- Tension: Waiting for a parent’s apology feels like holding onto hope, but it can quietly become the thing that holds healing back.
- Noise: The cultural conflation of apology, forgiveness, and closure obscures a harder truth — healing doesn’t require the other person to go first.
- Direct Message: Stopping the wait isn’t giving up on what you deserved — it’s reclaiming the attention that the waiting had been consuming all along.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
There is a particular kind of waiting that doesn’t feel like waiting at first. It looks more like staying hopeful. Like leaving a window open in winter because you’re certain someone is still coming, only to notice, years later, that the cold has just become part of the room.
That’s how a lot of people describe what it was like to wait for a parent to say sorry. Not dramatic. Just present. The expectation becoming so familiar they stopped noticing how much space it was taking up.
I’ve talked with many people over the years about their relationships with parents who never apologized. A parent who dismissed them, diminished them, or hurt them in significant ways and never acknowledged it. What I kept hearing, again and again, was not that they had given up hope. It was something quieter. Most of them had eventually stopped waiting. And that shift, it turns out, was the beginning of something real.
Why the apology doesn’t come
The easy explanation is that some parents are simply oblivious.
But as Iskra Fileva, Ph.D., a philosopher at the University of Colorado Boulder, explored in a 2023 Psychology Today piece, the reality is usually more complicated. She writes: “if the person who hurt us insists on not having done anything wrong, there is always a question about whether we are owed an apology. Closure is difficult.” Some parents see apologizing to a child as an undermining of their authority. Others appear to believe that providing financially, or simply showing up, purchases a kind of moral immunity. And some genuinely cannot bring themselves to say the words, not because they don’t know what they did, but because shame has locked the admission somewhere they can’t reach.
That last group is more common than people expect. Fileva describes cases where a parent privately acknowledges wrongdoing to a third party but never to the child they hurt. She notes: “Some parents who never say ‘I am sorry’ quietly and truly are.” That doesn’t make the silence any less painful. What it can change is the story you tell yourself about what the silence actually means.
What the wait was really about
People in these conversations were not only waiting for the words. They were waiting for their version of events to be confirmed. Waiting to feel less alone in what had happened to them. Waiting for proof that what they remembered was real.
The mind is good at preserving hope when the stakes are high. Adult children often describe reinterpreting a parent’s behavior in the most charitable possible light. Not because they’re in denial, but because the alternative, accepting that the person who was supposed to protect them simply wasn’t going to, required a kind of grief they weren’t ready for.
That’s why the absence of an apology can feel so disorienting. It isn’t only that no one said sorry. It’s that no one said: yes, that happened. In her book Why Won’t You Apologize?, therapist Harriet Lerner makes the case that what hurt people are actually seeking goes beyond the word sorry. They want their experience confirmed as real. They want the person who caused the pain to acknowledge what happened and that it mattered.
When a parent refuses to give that, whether out of shame, pride, or a sincere belief that nothing wrong occurred, the child is left holding the story alone. That can be a surprisingly heavy thing to carry, especially across decades.
I’m not a psychologist, and nothing here is intended as therapeutic advice. If what you’re reading is landing closer to home than expected, speaking with a therapist is something genuinely worth considering.
When people stopped waiting
Most people couldn’t name an exact moment. It wasn’t a decision made consciously. It tended to happen gradually, a slow reorientation toward something other than the parent’s response.
For some, a significant life event was the turning point: a child of their own, a loss, a long period in therapy. Something shifted their attention away from what they hadn’t received and toward what they were building themselves. For others, it was exhaustion. A recognition that the waiting had become the biggest thing in the room, and that the room didn’t have to be arranged around it anymore.
Dr. Sharon Martin, an LCSW who works with adult children of dysfunctional families, writes: “Freedom begins when you stop waiting for someone else to give you permission to heal.” That isn’t resignation. It’s actually the opposite.
The moment the room rearranged itself
The apology was never just about the words. It was about having your reality confirmed by the person who denied it. Letting go of the wait means finding that confirmation somewhere the parent was never going to provide it — inside yourself.
What it looked like in practice
Stopping the wait did not mean the relationship was fine. Many people described maintaining a functional relationship with their parent while simultaneously having let go of any expectation of accountability. They held both things at once. The relationship could continue without the apology that would have made it feel complete.
It didn’t mean forgiveness, either. The two things get conflated constantly, and separating them matters. Forgiveness is its own process, and nobody owes it on anyone else’s timeline. What most people described was something closer to acceptance: a recognition that the apology probably wasn’t coming, and that their healing didn’t require it to arrive first.
A few people noticed something else once they stopped: how differently they saw the relationship as a whole. The thing they had been waiting for had also been acting as a kind of lens through which everything else got interpreted. Without it, some things improved. Some things simply became what they were, which was its own kind of clarity.
The grief didn’t disappear. Most people still carried something, a quiet sadness about the relationship they had wanted and hadn’t gotten. What changed was less about the pain itself and more about where their attention was going. The waiting had consumed a lot of it. When it stopped, that energy went somewhere else.
What struck me most across all of these conversations was how rarely “stopped waiting” meant “stopped caring.” Most people still loved their parent, in complicated and imperfect ways. Most still wished they had been seen differently. The shift wasn’t about erasing that wish. It was about recognizing that the wish no longer had to run the relationship.
If this is something you’re sitting with, talking to a therapist is worth more than any article on the subject.
