Acceptance Without Approval: Can We Move Forward When We Remember the Past Differently?
Part Five of Breaking the Silence: Understanding Modern Family Estrangement
One of the things I find most interesting about family relationships is that two people can experience the same family, the same household, and sometimes even the exact same event, and walk away with fundamentally different understandings of what happened.
And both can genuinely believe their version is accurate.
This isn't exclusive to the relationship between parents and adult children, either. Ask three siblings what their childhood was like, and you may get three entirely different answers.
The oldest child may remember having their parents' undivided attention, but also carrying the weight of their parents' fears, anxieties, and expectations. The second child may remember parents who were a little more relaxed, but whose attention was now divided. By the time the third child comes along, those parents may be operating under entirely different circumstances.
And that's before we even begin accounting for differences in temperament, emotional needs, family roles, financial circumstances, or what was happening in the parents' lives during each child's upbringing.
We don't all get the same version of our parents, even when we grow up in the same house.
So why, when we become adults, do we expect everyone in the family to remember our shared history exactly the same way?
For You, It Was Tuesday. For Me, It Changed Everything.
I think one of the greatest challenges in navigating family estrangement is that we often become so invested in establishing whose version of events is correct that we lose sight of what we're actually trying to accomplish.
A parent may say, "That's not what happened."
An adult child may respond, "That's exactly what happened."
And suddenly, instead of having a conversation about the hurt that exists between them, we're holding a trial about something that happened 20 years ago.
Sometimes the disagreement really is about the facts. Other times, it's about the meaning someone took away from an interaction.
A parent might not remember the exact words they used. They may not even remember the conversation. But their child remembers how small they felt, how frightened they were, or what they came to believe about themselves afterward.
And those things matter.
Children don't experience communication through words alone. They experience our tone, our facial expressions, our body language, our availability, and the emotional environment surrounding an interaction.
Sometimes what we intended to communicate and what our children actually received are two very different things.
And sometimes, what was an ordinary Tuesday for a parent becomes something their child carries for decades.
A Personal Example
When I was around 13 or 14, my older brother, who was struggling significantly with addiction at the time, wanted to move back home.
My mother and stepfather were away on vacation. My biological father was staying with me while they were gone.
My brother called my mother asking to come home, and rather than making that decision herself, she called me and asked whether I wanted him to return.
I said no.
I loved my brother, but I was also a child who frequently felt unsafe when he was home. He stole my belongings, brought drugs into our shared living spaces, and his addiction had created circumstances that I wasn't equipped to navigate.
My mother's response was that I needed to tell him.
So I did.
I was a child telling my adult brother, who was intoxicated and crying hysterically, that he couldn't come home.
Later that night, he was struck by a vehicle on the side of the road and nearly died. He sustained a traumatic brain injury and had to relearn many basic functions, including walking, talking, reading, and eating.
And I carried the guilt of that accident for years.
I believed that because I had told him he couldn't come home, what happened to him was somehow my fault.
Years later, when my mother learned that I had blamed myself, she was genuinely baffled. She couldn't understand why I would have made that connection.
But that's precisely the point.
For her, the conversation may have been an inconvenient parenting decision that she delegated while she was away.
For me, it became an experience that fundamentally shaped how I understood responsibility, guilt, and my role within my family.
We experienced the same situation very differently.
And I don't need her to have experienced it the way I did for my experience to have been real.
I also don't need to believe she intended to cause me that kind of pain to recognize that asking a child to carry an adult responsibility had consequences.
Both things can be true.
Intentions Don't Erase Impact
I use a car accident analogy frequently in my clinical work because I think it helps remove some of the emotional defensiveness that accompanies these conversations.
Most of us don't get into our cars intending to cause an accident.
We don't leave the house hoping to damage someone else's vehicle, injure another person, increase our insurance premiums, or spend the next several weeks dealing with repairs and transportation arrangements.
But accidents happen.
And when they do, we still have to deal with the consequences.
We may have to repair our vehicle. We may be responsible for damage to someone else's property. We may need to navigate insurance claims, medical appointments, or other complications.
None of those responsibilities disappear simply because we didn't intend for the accident to happen.
Family relationships are no different.
You may not have intended to hurt your child. You may genuinely have believed you were doing the best you could. You may have been parenting with limited resources, unresolved trauma, financial instability, or an entirely different understanding of what good parenting looked like.
All of that context matters.
But context does not erase impact.
And acknowledging impact doesn't necessarily mean agreeing that every decision you made was wrong.
Sometimes accountability is simply being able to look at someone you love and say, "I genuinely had no idea that was how you experienced that. I'm sorry that you carried that pain, and I wish I had recognized it sooner."
That is very different from dismissively saying, "Well, I'm sorry you feel that way."
One invites connection. The other often communicates that the problem belongs entirely to the person who was hurt.
Maybe You Don't Need to Be Understood. Maybe You Need to Be Heard.
We talk a lot about wanting our families to understand us.
But I'm not entirely convinced that understanding is always what we're looking for.
I think sometimes we simply want to be heard.
I don't need you to have experienced my childhood the way I did. I don't need you to have the same emotional reaction to something that happened. I don't even necessarily need you to agree with every interpretation I've made.
What I need is for you to stop telling me that my experience is wrong simply because it was different from yours.
Think about eyewitness accounts.
Five people can witness the same event and provide five different descriptions. Some details will overlap. Others won't. Each person brings their own perspective, attention, expectations, and previous experiences into what they notice and later remember.
Our memories are not perfect recordings of our lives.
That doesn't mean every account is equally factually accurate, or that serious allegations of abuse should be accepted without question. There is an important distinction between acknowledging someone's emotional experience and admitting to conduct that did not occur.
But many family disagreements aren't about whether a particular act of physical or sexual abuse occurred.
They're about conversations, emotional availability, perceived favoritism, unmet needs, expectations, and the messages people internalized over years of living together.
And in those situations, repeatedly telling someone that they shouldn't have experienced something the way they did rarely moves a relationship toward repair.
You don't have to share someone's perspective to sit with them in their pain.
Sometimes the most meaningful thing we can offer someone we love is our willingness to listen without immediately correcting, defending, explaining, or trying to fix what they're telling us.
Your Best May Not Have Been Enough. That Doesn't Mean It Wasn't Your Best.
This is where I think both parents and adult children can become stuck.
Parents want their children to recognize what they sacrificed.
Adult children want their parents to recognize what they experienced.
And both are waiting for validation from someone who is also waiting to be validated.
I hear parents talk about everything they gave up to provide for their children, the hours they worked, the opportunities they missed, and the circumstances they endured.
And those sacrifices may have been significant.
But our children didn't ask us to have them.
My children didn't get a vote in the sacrifices I chose to make to provide the life I believe they deserve. Those were my decisions as their parent.
It would be unreasonable for me to turn around decades later and expect them to carry responsibility for those choices.
At the same time, adult children eventually become responsible for their own lives.
Your childhood may have made adulthood significantly more difficult. You may have experienced things you never should have experienced. You may have inherited relational patterns, emotional wounds, and responsibilities that were never yours to carry.
You didn't choose those experiences.
But at some point, you do have to choose what you're going to do with them.
You can be angry about what happened. You can grieve what you didn't receive. You can recognize that your parents contributed to difficulties you're still navigating.
And you still have a responsibility to participate in your own healing.
Both things can be true.
I often compare this to running a race.
I can train as hard as possible, show up, give everything I have, and still finish dead last.
I did my best.
My best simply wasn't enough to win the race.
Parenting can be similar.
You may have done the absolute best you could with the resources, knowledge, and circumstances you had available. And your child may still have experienced significant emotional pain or unmet needs.
Recognizing that reality doesn't invalidate your effort.
But your effort doesn't invalidate their experience, either.
Acceptance Is Not Approval
Acceptance is one of those concepts that sounds relatively simple until we actually have to practice it.
In adult family relationships, I think acceptance often means recognizing who someone is, what they're capable of offering, and what we're willing to participate in given the reality of that relationship.
Not the relationship we wish we had.
Not the relationship we believe we should have had.
The relationship that actually exists.
Sometimes people come into therapy describing everything they want their parent, adult child, or another family member to become.
And I'll ask them a question:
"Have you ever seen this person show up for anyone in the way you're asking them to show up for you?"
More often than not, the answer is no.
They're asking someone to become a person they have never demonstrated the capacity to be.
That doesn't mean people cannot change. I fundamentally believe in people's capacity for change. I wouldn't do this work if I didn't.
But we cannot build our entire emotional well-being around the expectation that someone else will eventually become who we need them to be.
And this is where boundaries become important.
Boundaries are not about controlling another person's behavior.
They're about determining what I am and am not willing to participate in, and what I will do when those limits are reached.
I don't need to change your beliefs, your personality, or your perspective to establish a boundary.
I can tell you that certain conversations or behaviors are not something I'm willing to engage in. You can decide how you want to show up, and I can decide how I will respond.
Ideally, we find a middle ground that allows us to maintain the relationship.
But acceptance doesn't mean I have to continue exposing myself to harmful behavior simply because I've accepted that it's part of who someone currently is.
Are You Here to Be Right, or Are You Here to Have a Relationship?
This is a question I think more families need to ask themselves.
Because sometimes you cannot have both.
If your goal in family therapy is to make another person admit that your version of the past is the only correct one, we're probably going to have a difficult time moving forward.
And that applies to both sides.
Parents cannot come into the process expecting their adult children to acknowledge every sacrifice while refusing to consider how their parenting affected them.
Adult children cannot come into the process expecting their parents to accept responsibility for every difficulty they've experienced in adulthood while refusing to examine their own patterns, choices, and contributions to the current relationship.
We're not here to hold a trial.
We're here to determine whether you can build something different.
That doesn't mean ignoring serious harm, excusing abuse, or pretending that factual disagreements don't matter.
It means recognizing that repeatedly litigating the past may not be enough to create the relationship you say you want in the future.
And sometimes the work that needs to happen isn't family therapy at all.
Sometimes it's individual therapy.
Because even when a family member acknowledges our experience, nothing they say can change the fact that we lived through it.
We still have to learn how to integrate those experiences into our lives without allowing them to dictate every emotional reaction, relationship, or decision we make moving forward.
That may involve trauma-focused approaches such as EMDR, Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART), or somatic work, depending on the individual's needs.
We need to be able to return to family interactions without automatically falling into the same roles and reactions we've occupied for decades.
And we need to be willing to allow the other person to show up differently, too.
That's often the part people forget.
We Cannot Rebuild a Relationship by Recreating the One That Brought Us Here
I think families sometimes approach reconciliation with the idea that the goal is to get their old relationship back.
But why?
That relationship is what brought you here in the first place.
The goal should never be to recreate a dynamic that wasn't working.
The goal is to figure out what kind of relationship you can build moving forward, now that you're both adults with your own needs, experiences, responsibilities, and expectations.
And that takes work.
I sometimes compare it to learning a new computer program at work.
You've used the same system for ten years. You know where everything is, you know how to navigate it, and you can practically do your job on autopilot.
Then someone decides the system isn't working anymore and introduces an entirely new program.
Suddenly, everything takes longer.
You're frustrated. You're second-guessing yourself. You keep talking about how nothing was wrong with the old system.
And maybe you genuinely believed there wasn't.
But other people were having difficulties with it, and something needed to change.
Six months later, you may find that the new program isn't so bad. You've learned how to navigate it. Some things may even work better than before.
Family relationships can be similar.
Learning to communicate differently will initially feel unnatural.
You may feel like you're overthinking every conversation. You may have to pause before responding, ask questions you wouldn't ordinarily ask, or tolerate discomfort you previously avoided.
That's part of changing an established relational pattern.
Over time, consistency creates new experiences. Those experiences can begin rebuilding trust, emotional safety, intimacy, and vulnerability.
Brené Brown's work on trust offers a helpful framework here. Trust isn't rebuilt through one apology or one difficult conversation. It develops through repeated experiences of reliability, accountability, respect for boundaries, and a willingness to show up differently.
And eventually, the hope is that when another disagreement happens, because it will, you have the tools to navigate it without immediately returning to the patterns that damaged the relationship in the first place.
That doesn't mean the relationship has to become particularly close.
Maybe you never speak to your parent every day. Maybe you don't even speak every month.
But perhaps when something significant happens, you feel comfortable picking up the phone. Maybe you've established a relationship where you can seek their perspective without feeling obligated to follow their advice.
That can still be meaningful.
A healthy adult relationship doesn't have to look like constant involvement in one another's lives.
It has to be something both people can willingly and sustainably participate in.
What If Acceptance Still Isn't Enough?
I want to be clear that accepting another person's lived experience does not guarantee reconciliation.
You can listen. You can acknowledge the pain. You can take accountability for your role. You can work on yourself and genuinely attempt to show up differently.
And the relationship still may not move forward.
Sometimes one person isn't ready.
Sometimes the harm has been too significant.
Sometimes the relationship someone is capable of offering simply isn't one the other person is willing or able to participate in.
And sometimes, despite all the work, two people cannot find a sustainable way to remain in one another's lives.
That doesn't automatically mean someone failed.
It means we're dealing with human relationships, and human relationships require more than one person's willingness to participate.
But before we decide that the only options are returning to the relationship exactly as it was or ending it entirely, I think it's worth asking whether we've genuinely explored what something different could look like.
Maybe that means a different level of contact. Maybe it means new boundaries, different expectations, or individual work before attempting family therapy.
And maybe, for now, it means distance.
We don't have to agree about every detail of our shared history to acknowledge that we experienced it differently.
We don't have to approve of everything someone has done to accept the person standing in front of us.
And we don't have to abandon our own experience to make room for theirs.
But if we're going to move forward together, we have to stop treating being right as more important than being willing to listen.
Because the goal isn't to get back the relationship we had.
It's to determine whether we're willing and able to build something different.
Additional Reading & Resources
For readers interested in exploring the ideas discussed throughout this article, the following resources offer additional perspectives on family estrangement, accountability, memory, boundaries, and rebuilding trust.
Dr. Joshua Coleman, Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict
Coleman explores the complexities of parent and adult-child estrangement, including changing family expectations, accountability, and the challenges of attempting reconciliation when family members understand their shared history differently.
Explore Dr. Coleman's books and resources
Brené Brown, The Anatomy of Trust
Brown's BRAVING framework examines seven components of trust, including boundaries, reliability, accountability, and generosity. These concepts are particularly relevant when family members are attempting to establish new relational patterns rather than returning to the dynamics that previously caused harm.
Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart
An exploration of emotional experiences and the language we use to communicate them. Particularly relevant to the distinction between hearing someone's experience and assuming we must have experienced something similarly to acknowledge it.
Explore Atlas of the Heart and its accompanying resources
American Psychological Association, Reconstructive Memory
A brief explanation of how remembering involves reconstructing experiences using stored information and existing knowledge. This provides additional context for why two people may sincerely remember shared experiences differently.
Read the APA's definition of reconstructive memory
EMDR International Association, About EMDR Therapy
For readers interested in understanding how trauma-focused treatment can help people process distressing experiences, even when family reconciliation or acknowledgment is not available.
Breaking the Silence: Understanding Modern Family Estrangement
Part One: Are Therapists Contributing to Family Estrangement? Looking Beyond the Headlines
Part Two: Is Family Estrangement Really Increasing, or Are We Just Talking About It More?
Part Three: Maybe We Don't Have a Family Estrangement Crisis. Maybe We Have a Family Transition Crisis.
Part Four: What Does Family Reconciliation Actually Require?
Part Five: Acceptance Without Approval: Can We Move Forward When We Remember the Past Differently? (you are here)
Part Six: When There Is No Path Forward: Life After Family Estrangement. (Coming week of 10/5/26)
For those interested in exploring adult family therapy, reconciliation after estrangement, or individual work around family-of-origin experiences, learn more about my approach at Trauma Wise Healing.