You Are Allowed To Be Both: A Somatic Talk for When Your Parents Did Their Best and You Were Still Hurt | Abi Beri

There is a sentence I hear in my therapy room almost every week. A client will be in the middle of describing something that happened to them, and right in the middle of saying it, they will stop and say — but my parents did their best. They say it in a particular way: not as a complete sentence in itself, but as a guard rail. As something they are putting up between themselves and the wound they just started to describe.What I usually say to them, very gently, is something like this. They probably did. Your parents probably did do their best. And you were also hurt. Both of those can be true. They are not in competition. You don’t have to choose between them.This somatic talk — drawing on inner child work, polyvagal informed somatic practice, and the systemic frame of Family Constellations — is about that moment. About the two voices that live in most of us: the adult voice that wants to be fair to our parents, that has perspective and context, and the wounded voice that didn’t get what it needed and is still, often without our noticing, carrying that. The work is not to make them agree. The work is to let them both speak.Guided by Abi Beri — Integrative Therapist and Nervous System Specialist (Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & online) — this is for anyone who has been quietly forcing themselves to choose between loving their parents and acknowledging that they were hurt. You don’t have to. They loved you. They hurt you. Both. Real. Allowed.Looking for a somatic therapist for inner child work, complicated grief about parents, attachment wounds or the two-voices work in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge or online from anywhere in Ireland or the world? More at somatictherapyireland.com and blissfulevolution.com.