—
She has been sober for nearly thirty years. She is in her early sixties now — warm, self-aware, genuinely delightful to be around. If you met her today, you would have no difficulty understanding why people love her.
But she was not always this person. For much of the time that she was raising her three children, she was drinking. Sometimes she was not present at all. When she was present, she was often not really there — emotionally unavailable, volatile, the kind of mother her children learned to read the way sailors read weather. They walked on eggshells. They covered for her. They grew up faster than children should have to.
She knows all of this. She does not minimize it or rationalize it. After more than thirty years in a twelve-step program, she has done the accounting with ruthless honesty. She has sat across from her adult children and said the words that are among the hardest in the English language: I know what I did. I am sorry. You deserved better.
She came to me not because she needed to be convinced she had made mistakes. She came because she did not know what to do with the guilt. And that, in my experience, is where many parents who have genuinely caused harm find themselves: not in denial, but drowning.
This is the third article in a series that began with what the research tells us about how much parents — and mothers specifically — shape their children, and continued with what adult children can do when that shaping left marks. Now I want to speak directly to the parents on the other side of that equation. The ones who already know. The ones who are carrying it.
The Many Faces of Parental Harm
Before we go further, I want to name something plainly: not all parental failures are equal, and not all of them belong in the same category.
There are parents who were verbally abusive — whose words were weapons, delivered with enough consistency and precision to do lasting structural damage to a child’s sense of self. There are parents who limited their children based on gender, race, or their own unexamined biases — I think of one patient whose mother celebrated her brothers, sent them to college, and treated her daughter’s ambitions as presumptuous. There are parents who were simply absent — who abandoned the family physically or emotionally, leaving the other parent or an older sibling or no one at all to fill the gap.
There are parents who lost their tempers in ways that crossed into physical harm. Parents who were unfaithful to a spouse and, in doing so, taught their children lessons about honesty, fidelity, and the value of family that no amount of later correction fully erased. Parents who belittled the other parent so consistently that the children absorbed the contempt along with everything else. And then there are those who crossed lines so serious — sexual abuse among them — that the harm requires not just acknowledgment but a category of its own.
I name these not to rank them in a hierarchy of shame, but to say: if you are reading this and recognizing yourself in any of these descriptions, you are not alone. The shape of the damage varies. The path forward, in its essentials, does not.
The Science of a Real Apology
Dr. Aaron Lazare was a psychiatrist and chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School who spent decades researching the psychology of apology. What he concluded — and this is the part I find both humbling and hopeful — is that we have had the answer for thousands of years. His framework for an effective apology draws directly from the Hebrew concept of teshuvah, the tradition of repentance codified by the philosopher Maimonides. It has four parts, and all four matter.
The first is honest confession. Not a vague expression of regret, not a non-apology apology, not I’m sorry you felt hurt — but a specific, unflinching acknowledgment of what was done. This is what I did. These are the particular ways I failed you. No minimizing, no qualifying, no but.
The second is explanation — not excuse. There is an important distinction here that I spend considerable time on in clinical practice. Explaining where your thinking was, what you were carrying, what you did not yet understand about yourself — this is not the same as asking your child to excuse the behavior. It is context. It is the difference between I was drunk and that is all there is to say and I was in the grip of an addiction I did not yet have the tools to address, and I am telling you that so you understand it was about my illness, not about your worth.
The third is repentance — a 180-degree turn. In Hebrew the word teshuvah literally means return — a turning back toward what is good. This is not a promise; it is a demonstrated reality. The woman I described at the opening of this article has been sober for thirty years. She is more present to her grandchildren than she ever was to her own children. That is not words. That is evidence. And evidence, in the long economy of trust, is the only currency that matters.
The fourth is making amends wherever possible. This does not always mean grand gestures. Sometimes it means showing up consistently over years. Sometimes it means paying for therapy you should have made unnecessary. Sometimes it means simply being the person, today, that you were not then — and letting that speak.
The research on apology is equally instructive. Studies consistently show that a genuine apology has a measurable physical effect on the person receiving it: blood pressure decreases, heart rate slows, breathing steadies. Empathy increases. The door to forgiveness, which may have been sealed shut for years, opens at least a crack. The key word, however, is genuine. More recent research has found that an apology perceived as insincere may be no more effective than no apology at all — and in some cases makes things worse. The four components above are not a formula to be recited. They are a posture to be inhabited.
Paul and Judas: Two Responses to the Same Failure
The New Testament gives us two men who both did terrible things and both knew it. The parallel is so precise it reads almost like a clinical case study.
Judas Iscariot betrayed the person he had followed for three years for thirty pieces of silver. When he understood what he had done, he was seized by remorse so consuming that he went out and hanged himself. The guilt was real. The accounting was honest. But his response to that accounting was to turn the shame inward until it destroyed him.
Paul — who before his conversion spent his days hunting down and persecuting the earliest Christians, who was present at the stoning of Stephen, who called himself the chief of sinners — had a different response to the same kind of reckoning. He did not minimize what he had done. He named it clearly, repeatedly, in letters that became scripture. But then he turned outward. He became the most prolific missionary in the history of the early church, spending the rest of his life telling anyone who would listen: I have done terrible things. I have been forgiven. And if I have been forgiven, so can you.
The difference between these two men is not the gravity of the sin. It is what they did with the remorse. Judas turned it into a verdict. Paul turned it into a vocation.
I have seen this choice made in real life, in circumstances as serious as any I can imagine. I worked with a man — and I share his story with his full permission, as I did in my book Keep Pain in the Past — who at twenty years old celebrated his university’s national championship by drinking too much and accidentally struck and killed a police officer with his car. He went to prison for approximately eleven years. He could have spent those years in the Judas response — collapsed under the weight of what he had done, defined for the rest of his life by its worst moment.
He did not. He took complete ownership of his actions. He used his time in prison to teach literacy to fellow inmates. And when he was released, he built a program to help other formerly incarcerated men and women reintegrate into the general population. He turned the verdict into a vocation. He did not minimize the harm he had caused — a man died, a family was shattered, and he carried that fully. But he refused to let it be the only thing he ever did with his life.
I think about this man constantly in my work with parents who are carrying genuine guilt. Because what I see, far too often, is a kind of psychological Judas response — not a literal one, but a slow, grinding version of it. An endless internal prosecution in which the parent serves simultaneously as defendant, prosecutor, and judge, relitigating the same failures across years and decades, never arriving at anything resembling acquittal. It is a kind of unofficial suicide of the spirit. And it helps no one. Not the parent. Not the children. Not the grandchildren who are watching.
What You Do With It Now
In my first book, Your Mind: An Owner’s Manual for a Better Life, I wrote about emotions as the dashboard warning lights on a car. They are not there to torment you. They are there to send a message. And the appropriate response to a warning light is not to ignore it, and not to stare at it indefinitely — it is to respond to what it is telling you, address the underlying problem, and allow the light to go off.
Guilt is one of those lights. It exists to tell you that you have done something below your own moral code, that you have hurt someone as a result, and that something needs to be done about it. Responded to appropriately — with honest acknowledgment, genuine apology, repentance, and amends — the guilt light goes off. It has done its job.
What is not useful — what is in fact actively destructive — is driving the rest of your life with the guilt light on. Those of us who owned older cars remember this well: the engine light would come on, we would not know exactly what to do about it, and so we kept driving. And kept driving. Until eventually the engine had serious problems that a timely response would have prevented. Unaddressed guilt works exactly the same way. It does not protect anyone. It does not pay any debt. It simply damages the engine.
Here is what forty years of clinical practice has taught me about guilt: it is useful for exactly as long as it motivates change. The moment it stops producing change and starts producing only suffering, it has outlived its purpose and become its own form of self-indulgence.
The children you hurt — who are adults now, with their own lives and their own wounds — do not need your guilt. They may need your acknowledgment. They may need your consistency. They may need time, and patience, and the evidence of sustained change. But your ongoing suffering is not a debt payment. It does not reduce what you owe them. It only reduces you.
Some of your children will reconcile with you. Some may not, or not yet. That is their right, and it must be respected. What you can control is the quality of the person you are today — to them, to their children, to the world you still have time to make slightly better than you found it.
The woman I described at the beginning of this article told me something in one of our sessions that I have never forgotten. She said: “I spent the first ten years of my sobriety apologizing. Then I realized that the best apology I could give my children was to become someone they didn’t have to apologize for.”
That is teshuvah. That is guilt fulfilling its purpose and then stepping aside. That is what it looks like when the warning light finally goes off — not because you stopped looking at it, but because you actually fixed the engine.
You cannot undo what was done. But you are not finished yet. And in this, as in most things that matter, what you do next is the only thing still within your power to choose.
***
Dr. Christopher Cortman has facilitated over 80,000 hours of psychotherapy during his distinguished career spanning forty years. A Florida Licensed Psychologist, he maintains a thriving private practice while specializing in emotional trauma and anxiety disorders. He’s appeared nationwide on talk radio and television. The acclaimed author of five previous books, his new book, The Guided Imagery Cure: The Best Proven Methods for Quickly Resolving and Healing Trauma, describes a profoundly impactful tool for addressing trauma, grief, and more. Learn more at srqshrink.com.
—
