Maybe you've never said it out loud. Maybe you've never even let yourself think it clearly — just pushed it down, changed the subject in your own head, felt the guilt arrive before the thought could fully form. But here it is, and you've found your way to reading something about it, which tells me it's been sitting in you for a while.
So let me say it plainly, so you don't have to: some people don't love their parents. Or they love them in a distant, obligatory way that doesn't feel like love at all. Or they feel something closer to relief when they leave, and dread when they return. If any of that is you — you are not a monster. You are not broken. And you are not alone, even though it probably feels like the loneliest thing in the world right now.
Why it's so hard to say in India.
The cultural instruction couldn't be clearer. Respect your parents. Honour your elders. They gave you everything — your life, your education, the sacrifices you'll never fully know. In this framework, not loving your parents isn't just a personal feeling. It's a moral failure. An ingratitude problem. Almost a sin.
The messages come from everywhere: from relatives who tell you your parents did their best, from films where the devoted child is the hero, from teachers and colleagues who speak of their parents with reverence that makes you feel quietly ashamed of your own silence. You learn, very early, that there is only one acceptable version of the parent-child story in India. And you have been living outside of it, pretending you don't.
So you perform. You call when you're supposed to. You visit during festivals. You say the right things at family gatherings. And inside, you feel depleted — by the performance, by the gap between what you show and what you actually feel, by the loneliness of carrying something no one around you would understand.
What "not loving your parents" actually means.
Here's what I've seen in therapy, over and over: this feeling is almost never as simple as the absence of love. It's almost always more layered than that.
For many people, what happened was this: love was there, somewhere, underneath everything. But it got buried. Under years of criticism that arrived instead of warmth. Under a parent who was emotionally unavailable — physically present, but unreachable. Under conditional approval that taught you, from childhood, that you had to earn closeness rather than simply have it. Under the fear of a parent whose moods you spent years trying to manage. Under the grief of wanting something from them that they never gave, and learning, eventually, to stop wanting it.
Love that grows in those conditions doesn't disappear cleanly. It gets tangled with resentment, with exhaustion, with grief, with fear. And what you feel on the surface — the numbness, the dread, the flatness — isn't the absence of love. It's what love looks like when it's been through a lot of pain.
The full spectrum of what people feel.
This isn't one thing. People who come to therapy carrying this describe it in many different ways — and all of them are real.
- I love them, but I don't like them. I'd help them if something happened. But being around them for more than a few hours costs me something I can't recover from quickly.
- I feel mostly nothing. When I imagine them, I feel hollow. Not angry, not sad — just empty. Like talking about strangers.
- I feel relief when I'm away from them. I breathe easier. My shoulders drop. I become more myself. And then I feel guilty for noticing.
- I actively dread being around them. The calls make me anxious for hours before and after. Visits take days to recover from. I cancel things and make excuses rather than go.
- I feel love, but it's wrapped in so much hurt that I can't reach it. Somewhere under all of this, I still want something from them. But I've stopped believing I'll ever get it.
None of these are shameful. All of them make sense when you understand the relationship they came from.
The "good child" performance — and the cost of it.
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from performing a relationship you don't actually have. Showing up to festivals with the right expression on your face. Taking the calls and making the small talk and not saying what you're actually thinking. Watching your parents tell other people how proud they are, while you stand there holding a version of yourself they've never actually met.
The performance is its own kind of loss. Because underneath it, what you're doing is grieving — again and again, quietly — the relationship you deserved but didn't have. Every festival you sit through is a reminder. Every phone call you dread is a reminder. Every family photo is a reminder.
And the guilt. The guilt can feel enormous, especially in India, where the cultural weight of parental love is so heavy. You feel guilty for not calling enough. Guilty for being relieved when you're away. Guilty for not feeling what you think you should feel. The guilt is exhausting, and it doesn't help anything — but it makes sense. It's a sign that you care about being a good person. The problem is that guilt is pointing at the wrong thing.
This is not a moral failing.
Here's something important, and I want you to actually take it in: children need to be loved in order to learn how to love back. That is not a metaphor. That is how emotional development works.
When you grow up in a home where love felt conditional — given when you performed well, withdrawn when you didn't — you learn that love is something you earn, not something you simply have. When you grow up with a parent who was cold or critical or controlling, a part of you spends years trying to crack the code of how to make them warm. When a parent weaponises love — uses it to manipulate, to guilt, to bind — love stops feeling safe. And your nervous system, very sensibly, starts moving away from it.
What you feel toward your parents is an emotional response to your actual experience with them. Not a character flaw. Not ingratitude. Not a sin. It is a response that makes complete sense given what happened.
What you can do with this feeling.
First: you don't have to keep carrying it alone. This is the kind of thing that is almost impossible to process in the normal run of life, because the people around you are often too close to it — too embedded in the same family system, too committed to the story that parents always mean well, too likely to tell you to be grateful or to forgive or to focus on the good.
Therapy gives you somewhere to put all of it down. Not to be judged. Not to be told what to feel. Just to be heard, fully, for the first time — possibly by the first person who won't tell you you're wrong for feeling it.
In therapy, you can grieve the relationship you deserved but didn't have. That grief is real. It deserves space. You can begin to understand how the relationship has shaped you — your patterns in other relationships, the way you relate to authority, the beliefs you hold about whether you deserve good things. And you can make conscious choices about what kind of relationship, if any, you want to have going forward — not from obligation or performance, but from an honest place.
You don't have to perform a love you don't feel. You don't have to be the child your parents imagined. You get to be an adult who decides, with clear eyes and some compassion for yourself, what is true and what you want your life to look like from here.
If you're carrying this — the weight of a feeling you can't say to anyone, the guilt, the grief, the performance — you deserve somewhere to put it down. You can reach me on WhatsApp. Just say you'd like to talk. That's enough.
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