Breaking the Silence: How to share your healing journey with your parents
Healing trauma is powerful work. And if you ever tried to share your journey, your insights, your pain, or your new boundaries with your parents or family, you probably already know: this is where speaking and standing in your truth can get really challenging.
Many of us come to a point where we start to see the dysfunctional patterns, unspoken rules, and the generational pain that has shaped our lives and identity. We often long to share these insights with those closest to us - to feel seen, to create understanding, maybe even to heal together and break the dynamics in our family system.
But often, instead of connection, we meet:
Emotional walls ("You’re too sensitive")
Defensiveness ("We did our best!")
Dismissal ("Why bring up the past?")
Or even painful rejection ("This is absolutely not true!")
In this post, I want to offer you a conversation toolkit: trauma-informed practices and phrases to help you stay connected to yourself, even in the most difficult family conversations. Breaking the cycle does not always have to look like dramatic confrontations, sometimes, it is simply speaking your truth calmly, setting a boundary, or choosing not to engage in old patterns.
Why These Conversations Feel So Hard
When you try to talk to your parents (or other family members) about childhood wounds or the impact of their actions, it is often your parents unhealed pain (trauma self) that responds and not their healthy, caring self.
Many parents carry their own unresolved trauma and when you speak about your feelings, insights and experiences this can easily trigger their emotional wounds.
Parents may feel shame, guilt, or helplessness when you bring up painful topics.
Defensiveness, denial, or shutting down are often protective mechanisms (survival strategies) our parents developed long ago and most of the time they may not have any other way to self-regulate when they feel confronted.
So if you have felt unheard, unseen, or invalidated in these conversations please know: this is not because your truth is not valid. It is because your parents’ system is protecting itself from feelings that they do not know how to face.
This is why having trauma-informed tools can help you navigate these talks in a way that protects your own nervous system, your truth, and your healing path, even when your parents are unable to fully meet you.
Common Challenges - And How To Respond From Your Healthy Self
When you try to talk about your healing or childhood wounds with your parents, there are a few patterns that frequently come up again and again.
Below, you will find some of the most common examples, as well as trauma-informed ways to respond, and sample phrases to help you stay connected to your truth, even when conversations get difficult.
1) When Your Parent Says: “You’re too sensitive”
This is a classic example of your experience being minimized or dismissed. Sentences like these can trigger your trauma self, the part of you that already feels unseen, unwanted or helpless. It can also bring up feelings of shame and self-doubt and may feel like deep rejection.
Why this happens: Parents who never learned emotional attunement (because of their own trauma) may shut down or zoom out (dissociate) when deep feelings are shared. By minimizing your feelings they protect themselves from feeling and confronting these difficult emotions. It is their way of numbing and avoiding discomfort.
Remember: Try to own your feelings, even if your parents cannot meet you emotionally. Your experiences are still valid. Acknowledging that our parents may not have the capacity to understand and attune to our experience is for many people a painful truth.
Phrases to support you:
“It hurts that you can’t meet me here, but I choose to stand in my experience anyway.”
“Even if this is uncomfortable, this is my truth, and it helps me to put words to it.”
2) When Your Parent Gets Defensive: “We did our best!”
This can hurt especially, because it shifts the focus to their intention and invalidates your pain. You may feel trapped between loyalty and truth.
Why this happens: Talking about the past can trigger guilt, shame, or helplessness in parents. Defensiveness is a survival strategy to shield themselves from these feelings and it also helps them avoid facing the impact of their actions.
Remember: Yes, often our parents may have done their best within the limits of what they knew, and at the same time many parents carried such deep, unresolved trauma that they were unable to meet their children with the care, safety, and love they needed. And in many cases their ‘‘best’’ still caused harm. Therefore, it is important to understand that these actions, their unhealthy or even toxic behavior come from their own survival and trauma self, that are parts inside them that remain unseen and unhealed.
Holding this both/and, meaning that your parents actions were based on their own unhealed pain, and that you carry real wounds from their actions can feel deeply challenging. But this perspective is often where true healing begins. It allows you to honor your pain fully while also acknowledging the cycle of generational trauma, even when your parents cannot face what they have done (or didn’t do) and how this affected you.
Phrases to support you:
“I understand this might be hard to hear. I’m not saying this to blame you, but to share how it affected me.”
“This isn’t about blaming, it’s about helping me understand myself better and expressing my feelings.”
“I know you did the best you could with what you knew then. And at the same time, I’m still working through some wounds and emotions that I need to give space to now.”
3) When You Hear: “You remember it wrong”
Hearing this can destabilize your sense of reality and also invalidate your lived experience. Your trauma self may feel confused, unseen, or even crazy.
Why this happens: When parents (or any other person) get defensive in these conversations, they usually react because they feel accused, blamed, or shamed. Their nervous system perceives your words as an attack, even if you are simply sharing your feelings. So they go either into fight mode (defend, argue, justify) or flight/freeze (shut down, withdraw, dismiss).
Remember: If you respond by trying to argue the facts, for example: "But you DID do that!", or "It really happened like this!", then you and your parent(s) may get locked in a power struggle over whose version of reality is correct. This often makes them even more defensive, and the conversation can easily escalate rather than being supportive. In these moments it can be helpful to try to shift from debating over what happened to staying grounded in your healthy self by sharing how a past experience made you feel (your internal truth and perception).
Instead of saying "You often ignored me when I was upset", which your parent(s) might deny, you can rather try saying: "As a child, I often felt very alone with my feelings and like I had no one to talk to." (this is your truth, and not an accusation).
Other phrases you can use:
“You may remember differently, but this is how I experienced it.”
“I’m not expecting you to remember everything the way I do. But I still need to process the impact of my personal experience.”
“I understand that this may feel uncomfortable or even threatening to hear and it’s okay if you can’t meet me in this conversation right now. But I’m going to honor what’s coming up for me.”
4) When you are blamed for “Digging up the past?”
You experience that your inner process and thoughts are dismissed with: “What’s done is done, why bring this up again?”. This can trigger feelings of hopelessness or even shame and guilt for speaking up.
Why this happens: Avoiding the past helps your parents to suppress painful feelings. This is their defense against feeling powerless about what happened and needing to acknowledge their role and responsibility in it.
Remember:
Your need to process and speak your truth is valid. You cannot change the past, but you can change how it is impacting you by acknowledging and processing your own trauma feeling and survival mechanisms.
Phrases you can use:
“I’m not digging it up, I’m trying to understand it, because it still affects me today.”
“This isn’t about getting stuck in old things, it’s about expressing what happened and how I felt. That’s part of my healing.”
“The past may be over, but it is still impacting me today. Putting words to my experience is my way of taking responsibility and showing up for myself.”
And while these phrases can support you to stay grounded during the conversation, it is equally important to care for your body and nervous system - before, during, and after. In the next section we will explore some self-care practices that can help you to stay anchored in your healthy self.
Self-Care Practices for Difficult Conversations
Sharing your healing journey or addressing unhealthy family patterns can be powerful, but it also can bring up old survival responses in you like, for example, the urge to fight, fix or please others when you do not feel seen or heard. Therefore, taking care of your own nervous system, your emotional safety, and your boundaries is essential.
Below, you will find a selection of self-care practices to support you before, during, and after difficult conversations. Remember that true healing is not just about speaking your truth, it is also about protecting your peace while you do so.
1) Use “I” Statements
Try to speak from your own experience using phrases like “I feel…,” “I experienced…,” “I need…”
How this can help:
Reduces the chance of triggering defensiveness in the other person
Keeps you centered in your truth
Supports your healthy self to stay present and clear
2) Set Your Intention Before You Engage
Pause before the conversation and ask yourself: “What do I truly want from this?” (To be heard? To set a boundary? To clarify something?)
How this can help:
Helps to prevent you from getting entangled in old family dynamics
Keeps you focused on your intention
Helps you to recognize when it it time to step back if the conversation is no longer healthy
3) Regulate & Ground Your Nervous System
Practice grounding before and after the conversation:
Feel your feet on the floor
Take some gentle and slow breaths
Place a hand on your heart or belly
Use a calming scent (e.g. essential oil) or object
How this can help:
Anchors you in the present
Soothes your nervous system so you can stay connected to your healthy self
Helps you to return to your healthy self more quickly if you get triggered
4) Try To Set Clear Boundaries
Connect with yourself prior to the conversation and identify what is okay for you and what is not. Be ready to say: “I need to pause here,” or “I’m not available for this kind of talk right now.”
How this can help:
Protects your energy and emotional safety
Prevents you from getting trapped in old, unhealthy patterns
Strengthens your self-trust and self-respect
5) Give Yourself Permission to Leave the Conversation
If you feel overwhelmed, dysregulated, or unsafe, you have the right to leave the conversation.
How this can help:
Reminds your nervous system that you are in control now
Breaks the trauma pattern of staying in unsafe situations to maintain connection at all cost
Validates that protecting your peace is more important than finishing the conversation
6) Have Support Ready
It can be a good idea to connect with a therapist, friend or other support person after the conversation.
How this can help:
Offers your system a safe place to land
Can support you to come back into regulation
7) Practice Self-Compassion
Try to speak to yourself kindly, especially if the conversation does not go the way you hoped. Try phrases like:
“This was hard, and I’m proud of myself for trying.”
“My feelings are valid, no matter how my parents responded.”
How this can help:
Strengthens the connection to your healthy self
Keeps you connected to your self-worth, even if you are met with rejection or denial
Gently rewires your nervous system toward more inner safety over time
If you have recognized yourself in these words, you are not alone. You are doing powerful healing work and even when family conversations feel hard, confusing, or painful, every little step you take to protect your peace, speak your truth, or care for your nervous system is a way of breaking old cycles.
Questions For Reflection:
Where in my life do I most long to be heard and seen right now?
How does my body feel when I imagine setting a boundary or speaking my truth?
I would love to hear what resonated with you and warmly invite you to share your reflections in the comments.
And if you would like to go deeper, whether it is exploring your trauma and survival responses, connect more deeply with your body or learn ways to regulate your nervous system, you are welcome to explore my offerings and reach out. I would love to support you on your journey.
Take good care of yourself.
Julia