Parents who sacrificed everything, children who feel distant anyway. What actually creates resentment, and what repairs it — for both sides.
Bhatta Psychotherapy6 min read
Share only if you are comfortable — general information, not personal medical advice.
This article is for both people in the situation — the parent who gave everything and cannot understand the distance, and the adult child who feels guilty for resenting someone who clearly sacrificed a great deal.
Both positions are usually sincere. That is what makes this so painful and so hard to resolve: nobody is lying about their experience.
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This is the heart of it. Many parents in Nepal genuinely sacrificed — worked abroad for years, went without, put children through school at real cost. That is love, and it is not in question.
But children do not primarily register sacrifice. They register attention: whether someone noticed how they were, whether it was safe to say what they felt, whether they were known rather than only provided for.
A child can grow up materially cared for and emotionally unseen. When they later say something was missing, the parent hears an accusation of not having tried — which is not what is being said at all.
Where sadness was met with don't cry, anger with how dare you, and fear with there's nothing to be afraid of, a child learns emotions are a problem to be managed rather than something that can be shared. That does not go away at eighteen.
Being measured against siblings, cousins, and neighbours' children is meant as motivation. What it teaches is that affection is conditional on performance — and that lesson lasts decades.
Subject, career, sometimes marriage. Often decided with genuine care and better information. But a life you did not choose is difficult to feel ownership of, and the resentment tends to surface later, in the thirties and forties, when the consequences are fully visible.
Where a child exists to redeem the family's status, or to compensate for what a parent could not achieve, they carry a job rather than a childhood. Success brings relief rather than pride, and failure feels like betrayal.
Violence at home, a parent's drinking, a parent who left. What produces lasting resentment is frequently not the event itself but the family agreement never to mention it — which leaves the child alone with it while everyone acts as though nothing happened.
Children cannot afford to resent their parents. They are dependent, and their safety requires believing the arrangement is fine. So the feeling is postponed.
It tends to arrive when it is finally safe — after leaving home, after moving abroad, or most commonly on becoming a parent, when someone realises what they would never do to their own child and understands for the first time that it was a choice.
The instinct is to list what you provided. That is understandable and completely counterproductive — it confirms exactly what your child is trying to describe, which is that their experience is not being heard.
What repairs this is smaller and much harder: I did not know it felt like that. Not a full apology, not agreeing with every accusation. Simply acknowledging that their experience was real.
Most adult children are not looking for their parents to be destroyed by guilt. They want to be believed. Many families never get past this point purely because the parent hears blame where recognition was being asked for.
You are allowed to hold both: that your parents did their best with what they had, and that something still hurt you. Those are not in competition, and you do not need to resolve the contradiction before you are permitted to feel it.
It is also worth knowing that your parents were shaped by their own upbringing, usually harsher than yours, with no language for any of this. That is an explanation rather than an excuse — but it often makes the anger easier to carry.
Some parents can hear this. Some cannot, and will not change. Where that is the case, the work becomes about your own peace rather than about their acknowledgement — which is not defeat, though it can feel like it.
Duty to parents is not a Western-style optional relationship here, and advice to cut people off translates badly. In a joint family it is often not even practically possible.
So the useful question is rarely whether to keep the relationship. It is what a workable version looks like — how much contact, on what terms, with which topics left alone. That is a real option, and it is more achievable than either total estrangement or pretending everything is fine.
Also read: When your parent went abroad — growing up in a split family →
Individual therapy helps sort what belongs to you now from what belonged to the household you grew up in — particularly where the pattern is repeating in your own parenting or marriage.
Family sessions can help where both sides are willing, though they work best when the goal is understanding rather than establishing who was right.
Bhatta Psychotherapy is one of the practices in Kathmandu doing this work, in person and online. Starting alone is entirely normal.
