What your parents want therapy to be: Learning to forgive and let bygones be bygones and move on.

What therapy actually is: Learning to recognize your trauma for what it is, accepting the fact that people (often your parents) really did hurt you and learning how to set boundaries to protect yourself going forward. Often this means cutting the toxic people out of your life, even if they're your parents.

Related: Trauma isn't something you get over just because the other person said, "I'm sorry." It's permanent mental and emotional damage. The person who hurt you may still be a trauma trigger decades later and regardless of how much they've apologized and/or say they've changed.

If you're part of another person's trauma, you should absolutely apologize and try to make it right and learn to do better. But you also need to recognize that you did permanent damage and that the relationship may never be restored and that that's your fault, not the fault of the person who was traumatized.

Now it may be that trust can be rebuilt over time and that, with the right boundaries, you can have a relationship again. But that shouldn't be assumed and it's not on the traumatized person to do that work.