I often encounter hesistancy in my clients when we first skirt too close to naming something in their past as either Bad or Not Good Enough. It’s a boring, but pervasive, stereotype that therapy is about blaming one’s parent’s for all one’s problems, a kind of professional buck-passing. That tired trope is now getting a new lease on life with the online maelstrom about adults going no-contact with their parents (at the behest of their therapists, naturally).
Here’s the thing. Therapy is about the client. It’s about their healing. It would be supremely inefficient (and ineffective) to focus the whole time on people who aren’t even in the room.
But since it’s about the client’s healing, things that hurt them are relevant and worthy of all the tenderness and care.
Clients will often say “but I know that my parent was doing their best. And I love them. I would never blame them”.
As an aside, blame is not the same as accountability. But this conversation is often happening at an early stage in the therapy, and questions of accountability are way down the road.
What matters right now is to acknowledge the significance of the harm. And clients are often surprised to learn that it is possible to acknowledge that the parent was doing their best, while still acknowledging that the client’s hurt is real and what happened to them was not ok.
Having compassion for the you who was hurt does not preclude having compassion for others. But by the same token, feeling like you can only have compassion for others, not yourself, is a sign that something survival-y is afoot.
When one person heals, they are healed in a community, in a network of relationships. The hurt that was passed on to them often came from somewhere, an intergenerational burden that was carried forward. Relationship was the vehicle of harm, but it can also be the vehicle of healing. And that means your healing extends beyond you, too. It’s hard to predict what will happen in a family when one person starts the healing process. But I can say that choosing to do this work is an undeniable source of good in the world.
