The Three-Way Mirror: Repairing Family Relationships in Recovery
A reflection from our June community gathering with Samantha Duggan, PhD and Tian Dayton, PhD., a conversation about reparenting and what it actually takes to repair.
Many of us are carrying something unfinished with our families. A regret about how we showed up as a parent. A hope for an apology that never came. A relationship that quietly came apart somewhere along the way, and we still don't know how to touch it without making things worse.
The mirror we stand in
Samantha walked us through a framework she teaches, one she calls the parenting mirror. Picture an old three-way mirror, a panel in the middle and two angled wings.
On one wing stands the prosecutor: my parents harmed me, badly, and that is the whole story.
On the other stands the defender: my parents were good, my childhood was fine, nothing really happened.
Both feel like positions. They are really just two ways of standing still.
The middle panel is the repairer, and the view from there is harder to hold but far more free: my parents were flawed and human, the way I am flawed and human, and I can go back in and repair.
Whichever way you hold your parents tends to become the way you hold yourself. Tian knew it from the inside. Years of blame pointed at her parents, and then a flood of shame the moment she fell short with her own children. Same coin. The harsh standard she held her parents to was the one she turned on herself.
Saying sorry is not the same as repair
We sometimes assume repair means apologizing. We say sorry, and then feel quietly stung when the relationship still feels broken. Samantha was gentle but clear: an apology is not repair. Real repair starts earlier, with actually understanding what was damaged. This is the slow, unglamorous work underneath making things right, and it is often where people get stuck.
You can heal even if they never change
This one frees a lot of people. Healing does not wait on the other person.
So often we keep hoping the real repair will come from our parent directly, and it just does not arrive. Unless a parent has done their own healing, we tend to go back in, say our piece, and watch them do what they have always done.
Tian works with this through psychodrama. Rather than chasing the conversation that will not come, she helps people say what they needed to say to the parent as they were back then, in the safety of the present. What happened, happened in the past. The healing can happen now. We can still feel the anger we needed to feel. We can still grieve the parent we wished we had. And we can do all of it without their permission or their participation.
As Tian framed it, the work is to put our own healing ahead of the apology we may never get.
Standing in the middle is hard. It is also where healing finally has room to happen.
About the presenters
Samantha Duggan, PhD is a behavioral psychologist, author, and recovery advocate based in the UK, working at the meeting point of psychology, family life, and lived recovery. She is the author of Channels of Peace: How Science and Faith Can Transform Your Family.
Tian Dayton, PhD is a clinical psychologist, psychodramatist, and senior fellow at The Meadows, and one of the leading voices on relational trauma and the lasting effects of growing up with addiction. She is the author of more than fifteen books, including Growing Up with Addiction.
There's more where this came from. We gather almost every week for workshops and community conversations on exactly this kind of work. If something here landed, come find the next one.