or therapist — not because something is wrong with them, but because some burdens are genuinely hard to carry alone. There is no shame in getting help with heavy things. It’s one of the more honest things a person can do.

Moving Forward

You don’t have to resolve everything to move forward. You don’t have to feel warmth you don’t feel, or offer closeness you’re not ready to give. What you can do — starting today — is decide that your story doesn’t end with what was done to you. Take one small step toward the person you want to be. That step, quiet and undramatic as it is, might be the most important thing you do all week.

Sources

• Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. 180 AD (approx.).
• Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. 1946.

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