As I’ve had plenty of time to myself over the last couple weeks, I’ve been doing some thinking. It has almost been a year since I stopped doing family therapy and was able to make peace with the idea of probably never talking to my parents again. Prior to that moment in late January of 2023, I’d been feeling guilty for cutting them off while they were still paying lip service to the idea of fixing things. Thanks to that incredibly awful two-month period, I was able to confirm that it was just lip service and that neither of them possessed the emotional maturity to recognize their part in the travesty that was my childhood. Since I’ve had enough time to process all that, I’ve been thinking about it again, mostly by way of reviewing in my mind what we talked about and how gaining a better understanding of my parents has or has not changed the way I see some of the events of my past. As I’ve slowly worked through this process (largely deciding that not much needs to change at this time), I’ve found myself thinking that, for all their faults, at least my parents never denied me my humanity. For all they put me through, for all the horrible and wrong things they taught me, at least they never taught me that I was somehow less “human” than other people. However, the more I’ve thought this, the more I’ve started to wonder if this is actually true, or if it is only technically true because they never explicitly used those words or tried to teach that specific lesson.