What is one thing you wish your parents could understand about what you’ve been carrying?
That thing you have been going through but you don’t have the words to explain to them in a way they would understand?
This is for the person who has been asking themselves this one question for the longest time: Do I tell my parents?
This is for the person who loves their family and knows their family loves them too, but has also come to realise that love and understanding are not the same thing. This is for you who believe that that very conversation you need to have might cost something. And you are not sure you are ready to pay that price.
The depression that has been sitting in your chest since you were fifteen, the anxiety that makes it hard to leave your house on certain days, that they read as laziness or ingratitude.
Or the thing that happened at your uncle’s place when you were a child that you have never said out loud to anyone in your family, because you know, you already know, how it would end.
Or that thing that happened years ago, in school, far from home, that you have never been able to bring back to the people who raised you, because their world does not have a category for that kind of pain without including shame.
Maybe it is the addiction, the drinking, the substance, the thing you used to stay afloat, that your family has seen the edges of but never the full shape of.
Maybe it is the relationship you were in that became abusive, slowly and then all at once, and you left it but still carry it, and you know that telling your parents would mean explaining things about yourself and your choices that you are not ready to defend.
Maybe it is the years of people-pleasing, the way you have squeezed yourself to fit into rooms and relationships and a version of your family’s expectations, and the exhaustion of that, the grief of it, is something you cannot make them understand without also telling them that some of what they did contributed to it.
Whatever it is, I see you.
Proverbs 13:12 says “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
Hope deferred. That is the exact phrase. Not hope destroyed — deferred. Pushed forward. Set to a later date that may never arrive.
There is a specific kind of suffering that comes from silence and needing something, be it understanding, acknowledgment, being truly seen by someone whose opinion matters most, but not receiving it. From carrying something alone that was never meant to be carried alone.
Let me name what you are actually experiencing, because I want to be specific.
The first is investment in silence. In many African families, silence about difficulty is a choice that was made, consciously, because survival required it. Your parents or grandparents may have come through circumstances where speaking your pain out loud was a liability. Where the only way to keep moving was to not stop and feel. That silence helped them avoid difficult situations to keep the peace and avoid family shame, and so they passed it down to you as well.
Some parents will respond to sharing your experience with more scripture rather than more listening.
And there is one more thing: And I want to be careful here because I do not want you to miss this: Your disclosure of that experience may activate your parent’s own unprocessed pain. People don’t say this enough.
When you sit down and say: “I have been struggling, it has been this way for a long time, I am in therapy”, you are not only delivering information about yourself. You are holding up a mirror. And what your parent sees in that mirror may be something they have spent decades refusing to look at. Their own unresolved grief. Their own anxiety they managed through control. Their own pain they converted into achievement, or religion, or silence.
What I am saying is your healing can feel like an accusation to someone who never got the chance to be healed. And that accusation is not something everyone is ready to receive.
So how then do you navigate this?
First: frame the conversation around function, not diagnosis.
A lot of our parents do not have a framework for mental health conditions as medical categories. What they know is: my child is not functioning. My child is not sleeping. My child cannot do the things they need to do.
So start there. Tell them that something is happening in your life that is affecting your ability to live well. That is a conversation they can enter.
Second: when possible, bring a bridge.
This might be a family friend who is a medical professional. A pastor who understands mental health. A trusted elder because the messenger often matters as much as the message in our culture.
Third: plant the seed without requiring the harvest.
Know that the first conversation would most likely not produce the outcome you hoped for. What it does do is begin a process.
Your parents may not respond well in the moment. They may respond with denial, or scripture, or by changing the subject entirely. And then, weeks later, your mother may call you. Or your father may say something that lets you know he heard you.
Fourth: You are allowed to decide how much you share and when.
Disclosure is not all-or-nothing. Partial truth is still truth. You can say: I have been going through a hard season, and I am getting some support for it. You do not have to name the therapist. You do not have to name the diagnosis. You do not have to explain everything.
Remember that you cannot control how your family receives this. You can only control the conditions under which you say it. So before you have this conversation, I want you to do three things.
One: know what you need from it. Not what you hope for, but what you need. Do you need them to understand fully? Or do you need them to know, even if they do not understand? Those are different conversations. Be honest with yourself about which one you are having.
Two: identify your one safe person. Before you talk to your parents, make sure there is someone in your life who already knows. A friend, a therapist, a community. Because if the conversation goes badly, you will need somewhere to land.
Three: decide in advance what you will do if they respond with dismissal or redirection to prayer. Being prepared for it means it does not have to destroy you. You can say: I hear you. I am still getting support. And leave it there.
Cycles break slowly, and they break first in the person brave enough to say this ends with me. That person does not have to have their parents’ blessing to begin. They just have to begin. You are allowed to get better even if no one in your family understands what you are healing from.