The Family We Came From, The Relationships We Build
How unhealed parent wounds can shape communication accountability, pride, and emotional safety in Black families
Content Note: This article discusses family dynamics, emotional neglect, childhood experiences, intergenerational trauma, and parental relationships. Readers may find some content emotionally activating. Please take care of yourself and pause as needed while reading.
I define myself as a Black woman however, I grew up with a multi-ethnic background. My mother is first generation Chinese “American” and my father is Black. I learned through the connection to my own heritage and roots that as a Black woman, many of us within our community are taught to survive long before we were taught how to heal.
Regularly we are told and taught to push through and be strong, showing up for everyone else expect ourselves. We are told to keep family matters inside the family (they’re going to take you and put you with a white family). We learned that we have to constantly work hard and harder (you have to be 10x better than any regular white person to be considered for the same thing). We are taught to pray harder and carry burdens that were often too heavy for us to have carried in the first place. Keep in mind that this conversation has nothing to do with race but it intersects like much of any topic within the Black community.
I ask though, what happens with the wounds that we carry from our relationships with our parents go unaddressed?
The unresolved trauma doesn’t disappear or stay neatly tucked away in childhood. These things follow us into adulthood. It rears it’s ugly head in our marriages, friendships, parenting and family relationships. It influences how we communicate, handle conflicts and whether we feel safe to be vulnerable with the people we love.
A lot of the times we're reacting to pain that has been present for decades without even realizing it.
Communication Isn’t Just About Words
One of the ways parent wounds showed up is through the way they chose to communicate with us as children.
If you think back to your home and visualize how emotions were or weren’t communicated, openly discussed or when conflict’s felt unsafe. Think presently how you may struggle to express your needs as an adult. You might expect people to “just know” how you feel because you weren’t taught how to identify and communicate your emotions directly.
Sometimes during conflicts we shut down often because that is what we witnessed growing up. Sometimes, we can become defensive as well because vulnerability never felt safe.
Often we may deflect our feelings with statements like:
“I’m fine.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Do whatever you want.”
Realistically under those words we are actually feeling hurt, disappointment, loneliness or frustration.
Due to healthy communication not being modeled for us as we grew up, we often learned how to protect ourselves verses how to connect. Now, when difficult conversations arise we will avoid them, suppress our feelings, become passive aggressive or even aggressive-aggressive. We may even wait until things become so overwhelming until we boil over and have no choice but to speak up.
Through this people around us have no idea how to change or respond because we didn’t communicate our needs or feelings.
What I Learned Growing Up
In my own personal journey of healing thank you poor relationships and parenting dynamics. I have had to acknowledge how much my childhood shaped the way I understood relationships, communication and my emotional safety.
I can remember growing up where my father would wake my mother and myself up in the middle of the night (keep in mind I was under 12 yr’s old) to have “family discussions.” During these discussions, my father would talk extensively about the family he wanted to build, his expectations and how “we” (my mother and I) lacked direction, and what eeevveryone else needed to do differently.
Looking back it was very manic, however, what stands out isn’t just the conversations themselves but the imbalance within them.
Often the focus of conversation with my father was how everyone else needed to change but very little accountability for his own actions or willingness to make meaningful changes himself. I think back and he regularly blamed my mother, maternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, and even myself as a child for when thing’s didn’t go as planned, blame was frequently directed outward. Disappointment, frustration, and personal shortcomings often became someone else’s responsibility to carry. I also preface as I got older in my adult years and had more conversations with my father this became even more prevalent as he would talk about past relationships and business deals that all fell through account to someone else’s choices and decisions.
As a child, I didn’t have the language to describe what I was experiencing, but I knew one thing: emotional safety felt uncertain.
If I could meet the expectation of what he wanted everything was fine until it wasn’t. I learned to pay attention to nuances of moods and learned to anticipate reactions. Uncomfortable conversations could happen at any moment and discussions were not about understanding each other but about being able to blame, control, or avoid responsibility.
I witnessed and felt how words could affect a person’s self-worth. How comments made during moments of frustration often lingered long after the conversations ended. How he didn’t apologize. As a child, those experiences shape your beliefs about yourself, your value, how you should be treated and what relationships are supposed to feel like.
For a long time, I thought these experiences were simply normal family dynamics. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to recognize how much they influenced my own communication patterns, comfort with conflict, and understanding of accountability.
We Don’t Talk Enough About Father Wounds
Within the Black community, conversations about family trauma often focus on mothers and generally for understandable reasons. Many Black women carry pain related to complicated relationships with their mothers. I am no exception to that rule even though my mother is Chinese.
However, I believe we don’t nearly discuss enough about father wounds.
Truth is when father’s are present, their presence doesn’t automatically mean there is a creation of emotionally healthy homes or stability. Sometimes fathers can be physically present but emotionally unavailable. Sometimes they are carrying their own unresolved trauma. I can honestly say when I think of my fathers story he most definitely does have unresolved trauma however, refuses to acknowledge it as trauma or how it has affected and impacted him over his life. Sometimes, they were never taught healthy emotional expression, accountability, or vulnerability themselves.
Many Black men like my father have had to navigate immense societal pressures, racism, economic barriers, community instability, and rigid expectations around masculinity. Many were taught that strength meant suppressing emotions rather than processing them (I regularly think boomer gen.).
As we are the product from these men, we have to understand that those are realities and those realities matter.
BUT understanding is not the same thing as excusing harm.
When a child grows up in an environment where criticism outweighs encouragement, where accountability is demanded but not modeled, or where emotional safety feels unpredictable and even manipulative, those experiences leave lasting imprints.
The goal of healing isn’t to villainize our parents. The goal is to tell the truth about our experiences so that we no longer unconsciously recreate those same patterns.
Compassion and accountability can coexist.
We can understand our parents struggles while also acknowledging the ways we were hurt.
Pride Often Looks Like Protection
Pride, pride, pride, lets talk about this piece for a moment.
Pride often discussed as a character flaw however, many times what we describe as “pride” is actually protection.
Growing up criticized, dismissed, or emotionally unsafe, admitting that you were hurt may feel extremely vulnerable. Asking for help feels uncomfortable. And apologizing first may feel impossible.
So we develop armor to protect ourselves:
“I don’t need anybody.”
“I’ll handle it myself.”
“I’m not about to beg someone to treat me right.”
These statements generally feel empowering, however, sometimes they are actually masking as we attempt to protect ourselves for deeper layers of fears, of rejection, disappointment, abandonment, or shame.
As we are attempting to show strength we are actually preventing ourselves from repair.
Healthy relationships require moments where someone (ourselves) says:
“I was wrong.”
“I misunderstood you.”
“That hurt me.”
“I need support.”
Those statements can feel threatening because it makes us vulnerable and during childhood vulnerability was never safe.
How Ego Keeps Us Stuck
Our Ego’s primary job is protection and unfortunately sometimes protection can become a barrier to our growth.
When someone offers us feedback, our ego may hear criticism. When our partner may point our a behavior pattern, our ego hears an attack. So, instead of us listening we start to build up our defense.
We explain why we’re right.
We explain why they started it.
We explain why our reaction was justified.
Heres My Ego, cause I cant think of a time when I was wrong.
And while those explanations may contain truth, they can prevent us from examining our own contributions to a situation.
When we are healing we require courage to actually ask:
What if both things are true?
What if someone hurt me and I still need to work on my response?
What if my childhood explains my behavior but doesn’t excuse it?
What if accountability is actually a form of freedom?
These questions aren’t easy, but they create room for us to grow.
How Parent Wounds Affect Families
Unhealed trauma rarely stays contained to just one person. These things generally ripple through entire family systems. Think our mothers came from a family and our father’s to. Which means they were also connected to mothers and fathers and so forth. The family’s blend and patterns of different trauma’s mingle.
When we haven’t addressed our own pain, we may unintentionally recreate familiar patterns.
We may struggle to apologize because no one apologized to us.
We may expect perfection because perfection was expected from us.
We may become emotionally unavailable because emotional distance feels normal.
We may react strongly to small disagreements because our nervous systems learned long ago that conflict equals danger.
We may struggle to hear our children’s emotions because our own emotions were never fully welcomed.
This doesn’t make us bad partners, parents, siblings or friends. It makes use human.
The goal isn’t perfection but awareness.
Once we become aware of a pattern, we gain the power to change it.
Healing Changes More Than Just You
One of the most beautiful things about healing is that it extends beyond the individual.
When you heal, your communication changes.
When your communication changes, your relationships change.
When your relationships change, future generations receive something different than what you received.
Healing helps us respond rather than react.
It creates room for accountability without shame.
It allows vulnerability to replace defensiveness.
It teaches us that love can exist alongside healthy boundaries.
It reminds us that being strong and being emotionally available are not opposites.
In fact, true strength often requires emotional honesty.
A Final Thought
Many of us have spent years trying to understand why certain conflicts keep repeating themselves. Why when we have certain conversations they leave us feeling unseen. Why we can become defensive when someone asks us to take accountability for things we may have said or done. Why we struggle to say what we need.
Sometimes the answers aren’t found in the present but lives in old wounds that have quietly shaped us for years.
Our healing journey isn’t about assigning blame to our parents. For a majority of our parents they are only carrying burdens that they themselves never learned how to set down. Ideally, the healing journey is about making sure their pain doesn’t become our inheritance and our legacy to our children.
As Black women, we deserve more than survival.
We deserve homes where emotional safety exists, where relationships have mutual accountability, where communication builds connection over fear and the freedom to be vulnerable without feeling weak.
Most importantly we deserve the opportunity to become the emotionally healthy ancestors our future generations will remember.
Every difficult conversation you choose to have, every boundary you establish, every apology you offer, every cycle you refuse to repeat is an act of healing.
Not just for yourself.
But for everyone connected to you.
Reflection Questions
I invite you to sit with a few questions:
What messages did you receive about emotions growing up?
Did you feel emotionally safe expressing disagreement in your family?
How did the adults in your life handle accountability?
When conflict arises today, do you tend to lean toward avoidance, defensiveness, or healthy communication?
What patterns in your current relationships remind you of your childhood experiences?
Is there a wound from a parent or caregiver that you know still deserves attention and healing?
What would change in your relationships if pride no longer had to protect you?
What family cycle are you intentionally working to break?
What does emotional safety look like for you today?
How can you offer yourself compassion while still holding yourself accountable for growth?
Healing isn’t about becoming perfect. It’s about becoming aware. And awareness is often where transformation begins.
Therapist’s Disclaimer: The information shared in this article is intended for psychoeducational purposes and personal reflection only. It should not be used as a substitute for individualized mental health treatment.