Author’s Note: The fifth commandment to “Honor your father and mother” is tricky. It has been described as the most complicated and abused one on the list of ten It is especially difficult to “honor your parents” when they are significantly unhealthy or even abusive. In the book, “Faultlines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them,” Dr. Karl Pillemer shares what he’s learned as he’s worked with the Cornell Reconciliation Project, a ten-year study on family estrangement. The book includes the story of a woman named Trisha, who experienced a very broken relationship with her parents. Dr. Pillemer writes:
TRISHA’S STORY
Trisha’s mother married a man with a criminal history and gave birth to Trisha as a teenager. Her parents were divorced when Tricia was very young, and she has few memories of the family being together. Trisha went to stay with her father when her parents divorced, visiting her mother on the weekends. Her mother lived on life’s margins, becoming involved with a number of men. When Tricia was 10 years old her mother remarried and disappeared. Trisha told me:
She moved without telling anyone. I came for my weekend visit and she was gone. She left whatever was in my room behind and moved. She dropped off the face of the earth. She just stopped communicating with me. I didn’t speak to her again until near the end of high school when her husband died. She called us the next day. She had been imprisoned by him, he beat her–it had been a bad situation.
Naive interviewer that I was, I made the initial mistake of assuming that Trisha’s father had stepped in during the intervening years to be the supportive parent. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Trisha laughed at that suggestion and explained why:
At that time my dad was not a good person. So, not only did my mom bail, but she left me with someone like my father. I was abused, both physical abuse from my dad and sexual abuse from people coming in and out of my life as a child. My dad was crazy; he couldn’t really function well.
The story of Trisha’s childhood went from bad to worse:
So, my father was always a drug dealer my whole childhood and I was made to sell drugs to people. By the time I was 10, someone would come by, and my dad wouldn’t be there, and it’d be somebody that came regularly that I knew, and I would give it to them. That’s just how my life was–I didn’t know anything different. He never came to any of my sports or activities. Then he got busted for drugs, and it was in the newspapers. My friends were no longer allowed to come to my house, so I was suddenly disconnected from the friends that I had.
This tenuous arrangement lasted until Trisha was 16 years old, when a crisis occurred. Her father had agreed to counseling with Tricia through a Family Services agency. On the day of an appointment, he hit Trisha and assumed that she would not mention it to the counselor. Trisha decided for once to stand up for herself and reveal the incident. The counselor, as a mandatory reporter, informed the authorities.
I fought back for the first time in my life. I was like “Never again. I will never let you touch me again. It’s just not going to ever, ever happen again.”
Trisha was allowed to become an emancipated minor, living on her own with state assistance. As she moved away from her troubled family relationships, her life improved dramatically. Now living on her own, she did well in school, worked part time to help support herself, and excelled in sports. She obtained fulfilling work after high school, found a partner, and had a son, Brian, now in college. Brian’s father was not long in the picture, but Tricia devoted herself to her son, and to being the best parent she could be.
Trisha told her story in a way that had me in suspense regarding the current state of affairs. When I asked, “Where do the relationships with your parents stand now?” I assumed that I would hear the by-now-expected rule of separation, stonewalling, and avoidance that characterize the family relationships of many people with far less troubling histories. So, the last thing I expected was to hear this survivor of abandonment, abuse, and deprivation tell me that she is in regular and largely positive contact with both parents. Through persistence, counseling, self-examination, and acceptance, Tricia has achieved a hard-won reconciliation with both her mother and, even more surprisingly, her father.
It was not until she reached her 20’s that she allowed her mother and father to enter her life again. I asked Trisha why she would choose to reconcile with her parents in the face of such an adverse past. Over time, both parents had settled into new, healthier marriages and their lives had stabilized. More important, Trisha believed that her son should have a relationship with his grandparents. This reflects Trisha’s values that give family life a central place. She told me:
I have this idea of what a family should look like, and so to not have my parents be part of that, I just can’t see that. I could see a million other people being in my shoes and never speaking to them again. It’s not that I depend on them. I haven’t depended on them since I was a teenager. But the idea of not having any contact or any relationship with them doesn’t cross my mind–it really doesn’t. I’d have to change my self-image to be somebody else, in order to abandon them.
Reflecting on decades of stormy family dramas, she told me that working to move through estrangement to reconciliation was worth the cost. Achieving the reconciliation taught her critically important lessons about how to meet her own needs, while accepting differences and showing compassion to others. She explained,
My dad’s not capable of saying he’s sorry, because he really doesn’t understand the ramifications of his actions. I can still be in a relationship with them and not own whatever they have going on. The biggest thing is being comfortable with who I am and the choices I’ve made.

HOPE FOR YOUR OWN JOURNEY
Trisha’s story does not explicitly mention “God,” but like the biblical book of Esther (which also does not mention God), the presence and work of God is evident in her story. Brokenness is being healed in Trisha’s life and that of her parents, and love is being shared. Trisha recognizes that “a million other people” would not do what she has done if they were in her shoes. She is not dependent on her parents, but as an adult she has chosen to be connected to them. Trisha lives a distinctive life that is true to her self-image and very different from her parents. With help from professionals, she has created healthy boundaries and found a way for her and her son to have a relationship with them. Perhaps the most powerful evidence of God’s presence in Trisha’s life is that she has compassion for her parents and is grateful for the present, not bitter about the past. Trisha has experienced transformation. She described her journey of reconciliation as being worth the cost.
Trisha honors her very imperfect parents. May her story of reconciliation and healing offer you hope that with God (and perhaps also with professional support), it is possible for you to honor your father and mother.
And that it is worth the struggle to do it.
The Serenity Prayer
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.
Trusting that He will make all things right, If I surrender to his will.
So that I may be reasonably happy in this world and supremely happy with Him forever in the next.
Amen.
Trisha’s story was excerpted from “Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them” by Karl Pillemer. P. 8-11
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