Heal before you pass it on - by Thatdarkwriter

I was having a conversation with someone recently about parenting and parenthood, and I came to a conclusion that I feel is somehow always overlooked. One of the major reasons so many of us walk around today carrying childhood trauma is because we have parents who never healed. You should not think about having children until you have healed from the things that hurt you. Having a child is more than giving birth or providing food, shelter, and education. A child is also shaped by the emotional environment they grow up in. And sometimes, without even realizing it, we pass our unresolved pain, insecurities, fears, anger, and unhealthy patterns down to our children. You may have grown up experiencing things that hurt you deeply, and none of that was your fault. But when you become a parent, you have a responsibility to become aware of those wounds and work through them, so your child does not have to carry what was never theirs to carry. And no, healing does not mean becoming a perfect person before having children. Nobody is perfect. Healing means being willing to understand yourself, confront your wounds, unlearn unhealthy behaviours, take accountability, and seek help when you need it. Because honestly, you have no right to bring a child into this world and then make them feel like they are the reason you went through everything you suffered in the past. You have no right to dump your unresolved trauma on a child and then call it parenting. Do not bring a child into this world only to make them carry the weight of your childhood. Do not create another person who has to spend years healing from the very home that was supposed to be their safe place. You go around trying to “make yourself a better version of your parents,” only to somehow become worse than them. “I don't want my child to live the way I did.” Yet you do things that make your child think, Maybe living the way my parent did would have been better. “I don't want you to make the same mistakes I did.” Yet somehow, we already feel like the mistake. That is the part that makes me angry. You become so focused on making sure your child does not repeat your mistakes that you fail to realize that you are becoming the very thing you were trying to protect them from. You are so focused on not becoming your parents that you don't notice when you have become someone your own children are afraid of. Someone they cannot talk to. Someone they cannot be vulnerable around. Someone they cannot stand being in the same room with. I have friends who cannot stay in the same room as their parents. I have friends who carry so much anger and hurt that forgiving their parents feels impossible. I have friends who don't even want to have families of their own because they are terrified of “ending up like my parents.” And all of this because they were unfortunate enough to have parents who were still living through their own childhood trauma while convincing themselves that they had already overcome it. Your children are not your therapists. They are not your second chances at reliving your childhood. They are not responsible for fixing what your parents broke in you. If you know you are carrying wounds, deal with them. If you know you have unhealthy patterns, unlearn them. If you know you are struggling, seek help. There is absolutely no shame in admitting that you need to heal. But please, for the love of everything, do not make a child pay for a childhood they never lived. Heal. Learn. Grow. Break the unhealthy cycles. Because having children does not automatically mean you have broken the cycle. Sometimes, you are the cycle. And until you are willing to face that, you are only passing the pain forward. When the time comes, let your children inherit something better than your trauma. Let them receive the healthier version of the love you once needed.

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