To think therapists want you to hate your parents?

[Dreolady]

I approached a therapist because I’m feeling low about a particular issue and have anxieties about the future: The therapist wants to work on healing my inner child and talking about my childhood. I’m not really sure how it’s linked to the issue I’m currently facing but she thinks I need to do “deeper” work. I trusted her judgement on this but now I feel like she wants me to be angry with my mother. and I don’t know how I feel about that because we have a good relationship.

I know my mother wasn’t the best parent but I think she was limited in her understanding of how to parent and she had a lot of her own traumas and issues to deal with. My therapist feels Im making excuses for her and I need to find my anger in order to heal my inner child.

I spoke to my friend about this and she had the same experience where she felt that her therapist wanted her to hate her parents. Is this common?

Respectfully, you have no idea what your sisters childhood felt like for her. You are so incredibly dismissive of her seeking therapy and the way you talk about her it's actually hard to read. Why exactly do you think you fully understand what is going on for your sister? You are not her.

There are so many defences on this thread a psychotherapist would have a field day!

Not sure - there’s a line between exploring, in a non judgmental and meaningful way, how a parent’s parenting style and personal baggage may have shaped your relationship and therefore you OR making you angry/critical of it?

A good therapist should be helping you explore, but not encouraging you to feel anger and resentment?

I would estimate that a good two thirds or more of the population have issues with lack of community.
Anyone who has moved to live in a different part of the country can struggle with lack of belonging, where the accent is different, you don't know the local towns and cities, and don't share any history with people who live around you.
Besides, even people who stay in the town they grew up in can suffer lack of community.

Please don't imagine that all 'native' people are living in communities and have that sense of belonging. Alienation, rootlessness, and loneliness are endemic in modern life.

Your problems in all likelihood are nothing to do with your mother, and everything to do with the way life is in a modern society.

We are all sitting at home watching TV and feeling isolated.

You absolutely can’t say that, because you didn’t inhabit your sister’s life. Birth order makes a difference, and where your parents were in their own lives, how they bonded with each specific child, what else was going on, how their relationship with each other was at the time, what other obligations/responsibilities etc. No one has an identical childhood to their siblings.

Both things can be true. I agree with your posts and share many of the same thoughts and experiences of modern living. However I believe early years experiences and attachment can also impact a person’s identity, sense of belonging, chronic loneliness and disconnection.

No. Estrangement often happens when abuse took place and the parents/abusers don't own up to it but continue to deny and even abuse. Therapy ideally teaches how a healthy and safe relationship feels like. Once you understood that and saw a whole new life ahead of you you don't event want to be around unsafe people anymore. You preserve your peace and grieve the lack of emotional of physical safety in childhood and a whole lot of other things.

Adult children don't become estranged because their parents don't agree on something or they don't like something about them.

And then there is the total lack of understanding what abuse is, especially emotional abuse. It isn't that 'johnny wasn't allowed to go out without a coat in -10 degrees' that leads to estrangement. It's so complex I believe it can almost not be understood without therapy or other major work.

Every good parent worries about 'messing up' their children.
The fact that you worry proves you are a good parent - bad parents couldn't care less about damaging their children.

It is not possible to be a perfect parent. Every single parent, all of them, "damages" their children in some way. That is part of life. That is being human.

Your anxiety about being an immigrant and not belonging is leading to anxiety about what this is doing to your children.
Just accept that every single human life has some troubles, there is nothing you can do to protect your children from life.

Yes, I think CBT to address your anxiety may be more useful than therapy that emphasises raking over your relationship with your parents.

If you don't want to work on what the therapist wants you to then you don't have to. Therapy is for you to talk about what you want to talk about. It's not up to the therapist to force an unwanted method on you. If they persist with it, tell them you don't want to work on inner child and hating your mother stuff. If they still persist, find a new therapist.

Also, a good therapist will let you work on your own feelings and not project on to you. Sounds like that might be happening here, as you say your mother wasn't a bad person.

@Dreolady maybe have the conversation with your parents as well as CBT.

As an immigrant, we're driven by fear - I've been in economic survival mode since 15. I try not to place too much pressure like most middle class and previous generation of immigrant parents, but my cavalier attitude to social and softer side of things may sometimes inadvertently come out as confidence-harming words or actions.

That's something you have a good chance at repairing over time.

As for your own kids, the fact that you're so worried that you sought therapy tells me you're a wonderful mother and your kids will be fine - no matter what mistakes you think you're making.

@EuclidianGeometryFan Absolutely. I do appreciate that isolation and lack of community is something a lot of people are facing in modern society. I think the problem is maybe exacerbated for people like me who grew up in close knit immigrant communities centred around extended family ties and religion and had a very strong sense of belonging once upon a time. That’s something I’ve lost and it gives me anxiety for my children. Trying to navigate life outside of that when you feel like a “outsider” is an additional challenge.
I agree with you though that my problem is very rooted in “modern life”. I have spoken to many others who feel the same but I feel like a lot of people have made some kind of peace with it whereas my anxiety around it is pretty intense.

I think this is a real thing OP.

Relationships with parents, and youth, can be a time when people set up certain habits and patterns of thinking, so that's important in talking about the present. But I think a lot of therapists are all to focused on the past.

My brother has been in therapy for years with differernt people, all of whom seem focused on the past, as is my brother. The thing is, it never seems to help with his current issues, in fact almost seems to be a way of avoiding him. I can never figure out how multiple people have failed to see this. It also doesn't help that he has a very twisted view of his childhood, and is very smart - probably cleverer than most of the therapists.

Which brings me to my main theory about therapy, which is that a lot of therapists just aren't particularly insightful people. You need to find one who is which is easier said than done.

I agree with you. Although, I noticed this much earlier.

You know what you are missing and what you have lost, that community you grew up in.
Your children won't know any different to what they have now. They don't miss what they never had.
They have adapted, and will continue to adapt, to the situation they are in.

Yes it is sad that you can't give the children what you had. And sad that you no longer have it.
So feel the sadness, let yourself feel it, then after a while start counting your blessings and reminding yourself of the reasons you came to live where you do now - there are positives.

Chronic anxiety would benefit from therapy, but probably not of the kind your current therapist is offering.

@EuclidianGeometryFan Yes you’re right that every life has its own troubles. My mother could not give me certain things but she gave me others. Those things that she couldn’t give me, I am actually giving my children, whilst not being able to provide some of the things that she was able to give me. I try to console myself with that thought sometimes but it’s hard. I really feel like I’m “grieving” the loss of what we once had. What actually does make me “angry” is modern society. It feels like everyone is too busy, disconnected or absorbed in social media to care about building actual community. I know there will be people who say this isn’t true and that I just need to go out there and find it. Maybe they are right and it does exist for some people. This is where I just get confused and then start wondering if I should blame myself for not having it!

'What actually does make me “angry” is modern society. It feels like everyone is too busy, disconnected or absorbed in social media to care about building actual community. I know there will be people who say this isn’t true and that I just need to go out there and find it. Maybe they are right and it does exist for some people. This is where I just get confused and then start wondering if I should blame myself for not having it!'

The confusion, the anger, which may or may not be misplaced, the grief - it's a lot to hold and to try to process on your own. Therapy is a great way to unpick all of this, to understand your own feelings, where they are coming from, what they are a response to. You're clearly curious about all this which is a brilliant starting point. Your therapist does NOT have all the answers, but they will want to open up these discussions with you

That may be this generation's problem vs previous plus the dilemma of modern feminism etc. And that modern life is more urbanised so all about consuming while being in a rat race to be able to consume, rather that nostalgic villages of community.

I think we all try to parent in the way we would like to have been parented, while acknowledging that there will also be positives from our own childhoods that we can’t replicate. I think that’s just parenting.

Sounds like you need practical help, to support you in calming your anxiety and giving you the confidence to start making better connections with people in your area. In short, maybe you need less time hashing over things, and more time (and confidence) to actually get out there and start doing.

I wonder if you might have a bit of a rosy-tinted view of community but I think it's still possible to find it. I would be looking at shopping locally and consistently, seeing what you can help or volunteer with, maybe your local church (they seem to be, um, not so focused on religion these days and more about community), any sort of local community centre stuff...

The inability to replicate is what I really struggle with emotionally. Interestingly my husband struggles with something similar (although to a lesser degree) around not being able to provide our kids with the material things (eg large houses) that our parents did on single incomes in the 90s. Somehow that’s never really bothered me that much.

@Lottapianos This is what I wanted to talk about but the therapist wants to talk about my childhood. She says that we can’t get onto the feelings I have around my children unless we address the underlying stuff (ie the relationship I had with my mum as a child)

@Dreolady It does sound like you need a different approach.

I hear you, but you will, as you’ve acknowledged yourself, be giving them things you weren’t given as a child. And if one of the things you can’t replicate is a sense of close belonging to a tight-knit immigrant community, I think it might be helpful to acknowledge that that community must have had downsides too? A sense of being observed, or required to do things a certain way, a tension between the culture of your parents’ homeland and where you were living?

What I do think it’s important is modelling good relationships and an open and involved attitude to the world outside your household, whether that’s by reading the papers, volunteering, protesting etc.

It's weird how they focus so much on parents doing damage.

Childhood teachers can do just as much if not more damage but you never hear therapists insisting on drudging up Mrs Chase from year 1. 🤷🏼‍♀️

@WarmFrogPond There were downsides of course but I feel like the positives outweighed those. I get glimpses off it now and again when my children occasionally get some insight into what my childhood was like. Full of people and a good kind of chaos. I see how happy it makes them when they do very occasionally get to experience it and that stirs up my nostalgia.