Just came across this on Reddit and felt it was important enough to share here.
If that’s too much, the most important thing to highlight is below
If you’re an estranged adult child and you’re looking for a way to get your parents to hear what the problem is, I’m sorry, but you have your answer already. They don’t want to know. They may be incapable of knowing. There are no magic words that will penetrate their defenses.
The good news is that you’re free. You can stop now. If you need permission, I’ll give it to you: You are hereby allowed to stop trying to get through to your willfully deaf parents.
Please stop.
This is super important.
If anyone is still curious about the thought processes of parents who do this, there’s an article called Missing Missing Reasons that I’d recommend reading here.
To summarize, a part of it is not wanting to give potential critics ammunition in telling them that they’re wrong, but another part of it, in several cases, is plain denial. Parents like this genuinely don’t know what they did wrong because they don’t WANT to know what they did wrong.
And unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done to fix this.
Fortunately, it means that, if you’ve got parents like this, you are most certainly not the one at fault, and you do not owe them anything.