Is therapy always about blaming your parents?

One of the most common concerns I hear when working with clients, is that they don’t want to come to therapy and feel like they are simply blaming their parents for the mistakes they made. In fact, clients often experience a great reluctance to talk about parents and other family at all, with many citing a feeling of disloyalty around doing so.

Looking Back Through the Lens of Adulthood

The clients I work with are all adults, many of whom can now look back on their childhoods and parents through the lens of ‘adulthood’, or maybe even through the lens of their own experience of being parents. Whilst this perspective can offer understanding of contexts that may not have been clear to their child selves, such as financial worries, relationship issues or simply the challenges of being parents, it can also rationalise these experiences in a way that wasn’t the child’s experience at the time. 

Why Talking About Parents Can Feel So Hard

This response to talking about parents is very common; and it makes sense why. From an attachment perspective, the emotional bonds with our early caregivers are formed within the first 5 years of life, at a time when without them, we literally would not survive. Protection of these attachment bonds therefore makes sense, even when those relationships in practise may not have been without complications.

When Childhood Trauma or Secrets Are Involved

In early childhoods that contain trauma, neglect or abuse, the need to have at least one parent who is ‘good’ can become essential to that child’s emotional survival, so even when the ‘good’ parent may have behaved in ways that could be considered harmful, it can be difficult to allow that view of the parent into the adult’s recollections. In some cases, children may have received messages about ‘not telling’, or threats about what would happen if they did, so their survival strategy is well-trained in not going there, even as an adult. 

It is sometimes the fear of what might be remembered that creates a barrier to talking about parents, or a reluctance to re-open painful wounds and emotions that the adult client has found ways to manage. All of these are valid, and the therapist should respect the hesitancy with which a client might talk about their family. 

When Love and Loyalty Complicate the Story

Not all reluctance is due to a painful or traumatic childhood. In many cases, the adult client has developed a close and loving relationship with the parent as an adult, and so to talk about ways that parent might have impacted them as a child, can feel unrepresentative of their relationship now. This can often be seen when a parent has a completely different relationship to their grandchildren than they had with the adult client as a child. They may be more affectionate, playful, patient or understanding of their grandchildren, leading the adult client to question whether they can trust their own memories of the childhood that seems very different. Sometimes resentment can exist here, but also a caution about rocking the boat especially if that parent is relied on for childcare or financial support. 

Moving Beyond the Blame Game

So how do we begin to talk about our experience of parents, without bringing the blame game into it? We can start by remembering that therapy is about UNDERSTANDING.

The therapist brings a curiosity about the client’s experience – present and past. What was it like? How did it feel? Has it left any impact on how you experience the world now?

Making Room for Multiple Truths

Every person, parent or child, has a complex history and a multitude of factors that influence how they behave and interact with others. The goal of therapy is not to work out who was wrong or right, or to explain why people behaved the way they did.

Instead, it’s aim is to create a space where the client’s lived experience can be looked at, recalled, felt and understood, in all its complexities. There is very little in this world that can be seen as black or white, and I haven’t yet a met a person or childhood that can be viewed in such a way. More than one thing can be true at the same time: your mum could have taken you on amazing holidays but still made you feel unseen; your dad could have punished you physically, but you also have happy memories of playing football in the garden with him.

Making room for all these things is the start of really understanding how your relationships, or lack of them, with your parents have influenced your life.