To think my therapist exaggerates about my mum?

[Nubnut]

Has anyone who is in therapy have experiences where it feels a bit like they’re being read a script about parents and they feel they want to tone things down a bit? About how negligent or rubbish their parents were?

Do you have any tips about how to get the conversation back on track?

She’s painting a picture of my mum that I don’t recognise. My mum has been painful to live with in not being good at listening to me, and playing the victim whenever I’ve got upset about something, and poor communication in general. But she’s also incredibly caring and loving and has her heart in the right place. I feel like my therapist is so used to awful traumatic situations that she’s not able to deal with a more ‘normal’ upbringing. Which it’s still useful to unpack to learn about yourself and be stronger at dealing with life.

On the other hand, maybe my therapist is onto something and I’m trying to play it down to unconsciously take the blame or because I’m always feeling guilty about her… so meta and confusing!

Would I be unreasonable to say really bluntly, “look it feels a bit like you’re laying all the blame on my mum, I don’t think that’s helpful as I think it’s always a two way thing?”

I guess she’s just trying to help me feel less guilty though and place some of the blame elsewhere, and the parents are always in for it!

All I can say is I have experienced the exact same thing with my therapist!

Yes I think you should say something to your therapist.

Some therapists do do this, my friend went to one and it nearly destroyed her relationship with her parents. She went non contact and broke her mother’s heart. It was only when she had her own children that she realised her mum wasn’t toxic, just a normally loving, flawed and stressed human being trying to do her best, and the relationship has healed somewhat.

Therapists aren’t omnipotent gods, they get things wrong, and when they do you need to tell them they’re barking up the wrong tree.

What type of situations are you talking about in counseling?

It is possible your counsellor is steering you to the wrong place or it is possible you're in denial and feeling uncomfortable with your counsellor not supporting your 'two sides' approach.

Some therapists are still indirectly influenced by Freudian ideas and go looking for fault in the mother (even well trained psychiatrists and clinical psychologists). Some feminist psychotherapists have pointed out that it's always the mother to blame, rarely the father unless he is very overtly abusive-and then it's more the mother's fault for failing to protect/allowing contact etc. (even when we know that the system can be stacked against mothers).
It's possible that your therapist has an unconscious bias and is looking for problems in your relationship with your mother as an explanation for any current difficulties you are experiencing.
It's also possible that you are minimising problems in your upbringing, it's impossible for anyone on here to know.
What does your therapist hope to achieve.? Does she want you to cut contact with your Mum (it isn't unknown for therapists to encourage this) or is she trying to help you look for patterns established early in life that affect how you relate to other people?
I would be careful,. It isn't long ago that Autism and Schizophrenia were blamed on "refrigerator mothers" or impossible to please mothers.
It could well be that you are mature and reasonable to see your Mum as a flawed person, who can be irritating but is basically supportive of you.
I would bring this into the open with the therapist and say that she seems to you to be overly focussed on your Mum's negative points and that you're wondering where she's going with this and how she thinks it will help.
It is not at all uncommon for therapists to project their own issues.

I'd say exactly what you've said here to your therapist, it's absolutely the point of the work. A therapist can only offer their best interpretations but they definitely don't always get it right.

I'm also interested in where the language of blame has come into it. A therapist isn't a judge. They aren't there (or at least they shouldn't be there) to decide who out of two parties is to blame, or to blame anyone per se. Blame has such a judgemental element to it. Rather, they're there to draw your attention to things, help you make connections, avoid repeating unhelpful patterns etc. All these things can be done without blaming people, it's just it's a very different to our prevailing cultural conceptions of talking about things that have caused harm. So your therapist may be interested that you see their drawing attention to your mother's more difficult and painful behaviour as "blaming her". Or they may not. I just found it interesting. Either way you'll only know when you raise this with them, and I think it'll lead to some really interesting new avenues of exploration either way...

I don’t think that’s helpful as I think it’s always a two way thing
It isn’t always a two way thing though. You may think it is in your case, but it definitely isn’t always.
MN is full of people describing terrible family situations with abusive family members, asking whether it’s normal when to the rest of us it obviously isn’t.
None of us here know what you’ve been through and what your family was like, but if you feel that your therapist hasn’t interpreted what you told them correctly, perhaps you should explain to them why you think that.

To add another layer to it - sometimes someone can be attention seeking in a way by saying that they don't see fault in their parents, as a way of getting the therapist/others to feel sorry for them. I'm not thinking this applies to you at all as I know nothing about the situation, but I have seen it in a group therapy type situation. One young woman who had had serious difficulties with her parents, especially her Mum, really liked to attention and sympathy of the group leader, as was almost a bit resistent to therapeutic suggestions as a result, because she wasn't at a place where she wanted to move on. For whatever reasons, she needed the attention and almost maternal like sympathy of the leader (this is probably the point that the leader should have recognised it and directed her to individual therapy). But the young woman got a lot out of having people feel sorry for her, and effectively tell her that she had had it so bad that she didn't even recognise how badly they'd treated her - something about that type of sympathy gave her what she needed. So it became quite complex - she needed to recognise that she had had bad things happen to her that weren't her fault; but recognising that took away the extra sympathy that she would get for not recognising that it had been bad. I doubt it was any kind of conscious thing on her part, but it did seem to be a recurring theme.

I don't think any of that is happening to you, but I can see how there could be layers of things going on, and it must be hard for a therapist sorting out with someone how much they need to be told that their parents' behaviours did affect them, without letting it get into this sort of complexity.

I've told my therapist this at times when I've felt he's overreacting to what is fairly bog-standard family stuff. I think my exact words were 'not everything is a bloody trauma' (and I have a diagnosis of PTSD). I think he gets it although does occasionally trot out a cliche which I just roll my eyes at.

It's worth exploring your feelings with your therapist.

I found therapy helped me retrieve relationships with both my parents, understanding why my mum had struggled to be a good enough parent (basically her own childhood was totally shite) and why my dad had let her (same sort of childhood)

Like you I always felt their hearts were in the right place and therapy got me on adult terms with them.

Your therapist may be used to people who need support to go NC or VLC with their abusive parents.

I kind of had the opposite experience - made the mistake of going into how I was re-traumatised by a current difficult situation with my family. She pretty much brushed it off. The following week I brought it up again because I was still thinking about the past a lot (I was a DV victim as a child). She implied I should have got over it and said she'd be concerned if I was still thinking about it in a month. She was a CBT therapist - good for practical help and little else. Lesson now learned - found myself a person-centred trauma specialist and I can finally unpack some of this stuff.

Most of our emotional wellbeing , mental health and behaviour is down to our set of core beliefs which are formed when we are very young, ie as a baby in its first days, months, years.
As a baby we are extremely vulnerable and totally dependent on our primary caregiver which is typically the mother.
If the mother neglects their child or is unable to provide emotional and physical intimacy (probably due to their own difficult childhood) then the child suffers trauma as they believe the parent has abandoned them and they are going to die.
In this situation the child blames themselves for the mothers failures.
Instead of getting angry with the deficient mother they get angry with themselves because attacking the person who is keeping them alive will only alienate the mother further and lead to further abandonment of the child and potentially their psychological or actual death.
The process of the child defending the mother and blaming themselves continues through childhood and into adulthood.
They develop the beliefs that they are not good enough and unlovable and create an inner voice that constantly tells them they are worthless and defective.
The childhood defence mechanism of idealising the mother, because it was a strategy that kept the baby alive, still persists and it is almost impossible for the adult to see through this fantasy on their own.
This is why a good therapist will gently try to get the adult to question their beliefs about themselves and their beliefs about their parents.
When the adult begins to see the reality that the parents deficiencies were the source of their inner child's trauma they will, for a period of time, feel intense anger and hatred towards the parent.
Eventually the repressed anger that, as a child, they should have directed at the parent instead of themselves starts to dissipate and they begin to see the parent as the real flawed but human person that they are, and not the fantasy parent they saw as a child.

The mother may not consciously or intentionally have wanted to harm their child but due to their deficiencies they did harm the child.

Depends how much you’ve spoken in depth about your parents .

I find it hard to admit to myself how bad my mum actually was and have a lot of guilt because she’s dead now.

maybe she’s telling you things you don’t want to hear or that hurt you.

either Way I’m sorry your childhood wasn’t great x

But what made you start therapy in the first place? It’s not something you do by accident!

Many of the issues that play out in our lives have their roots in what happened with our parents.

There may well be more that happened in your childhood than you are able to recognise right now.

Bring it up with the therapist next time and see how they react.

What you say she's done DOES traumatise a child. You don't need to protect her from your therapist, your therapist should hold no opinions. She can have traumatised you but simultaneously be a good person, it doesn't have to be one or the other

I agree with this.

It's very difficult to know without more information but do keep in mind, two things can be true re parents. They can be 'good' people and have their hearts in the right place and good intentions AND they can be emotionally neglectful. Often it's because they didn't know any better and their parents were also bad communicators and emotionally neglectful.

If your mother didn't validate your emotions or communicate emotions very well (yours and hers) then that can cause issues in adulthood. Your mother may not have had the emotional capacity or intelligence to be any different and may well have expressed her love in other, more practical ways, but that doesn't mean some emotional damage wasn't inadvertently inflicted on you that cause you issues today.

As for it 'taking two' that certainly can be true in relationships between adults, but with an adult / child dynamic, I disagree. It's for adults to model behaviour and to regulate their emotions so that their children learn and develop emotional regulation that will help them develop onto secure and emotionally intelligent adults.

Discuss your feelings with your therapist though. A good therapist will welcome the feedback.

Reading with interest, as I felt a bit like this in therapy - that I was being pushed towards a narrative that exonerated me from any responsibility for difficult situations with my parents whilst blaming them. Whilst there was probably some truth in it, and it was good to feel validated, I felt that the 'you weren't listened to' template was a bit convenient. I possibly didn't stick it for long enough to really explore the value though.

Also been down the CBT route (twice!) and have run a mile (twice!)
aargh. Sorry this happened to you.

My therapist is fully qualified clinical psychotherapist and 20 years + experience, no worries there. I’m happy with it being the right kind of therapy for my problems (as opposed to cbt! Especially)

Thanks to everyone for your replies and support. I’ve got a couple of weeks before my next appointment so I’m going to do some diarying to think it through, and I may come back to this thread. All the best.

I agree with this. I know as a parent myself I try really hard but I don't always get it right. It keeps me up at night thinking what if the kids remember that snappy remark forever and it's damaged them? I've got to admit I remember some things my parents did and said which did have negative consequences but overall they were trying and loved us. I'd hate to hear them described as abusive to be honest.

It's VERY usual to be defensive and protective of our parents, even if they were abusive. That's why there's so much suspicion of individuals who choose to cut off their parents, but consider how terrible those parents must actually be.

If you don't reflect on the negative aspects of your parents you can't really accept them for who they are either.

I am interested in your comment about it takes two.

While this is fair in adult-adult relationships, you are talking about interactions between you and your mum when you were a child. It was your mum's responsibility to be the adult in that situation - it's OK to acknowledge that being a mum is difficult, some kids are naturally easier than others, due to her own upbringing your mum may or may not have had the skills she needed but at heart meant well and a load of other things.

But she was the adult and you were the child and whatever you are feeling about it now is real.

It’s tricky to know in your case, without details.

Ive not had therapy myself, but my friend is a therapist. She became a therapist through her own trauma and therapy, it gave her the desire to help others. She’s a nice decent person.

However, she does have a tendency to project. I’m at peace with my upbringing. I went through a period of NC in my late teens with my
parents but we’ve talked and developed a different relationship as adults. I understand they were a product of their own upbringings. They made a conscious effort to evolve and develop in order to have a relationship with their grandchildren. We have a mutual understanding and boundaries, my dad even apologised unprompted out the blue a few years ago.

My friend though often injects like minor problems or situational depression and tried to link it back to something I feel is at peace. It gets annoying. I’m told I have teatime, whereas I do t think I do. I’m an assertive woman with a happy family and profession. Growing up I had the protective factor of good friends and I was someone who didn’t bend to their will- I just left when it reached a head.

Sorry to waffle- but what I’m saying is therapists are as human as the rest of us. Talk to her about your feelings

Ine of my brothers has a lot of what @Coyoacan and others describe. It's great his therapy has allowed him to be more compassionate to himself, and happier overall.

However there doesn't seem to have been any work in extending that compassion to my parents, who were immigrants from backgrounds of enormous trauma doing their absolute best to bring us from poverty to their understanding of success.

Of course they made mistakes, we all do, and there are plenty of things I and my other siblings aren't happy about and are doing very differently. But he's now SO angry at my mum (never my dad), and usually based on sky-high expectations of the most saintly and gentle of modern parenting.

It's all over tiktok too, in some ways I think it's a throwback to very young kids being furious and a bit scared when their mums can't meet their every need perfectly.