Here is the full transcript of Dr. Sherrie Campbell’s talk titled “Not All Parents Are Good” at TEDxDanville conference .
SUMMARY: Dr. Sherrie Campbell’s impactful talk, “Not All Parents Are Good,” challenges the societal norm that idealizes parenthood as universally positive. She bravely shares her personal journey, revealing the harsh reality of growing up with emotionally abusive parents, a narrative seldom acknowledged in mainstream discourse.
Campbell, a clinical psychologist, provides staggering statistics, stating that one in four adults in the United States has chosen to distance themselves from their parents at some point, highlighting the widespread nature of this issue. She criticizes the societal double standard that condemns abuse in all forms except when perpetrated by parents, pointing out the dangerous implications of such a blind spot.
Through her talk, Campbell advocates for a cultural shift towards acknowledging and addressing the existence of bad parents, emphasizing the need for societal recognition of emotional abuse and its profound effects on children. She calls for greater empathy and understanding towards those who have made the difficult decision to cut ties with their parents. Ultimately, Campbell’s message is a powerful call to action, urging society to break the cycle of generational trauma by facing hard truths and supporting survivors.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Idealized Image of Parenthood
If you Google the word “parents,” you’ll be flooded with images of picture-perfect happy families. You’ll see flashes of tender smiles on the faces of parents as they watch their babies drift to sleep, cozy autumn walks with a small child holding the reassuring hands of both parents. Siblings making cookie dough faces covered in flour with parents cracking up. And these images are truly heartwarming.
You could scroll through these glassy stock photos for hours and never come across a single photo of tears being shed by a child that aren’t being lovingly wiped away by the parents. We also see these images of perfect parents and happy homes splashed across the covers of our magazines, television commercials, and even highlighted in our most culturally iconic sitcoms. But I wonder how you feel if none of these images told your personal story.
I certainly never lived that happy fantasy. My parents were not good parents. It sounds taboo to say the words “bad parents” out loud because all we’re indoctrinated to know is the good parent. And it’s true that we see good parents all around us. However, in our culture, it’s misassumed that all parents are good, which is simply not true for so many.
Did you know that one in four adults in the United States chooses to cut off from their parents for some period of time over the course of their lifetime? This means that 25% of this audience can relate, which is staggering. As a survivor of parental emotional abuse and a leading expert in the field of clinical psychology, I can tell you what hides behind these staggering statistics are the untold stories of both minor and adult children who’ve suffered at the hands of their emotionally abusive and manipulative parents. So why don’t we hear about these stories?
The Silence Around Parental Abuse
After all, we’re intelligent. We’re very aware abusers exist. We’ve all heard of the public abuses to come from some of our most well-known religious leaders, medical doctors, government officials, entrepreneurs, school teachers, coaches, and even some of our most beloved athletes, actors, and musicians. And when these abuses are exposed, we condemn these abusers.
We would never dream of expecting children to remain in good standing with any person, regardless of their elevated status, who had abused them. But somehow, when it comes to parents, we have a difficult time accepting parents can be bad, abusive, and downright dangerous to their children. And regardless of parental abuses being exposed, we lean in to protect the parent by assuming that parents aren’t abusive at all, but they are. And we have a really hard time accepting that they can be harmful to their children.
We demand children remain in good standing with their parents, their abusers, for the remainder of their lives. So why do we do this? Why do we allow children to have this experience where they’re constantly being put in the face of parents who abuse them? It’s a sad reality in our society that we hold strangers to higher standards of treatment of children than parents.
When a stranger harms a child, that person faces losing their job, their license, and many have faced criminal charges. Whereas parents are given a public free pass on the same, if not far worse, abuses simply due to their title. It makes no sense to give parents a public free pass, allowing them to hide in plain sight. Perhaps it’s just too difficult to admit that abuse happens in our closest quarters and to the most innocent members of our human family, our children.
The Reality of Emotional Abuse
I am one of these innocent children who was raised under two severely dysfunctional parents, and life was really hard for me. I used to dread having to wake up to cope with a complete lack of predictability, stability, and moodiness of the people I called my parents, forcing me to master a stressful and delicate eggshell walk while I was around them.
I grew up feeling sad, alone, angry, and totally defeated every single day. Covert emotional abuse may not be identifiable by physical markers, but this type of abuse is potent enough to break the hearts and spirits of children, leaving them with lifelong internal bloody wounding that no one can see. This abuse is now punishable by the law in five European countries.
Sadly, I know many of you can relate, so I just want you to know that it’s okay. I assure you that the abuses you endured, they were real. They happened. They were bad enough to be labeled as abuse.
So who is this parent that we’re discussing here today?
In short, bad parents are cruel. They lack empathy. They’re extremely critical and controlling. They are never wrong. They’re always the victim. They are pathological liars and manipulators, and they are disturbingly immature and selfish.
It has never ceased to amaze me that we are not allowed to talk about the problematic character of bad parents in a culturally open and safe space. Instead, we allow the idea of bad parents to evaporate into thin air to protect the supposed holiness of parents. But it mind boggles me that we believe the physical act of bringing a child into this world is somehow powerful enough to eliminate ingrained character deficits and abusive traits. As a doctor, I can assure you bringing a child into this world does not resolve or cure the abusive and manipulative nature of an already abusive and manipulative person.
Bad parents were abusers prior to having children. They remain abusive throughout the raising of their children, and they continue to abuse, guilt, manipulate, and control their adult children long after they leave home. The unchanging person in this dynamic is the parent. Children do not cause bad parents. Emotionally abusive and manipulative people become emotionally abusive and manipulative parents.
So why do we allow the idea of bad parents to hide in the shadows of our collective awareness as we heartlessly place innocent children in the spotlight of blame and responsibility? That answer is cognitive dissonance. Our belief in the sanctity of parents is so powerful, we will deny all evidence that counters what we hold to be true.
We want to believe that all children love, adore, and respect their parents because our social cohesion is reliant upon this belief. This belief brings us a sense of security. So to hold onto this security, we blatantly ignore the suffering of children to avoid bringing shame upon the parents who raise them. This tells us we are far more concerned with the reputation and appearance of parents than we are with the protection of children.
Shifting the Narrative
So how do we assimilate this new information that not all parents are good into our cultural reality so we can stop silencing victims of emotional abuse? As an initial step, we must come together in acceptance, as the acceptance of hard truths is the prerequisite for any meaningful change.
A hard truth we must wake up to is that a parent’s repeated mistakes are not accidents. It’s a reflection of their poor character. And we must not allow this type of abuse to remain hidden. So whether you were raised by loving and adoring parents or through the hell of parental emotional abuse, it’s time we come together, collectively join hands, so we can create a meaningful shift in awareness.
So where do we start? First, we must listen to children. Young children especially, they can’t lobby for themselves, write books, give speeches, or start social movement campaigns. We must do it for them. We must also accept that neither minor nor adult children have an agenda against the parents they would love to depend upon for love, community, and survival. If they’re biting the hands that feed them, we must trust they have good reason.
Second, we must create a shift in accountability. We must remove the spotlight of blame and responsibility off a child’s behavior and place it back onto the source, the parent who is mistreating them. To accomplish this, we must establish a language in our cultural narrative that allows us to tell parents when they need to do better.
Lastly, we must stop telling adult children who’ve protected their lives from their parents that they’re doing something wrong with microaggressions such as, “You’re not going to go visit your parents for the holidays, are you? You’re going to crush them,” “You only get one mother,” “Your parents are getting older, you better fix things now or you’re going to feel guilty for the rest of your life,” or, “Your parents couldn’t have been that bad, you turned out okay.”
Advocacy for Change
Children raised under severely character disordered parents suffer a lifetime of problems. I’ve had many people say behind my back, “We like Sherrie, but we do not agree with her message.” Well, I am my message. My message chose me. I assure you, under no circumstances did I choose to come into a life to be recklessly and intentionally emotionally abused by the parents who raised me.
Children like me are judged and condemned wherever we go. It’s like being checked into the Hotel California. We got checked in by our parents, but we aren’t ever allowed to leave. Even when we had no choice in the choosing of who our parents would be, they chose us. Judging adult children for cutting off from their parents, it only deepens an already lacerating wound. No one wants to be a part of this club.
So let us all offer more understanding and kindness the next time someone we know tells us they will not be joining their family for special festivities now or in the near future. Here’s what I know for sure. All children, regardless of age, have the right to set boundaries and to move their lives in new and different directions so that the generational trauma that ran into them will stop with them right here, right now.
Allow me to tell you one last thing. I’m not here today to break up families. I cannot break up a family that’s already irretrievably broken at its leadership. I’m here today to serve the adult children who’ve cut off from their parents who want to be a part of this movement of stopping generational trauma in its path so as cycle breakers we can change the families of the future.
I’m here today to give voice to the child in you and the child in me that deserves so much better. It’s time that we understand DNA beyond the general definition of genetic family bonds that cannot be broken and understand DNA as “Do Not Abuse.” As Nelson Mandela so beautifully stated, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Thank you.