My brother and sister are angry with my parents. I feel caught in the middle. What can I do? | Family

My brother and sister are really angry with my parents. They say we had a terrible childhood because my father was often absent and my mother pitted us against each other to maintain control. There was a lot of discussion.

But that’s only half the story. I know my parents loved us all very much and tried to give us a good childhood. We always had homemade food and stories. Today, my parents try to make amends, but my brother and sister just don’t see it. They are so judgmental and to be honest I think they are a bit ungrateful. I feel caught in the middle. What can I do?

Eléonore says: Shouldn’t one of us be wrong? That’s the plea on both sides of a family disagreement like this, I think. One person says “it was totally unacceptable”, the other says “it wasn’t”; we know we can’t both be right, so disagreement feels like an accusation that we’re the ones seeing things incorrectly.

Sometimes when you try to talk about this impasse with other people, they fall back on “family things are all subjective.” That’s good, but it doesn’t go very far. The whole problem is that you and your siblings both feel like you’re telling the truth, the truth with fists. It was or was not acceptable parenting, just like it was raining or not raining yesterday. The facts from your childhood are important, which means it’s also important to be wrong.

One thing that can help break this impasse is to ask yourself whether you disagree about what happened or whether you disagree about how to weigh these elements in the moral accounting.

For example, do you think parents should be judged by whether they did their best or by what they actually did? Are we talking about degree of difficulty or absolute performance? Yes, they shouted this horrible thing, but how many jobs did they have? What support did they have, how hard was life for them, what knots in their heads did they inherit from their own parents?

Another big divide is whether we focus on what parents are today or what they were back then. Some people look at a memory from 20 years ago and see a blurry, sepia-toned moment, like an interaction between acquaintances we knew. Others view it in high resolution because the pain appears to have happened today.

And a really huge discrepancy is the extent to which you think you can participate in your parents’ evaluation. For some people, this is how important patterns and issues can be named. To others, it seems like hypocrisy or judgment.

This type of macroeconomic dispute may explain why the conflict seems so intractable. Your brothers and sisters say, “Don’t you see, they hurt us very badly. » You say, “Don’t you see, they were trying. » You both speak the truth, but neither feels heard; the cogs turn but do not come together.

You asked what you could do. One threat here is that you end up against each other again, whether by accident or not. To avoid becoming a middleman or conflict manager, you may want to choose phrases to repeat like a broken record on each side.

To your brothers and sisters; a sentence that expresses “I don’t agree with you” without saying “your memories are false”. Maybe something like: “I’m not asking you to forgive them, I’m just asking you to allow me to feel differently. »

And to your parents, something that expresses that you won’t relay messages or weigh in on conflicts, like: “I love you, I don’t want to be the referee.” » If you don’t produce any reactions other than these phrases when the topic comes up, you might find yourself in such a stalemate that they all stop trying to engage you.

The truth about any family is so long and complex that it is very difficult for one person to see it all at once, if ever. You and your siblings could each tell the truth about the parts you watch. If you want to maintain a relationship with everyone here, perhaps the trick is not to dispute events, but to say that you are allowed to evaluate them differently.

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