Estimated Reading Time: 10-12 minutes

What You Will Learn

• Why respect for parents carries moral weight across many cultures, while taking different forms from one culture to another.

• Why anger or hatred toward a parent can produce guilt even when the relationship has been deeply painful.

• How love, gratitude, resentment, loyalty, and disappointment can coexist within the same family relationship.

• What psychological research suggests about suppressing anger and other difficult emotions.

• Why literature gives writers unusual freedom to examine emotions that ordinary family conversation may prohibit.

• What expressive writing can and cannot do psychologically.

• How someone can write honestly about a parent without turning complexity into cruelty.

The Feeling We Are Not Supposed to Admit

Few statements violate expectations about family as abruptly as “I hate my parent.” Anger toward a partner, employer, politician, or former friend may be considered understandable, but anger toward a mother or father often receives a different moral response. The speaker may immediately be asked what the parent sacrificed, whether they did their best, whether forgiveness is overdue, or whether criticizing them publicly is itself an act of cruelty. The emotion is no longer treated only as a feeling. It becomes evidence presented in a moral trial about what kind of son or daughter someone has become.

This tension sits close to the emotional center of books such as Emad Rashad Othman’s The Parent I Despise. The disturbing power of the title itself comes partly from its willingness to name an emotion that family culture frequently prefers to soften. We are more comfortable saying that someone has “a difficult relationship” with a parent or carries “unresolved feelings” than acknowledging hatred, resentment, disgust, or the desire for distance. Yet difficult emotions do not become less human because they violate an ideal of family love. A person may experience intense anger toward a parent without wanting to harm them, just as they may continue loving that parent while believing the relationship has caused serious pain.

The more useful psychological question is therefore not whether someone is morally permitted to feel hatred. Emotions arise from experience and interpretation before they become deliberate choices. The important questions concern what the emotion means, what sustains it, how the person acts because of it, and whether the emotion has become the only available story about the relationship.

Respect for Parents Is Not One Universal Cultural Script

Many societies attach strong values to parental respect, care, loyalty, or obedience, but these expectations differ considerably in meaning. Contemporary research on filial piety is particularly useful here because it challenges two opposite stereotypes: that respect for parents is uniquely Asian and that filial piety simply means unquestioning obedience. A 2025 review describes filial piety more broadly through beliefs, emotions, and behaviors involving respect, duty, care, and family relationships, with considerable variation across cultures and across the lifespan. Earlier work similarly distinguishes reciprocal forms of filial respect, grounded in affection and gratitude, from more authoritarian expectations centered on hierarchy and obedience.

That distinction helps clarify why cultural expectations can sometimes become psychologically complicated. Caring for an aging parent because the relationship matters to you is not equivalent to believing that criticizing a parent is morally forbidden. Respect based on affection is different from compulsory silence. Even cultures that place strong emphasis on intergenerational responsibility contain disagreement about what children owe parents when the relationship includes serious neglect, rejection, violence, manipulation, or humiliation.

Nor should parental reverence itself be treated as harmful. Family loyalty can provide continuity, identity, practical support, meaning, and strong networks of care. Problems arise when one moral principle is used to erase every other consideration, so that being a parent becomes protection from accountability or being a child permanently eliminates the right to describe one’s own experience. Respect and honesty are not necessarily opposites. The conflict begins when a family or culture defines respect as requiring one version of the past to remain unquestioned.

Why Anger Toward a Parent Can Feel Like a Moral Failure

Parental anger is emotionally complicated because most people do not encounter parents as ordinary adults. For many years, parents occupy roles connected with survival, belonging, authority, approval, and identity. Even in adulthood, disagreement with a parent can therefore carry emotional meanings that are larger than the immediate conflict. Someone may know intellectually that they are allowed to criticize their father while still feeling internally as though criticism violates something sacred.

This helps explain why anger can coexist so easily with guilt. A person may think, “She sacrificed so much for me, so how can I resent her?” or “He had a painful childhood himself, so perhaps I have no right to be angry.” Those statements contain pieces of truth without necessarily resolving the relationship. A parent can have sacrificed greatly and still have caused harm. A father can have been wounded by his own upbringing and still be responsible for how he treated his children. Understanding context can expand the story without requiring someone to erase impact.

The emotion itself may also change over time. Hatred can sometimes contain anger, grief, disgust, betrayal, disappointment, or a wish for psychological separation that has never found another language. But it should not automatically be translated into something supposedly “deeper.” Sometimes a person is simply angry about treatment they experienced as wrong. Psychological maturity does not require replacing every angry feeling with compassion. It requires enough flexibility that one emotion does not have to explain the entire relationship.

Suppressing Anger Is More Complicated Than “Keeping It Inside”

Popular psychology often claims that unexpressed anger inevitably turns into anxiety, depression, numbness, or physical illness. Research supports a more cautious conclusion. A 2025 meta-analysis examining 81 studies found that greater anger was consistently associated with several regulation patterns, including rumination, avoidance, and expressive suppression, while acceptance and cognitive reappraisal showed negative associations with anger. However, the studies were highly heterogeneous, and association does not establish that suppression itself caused the anger or psychological difficulties.

Broader emotion-regulation research also shows that cultural context matters. A large 2025 meta-analysis involving data from 37 countries and regions found that the relationship between emotional suppression and mental health varies across cultural environments and demographic groups. Suppression is therefore not universally harmful in every context. Sometimes withholding an emotion is strategic, socially appropriate, or protective. We regulate expression constantly without damaging ourselves.

The problem is more likely to arise when a person has no psychologically acceptable way to acknowledge an emotion at all. There is a difference between deciding not to express anger during a family dinner and believing you are a bad person merely because the anger exists. The first is emotional regulation. The second can create an additional layer of shame around the original experience.

Acknowledgment does not require confrontation. A person can recognize resentment privately, discuss it in therapy, write about it, or simply admit to themselves that love and anger occupy the relationship simultaneously. The important shift is from “I must not feel this” toward “I feel this, and I can decide responsibly what to do with it.”

Why Literature Can Say What Families Cannot

Literature has always provided language for relationships that social convention struggles to hold. Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father remains powerful partly because it exposes fear, admiration, resentment, inadequacy, accusation, and longing within the same paternal relationship. James Baldwin’s writing similarly demonstrates how deeply a father can remain psychologically present even when the relationship contains bitterness and unresolved conflict. Contemporary works such as Othman’s The Parent I Despise continue this tradition by bringing forbidden family emotions into public language.

The strength of literature is not that it establishes which family member was objectively correct. Literature can hold contradiction without immediately resolving it. A writer can describe a father as frightening in one passage and vulnerable in another, or admit gratitude toward a mother while also naming the damage caused by her behavior. The page can contain competing truths more comfortably than many family conversations can.

This is especially valuable when social language becomes too narrow. If someone is allowed to describe a parent only as loving or abusive, grateful or ungrateful, forgiving or resentful, much of actual family experience disappears. Literary writing can resist that pressure. It can say: I loved this person. I feared this person. I needed this person. This person hurt me. All of these sentences may belong to the same story.

That complexity is more psychologically interesting than simply deciding whether hatred is justified.

Writing Can Create Meaning, but It Is Not Guaranteed Healing

The original expressive-writing tradition associated with James Pennebaker generated considerable interest in whether writing privately about emotionally difficult experiences could improve health. The evidence accumulated over decades is mixed. An earlier meta-analysis of randomized trials found little or no overall benefit across psychological and physical health outcomes, challenging popular claims that disclosure is reliably therapeutic. A more recent 2023 meta-analysis of 31 experimental studies involving more than 4,000 participants found a statistically significant but small reduction in depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms at follow-up.

The balanced conclusion is that expressive writing can be useful for some people, but it is not a dependable cure and does not automatically transform difficult emotions into resolution. Writing may help someone organize events, notice contradictions, explore perspective, or develop language for an experience that previously felt chaotic. It may also intensify distress temporarily, encourage rumination, or lead someone to treat a highly emotional account as the only possible interpretation of the past.

This matters especially when writing about parents. A journal entry written during rage may capture something emotionally true about that moment without representing every truth about a decades-long relationship. The value of writing is not that every sentence becomes a final verdict. Its value can lie in allowing thoughts to become visible enough to question, develop, contradict, or revise.

Not every piece of writing needs to be published. Private writing and public writing carry different responsibilities, because publication introduces privacy, reputation, family members, and sometimes legal considerations that do not exist on a private page.

Writing Honestly Without Turning a Parent Into a Caricature

Ethical writing about family pain does not require pretending to be neutral. Memoir, essay, and reflective nonfiction are necessarily written from a perspective. A writer is allowed to describe what they remember, how an interaction affected them, what they believed at the time, and what they understand differently now. Emotional truth does not require eliminating subjectivity.

But subjectivity is different from certainty. “I experienced him as frightening” carries a different claim from “He wanted me to be afraid.” The first describes experience; the second claims access to motive. Writing becomes stronger, not weaker, when it distinguishes what happened, what the writer remembers, what they felt, and what they infer. It can also acknowledge uncertainty without surrendering the right to speak.

Complexity is another form of ethical precision. A parent does not need to become either a monster or a misunderstood saint. Writers can acknowledge tenderness without using it to erase harm, and acknowledge harm without pretending tenderness never existed. This is particularly important when writing about real people whose histories may be partly unknowable.

Such restraint does not dilute painful material. Often it makes the writing more credible and more emotionally powerful because readers are trusted to encounter contradiction rather than being instructed whom to condemn.

Hatred Does Not Have to Become an Identity

Naming hatred can be clarifying precisely because it separates the emotion from the person experiencing it. “I hate what happened between us” or even “I hate my father” describes an emotional reality, but it need not become a permanent identity organized around opposition to the parent. A person may remain angry for years, later feel indifference, regain affection, choose distance, reconcile partially, or continue holding several emotions indefinitely. There is no required emotional sequence.

This distinction also protects writing from becoming another prison. Someone who has spent years being defined inside a family as difficult, disloyal, or ungrateful does not need to become permanently defined outside the family as the wounded child either. Writing can examine how the relationship shaped them while allowing identity to expand beyond it.

That may be one of the most useful ways to understand Othman’s willingness to write directly about parental resentment. The value lies not in teaching readers that hatred is noble, nor in telling them that forgiveness is required. It lies in allowing an emotion that is culturally difficult to admit to enter language, where it can be examined rather than merely feared.

Conclusion: The Right to Name a Complicated Truth

The cultural taboo around hating a parent exists for understandable reasons. Families depend on loyalty, gratitude, sacrifice, and responsibilities between generations, and societies have long developed moral traditions to protect those bonds. Those traditions can sustain families through illness, hardship, aging, and conflict. But a value becomes restrictive when protecting the institution of family requires denying what particular relationships actually contain.

Psychology does not tell us that anger toward a parent is inherently healthy or unhealthy. Anger is an emotion whose significance depends on its causes, intensity, duration, regulation, and consequences. Suppressing every expression of anger can be associated with difficulties, but cultural context matters, and unrestrained expression is not automatically healthier. Writing offers one possible space between silence and confrontation: a place where emotion can be described before anyone decides what must be done about it.

The strongest writing about parents therefore does more than accuse or forgive. It makes room for gratitude and resentment, history and accountability, memory and uncertainty, loyalty and limits. It allows writers to say that a parent mattered profoundly and caused pain without forcing one truth to cancel the other.

Writing about a parent you resent is not automatically an act of betrayal, just as writing about pain is not automatically an act of healing. Its value lies in making a complicated human experience speakable enough to be examined honestly.

References

Othman, E. R. (2020). The Parent I Despise. Al Rewaq Publishing House.

Kafka, F. (1919/2008). Letter to His Father. Schocken Books.

Baldwin, J. (1963). The Fire Next Time. Dial Press.

Kyeong, Y., Yu, M., Tiemeier, H., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & Setoh, P. (2025). Filial piety across sociocultural context and the life span. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 34(3).

Bedford, O., & Yeh, K. H. (2019). The history and the future of the psychology of filial piety: Chinese norms to contextualized personality construct. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 100.

Chen, M. S., Cai, Q., Omari, D., et al. (2025). Emotion regulation and mental health across cultures: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Nature Human Behaviour, 9, 1176–1200.

Pop, G. V., Nechita, D. M., Miu, A. C., et al. (2025). Anger and emotion regulation strategies: A meta-analysis. Scientific Reports, 15, 6931.

Guo, L. (2023). The delayed, durable effect of expressive writing on depression, anxiety and stress: A meta-analytic review of studies with long-term follow-ups. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62(1), 272–297.

Reinhold, M., Bürkner, P. C., & Holling, H. (2018). Effects of expressive writing on depressive symptoms: A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 25(1), e12224.