Thread by @LisaMarchiano

I’ve just heard another story from an acquaintance about a therapist encouraging someone to cut off contact with her parents. This is such a fraught and complex area, but I have thoughts. Here goes.

First, of course, there are times when a parent has been so horribly abusive or is currently so difficult to contain that it makes sense to have no contact. However, I think these cases are unusual.

Most of us have parents who tried to be “good enough.” James Hollis has said that life is traumatic, and parents can either mitigate or intensify that trauma. None of us make it to adulthood without some wounding experiences.

Our parents certainly did things that were wounding at some point. This is rarely abuse. Most of the time, it is the more ordinary, inevitable, and perfectly human ruptures in attunement. Weathering these ruptures will mold us, make us resilient, and shape who we become.

But they are wounding nonetheless, and we will need to come to terms with them.

We all must separate psychologically from our parents if we are to become the fullest version of ourselves possible.

For most of us, this process begins during adolescence but continues throughout our twenties and even thirties. This process takes time. Part of it involves acknowledging parts of our childhood that were wounding.

Evaluating these wounds – understanding where our parents let us down or hurt us and how that has affected us – is an important part of gaining self-understanding. The path to psychological growth means acknowledging the ways in which we were wounded.

Every therapist has had an adult come into therapy claiming they had a perfect family and everything about their childhood was great. That is a sure sign that the person is defending against something too painful to acknowledge.

If exploring our childhood through the lens of our woundedness is a necessary step toward psychological independence, it is not sufficient. We must move beyond grievance to take responsibility for ourselves and our lives.

We cannot do this while remaining focused on what our parents did or didn’t do for us. To believe that everything that is wrong is our parents’ fault infantilizes us.

It keeps us trapped in a black and white world where all of the “bad” is out there and we can protect ourselves if we just stay away from it. In truth, the world is complex. People are complex. We are complex and so are our parents.

In the 2017 film “Lady Bird,” the titular character comes to accept and understand her mother’s fervent love for her even though her mom is flawed and held back by her own limitations.

Monstering our parents prevents growth in other ways as well. We are usually similar to our parents. If we are our parents’ biological child, we may have much in common with them.

Making a parent out to be the villain makes it harder for us to accept those parts of ourselves that we have in common with that parent. For this and other reasons, we must move beyond guilt and blame if we are to grow toward wholeness.

Clients often need help from therapists identifying relational patterns in their family of origin that may have been maladaptive. Doing this work can bring up previously cut-off feelings of hurt and anger, and it's important that these feelings have plenty of room and validation.

Clients may need help setting good boundaries with parents who are intrusive, demanding, or controlling. But care must be taken that therapist and client don't collude in creating a black and white narrative that paints the parent as “toxic” and irredeemable.

All things being equal, being in contact with our families is better for everyone – as long as we maintain good boundaries. If your therapist encourages you to cut off contact with your parents without extremely good reason, consider that this may not be in your best interests.

"But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it...

...The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart.” ~C. G. Jung