How Do I Honour a Parent Who Has Hurt Me?

Question 11147.

Honouring difficult parents is one of the hardest commands in Scripture to obey with integrity, because the fifth commandment was never written for families where love flowed easily. Exodus 20:12 says honour your father and your mother, full stop, with no footnote excusing us when a parent has been unkind, absent, controlling or worse. I have sat with enough church members carrying real wounds from a parent to know this question is never academic. It usually arrives in my study with tears attached.

So let me say plainly at the outset that honouring a parent who has hurt you does not mean pretending the hurt did not happen, and it does not mean submitting yourself to ongoing harm in the name of obedience. Honour and honesty are not opposites.

I have found that many church members carrying this particular weight have quietly assumed that faithful obedience requires them to feel warmly toward a parent who caused them real damage, and that any distance or reserve is itself evidence of spiritual failure. I want to dismantle that assumption early, because it adds a second layer of guilt on top of an already painful history, and Scripture never asks that of us.

What Honour Actually Means in the Hebrew

The Hebrew word behind honour, kabad, carries the sense of weight or heaviness, giving someone their due significance rather than treating them lightly. It does not mean approval of everything a parent has done, and it certainly does not mean silence about genuine wrongdoing. You can give a parent their due weight as the one through whom God gave you life, while still being entirely honest, with them or with a counsellor, about ways they failed you.

Honour is closer to respect for the office than agreement with every action the person holding it took. A citizen can honour the office of a judge while still appealing a bad ruling. In the same way, you can honour the position your parent holds in the structure God built into families while refusing to call their harmful behaviour good.

It is worth noticing that the fifth commandment is the first commandment with a promise attached, according to Ephesians 6:2 to 3, that it may go well with you and you may live long in the land. That promise is about the wellbeing of the one who honours, not a guarantee about the character of the parent being honoured. God attached a blessing to honouring difficult parents precisely because he knew it would sometimes be hard, not because he expected every parent to make it easy.

Distinguishing Honour From Obedience

Ephesians 6:1 tells children to obey their parents, but that command is addressed to children still under a parent’s authority, not to grown adults negotiating an unequal or hurtful relationship decades later. Honour is the lifelong command. Obedience belonged to childhood. As an adult, you are no longer required to obey a parent’s demands, only to give them the honour due to the role, which leaves considerable room for boundaries, distance and self protection that obedience as a child would not have allowed.

I have watched adult children carry unnecessary guilt for years simply because they never made this distinction clearly. They assumed that grown up honour still meant childhood obedience, complying with every request, absorbing every criticism, showing up whenever summoned, and that assumption kept them trapped in patterns Scripture never actually required of an adult.

What Honouring Difficult Parents Does Not Require

Honouring difficult parents does not require you to expose yourself or your own children to ongoing abuse, manipulation or emotional harm. It does not require pretending a painful history did not happen, minimising it to keep the peace, or accepting blame that belongs to someone else. Proverbs 4:23 tells us to guard our hearts above all else, and that instruction applies inside family relationships as much as anywhere else. Wisdom sometimes looks like limited contact, supervised visits, or firm boundaries around what topics are safe to discuss, and none of that is dishonour. It is stewardship of a heart Christ has entrusted to you.

Nor does honouring difficult parents require you to defend them to others, cover for them, or present a falsely rosy picture of your childhood to keep up appearances in front of the wider family or the church. Honesty, spoken with appropriate discretion and to the right people, is not gossip and it is not dishonour. It is simply telling the truth about your own life, which you are entitled to do.

Practical Shapes Honour Can Take

For some, honouring a difficult parent looks like continuing to visit while keeping conversations brief and boundaried. For others, given a history of real abuse, it may mean speaking to a parent kindly but rarely, from a safe distance, or communicating only through a third party. Honour can be shown through a birthday card sent without expectation of relationship, through praying for a parent you cannot safely see, or through simply refusing to speak evil of them to others even while being honest in appropriate settings such as counselling. There is no single template, and I would be suspicious of anyone who tries to give you one without knowing your particular story.

I have also seen honouring difficult parents take the shape of practical provision without emotional closeness, arranging care for an ageing parent through professionals rather than in your own home, for instance, when direct daily contact would be genuinely harmful to you or your family. Meeting a genuine need is itself an act of honour, even when it is arranged at a careful distance.

The Example of David and Saul

David honoured Saul as the Lord’s anointed even while Saul hunted him through the wilderness trying to kill him, refusing to raise a hand against him in 1 Samuel 24, yet David also fled, hid, and kept his distance rather than remaining exposed to Saul’s violence. That is a striking biblical model: genuine honour for the position, combined with entirely appropriate physical distance from genuine danger. David did not confuse honour with proximity, and neither should you.

Notice too that David never pretended Saul’s behaviour was acceptable. He named it plainly to his own companions, grieved over it, and took wise practical steps to protect himself and those with him, all while still refusing to curse the man or seize an opportunity for personal revenge when it presented itself in the cave. That combination of clear eyed honesty and restrained, undiminished honour is exactly the balance most people wrestling with a difficult parent are trying to find.

Grieving What You Did Not Receive

Part of honouring difficult parents honestly involves grieving the parent you needed and did not have, rather than either denying the loss or letting bitterness calcify into permanent resentment. Grief and honour can coexist. You can mourn what was missing while still refusing to let unforgiveness poison your own soul, remembering that forgiveness is a decision to release a debt rather than a feeling you wait to arrive.

This grief often surfaces unexpectedly, at a wedding, the birth of your own child, or simply watching another family enjoy an ease with their parents that you never had. Let those moments come rather than suppressing them. Grief acknowledged tends to loosen its grip over time. Grief denied tends to surface later in ways that are harder to manage, often at the moments you can least afford it.

Honouring Difficult Parents Publicly, at Weddings and Funerals

Occasions such as weddings and funerals bring the question of honouring difficult parents into particularly sharp focus, since custom often expects a public role for a parent that private wisdom might otherwise avoid. I would encourage you to think through these moments well in advance rather than improvising under pressure, deciding deliberately what role, if any, feels safe and appropriate, and communicating that decision calmly to family members who may expect otherwise. Honouring difficult parents does not require you to hand them a microphone simply because tradition assumes you will.

So, now what?

If you are carrying real pain from a parent, please do not carry the added weight of thinking Scripture demands you pretend it away. Honour is possible without denial, and boundaries are possible without dishonour. Bring your actual story to God rather than a sanitised version of it, and if you need help working out what honouring your particular parent should look like in practice, please come and talk it through rather than guessing alone.

As I explore in whether the sins of parents affect their children, you did not choose your parents, and you are not responsible for what they did or failed to do. You are only responsible for how you respond now, and God’s grace is more than sufficient for that. Honouring difficult parents, done wisely and honestly, is a long obedience, not a single decision made once and forgotten.

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

Exodus 20:12 (ESV)