They tried. It still hurt. Both count.

Someone once asked what the best thing therapy ever taught people was, and one answer arrived carrying — in the answerer’s own telling — what a therapist had handed them: a sentence built to end a very specific civil war: it’s possible that your parents did the best they could, and that their best still fell short of what you needed, in real ways. Both stand true at once — and holding that, the person added, can coexist with compassion toward them.

The war it ends is the forced verdict. Most people carrying childhood hurt believe they must choose a courtroom outcome: either the parents were good — in which case the hurt must be exaggerated, ingratitude, your flaw — or the hurt was real, in which case the parents must be filed as villains, along with every warm memory. Both verdicts cost something true. The dialectical frame pays neither price: their limitation was real (the exhaustion, the poverty, the wounds they were passed and never got to treat), and the shortfall landed on a child who deserved more. Gratitude and grief, side by side, no arithmetic canceling either.

What changes when both count is mostly what stops: the endless re-litigating. You no longer have to minimize the hurt to keep loving them, or manufacture villainy to justify the ache. One of that conversation’s other therapy tools pairs naturally here — when the spiral starts, ask what are the facts? The facts in this case were always both columns, which is why any single-verdict story kept collapsing.

The boundary the page holds firmly: they did their best describes limitation, never license. Cruelty doesn’t get the both-true treatment, and if that’s your history, the pages about walking away speak to you instead — no compassion clause owed. And even inside both-true, nothing is scheduled: distance, grief, and how much relationship exists now all remain yours to set. As another line from that same conversation goes — a ball thrown your way was never a ball you owed anyone a catch on.

They tried. It still hurt. You were never required to pick one.