A lifetime of unspoken pain and misunderstood intentions hung heavy between a mother and her eldest daughter, each trapped in their own shadows of past trauma and cultural expectations. The mother, shaped by the harshness of her own upbringing and haunted by PTSD and possible postpartum depression, struggled to bridge the widening gap with a daughter whose silent battles with depression were met with strictness rather than solace.
In a moment charged with raw emotion, the daughter’s frustration erupted — a fierce cry that blamed her parents for a lifetime spent feeling she had to prove her worth. Their story is a poignant testament to the deep scars left by generational pain and the desperate, complicated yearning for understanding and acceptance within a fractured family.
AITA for telling my daughter I couldn’t have known my parenting style would cause mental issues and say its partly her personality?
Dr. Gabor Maté, a physician and author focusing on trauma, addiction, and mental health, often discusses how early relational environments profoundly shape adult psychological structures. He emphasizes that unmet emotional needs and conditional acceptance during development can lead directly to feelings of inadequacy and the development of mood disorders like depression.
The primary conflict here lies in the mother’s inability to fully integrate her accountability for the past actions with her current need to self-justify. By introducing the younger sister’s relative resilience, the mother commits the ‘survivorship bias fallacy’ in a personal context. She correctly identified that demanding academic performance as a prerequisite for approval created deep insecurity in the older daughter. This dynamic—where love and acceptance were transactional—is a significant environmental stressor known to contribute to clinical depression. The comparison to the sister, while perhaps stemming from a desire to prove the parenting style was not entirely destructive, shifts blame away from the action itself onto the recipient’s perceived weakness. This minimizes the daughter’s current pain and re-traumatizes her by implying her suffering is an overreaction or a personal failing.
The mother’s admission that she was ‘hard and strict’ due to PTSD and cultural norms shows insight, but the subsequent defense invalidates this progress. A more constructive path involves radical acceptance of the harm caused, independent of the sister’s outcome. The daughter needs validation that her feelings are a direct, logical response to the historical treatment, not a sign of a ‘weak personality.’ Moving forward, the mother should focus solely on repairing the relationship through present-day validation, perhaps by seeking family therapy to process the generational trauma that influenced her parenting choices.
REDDIT USERS WERE STUNNED – YOU WON’T BELIEVE SOME OF THESE REACTIONS.
This is all from your own words.
![[deleted] YTA](https://animalstrend.com/wp-content/uploads/wp-img-cache/b46d7998b6b3678465c4a4b65e8d4c6e.png)
OP i understand that you were raised the same way. That you struggled to try and give your daughter a better life.
you turned right around and perpetuated the cycle to your own children. You did not turn out fine. I’m not saying this to be cruel. You don’t deserve cruelty.
eeta: thank you so much for the awards!!!
The mother acknowledges past mistakes in parenting, specifically the use of harsh negative reinforcement driven by her own trauma and cultural background. However, she struggles with accepting full responsibility for her oldest daughter’s current depression, feeling that the daughter’s individual personality also plays a role, especially when comparing her to her less affected younger sister.
If the core issue is the long-term impact of conditional approval on mental health, is it fair to mitigate parental responsibility by pointing to the differing outcomes in the other child, or does this comparison invalidate the acknowledged harm done to the child who is clearly suffering?
