On Blaming the Parents - Soil for Roots

I want to share a brief insight that I had while working with one of my clients recently. First, some background:
Quietly in the shadows of all my clinical work of the past few years has been a struggle to reconcile one of the oldest clichés in clinical psychology – that whatever ails you is your mother’s fault, with my own fervent hope that I wouldn’t one day be blamed for all the ills in my children’s lives. Of course – the real hope is that I wouldn’t BE the cause of ills in their lives, but since I inevitably will be the cause of some ills, I do hope for some compassion and leniency when the day arrives for them to realize this. Meanwhile, if we approach some psychological theories unscrupulously they do seem to suggest that the work of a psychologist entails uncovering just how the clients’ parents have traumatized them, and then coaching the client to take the shame, pain and rage they may have been turning inward, and turn it outward and back toward their parents. Then they get to walk away from the scene of the train wreck lighter and healthier, leaving the trauma (and their ignoble parents) in the past.

This is a major, shameless and odious exaggeration and “cartoonization” of therapy (I believe this is a new word – you’re welcome), but the point is that this image of therapy does exist out there, and while I would love to say that social media, regular media, and whoever else I might conjure is to blame, this is not strictly true. We, mental health professionals, bear some blame for this too. Some of our writing and case presentations and discourse is unkind to parents and I am as guilty of this as the next person.

So with this background in mind, here is my dilemma represented as A vs. B.

A. It is undeniable that a good number of people I see in my work are suffering now in direct consequence of poor treatment, erroneous lessons, harsh speech, general meanness, various forms of deprivation, and general lack of foresight that was practiced by their parents when they were young. When people do not appreciate that certain wrongs were done to them through no fault of their own, they tend to blame themselves for things they have no culpability for, so understanding the circumstances of childhood would appear to be very important.

VS.

B. I am starting to have serious doubts that diving too deep into our childhood experiences is as useful as I once believed it was on the grounds that I think it might inspire people to rewrite their memories in the spirit of trauma and victimhood and it might inspire people to sever some emotional ties with their parents that would have served them better if they were whole. A caveat: I have seen some people who were terribly abused by their parents and what I say here does not apply to them. There are people for whom healing calls for the severing of ties with abusers. However, thankfully, this is not true for the majority of people.

I have been pondering how to reconcile these two observations and this brings me to the insight I had recently during a session with a person whose family had been severely dysfunctional and traumatizing in many ways, but who has a beautiful way of maintaining love in her heart for individual members of her family:

A parent’s love is a great gift for a child. In simple terms, it is the gift of esteem – of knowing that you are worthy of good things in your life and that you have value to others. The trick is that, just as with any physical gift, having it is not enough. You have to actually give a gift to the person for whom it was intended. If you have it but you don’t deliver it – you might as well have not had it to begin with.
To give a regular gift you need to purchase it, wrap it and find a way to physically transfer it into the intended receiver’s possession, maybe by mailing it, or by bringing it over and giving it to them. Well, in order to give the gift of love you need to create a loving environment. A loving environment is the conduit by which love travels from the heart of the one who has it and into the psyche of the one intended to receive it. In the case of a child, once a parent’s love travels, by means of a loving environment, and arrives into the child’s psyche, it settles there and causes the child to feel worthy, safe and deserving of good things.
Unfortunately, there are many parents out there who have love for their children, but they were not able to create a loving environment and so the gift was available, but it was never delivered. It is still lying around in the parents’ basement collecting dust.

The insight I had is that it is okay to go back and explore the shortcomings of one’s childhood environment as long as the purpose of this exploration is to lead us back to this love that was never delivered. I personally feel a lot better conducting therapy when I view my job this way and it feels much less likely to descend into cold and needless condemnation of the parents (again, if no love was ever there – if this was an abusive household for example, then it is a different, but fortunately rather rare situation).
I am now starting to view therapy like this: Somewhere in a dark basement lies a gift of love that was intended for this person in front of me but was never delivered. The conduit for love, the road that would make it possible for this love to travel into this person’s psyche – the loving environment – just wasn’t there. Our job then is to travel back far enough that we can find this dusty package and help the client take it. Maybe they are going to have to steal it – that’s okay. It is fair that it should go to them. Once they retrieve it though, and once they start being able to see more clearly that they were worthy all along and deserving all along, they don’t really have to go back to the basement anymore. They certainly can, and they might, but we don’t really have to keep going back there in order to do good therapy.