Maybe They’re Struggling? Maybe it’s Trauma? But Why Don’t They Think That About Me?

How many of us have heard it? The constant refrain. Be patient with your parents. They’re from a different generation. They’ve been through so much. They’re doing their best.

I have. More times than I can count.

Here in Dehradun, nestled between the Himalayan foothills and the plains, life moves at its own rhythm. The mountains watch over us impassively as we enact the same dramas that have played out for generations.

My father calls. He wants to know when I’m getting married. He doesn’t ask how my work is going, whether I’m happy, what I dreamt about last night. Just when I’m going to fulfill the obligation he’s been waiting for since the day I was born.

“You need to understand,” a well-meaning aunt tells me later. “Your parents grew up in different times. They faced hardships you can’t imagine.”

And there it is. The asymmetry that haunts every interaction.

I know this script by heart. We’re supposed to extend endless compassion to our parents. To understand their trauma, their limitations, the cultural baggage they carry. We’re told to see beyond their words, their actions, their judgment.

But who tells them to see us?

The one-way mirror of generational trauma

There’s a concept in psychology called the fundamental attribution error. We attribute others’ behavior to their character while attributing our own to circumstances. He’s late because he’s disorganized. I’m late because the traffic was terrible.

This plays out writ large across the generational divide in Indian families.

When my mother criticizes my career choices, I’m told she’s anxious because she grew up in economic uncertainty. When I express frustration at her criticism, I’m ungrateful. When my father demands I live according to his blueprint, it’s because he wants security for me. When I resist, I’m selfish.

Their behavior comes from trauma. Mine comes from character flaws.

It’s maddening.

I’m not denying their struggles. The India my parents grew up in bears little resemblance to the one I inhabit. My father walked miles to school. My mother was one of few girls in her college. They built stability from nothing, brick by brick, sacrifice by sacrifice.

But acknowledging their struggles doesn’t mean dismissing mine.

The trauma we don’t name

What about my trauma? What about the pressure that’s been on my shoulders since I was old enough to understand what expectations were?

The hours spent studying subjects I had no interest in because medicine or engineering were the only acceptable paths. The constant comparisons to cousins, neighbors, random children in the newspaper who won spelling bees. The suffocating weight of knowing my individual desires would always come second to family reputation.

“Beta, what will people say?” The question that haunts every Indian child’s decisions.

We talk about our parents’ trauma as if it exists in isolation, as if trauma isn’t passed down like a family heirloom, growing heavier with each generation.

I carry my own wounds, and I carry theirs too. I carry the weight of their unfulfilled dreams, their insecurities, their fears of a changing world they don’t recognize anymore.

Nietzsche wrote about the eternal recurrence, the idea that we should live as if we’d have to repeat our lives infinitely. Would I choose to repeat this cycle of one-sided understanding? This constant justification of why I deserve the same empathy I freely give?

No. I would not.

I once read somewhere though I couldn’t remember where, that demanding special respect for painful history too often becomes a license to constrain the freedoms of others. The author wasn’t talking about Indian family dynamics, but he might as well have been.

“Your parents had it harder” becomes the conversation-ending trump card. As if suffering confers absolute moral authority. As if having endured hardship gives you the right to inflict different hardships on others.

My parents struggled. That’s true. But their struggle doesn’t negate mine. Their pain doesn’t override my personhood.

When I try to explain modern pressures — the gig economy, climate anxiety, the paradox of endless choice paired with diminishing opportunity — I’m dismissed. These aren’t “real” problems. Not compared to what they faced.

Pain isn’t a competition. Suffering isn’t a finite resource we need to ration.

And here’s what truly baffles me: if their experiences taught them how painful it is to not be seen, to not be heard, to have your reality dismissed… why would they inflict the same on their children?

The missing reciprocity

“They just want what’s best for you.”

Another statement that’s supposed to end all debate.

But who decides what’s “best”? And why is their vision of my best life more valid than my own?

I’m in my twenties. I’ve lived, loved, failed, succeeded. I’ve built a life with its own contours, its own meaning. Yet in my parents’ eyes, I remain perpetually seventeen — old enough to take responsibility but too young to make decisions.

The fundamental asymmetry remains: I’m expected to understand the complexities of their psychology, the nuances of their upbringing, the cultural forces that shaped them. But they’re not expected to extend the same understanding to me.

I must adapt to their world, but they needn’t acknowledge mine exists.

Here in my hometown, where the mountains meet the plains, I sometimes think about geological time. These mountains were once seabeds, thrust upward by tectonic forces over millions of years. Nothing is permanent. Everything changes.

Even family dynamics can change.

I don’t want to reject my parents or their love. I want to transform our relationship into something more balanced, more honest, more mutually compassionate.

I want them to see me with the same generosity of spirit I try to see them with.

I want them to consider that maybe I’m struggling too. Maybe I have trauma. Maybe my resistance isn’t rebellion but self-preservation.

And I want them to ask themselves why their first instinct is to silence my pain rather than understand it.

Is it because acknowledging my struggle would force them to question their certainties? Would require them to see me as fully human, with my own valid inner life? Would mean facing the possibility that some of my wounds bear their fingerprints?

There’s a quote attributed to Bertrand Russell that I keep coming back to:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

I’m full of doubts. I doubt myself constantly. I question whether I’m being unfair, ungrateful, unreasonable.

My parents harbor no such doubts about their rightness.

Maybe that’s the first step toward reciprocal understanding … introducing doubt where certainty has calcified. Maybe it’s about asking questions that have no easy answers.

Questions like: What if we’re both right, and both wrong? What if understanding goes both ways? What if my experience is as valid as yours?

What if we’re both just humans, doing our best with the tools we have, deserving of the same grace, the same patience, the same benefit of the doubt?

I don’t have a neat conclusion for this. No five steps to perfect family harmony. Just the hope that one day, when someone says, “Be patient with your parents,” someone else might respond, “And remind the parents to be patient with their children too.”

Until then, I’ll keep asking: Maybe they’re struggling? Maybe it’s trauma? But why don’t they think that about me?