When we stop trusting and relying on a parent emotionally at a young age, our self-trust is damaged. Parents and their children are wired to love each other. However, when a parent can’t bond with us, breaks our trust, betrays, repeatedly disappoints, or abuses us, or simply doesn’t live up to our ideals, we may correctly perceive them as unsafe, incompetent, or untrustworthy.

To avoid our hurt or disappointment and stay true to ourselves, we may reject, dislike, or even hate them. Still, we wish that they would change. We may idealize our hope and hunger that they will become the mother or father we need.

Too often, we secretly feel guilt and shame for not feeling the love and respect that society dictates we should. When this happens too young, before adolescence, it harms us and affects our future romantic relationships.

MISSING INTERNAL PSYCHIC STRUCTURES

Psychoanalytic theory about internal structures helps explain why this hurts us so deeply. We don’t naturally think of our psyche in structural terms, but only as the “I” who perceives, thinks, feels, and acts. Psychoanalytic and developmental theorists, such as Freud, Erik Erikson, and Heinz Kohut, conceptualized the idea of psychic structure developing from infancy onward. Kohut proposed that idealizing our parents helps us develop a stable sense of self, a foundational sense of home, emotional balance, and internal guidance for our values and goals. Idealizing a parent isn’t blind admiration; it’s internalizing a figure who has your back when things are hard. By the time we’re young adults, we gradually de-idealize our parents and can see them realistically with positive and negative traits.

Parents don’t have to be healthy role models for idealization to happen. Even children who love and idealize neglectful or abusive parents can gain a sense of inner anchor when things fall apart, though their self-esteem may still be affected. For example, children can idealize irresponsible but loving or entertaining parents or anxious or narcissistic parents who are powerful, central, or psychologically dominant.

Some parents are largely absent, while others are present but controlling, misattuned, or subtly hostile—and often, these experiences overlap. In either case, children may reject their parents as figures worthy of idealization. When this happens too early, our psyche organizes itself very differently without a stable inner foundation. We may learn that sharing our feelings or needs is unsafe or disappointing, or that trying to match or adapt to a parent’s responses requires twisting ourselves to fit. Without an inner figure worth growing toward, our rejection isn’t defiance; it’s self-preservation: If I become like you, I lose myself.

EARLY WARNING SIGNS

The following are signs that our psyche registers a mismatch between what we need and what is available:

• Wishing someone else ( or a fictional character) were your mother or father
• Admiring or turning to a relative or teacher in place of your parent
• Feeling depressed at a very young age
• Thinking, “I don’t want to be like or marry someone like my mother or father”
• Being “too old, too young”
• Feeling there’s no one you can turn to, or not sharing feelings or needs with a parent before 12 years old
• A sense of relief at a friend’s house
• Daydreams about being adopted, rescued, or belonging somewhere else
• Feeling like an orphan

THE COST OF FAILURE OF IDEALIZATION

What unites these examples isn’t obvious trauma, but the early recognition that our inner life won’t be met. We miss having an internal companion—someone inside who stays present when things are hard, disappointing, or unfixable. Instead, we manage internally, thinking our way through life in place of feeling. When this happens very young, it often goes unnamed for decades, showing up instead as self-reliance, muted expectation, or cycles of private vitality followed by quiet deflation.

Such children often remain sharply aware, morally anchored, and psychologically independent, yet they carry a quiet grief for not being mirrored, celebrated, or joined in their aliveness. They grow up faster, go quiet sooner, and stop expecting attunement. Without a stable internal ideal, they may feel chronic emptiness and struggle to sustain self-esteem and confidence.

Kohut emphasized oscillations: periods of vitality, creativity, or joy followed by collapse, fatigue, or despair. Lacking a calm, steady inner presence to lean on, we become vulnerable to deflation after excitement and tend to seek intensity, romance, or inspiration to fill the gap and stave off emptiness and despair. We carry a mournful sadness that says, I needed something real. It wasn’t there. Decades later, this can show up as difficulty receiving care, chronic disappointment in others, or a sense that joy doesn’t quite “stick”—because the template for being met was never fully installed.

Sometimes we can idealize one parent while rejecting the other. This “splitting” allows the psyche to take in some guidance and support, but leaves gaps where the rejected parent might have contributed, including a feminine or masculine role model. The choice of which parent is idealized often reflects emotional availability, perceived competence, or modeling relevance—not just gender.

Even when parents aren’t idealized—or when love feels conditional rather than freely given—we may still acquire some foundation. Self-reliance can fuel strong values, ambition, and independence (I won’t rage like my mother, fail like my father, or need anyone). We may develop a strong work ethic, moral principles, or discipline, often reinforced by culture or religion. Outwardly, we may seem mature, competent, successful, and independent, but inside, we’re vigilant and lonely, having practiced self-erasure to survive emotionally.

A DAMAGED SENSE OF WORTH AND SELF-TRUST

The psyche adapts by relying on effort, conscience, and performance rather than inspiration or longing. Striving becomes a way to secure love: If I try harder, do more, or get it right, I’ll be worthy. If I can’t change my parents, I’ll try to change myself. Life becomes something you do correctly, rather than something that carries you. We feel inner pressure—harsh or restless, driven, and never quite at ease.

When idealization itself fails—when the parent cannot be trusted as a guide, we don’t just doubt our worth, we doubt our own judgment. Different patterns can emerge. Self-doubt often overlaps with shame, especially with a parent who is both shaming and untrustworthy. We don’t just question our judgment — we question ourselves. Am I doing this right? quickly turns into: Am I doing enough? Am I good enough yet?  Yet, for some of us, the inner voice may not question our worth. Lack of self-trust may not sound self-critical so much as uncertain: Can I count on my perceptions? Can I relax into a choice? Am I reading this right? Should I act or wait? Do I even know what I want? For others, we question both our worth and our perception or judgment. Having to manage things alone, we didn’t learn how to feel supported and may not even realize we need it.

Self-doubt isn’t always low self-esteem in the usual sense; it’s instability in self-trust. We scan for cues about what’s “right.” Internally, we second-guess ourselves and feel hesitation and a loss of confidence in our knowing. That’s why confidence doesn’t reliably accumulate with success. Insight doesn’t settle. Growth doesn’t consolidate. The psyche keeps asking for an external reference point because a stable internal foundation was never installed. When therapy doesn’t address it, we feel forever in process. Over time, the cost may show up less as emptiness and more as exhaustion—the sense of having done so much work, yet never quite resting.

WHEN IDEALIZATION COLLAPSES LATER

If we were able to idealize even a critical parent, we have a sense of structure. We absorb our parents’ standards, rules, confidence, and certainty about how the world works — even while being wounded by them. So the inner voice says harsh things, but there’s a backbone underneath it. That’s why we can often function well, achieve, and eventually stand up to the parent. Self-doubt is loud, but a basic sense of who we are, our self-concept, exists.

As adults, when we discover our parents’ betrayal, the wound is the collapse of a fantasy later corrected. We must grieve that loss. That grief, although painful, rests on a foundation that already exists. We do not need to go through the earlier loss of having had no reliable internalization at all, because enough goodness was taken in early to sustain us through disappointment. The betrayal hurts precisely because something valuable was real.

In contrast, where idealization never could be sustained, there is no illusion to dismantle—only absence to metabolize, of never being emotionally held. That produces a quieter, more sober grief. Internally, we may have kept waiting rather than settling, rather than giving up hope and collapsing into despair. Waiting is still enlivening, making self-comfort elusive. Settling requires the certainty that no one else is coming.

THE IMPACT ON ADULT RELATIONSHIPS

An unmet need to idealize parents in childhood can shape adult relationships in subtle but powerful ways, contributing to insecure attachment styles—either avoidant or anxious. Some people avoid closeness, mistrust others, or suppress their need for connection. Others repeatedly idealize and attach to inconsistent or unavailable partners, hoping they will supply what was missing, and then we devalue them when they fail to fulfill our imaginary ideal. Our distrust and inability to take in good from our parents inhibit our ability to receive real love and help when it’s offered. For example, we may find fault with a loving partner, see them as not quite enough, or project onto them the flaws we judge in ourselves or in our parents. Even partners who are “good enough” can seem insufficiently present or attuned. This often triggers our childhood wounds. They can resurface when a relationship ends, or we feel rejected, making recovery slower and more painful than expected.

HEALING WHAT’S MISSING

Healing doesn’t depend on when we recognize or psychologically reject a parent, but on having enough support when that truth appears. It’s never too late to build what was missing. In therapy, through consistent experiences of support, attunement, and agency, what was missing can be slowly built—an inner ground that holds us steady, carries choice, and allows self-trust to take root. We’re learning to feel held from the inside. Self-compassion replaces shame and relentless self-management. Letting go of the idealized hope that a parent (or romantic partner) will one day become who we needed growing up means finally turning toward the child’s sorrow of realizing, not as insight but as embodied truth, What I needed wasn’t there, and I had to grow without it. And after mourning, something quiet and durable emerges. Not a need to be endlessly mirrored, and not indifference either—but a grounded feeling of solidity. Joy no longer asks permission. Aliveness no longer waits to be met.

Begin by overcoming shame and practicing self-love.

© Darlene Lancer 2025