Tag Archives: parenting

On Blaming the Parents

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.

Copyright © 2023 Anna Braverman

On the Misuse of Suffering

My work with young people – people in the “climbing” stage of their lives, has crystalized for me a phenomenon that I think exists everywhere in our society – the misuse of suffering as a proxy for effort, success, worthiness, etc. Let me explain what I mean:

Think of a role you play in your life that matters a lot to you. It might be your role as a parent, a student, a practitioner of your profession, a citizen, a friend, an artist – these are just a few (and we all play multiple roles in our lives). Now, in each of these areas there are some markers of success that are easily quantifiable. For instance, if you think back to a time in your life when you were a student (e.g., in school) you will probably recall that grades are one such quantifiable marker of success – it may not be easy to get an A, but it is quite easy to define what an A is and you can easily know whether you got it or not. It is also easy to quantify how much time, in hours and minutes, you are spending with your child/spouse/friend etc. For that matter, it is easy to quantify how much gross time you spend doing anything (stay in the office, for example).
The challenge is that some of these quantifiable markers of success are not necessarily the most meaningful, important or personally relevant. Grades are a compellingly simple reward system, but their relevance fades once we leave academic settings, or advance in them beyond the undergraduate level. Time spent is also simple, but if you think about it, it is a very crude measure of actual effort and even less good as a predictor of the value of someone’s contribution to any cause.
One thing that tends to be true of most people is that they struggle with ambiguity and tend to be driven to reduce anxiety-provoking doubt. Therefore, people on average, no matter how fervently they proclaim that they do not like to be formally evaluated (e.g., tested), tend to struggle with tasks that offer no built-in way to evaluate success or progress. And what do people do when an obvious way to measure progress does not exist? They try to create a way.

Unfortunately, it seems that there is a process in our society (and perhaps it is not unique to our culture – that may be a topic for another blog) that compels people to view suffering as an acceptable way to measure success. This makes a lot of sense. After all, what really does it mean to spend QALITY time with a child? That is a deeply philosophical question that requires deep reflection on what kind of person that child is, what kind of person you are, what each of your skill sets are, what both you and this child are most in need of in this particular moment in time, what your general goals for parenting are, what kind of adult you want this child to become, how long the child’s attention span is, and much, much more. Suppose that a deep reflection on all of these questions leads you to believe that this child would benefit most from seeing you take care of yourself so that they feel that they are allowed to take care of themselves too. What if quality time for this particular child right now means seeing you give yourself a manicure? But can you be sure that this is true? Can you be sure that this conclusion was not driven by your selfish desire to have a manicure?
The truth is, that we can have a pretty strong hunch, but we can never be 100% sure that we are succeeding, because almost everything in life that is meaningful (like raising children, building a career, being creative) is also complicated. But somehow, there seems to be a process in people’s minds that says that if they have suffered or made sacrifices while doing something it is more likely to be the right thing to do than if they enjoyed it. Therefore, people seem to be more likely to conclude that if they give up their date night to spend an evening with their child (whose only desire that night may be to chat with a friend), that is more likely to make them feel like better parents than giving themselves a manicure.
Even the way we talk reflects this bias. For instance, it is not very common (probably because it is not always viewed as socially acceptable) to openly compliment oneself on how WELL one has done something. However, it is perfectly acceptable to imply that one has worked on something more hours (and slept fewer hours) than anyone else at the office. It is not socially acceptable to praise oneself as a parent, but it is acceptable to expound on all the sacrifices one has made for one’s child and the suffering one has accrued while making said sacrifices.

I wish there were an easy way to get out of this pattern of thinking, but there may not be. After all, using suffering as a proxy is a shortcut, and people create shortcuts for a reason – because the alternative road may be long or complicated. The alternative to using this shortcut, in my opinion, is to reflect deeply on one’s values and goals, and to be mindful of what one truly wants to see as an outcome of a particular action or activity. This may require a good measure of honesty with oneself and general self-awareness. However, the benefits are considerable. Imagine what it would be like to give yourself permission to leave work on time, to take the weekend off without guilt, to invite a babysitter on a night you really need to recharge, to accept help from a loved one, etc.

I encourage all of us (myself included) to reflect on the moments of suffering in our lives and try to be mindful of which ones are driven by the inevitable pain of being human, which we cannot avoid (e.g., by painful life events), and which ones are instances of needless suffering driven by the desire to quantify success/progress in areas of our lives that may be inherently not quantifiable. This might be a necessary first step to suffering a little less.

First published here: https://www.mmcounselingcenter.com/mindful-living-blog/archives/10-2019

Copyright © 2023 Anna Braverman