Is therapy just about blaming your parents?
Short answer: no.
There is, I think, a stereotype in the media that says that therapy is just about self-indulgence and blaming everything on your parents.
Well, it’s not.
I tell my clients at the beginning of therapy that the way I work does involve discussing their childhoods as well as talking about what is going on for them right now. This is because so much of what we take for granted as the “rules” of life are actually messages that we internalised from our upbringing. Sometimes, as adults, these “rules” no longer serve us and conflict with other beliefs and emotions, often resulting in feelings that we cannot explain and find hard to understand. This is, for the most part, going on unconsciously - we don’t even realise it’s happening. Instead, we get psychological symptoms; feeling low, anxious, confused, stuck.
People often come to therapy blaming themselves for their problems in a way that keeps them stuck in the same cycles. Therapy isn’t about shifting the blame onto other people, it is instead about gaining an understanding of how we came to be the way that we are and how that affects us in the here and now, so that we can take control of our lives. If we do not understand our current circumstances (both internal and external) and how they came to be that way, we have very little hope of making changes. Continuing to berate ourselves with the belief that it’s all our own fault anyway doesn’t actually help us take responsibility for our lives.
Every parent is a human being with issues and blind spots of their own, and these will play out in the messages they consciously and unconsciously give their children. They probably did the best with the mental and physical resources available to them at the time, but this isn’t a reason to avoid exploring the circumstances of our own early years. Realising that we were children when we learned fundamental beliefs about the world can help us have more compassion towards ourselves. Knowing that you aren’t experiencing your current distress because you are defective or fundamentally bad gives you the agency and authority to start making changes in your life.
We were all dealt a hand of cards in our lives. Honestly appraising those cards doesn’t mean that we are necessarily blaming anyone else for them, but it is a necessity if we want to play those cards well. The catch is that most of us don’t really know the cards we are dealing with. Therapy can help us start to look at the cards that we’ve avoided looking at, giving us the opportunity to actually play our cards rather than being played by them.
