Healing Fantasies: Grieving the Parents You Wish You Had

For most of my life, I carried around something I didn’t even know had a name: a healing fantasy.

A healing fantasy is the belief that one day, the people who hurt you will change. That they will wake up, realize the harm they caused, finally change and start to give you the love, safety, and understanding you always needed.

We hold on to these fantasies for a reason. Many of us have done deep inner work-- therapy, self-reflection, accountability and we’ve experienced firsthand that change is possible. So naturally, we believe that if we can transform, then anyone can.

If you grew up with emotionally immature parents like I did then you probably know this pattern well. Most children of emotionally immature parents grow up with an overdeveloped sense of empathy, trained from childhood to read moods, tiptoe around conflict, and understand why people act the way they do. This makes it far too easy for us to justify harmful behaviour, especially from the people we wish would change.

But here’s the truth: emotionally immature and narcissistic parents rarely recognize their behaviour as harmful. Without that self-awareness, there is no accountability, and without accountability, there is no real change. That is why a healing fantasy is so dangerous... because it keeps hope alive when reality is showing you the opposite.

A healing fantasy is an easy thing to hold on to because the alternative is facing the reality that your parents are never going to change.

From Childhood Wounds to Adult Choices

At some point in my adult life, I realized a hard truth: my life, along with all the trauma and baggage I had acquired as a child, was now my responsibility. It was not my parents’ job to “fix” me. That responsibility fell to me alone.

Once I accepted that truth, I embarked on an extensive healing and self-development journey that included a lot of therapy. I got myself to stable ground. I started working on the very behaviours that were holding me back, behaviours I could now see were direct results of my traumatic childhood.

For me personally, the biggest challenges I faced early on in my young adult life were an intense lack of safety, deep resentment toward my parents, anger, and my own emotional immaturity, all things I had acquired being raised in a dysfunctional family.

Therapy helped me see that my behaviour wasn’t random at all nor was it just part of my personality. In fact, it was painfully predictable. Every reaction, every pattern, was rooted in coping strategies I had developed to survive in a dysfunctional home. My nervous system had been trained to stay on high alert, keeping me in a constant state of fight or flight. I lived in severe hyper-vigilance, always scanning for the next threat, bracing for impact before it even came. Over time, that kind of tension doesn’t just live in your mind, it embeds itself into your body, showing up as physical discomfort, exhaustion, and a sense of never truly feeling safe, even when no danger is present.

Recognizing How Your Childhood Shaped You

If you grew up with narcissistic or emotionally immature parents, you probably have coping mechanisms you are not even aware of, patterns that once kept you safe but now sabotage your relationships, your peace, and your self-worth.

Some common signs include:

• Overreacting or shutting down during conflict

• Avoiding vulnerability out of fear it will be used against you

• Hyper-vigilance and constant scanning for danger

• Difficulty trusting others or feeling safe

• People-pleasing or perfectionism to avoid criticism

• Explosive anger or emotional withdrawal

The first step is seeing it for what it is. Many of us grow up thinking our childhood was “normal” simply because we had no other frame of reference. However, once you learn how not normal it actually was, you can finally see how it shaped your thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours today.

The second step is owning your healing. You cannot just blame and complain forever. That keeps you stuck in suffering. Your parents are not the ones suffering, they have the cognitive blind spots that allow them to remain blissfully ignorant to their behaviour. You are the only one who is continuing to suffer and carry the pain.

And the third step is accountability and boundaries. You have to decide how you will change your own behaviours and what boundaries you need to set to protect yourself from continued harm.

My Healing Fantasy in Action

A couple of years ago, I decided I was in a healthy enough place to rekindle a relationship with my parents. I thought I could handle it because I had done so much work on myself.

In my mind, the years apart had been enough to create change. I assumed that the space and silence between us had given them time to reflect, to recognize the harm they caused, and to want to do better. I told myself that I had grown so much over the last few years, surely they would have grown and changed too. After all, what else would they be doing with their time?

In my fantasy, the time away had been an opportunity for transformation, a reset button that would magically erase the dysfunction and replace it with understanding, empathy, and accountability. The truth I would come to learn was that time alone changes nothing. Without self-awareness, there is no reflection. Without reflection, there is no growth. And without growth, people stay exactly the same.

The only thing that had truly changed during those years was me. I had developed boundaries. I had developed emotional maturity. I no longer reacted the way I once did when they tried to push my buttons. That was empowering, but it didn’t mean it was healthy to keep subjecting myself to their emotional immaturity or volatile behaviour.

Through my research and lived experience, I learned something that was both sobering and freeing: the odds of emotionally immature or narcissistic parents truly changing are next to none.

While cutting ties may sound extreme, sometimes it is the only real option for protecting your peace. To learn more about estrangement read my blog on this topic here.

What You Can Do Right Now To Begin Healing

1. Name your healing fantasy. Be honest with yourself about whether you are still waiting for them to change.

2. Accept your responsibility now. Your childhood was not your fault, but your healing is your responsibility.

3. Recognize your coping strategies. Ask yourself: how did I survive back then, and how is that showing up in my life now?

4. Speak your truth. Keeping it bottled up will only keep you stuck.

5. Set and keep boundaries. They do not have to like them. You are not doing it for their comfort, you are doing it for your safety.

Why We Cling to Healing Fantasies

One of the biggest reasons adult children of emotionally immature or narcissistic parents hold on to healing fantasies is because we have done our own inner work. We have gone through the discomfort of self-awareness, faced our patterns, and taken accountability for our healing. We have experienced firsthand that transformation is possible, so naturally, we believe that if we can change, anyone can.

What we fail to see is that emotionally immature and narcissistic parents do not operate from that same place. They do not recognize their behaviour as harmful, so they see no reason to change it. Without self-awareness, there is no accountability, and without accountability, there is no transformation.

Another reason these fantasies are so hard to let go of is because many of us have developed an overactive sense of empathy as children. We grew up scanning the room, reading moods, and tiptoeing around to avoid conflict. That hyper-attunement to others makes it easy for us to understand why people are the way they are, and it becomes just as easy to justify their behaviour.

While empathy is a strength, it can become harmful when it leads you to excuse someone’s behaviour at the expense of your own well-being. Understanding why a person is the way they are does not obligate you to accept or endure their harmful treatment.

Signs your empathy is crossing into self-betrayal:

• You repeatedly minimize or excuse someone’s harmful behaviour toward you.

• You stay in relationships that consistently make you feel unsafe, unloved, or unseen.

• You prioritize someone else’s comfort over your own emotional or physical safety.

• You avoid setting boundaries because you fear how the other person will react.

• You feel guilty for putting your needs before theirs, even when their behaviour is hurting you.

Empathy should be a tool reserved for connection, not a weapon used against yourself. When you redirect even a fraction of the compassion you show others toward yourself, you will begin to see that protecting your well-being is not selfish, it is essential. Stop gaslighting yourself into believing that change might still happen or that their behaviour wasn't really that bad. The longer you cling to that hope, the more you delay your own healing.

Letting Go of the Fantasy

Healing fantasies are tempting because they keep hope alive, but it is a false hope that keeps you tied to people who continue to hurt you.

Even if you have developed strong boundaries, your nervous system never forgets who has failed to keep you safe. The moment you are around them, your body automatically goes into overdrive. Your body feels the shift... the tension, the unease, the heaviness in the air and whether you consciously notice it or not, your nervous system is already reacting to the danger. That negative energy is real, and staying in it keeps your body and mind in a constant state of hypervigilance, essentially retraumatizing you every time you visit.

If you have been holding on to a healing fantasy, start by naming it for what it is. Write down what you are hoping will happen, and then ask yourself if there is any real evidence that this person has changed. Be honest about whether their actions match the version of them you are holding onto in your mind.

Next, shift your focus inward. Channel your energy into creating the life, safety, and peace you once hoped they would give you, and claim it for yourself instead. Surround yourself with people who consistently make you feel safe, heard, and respected. Practice setting and keeping boundaries, even when it feels uncomfortable.

Most importantly, stop waiting for them to become the person you needed. The closure you are looking for will not come from them; it will come from you.

You did not choose the family you were born into. But you do get to choose the life you create from here.

Grieving the Parents You Wish You Had

One of the hardest parts of letting go of a healing fantasy is grieving people who are still alive. It feels unnatural. We’re used to thinking of grief as something that happens when someone dies, but this is a different kind of loss... one that doesn’t have a funeral or a clear end point.

When you step back and really think about it, you’re not sad that your current parents aren’t part of your life anymore. If you honestly compare their behaviour to the standards you have for your friends, you realize you’d never choose to keep someone in your life who consistently shows those toxic traits. You can logically recognize that you’re better off without their dysfunction. What you’re really grieving is the fact that they will never be who you needed them to be. That reality hits like a punch to the chest. It is the moment you understand that the love, safety, and emotional support you longed for simply will never come from them, no matter how much time passes or how hopeful you are.

This grief is real. It’s the loss of a relationship that never existed in the way you needed it to. It’s the ache of knowing that the people who should have protected you, nurtured you, and guided you were never capable of it. It’s also the realization that you now know you deserved so much more, and admitting that to yourself is both empowering and heartbreaking.

Acknowledging this grief is painful, but it’s also necessary. You can’t heal from a wound you’re still pretending isn’t there.

Let yourself mourn the parents you never had, because only then can you start building the life, relationships, and safety that you deserve.