I’ve been in therapy for a few months now and I still don’t understand my dad. Sessions help – I don’t want to deny that. It pays to say things out loud in a room where someone is being paid to listen without blinking an eye. I have cried. I made connections that I hadn’t made before. The process works slowly, incrementally.
But understanding him—the real thing, the kind that changes how you hold a person in your mind—has yet to arrive. Not from talking, anyway. The closest I came was when I was alone at my desk, trying to write a scene from my childhood, and I realized I didn’t actually know why he was doing it. And then I ask for the first time, no what did it do to me but who was it when it happened.
The sentence I was trying to write was unfinished for a long time. I finally got it right, something I’d been talking about for months wouldn’t budge. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
What talking can’t do
Therapy is, among other things, a technology for telling your story. A good therapist creates an environment in which you can safely narrate your experience, examine it from different angles, and—ideally—reexamine the meaning you derive from it. Talking is important. Attitude is important. The structure of the session is important.
But talking is also fast. It moves at the speed of thought, meaning it tends to follow already worn grooves in your thinking. You say what you said before, a little differently, and your therapist reflects it a little differently, and somewhere in that exchange, something might come loose. But the core story—the story you’ve been telling yourself for twenty or thirty years about who your parents were and what they did to you and what that meant—is extremely resistant to rapid revision. It has been reinforced many times. It goes very deep. Words arrive already formed, already edited, and always in the form you give them.
Writing is slow in a way that speaking never is. It’s not just slower – it’s structurally different. When you write about someone, you need to find the exact word, the exact verb, the image that captures not only what happened, but also how they felt, what they meant, and why they mattered. And in your search for the right word, you often discover that the word you used is wrong. The story you tell is a simplification. The character you carry around in your head—the difficult parent, the absentee who gets it wrong in ways that still resonate—is flatter than it really is.
The requirement for specificity
What the post does that almost nothing else does in the same way is power specificity.
In conversation, in therapy, even in a personal journal, you can stay generic. He was cold. He was unexpected. They didn’t understand me. These statements can be true and cause real pain, and you can hold onto them for years without questioning them too deeply. The general is emotionally sufficient. Explains enough. This allows you to organize your experience around a consistent account of what went wrong.
But in writing—the kind of writing that actually works, that grabs the reader’s attention—general is not enough. You can’t write “it was cold” and leave it there. you have to write the moment. Special Tuesday. What he said or didn’t say. How he looks at you or through you. The coat he was wearing. What was on the table? What did you want from him and how did this desire manifest itself in your body before you could find the words for it.
A strange thing often happens in the process of finding a Tuesday evening: you remember the things you edited. Context is coming. He was at work for twelve hours. There was a phone call in the morning. His own father was sick. None of this excuses anything. But it complicates the scene, and complexity is exactly what the general protects you from.
A flat character begins to gain depth, not because you decide to be more generous, but because the writing job won’t let you keep it straight.
The point of concern
There’s a stage in writing about a parent—and I think most people who do it will understand—where the essay starts asking for something you don’t want to do.
You write from your own point of view, which is the only place you can start. You have memories, feelings, your own version of events. And then writing—good, honest, demanding writing—starts to ask: but what was true for them? Not to invalidate your experience. Not as a call for forgiveness or forgiveness. Just as a matter of accuracy. Because a scene with a fully realized person and a cardboard figure is not a real scene. This is a complaint dressed up as a story.
Many personal posts about parents stop here. The writer overreaches his story and withdraws, into the safe harbor of his wounds. The result is writing that feels cathartic to the creator, stuffy to others—the reader can sense an unopened door, a guarded dimension.
Walking through that door doesn’t require you to change your feelings. It requires you to care about someone you’ve spent years trying to convince yourself of. This is a different skill than therapeutic processing. It is nearer the skill of a novelist who has to inhabit a character he does not entirely like.
What do you find on the other hand?
I don’t want to sound like the goal is always forgiveness, peace, or warmer relationships. Sometimes you write your way back to the parent and come up with a clearer, more documented version of why the relationship is the way it is. The understanding you get is not always amicable. Sometimes it is more true.
But truth has its uses. Replacing a vague, inherited story about someone with a concrete, researched one changes their emotional weight—even if the facts don’t change. Grief does not disappear, on the contrary, it worsens. Dissatisfaction doesn’t go away, but it loses some of its free-floating quality that allows it to cling to everything. You know more precisely what you’re upset about, or rather, what you’re still angry about, and that precision is different from the blur that most of us carry around when we haven’t yet put it into sentences.
Writing also does something that neither talk nor therapy reliably does: it creates an object. When you finish an essay about your father, there is something you can look at, revise, go back to. The concept it contains is not resolved when the session ends or the conversation moves on to something else. It sits on the page, it’s accessible, it can be revised, it can be improved over time.
A note on whether or not to publish
None of these require an audience. Some of the most useful writing about parents is not shown to anyone – drafts that exist not as a way to communicate with the world or confront the subject, but simply as a mechanism for seeing clearly.
Publishing adds a layer of complexity that has nothing to do with understanding. This raises questions of fairness, consent, harm – all legitimate and worth careful consideration. But these are separate questions. The clarifying work happens regardless of whether anyone reads it.
If you’ve been circling something about a parent for years—in therapy, in conversation, in the middle of the night—and still haven’t tried to write it down fully, with specificity, with the patience you give to a character in a fictional story, it might be worth a try. Not to publish. Not to send. You haven’t told yourself yet to see what the sentences know.
The slow, careful work of putting something into sentences is not additive to understanding. For many people, this is where the concept really lives.
