a lot of children - especially mentally ill children - end up traumatized not because someone was specifically hurting them but because their needs weren’t being met, or because their problems weren’t being seen, or because they were rendered particularly vulnerable by other aspects of their identity, like queerness or race.
and it can be hard to look at your childhood and go “I was hurt” and also know that the hurt wasn’t deliberate. it’s uniquely painful to not have someone to blame.
you do not have to excuse the people who hurt you, even if it was unintentional. & acknowledging your own pain does not necessarily entail blaming them for it.
you are allowed to do what you need to do in order to recover.
Also:
“they did the best they could/with what they had” and “it wasn’t (good) enough” are two things that can and must be true at the same time
This is something, at thirty, I'm grappling with and helping my mother grapple with. She had a lot of her own trauma and needs that weren't met and she didn't have the language or resources to know what to do.
It might not be exactly what OP meant, but I think of it like this. If someone put a gun to my head and told my tone-deaf mother to sing a perfect scale, she couldn't do it. I could die because she couldn't but that wouldn't be her fault. Even if I got shot, it wouldn't be her fault, and yet the hurt to me would also be real.
So who do we blame? Each other? Her father? His father? A system that taught my family to deal with everything by pushing it down and drinking and hoping for the best. Wearing themselves to the bone to be "worth something" and burning out or dying by middle age.
Sometimes, everything is bad and breaking the cycle doesn't mean turning your back on your family or their mess. It can mean turning to finally face it and see it for what it is.
