There is one sentence that can stop attempts to repair a tumultuous or estranged parent/child relationship in its tracks. For many, this experience may sound achingly familiar:
An adult child is naming a painful experience from their youth, often something a parent said or did that hurt them. They are typically hoping to share the truth of their experience and be met with compassion, accountability, and perhaps an apology or steps toward repair.
“That never happened,” their parent says. Or, a slightly softer “I don’t remember that,” fills the space of the conversation.
Memory isn’t a simple recording of past events, even though we often treat it as one.
At this point, the conversation often dies or escalates into an attempt to litigate two memories that simply do not align. It usually doesn’t go well, and everyone walks away more hurt and confused than they were to begin with.
How Do We Navigate Two Different Stories?
As family estrangement becomes more widely discussed, one critical question often goes unanswered: What do we do when two people’s memories of being in the same family are profoundly at odds?
For parents and grown children caught in the challenging dance of rupture and repair, a difference in memory is more complicated than it looks.
For parents and grown children caught in the challenging dance of rupture and repair, a difference in memory is more complicated than it looks. One of our greatest tools in these moments is understanding how memory works.
The first thing we need to understand is that memory isn’t a simple recording of past events, even though we often treat it as one. As a hypnotherapist, I work with memory and long-held beliefs every day to support clients as they overcome fears and phobias, develop more confidence and trust in themselves, and navigate complicated family relationships.
Change is possible precisely because memory is malleable—while we may not be able to change our past, we can change the way we relate to it. This change ripples outward into our lives.
Over time and with the right support, the critical voice of a parent that we’ve carried for decades can begin to quiet, or a deeply held belief that we’re not good enough can give way to something new and more helpful. This flexibility is part of what makes healing possible, and also part of why two people can remember the same past very differently.
Reconstruction vs Reproduction
As memory researchers Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger explain, the process of remembering is reconstructive, rather than reproductive.
You might think of it like the difference between multiple iterations of an artist’s painting. Consider an artist like Monet, who painted his famous water lilies roughly 250 times over 31 years. As an artist continues to paint, their experiences, emotions, knowledge, and beliefs influence the look and feel of every painting—even those images of the same pond of water lilies. The same is true for memory. We selectively encode experiences into our memory, and then we reconstruct them every time we remember.
For one person, an important memory may grow stronger, more vivid, and more steeped in meaning over time. This can be especially true for a painful memory that gets revisited over and over, ultimately becoming part of the architecture of a person’s beliefs about themselves and the world around them.
This doesn’t mean the original memory never happened; it means that it has grown in importance and emotional charge over time. The opposite can be true for memories that aren’t deemed important or meaningful. Less significant experiences may never be strongly encoded in the first place, or may grow harder to recall over time.
The parent/child relationship is one that necessarily holds a significant power imbalance…That can create an imbalance in meaning around even the smallest memories.
The Role of Power
This is especially important when we’re talking about differences in memory between parent and child. We remember events in part according to the meaning and emotional significance that they held for us at the time. The parent/child relationship is one that necessarily holds a significant power imbalance: a child depends on their parent for safety, emotional regulation, belonging, and survival, in a way that the parent simply does not. That can create an imbalance in meaning around even the smallest memories.
I’ve seen this with clients on both sides of estrangement. A parent shouting at a child for making a mess, being too sensitive, or doing poorly on a test may not register long-term for the parent while becoming a core part of the child’s narrative. Conversely, parents I have worked with may remember an entirely different version of reality—not the yelling or the critical remarks, but the stress they were under while working multiple jobs or going through a rough divorce.
Both memories reflect something real about each person’s experience, but because of the power imbalance, the impact may have been profoundly unequal. Any parent or adult child trying to repair their relationship needs to understand this. In fact, research also shows that memories of harm are often asymmetrical: people tend to remember being harmed more easily than harming others.
Sometimes “That didn’t happen” is deliberate denial or gaslighting, and sometimes psychiatric or neurological conditions can distort a person’s perception or recollection of events.
Because of this and more, most families at some point will encounter dissonance between memories of important events. There are, of course, important exceptions. Sometimes “That didn’t happen” is deliberate denial or gaslighting, and sometimes psychiatric or neurological conditions can distort a person’s perception or recollection of events. These situations require a different lens than the ordinary differences in memory I’m describing here.
Presence Over Perfection
While our memories may never be identical, that probably wasn’t the point in the first place. When an adult child shares a painful memory with a parent, they are rarely asking for a forensic accounting of the past. More often, they are asking their parent to understand something about how they felt or what it was like to be them in that moment. What matters most here isn’t whether both parties can perfectly reconstruct and confirm the facts behind a memory. It’s how that memory is treated.
What matters most here isn’t whether both parties can perfectly reconstruct and confirm the facts behind a memory. It’s how that memory is treated.
Does the parent empathize and get curious, or do they immediately make the case that the child is wrong? Can they pause and acknowledge the potential impact of the memory, even if they don’t remember it clearly? Can they take responsibility where it’s possible to do so? Sometimes, something as simple as “Wow, I don’t remember that clearly, but it sounds really painful. I’m sorry,” can be the springboard into a relationship with more room to grow.
On the flip side, can the grown child leave some room for the possibility that a parent may not remember the same event, not out of malice, but out of the fallibility of memory itself? When we understand this, we can explore with less reactivity.
Ultimately, repair doesn’t require that we come to an exact and agreed-upon version of the past. While we may never remember the same moment in the same way, we can become curious about why it mattered, about our impact on each other, and what we can do now in the present moment to repair.
