Why criticising your parents feels wrong

and why it's actually one step to healing

I have noticed a moment that often comes up in my therapy room; it’s one that usually happens at the start of therapy, when we start to look closely at childhood. My client will be mid-sentence, describing a painful memory or an unfair dynamic from childhood and suddenly they’ll freeze.

The air in the room shifts; I can see their body language changing and seizing up. Usually what comes out next is something like, “I feel like I am betraying my family”, “but I really love them” or “I can’t complain, they gave me a roof over my head”.

Underneath that pause is a wave of guilt and shame. For many people, speaking honestly about their family (especially their parents) can feel like an act of high treason. Depending on how you were raised, or the belief system you grew up in, naming a family member’s flaws can feel genuinely sinful, wrong or dangerous.

If you have ever carried that knot in your stomach, I want you to know: looking at your family with honest, critical eyes is not an act of betrayal. It is often the first step toward true healing.

Let’s look at why this hurts so much to do, and why it’s so necessary.

The Invisible Rules of Survival

When we are children, our parents are our entire world. We rely on them for survival. To keep us safe, our brains are wired to protect our bond with our caregivers at all costs—even if that means suppressing ourselves. If something goes wrong, a child’s brain is much more likely to think, “I am bad,” than “my parent is struggling or making a mistake,” because self-blame provides the child with some control. It is easier to feel like you are the problem than to think your parents are unsafe or unstable. Children always look to parents for protection and safety.

As we grow up, those survival mechanisms harden into unspoken family rules and into our own internal rules we take well into adulthood. This is especially true in two types of family dynamics:

1. Enmeshed Families

In some families, boundaries don’t really exist. This is what is known as enmeshment; a state where personal boundaries are blurry, and everyone is expected to think, feel, and behave as a single unit rather than as individuals. It is not emotional closeness and intimacy but a lack of separation and respect for individual identity and autonomy.

In an enmeshed family, independence is viewed as a threat. If you start to develop your own separate identity, or if you point out a flaw in the system, it is treated as a rejection of the whole family.

2. Collectivist Cultures

In many cultures and tight-knit communities, family identity and community are collective rather than individualistic (these cultures are known as collectivist cultures). Your actions, your successes and your struggles reflect on the entire community. There is often a strong sense of safety, harmony, social cohesion and support in these communities. However, a byproduct can be a high-stakes environment where keeping up appearances becomes essential.

In this kind of structure, any criticism or grievance is treated as a secret that must never be uttered: even behind the closed doors of a therapy room. Doing so feels like exposing the family to shame.

Often, this hyper-vigilance around reputation and secrecy can be symptoms of intergenerational trauma. If your parents or grandparents experienced systemic oppression, poverty, war, or displacement, they learned that sticking together and keeping a united front was a matter of survival. That survival instinct gets passed down through the generations as a rigid mandate: protect the family reputation at all costs and never let outsiders see the cracks.

In collective cultures, this is the thought process going on behind the scenes: if someone knows what goes on behind closed doors it means our reputation will be diminished, which means we will be shunned in wider society, leading to the destruction of our family unit.

Having a good reputation and being accepted in the community is a survival tactic that kept families alive and prospering; shame functions as a way to keep social cohesion and harmony and, ultimately, is a tool of survival.

The legacy of all of this is that talking about the inner workings of your family feels shameful and is treated as shameful if it comes to light.

However, keeping things hidden is not helpful in the healing process—if we don’t understand the full picture, how will we know what we need to heal from?

Honest Curiosity is Not a Weapon

If you take one thing from this article it’s this: being honest about someone is not betrayal. Recognising a flaw is not the same as disrespecting someone.

Therapy is not about putting your family on trial; it’s not about disrespect or backbiting. It isn’t about cutting people off, ruining relationships or erasing the good things your family gave you. This can be hard to internalise; being honest is not the same as backbiting or gossiping—it’s about understanding yourself, your background and your development.

The goal of therapy is personal development and improving the connections in your life. But to improve a connection, you have to know what it’s actually built on.

Imagine trying to renovate a house without being allowed to look at the foundation. If you aren’t allowed to look underneath the surface and point out the cracked beams, you can’t fix the floorboards above it. Looking at the crack doesn’t mean you hate the house, or that you want to tear it down. It means you want it to be safe to live in.

Talking honestly about your family allows you to untangle their history from your future. It helps you see that your mother’s anxiety or your father’s emotional distance belonged to them—it wasn’t a reflection of your worth.

What Happens to the Relationship?

A common fear is that if you talk critically about your family, you will ruin your relationship with them forever.

The reality is that your relationships will change when you enter therapy, because you are changing. And isn’t that the goal? But change does not have to mean destruction.

• If a relationship is healthy and secure, it can handle the truth. True love doesn’t require blind, fragile loyalty. It allows for the complexity of holding two truths at once: “I love you AND it hurt me when you did that.”

• If a relationship is fragile or harmful, then yes, looking at it honestly might require you to set new boundaries to protect your well-being.

Acknowledging the flaws in your upbringing is actually an act of profound maturity. It allows you to move away from a childlike, idealised version of your parents and see them as they truly are: complicated humans who carry their own unhealed wounds. Nobody is perfect, and that’s ok!

You Don’t Have to Navigate This Alone

If you are carrying the weight of family loyalty, navigating these feelings can feel like walking through a minefield. It takes an immense amount of courage to speak the unspoken.

That is why working with a therapist who is culturally conscious and sensitive to these systemic pressures is so vital. A good therapist won’t push you to match an industrialised, individualistic ideal of “cutting ties.” Instead, they will help you honour your cultural roots and your love for your family, while still holding space for your individual truth and healing.

You are allowed to love your family and still speak honestly about the ways they hurt you. Both things can be true. And speaking that truth is where your freedom begins.