this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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That is a bit of a hen-egg question, isnt it? Do people in certain circles see their parents negatively because the circles echo such thoughts, or because such circles attract people like that? I have no definite answer, tbh.
Maybe it is because those circles make it easier to speak about such things?
Maybe because someone who experienced hardships themselves might turn to more "left" ideas to avoid this happening to others?
I personally am very grateful to my parents, they sacrificed a lot of potential happiness for their children. And yes, they are flawed human beings in a flawed world, who make mistakes, have some issues of themselves and so on. But psychology is messy, fuzzy, and hard to wrap in nice logical statements.
it's easy to talk about such things in therapy, but a good therapist isn't going to bias-confirm you, or engage you in escalation/exaggeration. online communities do that, inevitably.
your therapist also isn't going to flip out at you and call you a ungrateful piece of shit when you complain about your parents. people online and irl will definitely do that.
there is a cultural default where you are not supposed to be critical or resentful towards your parents for sure, which I think forces almost all of us to internalize this stuff. personally i've never had a partner who i could talk to about my parental issues without serious blowback and judgement for what a shitty person i was for daring to say such things about my folks... but my siblings? yeah they are more than happy to be critical about my parents esp def to how difficult they were about elder care, which made us all angry and frustrated with them. and i had to keep point out to my siblings... my parents were like this their entire lives... they weren't magically like more difficult as they got older, they had always been inflexible, stubborn, and refused to be proactive... so we basically had to do all that for them as they aged.
Obviously, people online and even good irl friends cannot replace professional therapy.
I've seen both, the "social default" of having a somewhat ok relationship with one's parents, and people in certain circles who tend to assume that there must be at least some difficulties.
true, some folks relationships, parental or otherwise, are just... boring and staid and uneventful and they are fine with that. some folks want something deeper, or more dramatic.