I once was trying to advocate to a friend that she should experiment with puppy parenting before she tried on a human kidlet. Puppies can be left at home alone, from day one, I argued. They’re generally already walking before you bring them home. Oh! And you can potty train them in a couple of weeks, I went on; my son was almost three before he got it together. 

Human children rely upon their parents, with life or death stakes, for a really, really long time, compared with other mammals. Years. 

And maybe it’s precisely because we once relied on them for life and death. Or because in the earliest stages of our nervous systems’ wiring process, if they neglect us (regardless of why), it feels like we’ll die, and if they smother us, it feels like we’ll suffocate. And so those feelings linger and transfer over to other relationships, well into adulthood.

Maybe it’s that. Or some combination. Jung had some ideas. Freud did, too. 

Because of all of these things and some I’ve omitted, we give our parents a very outsized character role in the narrative of our lives. We attribute our traits to them, good and bad, silly and grave. We ascribe our relationship dynamics, bad habits and unhealthy food fetishes to them, too. And even if we’re not the type to blame them for our life’s story arc, per se, we still talk about the things they said to us one time or a million times, the dynamics of their own love relationship(s), and the way they felt and talked about their bodies, our bodies, our smarts and their hopes, dreams and disappointments in us as pivotal moments in defining who we are and how we live.

When we start the work of trying to heal our lives, and resolve unfinished childhood business, we often remark on these things. We spot these moments, and we may realize how our feelings of smothering or abandonment are still playing out, 50 years later, in every relationship. This might all be very fair and true. But also, we often do this analysis thinking of the people who spawned us, raised us or failed us as Our Parents, an archetype that looms so large in our minds that we have collectively assigned completely impossible standards to their behavior. 

A wise man I was talking with a few days ago told me how he, too, had felt so much vicarious pain when he evaluated his parents’ lives and some of what he judged to be their dysfunctional patterns of relating. He was clear that his own approach to relationships had largely been defined by trying to avoid doing what his parents did. He told me how, on the way home from the holidays one year, he had a flash of insight: that his parents were just regular people. 

That they didn’t have any special magic or supernatural ability to somehow be better at relationships than every other person he knows just by virtue of the fact that they were His Parents. 

That they had actually had very understandable, valid to them at the time, reasons for making the choices they’d made, throughout their lifetimes. 

Somehow, recasting his parents from that role into the roles of regular person #1 and regular person #2—flawed and beautiful and wounded like all of the rest of us—made him feel much more ease, softness and compassion toward his parents, from that moment on. 

When they weren’t being held to a mythical, capital P “Parent” standard, they were just people, doing the best they could with what they had and where they’d been. What he said reminded me of something I read once which I interpreted to this effect: if we are able to do personal growth work, read self-help books, attend workshops and be conscious livers of life, our parents were good-enough. Full-stop. Is every parent good enough? No. Plenty of people had parenting or other traumas that prevent them from being able to live what we think of as a conscious life. 

But most of ours were. Even a lot of the really bad ones. Seriously, even some of the abusive ones, including parents like mine who operated out of fear and love, giving my brother and I some incredible opportunities, making extraordinary sacrifices, and also inflicting all sorts of damage. They were good enough.

When I learned about the concept of the Good Enough Parent was when I realized that our parents are people, too. And they have their own emotional wounds. And their parents did, too. And that all human beings leave childhood with wounds from their parents, as a result. And most importantly, that it’s possible and even probably healthy to hold in the same space a compassion for my younger self and her wounds and hurts and the sense that my parents were actually doing the best they could with what they had, wounds included. 

To think of your parents, flaws and all, abuses and all, irresponsibilities and all, as Good Enough does not mean you ignore, deny, repress, sublimate or otherwise sweep your very real history under the rug or submerge it below a happy-all-the-time veneer. It doesn’t mean you forget or revise history. 

It doesn’t mean they never hurt us, and it certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t spend some time healing and integrating historical hurts. It doesn’t mean you don’t get to stop cycles, stop bad behavior or draw boundaries with them now. It doesn’t even mean that you shouldn’t or can’t talk things through with your parents. Or flat-out confront them, in some cases. Whether and when to do this is an individual decision. For me confrontation and rehashing has mostly been helpful when self-expression (vs. expecting an apology, or changing your parents) is the sole objective of the conversation. 

But the concept of the Good Enough Parent does suggest one very powerful takeaway: that nothing in our parentage is indelibly harming. I know this is a very difficult concept for some of us. It was once for me. But at some point I realized that in holding onto this belief or habitual thought that I’d been broken in some way by my parents, I was really just arguing for my limitations, holding fast to the belief that my life had to be hard in some way, no matter how joyful and delightful it was actually inclined to be.

So, now, I stand behind this statement, even if you disagree. If you can read this—if you are reading this—then your parents were Good Enough. And if you had Good Enough Parents, there’s no emotional wound beyond healing, no trigger we can’t pull out, or dissolve. Acknowledging the hurts of the past. And seek, aggressively, to heal them. But at the same time, acknowledge that enough went right in your upbringing that your childhood challenges were preparations, possibly painful ones, but preparation nonetheless, for your greatness at whatever you were put here to do.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. But I wrote this post on Day 18 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.