The Myth of Parental Innocence
When you were young, your brain was hard-wired to seek connection and care from an adult. For most of us, it was one or both of our parents. As you grew, your brain learned a lot from your parents, or whoever it was who filled that role in your life. You learned about what it means to care for a person, how to get what you want, and what to do when you don’t get what you want. These were life-and-death lessons at the time. You needed someone to look after you, because you weren’t equipped to survive on your own. You also needed someone to teach you how to handle adult relationships and responsibilities.
Some of what you learned from your parents was helpful, and some of it was harmful. As an adult, it’s your responsibility to sort through what you learned as a child, especially if you are raising children of your own. In normal families, parents pass down to their own children the relationship patterns they learned in childhood. One of the hardest things we can do in adulthood is to really deal with the brain programming we received as children.
As a child, your brain was programmed to see your parents as more innocent than they really were. This filter makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, because it increases a child’s chance of surviving into adulthood. Children who ran away from abusive parents a thousand years ago were less likely to survive into adulthood, so over many centuries our brains got preconditioned to ignore bad parenting.
Because of this filter, your brain categorized some of your parents’ worst behavior as normal and acceptable, and your parents probably amplified the distortion by insisting that they were always acting in your best interest. The parental innocence filter is useful in childhood, but it’s harmful in adulthood because it affects more than just how you see your parents — it changes how you see everyone, and especially how you see yourself.
It’s hard to avoid your parents’ mistakes if your brain is keeping you from seeing those mistakes clearly. Parental immaturity is the water we grow up swimming in, and if we’re not careful, we end up constructing a very similar environment for our own children.
Dr. David Schnarch used two exercises to help couples understand and overcome their parental innocence filter. The first exercise is called revisualization: picture a memory from childhood in your mind. Focus on the visual memory you have of the people in the scene. Try to imagine their facial expressions, and see if you can figure out what they were thinking and feeling.
As you revisualize your memory, see if your previous interpretation of what happened still makes sense. Given what you know about your parental innocence filter, has your brain been hiding something from you? One of the most common results of the filter is the idea that your parents didn’t understand the emotional impact they were having. This “ignorance is bliss approach” makes childhood easier, but it also makes it more likely that you will inflict similar things on your own children.
Schnarch’s second exercise is the written mental dialogue. Imagine a conversation with one of your parents, the kind of conversation where you say things that might make one them uncomfortable. This exercise involves writing down that kind of conversation as if it were a movie script. You focus on taking straight to your parent, saying the things that you weren’t allowed to say as a child. It’s not about being cruel or unkind — it’s about standing up for yourself and talking straight to the person who trained your brain.
This exercise helps you get closer to your parent’s brain, and take a look at it from an adult perspective. It also helps you face the reality of how hard it is to be clear about what went on between the two of you. This is true if you had abusive parents, and it’s also true if you had normal parents. Parenting tends to bring out the worst in us, and all parents treat their children poorly some of the time. This happened to you too, and it had an impact on your brain. If you want to learn how to treat or own children better, you have to first face the reality of how your parents treated you. There were things that your young brain protected you from, and those things are getting in the way of you becoming the person you want to be.
