Part One: The Childhood We Were Promised, and the One We Lived

By Sarah Benitez-Zandi LCSW

There’s a story most of us are taught early on about what childhood is supposed to be. Sometimes it’s spoken directly, sometimes it’s absorbed quietly through culture, school, media, or the way adults talk about “good families.” Childhood is meant to be safe. Parents are meant to be steady. Home is supposed to be the place where you’re protected, believed, and cared for, even when things aren’t perfect.

Alongside that story is another one that often goes unquestioned. That family is sacred. That blood matters more than anything else. That family should be forgiven no matter the transgression. That loyalty means endurance. That walking away is worse than being hurt.

In American culture especially, family is treated as the one relationship that should be preserved at all costs. The message is subtle but persistent: if you’re still impacted by something that happened in your family, the problem must be that you haven’t healed enough yet. If you set boundaries, you’re cold. If you pull away, you’re unforgiving. If you name harm, you’re “holding onto the past.”

But that belief system is deeply unhealthy.

It teaches people that love and harm can coexist without limits. It teaches that those closest to you are exempt from accountability. It trains people, from a very young age, to tolerate behavior they would never accept from anyone else. Over time, it erodes the ability to understand what boundaries are, how to set them, or why they matter at all.

And when that lesson is learned in childhood, it doesn’t stay there.

For many people, childhood wasn’t just imperfect. It was unsafe. Homes were shaped by addiction, untreated mental health issues, emotional volatility, or chronic absence. Abuse happened, whether verbal, emotional, physical, or sexual. Neglect happened too, often quietly, in the form of children being left in situations that were unsafe while the adults who knew better either couldn’t intervene or chose not to. Some children learned very early that their needs were inconvenient, their feelings were dangerous, and their role was to keep the peace at all costs.

Later, when we are adults, we try to make sense of this, and we are often met with a familiar response: your parents did the best they could with what they had, or others had it worse than you did.

That may be true.

And it can also be true that what they had, and what they offered, was not enough, and that others having it “worse” does not change or lessen the hurt and pain of your experience.

Both of those truths can exist at the same time, even though many families insist they cannot. This is where the demand for forgiveness becomes especially harmful. Forgiveness is often expected without ownership, without accountability, and without change. It becomes a way to protect the family narrative rather than address the harm that occurred. A way to silence pain instead of repairing it.

Forgiveness without accountability is not healing. It’s avoidance.

Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences helped give language to what so many people already felt in their bodies. Repeated exposure to instability, abuse, neglect, or chronic stress shapes how the brain and nervous system develop. A child’s body adapts to survive the environment it’s raised in. When safety is unpredictable, the nervous system stays alert. When emotions are dismissed or punished, the brain learns to disconnect from them. These adaptations aren’t failures. They’re survival.

But they don’t disappear just because someone grows up.

They show up later as difficulty trusting others, as hyper-independence, as dissociation, as perfectionism, as substance use, as people-pleasing, as staying in relationships long after they stop feeling safe. They show up as blurred boundaries, because boundaries were never modeled or respected in the first place.

When forgiveness is demanded without change, it reinforces this confusion. It teaches people to override their own internal signals. It tells them that discomfort is something to tolerate rather than information to listen to. Over time, this depletes the ability to recognize what healthy boundaries even look like, let alone set them.

This is why so many adults feel stuck in patterns they don’t fully understand. They minimize harm. They rationalize behavior that hurts them. They feel guilty for wanting distance. They stay, not because they want to, but because leaving still feels like failure.

None of this means someone is broken.

It means they were taught, very early, that love required self-abandonment.

And then there’s the phrase that often gets used to reinforce all of this: blood is thicker than water. It’s usually said as a warning, or a guilt trip, or a way to end the conversation. The implication is clear. Blood family should come first. Blood family should be forgiven. Blood family should be immune from accountability.

But that phrase has been shortened and repurposed to serve a very specific narrative.

The full saying is: “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”

And its meaning is almost the opposite of how it’s commonly used.

It speaks to the idea that chosen bonds, relationships built through shared values, mutual care, safety, and accountability, can be stronger and more meaningful than the family you are born into. It acknowledges that biology alone does not create trust. That connection is not guaranteed by blood. It is built through consistent, respectful behavior.

Somewhere along the way, that meaning was stripped out and replaced with a version that protects systems instead of people. A version that suggests family is exempt from accountability simply because it is family. A version that pressures people to stay connected at the expense of their own well-being.

Blood does not excuse harm. History does not erase impact. And forgiveness without accountability is not love.

Understanding this isn’t about rejecting family for the sake of it. It’s about reclaiming your right to safety, clarity, and choice. It’s about recognizing that real connection doesn’t require you to abandon yourself. And that chosen family, whether that’s friends, partners, community, or even the relationship you build with yourself, can be just as real, just as meaningful, and often far more healing.

Before healing can happen, reality has to be acknowledged.

And for many people, this is the first time they’ve ever allowed themselves to do that.

In Part Two of this series, we’ll talk about grief. Not the kind with casseroles and clear endings, but the quieter grief of realizing the family you needed may never exist. We’ll explore what it means to mourn people who are still alive, how guilt gets tangled into that process, and why grief is often the first step toward real healing.

You don’t have to rush it.
But you don’t have to pretend anymore, either.