Psychology says the clearest sign you were raised by unready parents isn't trauma — it's the instinct to describe your childhood as "not that bad," because that phrase was installed by the same people who needed you to believe it so they wouldn't have to face what they did

"It wasn't that bad."

I must have said those four words a thousand times throughout my twenties whenever anyone asked about my childhood. Like a reflex. Like breathing.

The weird thing? Nobody was asking if it was bad. They'd just ask normal questions like "What was it like growing up with three siblings?" or "Did you enjoy Sacramento?" And there I was, unprompted, assuring them that things weren't that bad.

It took me years and a lot of reading about behavioral psychology to understand what was really happening. That phrase wasn't my assessment of my childhood. It was programming. A mantra installed by the very people who needed me to believe it most.

The invisible script we inherit

Here's what psychology tells us: children of emotionally unready parents develop an almost supernatural ability to minimize their own experiences. We become master editors of our own stories, cutting out the difficult parts and highlighting whatever scraps of normalcy we can find.

Why? Because acknowledging the truth would have been too dangerous when we were young. If we admitted our parents weren't equipped to raise us, where would that leave us? A five-year-old can't exactly move out and get their own apartment.

So we adapted. We learned to see dysfunction as normal, neglect as independence, and emotional absence as "not being coddled." We became tiny PR agents for our own families, spinning every story to protect the image that kept us safe.

The tragedy is that we keep doing this long after we've left home. Long after we need to.

Why "not that bad" is actually pretty bad

Think about it. When something is genuinely good, you don't describe it by what it isn't. Nobody says their vacation was "not that terrible" or their meal was "not that disgusting."

The phrase itself is a confession. It admits badness existed while simultaneously trying to minimize it.

I've noticed this pattern in conversations over coffee, at parties, during those late-night talks where people start sharing real stories. The people who had genuinely supportive childhoods? They just tell you about it. They share memories without disclaimers. They laugh about family quirks without that edge of anxiety in their voice.

But those of us who insist things weren't that bad? We're telling a different story entirely, even if we don't realize it.

The protection that becomes a prison

Growing up in suburban Sacramento with my siblings, our household had all the external markers of normalcy. Family dinners, school events, the usual American middle-class routine. From the outside, everything looked fine.

But emotionally unready parents are experts at maintaining appearances while failing at the invisible work of parenting. They can pack lunches but can't handle big emotions. They can drive you to soccer practice but can't have difficult conversations. They can provide shelter but not psychological safety.

And when you're a kid in that environment? You learn to match their energy. You become an expert at surface-level functioning while your deeper needs go unmet.

The "not that bad" narrative protected us then. It helped us survive environments where acknowledging the full weight of our unmet needs would have crushed us. But here's the thing about protective mechanisms: they don't know when to stop protecting.

Breaking free from someone else's story

The real breakthrough came when I started reading about family systems theory and realized something profound: that story I'd been telling about my childhood? It wasn't even mine. It was the story my parents needed to be true.

They needed to believe they were doing their best. They needed to believe that providing food and shelter was enough. They needed to believe that their own unprocessed trauma wasn't affecting their kids.

And we, as children, absorbed their need and made it our truth.

Think about how wild that is. We literally edited our own experiences to protect the feelings of the people who were supposed to be protecting us.

The cost of carrying their comfort

Every time we say "it wasn't that bad," we're doing emotional labor for people who should have done their own emotional work before having kids. We're still protecting them from the discomfort of facing what really happened.

But what does this cost us?

It costs us the ability to trust our own experiences. It costs us the right to feel what we actually felt. It costs us the chance to grieve what we didn't get and to stop pretending we didn't need it.

I see this play out in so many areas of adult life. The inability to ask for help because we learned early that our needs were too much. The tendency to over-function in relationships because we're still trying to earn love that should have been unconditional. The constant minimizing of our own struggles because we've been trained to believe they don't matter.

What healing actually looks like

Here's what nobody tells you about healing from being raised by emotionally unready parents: it doesn't require their participation or acknowledgment. In fact, waiting for that is often just another way we stay stuck.

Healing looks like finally saying, "Actually, some parts were pretty bad, and that's okay to admit."

It looks like understanding that you can love your parents and acknowledge their limitations simultaneously. These aren't mutually exclusive.

It looks like recognizing that the phrase "not that bad" is not your truth but their defense mechanism that you've been carrying for them.

Most importantly, it looks like giving yourself permission to stop minimizing your experiences to make other people comfortable.

The difference between forgiveness and denial

I've mentioned this before, but true forgiveness isn't pretending something didn't happen or didn't hurt. It's acknowledging the full truth of what occurred and choosing to release its hold on you anyway.

When we say "it wasn't that bad," we're not forgiving. We're denying. We're participating in a collective fiction that serves nobody, least of all ourselves.

Real forgiveness might sound more like: "My parents were emotionally unready to raise children. This affected me in profound ways. I understand they were doing their best with their own limitations, and I'm choosing to heal anyway."

See the difference? One minimizes reality. The other acknowledges it fully and chooses a path forward.

Wrapping up

If you find yourself reflexively saying your childhood "wasn't that bad," I want you to know something: that phrase is not your friend. It's not protecting you anymore. It's keeping you from the very healing you deserve.

Your experiences were real. Your needs mattered. And if they weren't met, that's worth acknowledging, not because you want to blame anyone, but because you deserve to live in reality, not in someone else's preferred narrative.

The clearest sign of being raised by emotionally unready parents isn't the dramatic trauma we see in movies. It's this quiet, persistent minimizing of our own experiences. It's the way we've been trained to gaslight ourselves before anyone else even has the chance.

But here's the beautiful thing: once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you stop saying "it wasn't that bad," you can finally start saying what it actually was. And from that place of truth, real healing becomes possible.