My adult children don’t speak to me – I blame their therapists

[IwantToRetire]

NB - this is not about trans children, but thought some of the experiences seem to be the same, and the article seems to focus on mothers ...

“They have all talked to therapists in the various places and countries they’ve lived. They all seem to speak the same ‘therapy language’, talking about ‘toxicity’, and ‘boundaries’. It seems like a witches’ cauldron of dark forces feeding the whole scenario. The children seem happy to carry on with blaming us for anything and everything that doesn’t tally with their unreasonable expectations of us.”

“[Therapy encourages] people to do things for their mental health, and what’s best for them, and relationships are now governed on the basis of whether or not they promote one’s happiness. The idea of previous generations that you cared for your family, that you had duty to them, has been replaced by a more self-centred perspective.”

Where does therapy come into this? “The goal of therapy is often to not feel so guilty or obligated or responsible for other people’s feelings. Your obligation is really to yourself and your own happiness. I don’t think a lot of therapists have really reckoned with the harm that can be done by supporting or encouraging estrangement.”

“There’s been an enormous expansion in what gets labelled as harmful, abusive, traumatising, and neglectful behaviour in general. I often see adult children who have different ideas of what constitutes mental illness and harm and abuse, trauma and neglect, compared to the parents. I see parents so confused, because they think: ‘But I gave you a great childhood, I’d have killed for you.’ The idea of trauma has become more subjective, so that if you say that someone has traumatised you, then they have traumatised you.

“I see things get labelled ‘traumatising’ or ‘triggering’ which would have, to previous generations, been seen as the normal slings and arrows of family life. Therapy has given adult children a much bigger stick with which to beat their parents, and the parents – particularly those who feel they gave their kids a far better childhood than they experienced themselves – are left confused.”

Just a few paragraphs from a much longer article at https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/adult-children-dont-speak-to-me-blame-therapists-3158291

Can also be read at https://archive.ph/3BENZ

But that is one of the things therapy is designed to achieve.

People are stuck in the past because they haven't resolved it and are bringing all those unresolved feelings, habits and behaviours into their current relationships, jobs, parenting. Working through the past means no longer being trapped in it, it doesn't mean you obsess about it, quite the opposite.

Once you understand why you think, feel and behave a certain way then you can start to change things.

I've got a colleague who absolutely loses her shit whenever she feels she's not getting attention. She gets furious about it and absolutely hijacks meetings. Unless and until she understands that her level of fury is not about the NOW it's about the past when her mother didn't give her the attention she craved, she will continue to drive everyone around her crazy.

Incidentally my parents wouldn't have had any truck with therapy. They would have thought it was self-indulgent and woo-woo. Instead they took out all their issues on the kids and screamed at them regularly for no reason apart from their own internal frustration. I managed not to revisit that on my adult children who haven't needed any therapy and are not planning to be estranged from me any time soon.

People are stuck in the past because they haven't resolved it and are bringing all those unresolved feelings, habits and behaviours into their current relationships, jobs, parenting. Working through the past means no longer being trapped in it, it doesn't mean you obsess about it, quite the opposite.

This. I can honestly say that I would have been a terrible parent (and partner and friend) if I hadn't done a lot of work in therapy. I'm don't have any delusions about being the perfect parent (no one is), but I have and will continue to work on my own shit to keep from sadling my children with it and so that it doesn't affect every relationship and area of my life.

I agree with this.

Have only had time to come back to this thread and hadn't expect so many posts.

So just to be clear, I posted because (and dont want to upset anyone) some of the comments from parents sort of chimed with some of the threads started by someone who is feeling their child is being taken, misdirected, whatever word away from them because they are being enabled to be trans.

But clearly not what anyone who has responded so far has in any way seen. So maybe I was wrong.

Along with, which has come up on threads, how it seems the younger generation (well some) have got to the point that they feel they should never ever be under any stress or have to acknowledge that others may not share their viewpoint.

So I am really touched that so many have felt able to talk about their experiences and how therapy has helped them.

I have never had therapy but my parents did wonder if I should. But that was because (and I couldn't articulate it, and not sure they would have understood) I had become a feminist without know that is what it was. So I just felt we had nothing in common. For a while I was quite sad about that as i realised I would not be the adult daughter they would hoped to have had. And also when it seemed other families were doing lots of family things together I thought they were lucky as we did less and less. So a bit like having neighbours you dont have much in common with I just sort of kept in touch. For a long time I just thought it was a generational difference.

But as for the really strange comment about what has this got to do with feminism. Even without the article, it is clear that what many women have experienced in childhood and later if life is about being female.

That is the value of FWR. That (even when we have niggles with each other) postings are coming from a shared understanding about women.

So sorry for those who suffered abuse, and all respect for to you all for finding a way to get on with your lifes.

I think if all 3 of your kids won’t talk to you, the chances are they have a point.

@IwantToRetire, I have friends who are clinical psychologists and they are acutely concerned about 'trans enablement'. Those who work for the NHS are actually bound to an affirmation model; they could lose their jobs for exploring a young patient's whole psychological landscape instead of focusing on their 'trans identity'.

I think and hope the NHS is relaxing on this, but it's still a huge issue. It affects those in private practice, too. Unless they're willing to set up as independents and advertise themselves as favouring a 'watchful waiting' approach, they tend to run into the rainbow juggernaut.

You might be right, but of course it is possible she is just an asshat

Yes that's a fair point. It's just the extreme nature of her reaction that makes me think it's not related to the present.

But indeed some people are just tossers!

I have been in therapy for several years now, and I agree with others' mixed opinions on this.

Broadly, I disagree. I think people who go to therapy, at least in the UK as others have mentioned it might not be the same in the US, tend to do so because they are in some way unhappy. It's a very expensive thing to do for effectively no reason, and people without trauma and issues to unpack aren't going to have a fun time being psychoanalysed, either. As others have said, it is also true that some parents would rather blame the therapy than acknowledge their own actions. I rarely talk about my therapy to my mother, even though she asks, because I know when we have discussed it she has been incredibly uncomfortable faced with the knowledge that I have experienced emotional trauma. I do not blame her for it and I would hate for her to blame herself either, but I know she hates to think she played even a passive role in those situations.

I think there is a middle ground, but also I don't blame people for going NC with abusive or neglectful parents and I think it's difficult to judge from an outside perspective. Some people initially go NC and then change their mind as time goes on and they begin to heal, which is understandable as well, as starting therapy gives people a great power in offering them the words to name and understand the impacts of their negative experiences and people can make rash decisions in those early stages of treatment. The feelings run high right at the time you become fully aware of the things you can do to improve your life, and often settle down over time. Therapy has been vastly helpful to me, and I am now in a maintenance phase instead of that all-consuming beginning where I had to talk through all of my trauma.

I think the answer, in most cases, is just to give people time. Therapy isn't the enemy here, and I wouldn't always trust the parents who blame therapy for their children's actions rather than acknowledging the potential impact of their own.

Everybody turns out differently, and it is not wholly and sometimes not even substantially due to their parents. I don’t blame my colleagues parents when they have difficult personalities. Maybe therapy would help these colleagues understand why they struggle to relate normally, but it is such a huge jump to blame their parents. Aren’t most of the parents you know doing the absolute best they can and love their children more than anything?! Just about all of the parents I know are.

Ido think this article is very reminiscent of what a lot of parents have gone through with affirmation supporting therapists.

I don't think that's as much an outlier situation as many might like to think, in that I do not think it is only with gender that you have therapists with such piss poor judgement and treatment models.

My own experience is that a surprising number therapists seem, unaccountably, to be vulnerable to being taken in by clients who actually aren't so much victims of real trauma as they are people with personality disorders who victimize others.

It always makes me think of Tony Soprano, learning through therapy to manage his more human frailties as well as fool others, all the better to carry on as a psychopath.

Aren’t most of the parents you know doing the absolute best they can and love their children more than anything?!

Oh, definitely! It's simply that many parents' absolute best is pretty awful - and that's usually not their fault because it's what they got from their own parents (who were no doubt doing their best, too). Love means different things to different people, as well, and can look pretty damn weird in some families.

When people seek therapy, they are often looking to break the repeating generational cycle of lousy 'best we can' parenting and relationships.

Many? Do you really think many parents are terrible parents? I disagree. A few parents are terrible parents. Some are flawed in one way or another and do ok. Quite a lot are normal- they love their child, they try to do reading with them and keep a curfew as a teen, have some fruits and veggies, while dealing with the stresses of adult life. Quite a lot are pretty good. A few are terrible. A small few.

My mum did something like this. My son was older and we'd been having a not very good time (I was struggling badly with my mental health). He wanted to leave, and my mum refused to send him home. It broke my heart. She was cruel about it, it was an extension of an argument between me and her. Things went back to normal after several weeks. I still talk to her, but it feels weird now. I know that there are lines she will cross and she will hurt me if I'm weak. She always has.

So three adult children seek out therapists in different countries and all three talk about boundaries, ask the mother to go to therapy and the mother things she has done nothing wrong.

The only reason I was still in contact with my mum before she died is for my dad.

I have found this a good thread to read.
I'm not sure how much detail I want to disclose - even on an anonymous forum.
I and many of my siblings / extended family members were sexually abused by the same family member. My parents enabled it (and both were themselves victims of abuse / neglect in childhood).
I do think there has been a trend for therapists to raise the option of going no contact. Even that phrase, it's a bit of therapy speak.

I am very glad for the wise and grounded therapist I had, it would be nearly twenty years ago now, who I talked to about going NC with my own parents. For me it was more about /proving/ that what I had been through was bad. And exerting control over my parents, from a distance. I am able to forge a relationship with my parents that is safe for me, and while in some ways it will never be what I desire from them in my heart of hearts, these are my parents and it is what it is. I recognise that it's very different for other people and I'm not telling this story as the only right way to go about life.
Laura Davis' writing was a big part of helping me heal and when I first came across her book, I Thought We'd Never Speak Again, it was like a betrayal. But now I'm much more in a place of being able to see my own parents' damagedness.

I came late to being a parent myself - in my 40s. With my own son I really open to all the sadness of what my parents weren't able to give me: seeing him and his fears, being overwhelmed by distressing emotions, his anger, his gentleness - I am so glad that I am able to remain open to him in all this and accept and love the whole of him. And I feel deeply sad my parents couldn't to that for me. Sad for myself, of course, but sad for them, also.

For the people I know who have gone NC or low contact with a parent, the main trigger hasn't been therapy but parenthood, either because they spent their childhood believing that parenthood required X behaviour and realised on having their own children that it was possible to be loving and nurturing and gentle and supportive, or because they saw their own children being children like they were in the past and needed to take steps to stop a further generation experiencing that abuse.

And ant therapy is to help them cope with the realisation that their childhood was not ok, and the dilemma of working out whether their duty is to their parents or their children.

You’ve cherry picked part of my post and twisted it.

If abuse and trauma are words that have meaning, it has to be possible to make judgements about what constitutes them. And therefore not everybody has experienced these things. I don’t think that’s a controversial point. But nowhere did I pass judgement on specific cases, and as you’ll see from the part of my post you chose to ignore, I acknowledge that therapy can be life giving/saving for people.

I can see why the OP thought the article was relevant to the topic. There is the fear of parents who are seeing their teenage/young adult child using a therapy-infused type of language to explain that they are trans and that anything other than full and uncritical acceptance will mean estrangement.

However, I think the main problem with the comparison is that people who claim trans identities are not having therapy to explore those feelings. They have picked up the language from peers and (in the past, not sure about the post-Cass world) receiving immediate affirmation from the medical professionals they approach for help.

So it is actually the lack of therapy that is the issue.

I think the trouble with saying that parents are doing "their best" is that "best" is defined from the point of view of the parent.

I've several times unsucessfully tried lose weight and keep it off. In each case I would say I was "doing my best" but the end result is still the same - that I didn't lose any weight. If I actually wanted to lose weight I would have to try a different approach that took me out of my comfort zone, or do something that I wasn't keen on like eating much less chocolate :)

I think this is the same as parenting. You can do "your best" but it may simply not be good enough.

What parents really need to do is to constantly evaluate whether what they are doing is the right thing or whether they need to take an entirely different approach. But this requires a degree of self awareness and self reflection that not everyone has, and most particularly the types of parents that their children describe as toxic do not have.

Sadly I think a lot of therapy is hinged on 'how did your parents f### you up?'. I've had my fair share & have had the bad advice of 'treat your friends as family' - my experience of friendships is that they come and go!
I agree with the above, I cringe at therapy speak & I see some of my friends getting into it.
Absolutely there are properly abusive families, but most difficult families are more dysfunctional - I feel therapy promotes victimhood rather than resilience.
My family made a boat load of mistakes and mis steps but they cared for me and raised me and I can only be grateful for that.

Should we all, at some stage in our lives, go to therapy? Yes, why not? If we are interested in who we are as humans and what makes us react in certain habitual ways; if we would like relationships that are happy and healthy. Is therapy the only route to insight? I doubt it, but it is one route.

Working with trans clients is currently a huge issue in the therapy world; many therapists feel coerced by their professional bodies into simply ‘affirming’ whatever the client brings regarding identity and that they risk censure if they do not. Many of us feel concerned that our professional curiosity and the therapeutic need to challenge someone’s beliefs are under threat in this area.

I agree that the vocabulary of therapy is now taken out of context, the concept of trauma in particular, used often in reference to ordinary human adversity and without reference to the need for us to find and build our resilience. That the vocabulary of a profession is mis-appropriated does not mean the vocabulary has no meaning.

I think it is very complicated and that sometimes, therapists (and in my family’s case a psychiatrist) can sometimes do more harm than good, especially if they apply blanket assumptions to complex situations.

Many years before it happened in my family, I watched as a friend went through a very traumatic experience. At the time, she needed support from her family, and they let her down.

The psychiatric help she received helped her break down the reasons why, which was mostly down to a narcissistic mother and (I think) a weak father. She was told that her father, who she’d always seen as loving and kind, was just as bad as her abusive mother, for not protecting her. The thought that the man she’d always seen as her lovely dad was as bad as her mum, was much more traumatic for her than accepting that her mother was a bully, which she’d always known. I know this thought was incredibly painful to her, but I assumed the psychiatrist knew what he or she was talking about.

Years later, without having realised a similar scenario was playing out in my own family, I got my troubled, teenage son psychiatric help, for what I believed was depression. I was aware his father was abusive, but thought there was also a personality clash occurring.

It hadn’t crossed my mind that I would now be the one painted as the enabler. The reasons I was still in the marriage were complex and I’m not going to go into them, but I will only say that, when a psychiatrist asked me later, whether I had made the decisions I had, with the best intentions for my children, I could honestly answer that I had.

I was fortunate that my son and I were able to build our relationship back up after he went non contact with me. I know I was incredibly fortunate that my own parents supported my son through it. I think they were a significant factor in stopping him falling into addiction or worse. They also ensured that all contact was not lost, as I was able to send him letters and know he got them. It was the worst time in my life and the ill health that came with it is still a factor, even years later.

Even my parents saw me as “the enabler” for a while, even though they didn’t cut contact with me, thank goodness. It took a friend of theirs, saying very firmly to them that I was a victim too, to snap them out of that black and white thinking about the situation.

So what I would say is that situations are nuanced and not black and white, especially around the parent who might be designated as “the enabler”. I think my son was dangerously young to be encouraged to go no-contact and it’s by vey good fortune that he survived it. Without very strong support, I think it could have the opposite effect to that it’s meant to have and could lead to the patient spiraling out of control.

So I can’t say NC is always wrong. There are situations, some of them described in this thread, where it is obviously the right thing to do. Enabling your spouse to sexually abuse children (for example) is a very clear dereliction of duty as a parent.

But there are many situations where the abuse is much less clear cut. I’d also say that, even where there is obvious abuse, there are times when people stay as they know that 50:50 living arrangements after separation would give their spouse or partner unrestricted access to the child.

So those helping young people especially, should be much more careful than they sometimes are. The current situation, with so many therapists pushing affirmative care for children who say they are trans is an eye opener for many who would assume these people know what they are talking about. These black and white, right or wrong and no in between versions of life can be very dangerous.

I believe it’s also widely considered that many people who go into psychiatry or psychology do so because they are troubled themselves. I think that, as with having transitioned doctors driving gender medicine, there is the possibility of a conflict of interest here, that may well lead to a branch of the medical establishment that is not always being driven by altruistic and rational people. Something to think on, perhaps.

I haven't read the whole article. A healthy person seeing all their children had gone to therapy and now they are putting in boundaries. My job as a parent and just healthy individual isn't to invalidate that. If I want to maintain a relationship with them I have to respect them.meet them half way try to understand their perspective. My own perspective is not the only one that matters.

That's the basis (or should be) of all relationships. Family dont get a pass because we are related. Therfore we tolerate unkind behaviour. I have no interest in a friendship that dictates I only feel what they deem acceptable. I have no boundaries myself to keep them comfortable I abandon my own needs. What does that start to sound like? Abuse.

Therapy although I'll admit there are some not to great therapists out there but on the whole it's not a brainwashing scheme to pull apart families. It's a inpartial safe space to talk about feelings about experiences. To see how your current life is being affected by past experiences or others.

The person in the article is blaming everyone else around them and not reflecting on themselves at all. Why are they so affected by their children having boundaries and wanting to be happy?

I want that for my children why would it cause me any issues unless I've been operating in a toxic way which suddenly stops working if everyone else around me becomes healthier and more aware.