Dr. Lindsay Gibson

It's hard for them to imagine other people suffering.

So they just assume that if I'm over it, you should be over it, too.

because for them, reality is what they are feeling.

It's not a fact.

And they can be really dismissive and distorting and use a lot of denial when they hear things that they don't like.

I mean, nobody in the 40s, 50s was really thinking much about anything other than being a successfully functioning authority figure for your child and keeping a roof over their heads.

But even though they didn't intend to cause harm, I mean, far from it, they were doing the best job they could according to their knowledge, like you said, and according to what the cultural norms were.

I mean, everybody spanked their kids.

Everybody yelled at their kids.

It's just the way it goes.

But there's lots of love.

There's probably lots of love going on as well.

But when you have that kind of behavior that has full license to be reactive and authoritarian, it's not like it doesn't matter because they didn't intend it that way.

It doesn't matter that they were not trying to be mean or aggressive.

What matters is how it affected that child.

And that doesn't change according to the intent of the person who's doing the behavior.

So we have a lot of people living today that have had a lot of invalidating and emotionally harmful experiences from parents who love them dearly.

Yes.

You know, that's a factor of not knowing better and also having huge social and cultural support for being the authority figure who's not questioned.

Oh, that's an interesting question because one of the saddest things I've seen in my consulting room is someone who says, you know, I never had children because I didn't want them to have the same experience as I did.