- Tension: Some people endure devastating hardships yet emerge without bitterness, while others remain stuck in justified anger.
- Noise: The belief that forgiveness means pretending harm didn’t happen or that parents meant well.
- Direct Message: True freedom from bitterness comes from accepting that those who hurt us were doing their limited best.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
I’ve watched two clients from the same devastating childhood turn into completely different adults.
One carries a kind of lightness that seems impossible given what they survived. The other remains locked in a battle with ghosts — angry, justified, and somehow frozen at the age when the damage was done.
The difference between them isn’t denial or positivity or even therapy, though therapy helped. It’s something more fundamental that I’ve seen play out in my practice dozens of times.
The weight we choose to carry
During my twelve years in clinical practice, I kept encountering this pattern. Two clients with remarkably similar histories — neglect, emotional abandonment, sometimes outright abuse — would sit in my office carrying their pasts in completely different ways. One would be stuck in loops of rage and grief, cataloging every betrayal, every failure of care. The other would describe the same kind of childhood with a kind of clear-eyed acceptance that wasn’t minimizing or excusing, just… settled.
The angry ones weren’t wrong. Their parents had failed them in real, damaging ways. Their childhoods had been legitimately difficult. But being right about the damage wasn’t helping them heal from it.
The ones who had found peace weren’t in denial either. They could name exactly what had happened to them. They understood the clinical vocabulary — attachment disruption, emotional neglect, parentification. They weren’t pretending their childhoods had been fine. But somewhere along the way, they had made a specific internal decision that the angry ones couldn’t quite reach.
What the decision actually is
The decision is deceptively simple and almost impossible to force: accepting that the people who hurt us were doing the best they could with what they had.
I know how that lands. When I first encountered this idea in my training, I wanted to argue with it. How could a parent who ignored their child’s emotional needs be doing their best? How could someone who chose addiction over parenting be trying their hardest? The whole framework felt like it was letting harmful people off the hook.
But here’s what I learned, both in my practice and in my own therapy: accepting someone was doing their best doesn’t mean their best was good enough. It doesn’t mean it didn’t damage you. It doesn’t mean you deserved what you got. It just means recognizing that people can only give from what they have.
A parent who grew up with their own attachment wounds, who never learned to recognize or respond to emotional needs, who was raised by people who were themselves emotionally absent — that parent literally doesn’t have the internal resources to provide what their child needs. They’re not withholding something they possess. They’re failing to give something they never received and never developed.
Psychology Today notes that “Resilience is the psychological quality that allows some people to be knocked down by the adversities of life and come back at least as strong as before.” But what creates that resilience isn’t positive thinking or denial — it’s this fundamental shift in how we understand the failures we experienced.
Why some people can’t make this shift
The clients who remained stuck in bitterness often had one thing in common: they needed their parents to have been capable of choosing differently. The story they told themselves required villains who knew better but chose to harm anyway. Because if their parents genuinely couldn’t have done better, what did that mean about the randomness of their suffering? What did it mean about the fantasy that somewhere, somehow, they could have been properly loved if only their parents had tried harder?
There’s a strange comfort in anger. It maintains a connection, even if that connection is forged from rage. It preserves the belief that our parents had something to give and chose not to give it. That’s easier to bear than accepting they were empty-handed from the start.
I had a client once who spent two years furious at her mother for never protecting her from her father’s rages. Then one day she said, “I realized my mother was terrified too. She was a scared kid in an adult body, raised by people who taught her that keeping quiet meant staying safe. She wasn’t choosing not to protect me. She didn’t know protection was possible.”
That shift — from “she wouldn’t” to “she couldn’t” — changed everything. Not overnight, but fundamentally.
The difference between acceptance and forgiveness
This isn’t about forgiveness in the traditional sense. You don’t have to forgive someone to accept they were doing their best. You don’t have to maintain a relationship with them or pretend the damage didn’t happen. You can hold both truths: what they did hurt you profoundly, and they were operating at the limit of their capacity.
Some of my clients who made this shift never spoke to their parents again. Others maintained careful, boundaried contact. A few found their way to closer relationships, though those were rare. The decision about contact was separate from the decision about acceptance.
What changes when you accept people were doing their best is that you stop waiting for them to apologize for being someone different than who they were. You stop needing them to see what they did. You stop requiring them to have been capable of more. The battle ends not because you’ve won or lost, but because you’ve recognized you’ve been fighting someone who was never equipped for the fight you needed them to show up for.
Living with the decision
I’ll be honest — I’ve made this shift in some relationships and not in others. Knowing the clinical framework, understanding the theory, doesn’t make it automatic. There are still people from my past whose limitations I can’t quite accept as the best they could do, even though intellectually I know it must be true.
But where I have managed this acceptance, the relief is profound. Not happy-ending relief, not everything-is-okay relief, but the relief of putting down a weight I didn’t realize I was carrying. The exhaustion of needing someone to have been different than they were capable of being — that’s what lifts.
The people I’ve known who carry no bitterness after genuinely hard lives aren’t special or enlightened. They’ve just reached this particular understanding: everyone is doing the best they can with the tools they have, even when that best is destructive, even when those tools are broken. They’ve stopped requiring the past to have been different. They’ve stopped needing people who hurt them to have been capable of not hurting them.
What this means for us
If you’re reading this and feeling resistance, that’s normal. If you’re thinking about all the reasons why the person who hurt you absolutely could have done better, I understand. This isn’t something you can force or fake. It’s not something you should feel guilty about not being able to do.
But if you’re tired of carrying the weight of old anger, if you’re exhausted from the battle with people who aren’t even fighting back anymore, maybe there’s something here worth sitting with. Not accepting their behavior was okay. Not pretending you weren’t damaged. Just considering that maybe, in their own limited, broken way, they were doing the only thing they knew how to do.
The decision isn’t about them anyway. It never was. It’s about whether we want to keep waiting for people to have been different, or whether we’re ready to work with the reality of who they were. One keeps us tethered to a past that can’t change. The other lets us finally, fully, inhabit our own lives.
