My parents treated me well but I still feel I need therapy. Why?  
The trauma you might not be aware of

Here’s something I hear a lot in my practice: “My childhood was fine. My parents loved me. They didn’t hit me. They showed up. So why do I feel like something’s off? Why do I still want therapy?”

People usually say it with a mix of guilt and confusion. As if the wish to help oneself needs an excuse. And in the case of outwardly stable families, it is very tricky because such families may still cause their children the trauma of disorganized attachment.

And this is the case where trauma doesn’t announce itself as trauma, since it comes from a parent’s own unresolved trauma.

Let me explain.

A baby is wired to run to their parent for safety when they’re scared. It’s a basic survival instinct. But what happens when the parent is the source of the fear?

That’s the paradox at the heart of disorganized attachment. The very person who should be a safe harbor becomes, unpredictably, a source of alarm. For example, a mother lost in her own grief for years, staring through her infant with a trance-like look. Or a father, struggling with depression, jerks away when his toddler reaches for a hug, because he has no energy for hugging.

These moments are often fleeting and are easy to miss for an adult. But to a baby, they’re world-shattering. The instinct says “go to mom,” but the fear of encountering something dangerous and inexplicable says “run away.”

The child is literally trapped – caught between two conflicting biological commands. And the result isn’t just insecurity, but the collapse of any coherence for getting comfort and building a stable relationship.

This is what Freud called “cumulative” or “strain” trauma (1). It’s not one big, horrible event. It’s the slow accumulation of tiny fractures in the parent-child bond. A thousand consecutive and very subtle missteps, missed connections, and muffled fears that, over time, disorganize a child’s inner world.

So where does this parental behavior come from? Often, it’s a ghost from the past.

In their article, Main & Hesse found a key link in the attachment research (2). They use a tool called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), which asks people to talk about their childhood relationships and experiences of loss. What they discovered was striking.

Parents who had unresolved states of mind regarding their own past trauma or loss, like the death of a parent they never properly grieved, were far more likely to have infants with disorganized attachment. And it wasn’t the loss itself that mattered. It was the lack of psychological resolution of that loss.

It’s not that the parents were intentionally cruel. But they were scared, mixing up past and present, self and other (3). Their internal world was still haunted, and that hauntedness seeped out in the child’s world. Whether they showed up as being frightened of the child or acted in frightening ways toward the child, their fear and unresolved trauma became the child’s inheritance.

If parental trauma, fear and inability to form a stable emotional attachment to a child is not dealt with by the parent by the time the child reaches the age of 6, these kids might become controlling in self-defense. They either boss their parents around with punitive harshness, or they become little caregivers, overly worried about their parent’s emotional state (4).

Traumatic fantasies are prevalent in such kids. In both their dreams and real-life play, the children spin tales of catastrophe: houses blowing up, families destroyed, hills coming alive to smash everyone (4). As children utterly depend on their parents, the parent’s depression, loss of grip on reality, and unresolved mourning awaken in the child the state of traumatic anxiety and fear of annihilation (1).

As adults, this might translate to a few things.

You might feel a deep, sometimes inexplicable dread of abandonment, yet also push people away. Relationships might feel like minefields where you’re either in control or completely helpless. You could struggle with a fragile sense of self, or feel responsible for other people’s emotions in a way that exhausts you. In severe cases, this pattern is linked to borderline personality disorder, dissociation, and chronic affective disorders (1).

It’s a feeling of being stuck that might be hard to explain. You crave connection, but it feels threatening. You need autonomy, but it feels like abandonment. In this case, you might be carrying not your own, but the inherited parental trauma.

While the parents functioned outwardly well, it’s often not what they did that matters, but how they felt, as it might have prevented them from giving you the emotional safety.

So, what now?

Trust your gut. If you feel that you need therapeutic help, you probably need it, even if you can’t explain why. Therapy might be a very multi-layered process (read my article “What Is Therapy Beyond Treatment“).

This isn’t about blaming your parents. Most of the time, they were doing their best while carrying their own invisible wounds. It’s about slowly getting rid of the unwanted heritage, getting free from it, and learning to name, recognize, and untangle the overwhelming feelings. It’s about building a healthy attachment with yourself and others, which positively impacts how you build close relationships with your family and the world.

A good therapeutic relationship can itself provide a corrective, coherent experience that your parents couldn’t provide. Yes, it’s a bummer to do that emotional work that your parents needed to do, but my experience says that it’s worth it – not for them, but for you.

Bibliography:

1. Diamond, D. (2004). Attachment Disorganization: The Reunion of Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 21 (2), 276–299.

2. Main, M., & Hesse, E. (1990). Parents’ unresolved traumatic experiences are related to infant disorganized attachment status: Is frightened and/or frightening parental behavior the linking mechanism?

3. Main, M., & Goldwyn, R. (1998). Adult attachment scoring and classification systems. Unpublished classification manual, University of California, Berkeley.

4. Solomon, J., & George, C. (1999). The place of disorganization in attachment theory: Linking classic observations with contemporary findings.

Published by author on Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-psychology-of-relationships-and-emotional-intelligence/202512/my-parents-treated-me-well