Accepting what your T has to say

My T generally isn’t the type to tell me what to do or how to feel, but he clearly keeps sending me the message that he thinks I perceive my childhood as normal when he believes it wasn’t. I guess you could say we sort of argue about this. This feels like such a stereotype of therapy to me - going to therapy to blame everything on your parents, and I’m not sure of the benefit of playing that game. I’m high functioning and have a generally good life. I’m aware that my parents had issues of their own, but they weren’t cruel or abusive and they loved me. Through talking about my childhood I’m aware that my parents weren’t completely in tune with my emotional needs, and perhaps made choices that I would not have made, especially now that I’m a parent and can think about how I’d do things differently. Last week I admitted that “maybe there was an element of neglect,” and he cut me off saying, “it wasn’t just an element. It was neglect.” He also has started to occasionally bring up a particularly difficult year in my childhood where I coped by watching a certain inspiring movie several times per week and bonding with my dog. I’m conflicted because when he says things a certain way, I can see his point that I was largely emotionally alone as a kid. My parents did not see me. I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to do with this now. As an adult, at this point in my life, how is this useful? Am I supposed to cry about it and be sad about it? Am I supposed to be angry? Because I just don’t feel like it. My father took his life when I was a teen and I feel like I’ve mourned that already. A few years ago I chose to have no contact with my mother for reasons that are complicated and this breaks my heart, but I felt like I had no choice and it’s honestly made my life easier in a way. What good does it do to go back now and pick apart my not-so-extraordinary childhood? Wondering if anyone has had a similar experience?

I never figured out what the point of that sort of stuff was.

I didn’t have a great childhood, but there were a few events that my therapist tried to repaint as worse than they actually were. I struggle to understand how certain periods of my childhood can be called ‘traumatic’ when they weren’t originally processed traumatically. In fact I recall being more or less happy during those times, despite.

Ironically, we used to argue that various therapy incidents felt traumatic (or retraumatizing) to me and those incidents were dismissed by her and glossed over as ‘nothing’ at the time.

The brain is an interesting thing. A year post-therapy and it’s the therapy incidents that haunt me at night.

You dont know what you dont know.

Its not like, okay, you are not an eskimo, so you dont have a hundred words for snow. You grew up without water. You grew up on liquid nitrogen. You dont know how that skewed things. Except that you did bring yourself to therapy, apparently.

We discuss similar things in my therapy. For me, it's not to cry about it or get mad about it. I have trouble remembering a lot of detail from my childhood. My therapist has said that it doesn't matter if I can't remember what happened, that it's obvious that my emotional needs weren't fully met as a child because of my reactions in therapy and how I feel. I find him telling me things like this useful because it helps explain why I am like I am.

I drank the psychologists' Kool-aid about my dysfunctional family for decades. Blaming the parents didn't help a lot.

What helped -- "helped" in a way I couldn't have foretold -- is that when my last therapist got triggered (by me) and reactively rejected me -- disapproved of and shamed me in ways like my mother, grandmother, and aunts -- it eventually triggered memories of horrible feelings that I had shut off from way back when, and that I had avoided feeling again through people-pleasing and various other things that I was not aware of -- despite the years and years of therapy. Going through the pain of all that, alone, because the T had rejected me, was h....l. But here I am, 3 years down the road, and better, hopefully.

I so hated and/or was afraid of rejection, or something, that I would do almost anything not to feel it -- all automatically, cluelessly, unconsciously. Or so it seems like that now.

It's not so much that I was abused (somewhat) or negected (somewhat) or not seen -- they hadn't been either, they didn't have a clue, experts saying they had a responsibility to do better and blaming them when they didn't have the response-ability to do better didn't help ME a lot. Maybe it helped some other people, I don't know. It just gave me a self-righteous, somewhat entitled victim-complex. Again, largely unconscious.

But there's a whole aspect to life and other people and maybe relationships that wasn't available to me because of the pain that I had apparently numbed out and habitually avoided.

I'm able to see, somewhat, now when I'm being a pain or demanding with my adult daughter. And able sometimes to make a shift in my attitude and improve things with her. Because she rejected me, too, several years ago, for several years, and I didn't like being rejected by her, either. There's just a whole complex of stuff with regard to relating to my female relatives that I was largely unconscious of, because I had cut off or numbed out the whole complex when I numbed out the pain. If that makes any sense, which it probably doesn't.

But regaining parts of my ability to feel and function and interact with other people -- that's what feeling the pain can eventually allow, I think and hope. Yes, feeling angry with relatives is a part of that, yes feeling sad, too. And then, at the end of that -- for me, there is also the recognition that I love and loved them despite the other emotions, too. I may not see them again (some are already dead), I may not have a relationship with them because that requires something on their end that they may not have, too. And/or maybe more skill on my end than I currently have. But -- I love them, and I know it (I can distinguish it from other feelings, because I feel those, too) and that's a big plus in my life. I hope it may allow me to participate and maybe contribute more to life and other people than I have been up until now. Time will tell.

Been there! Past is past. Got over it. Let it go. Even as a military brat thought T, a civilian, just couldn't understand. That's just how it was for everyone..Dads gone, moving, 4 high schools in 4 years. Perfectly normal. No need for tears or wish-it-had -been -different whinning. Until a year ago. Good or bad, I adapted the best I could. The only ways I could. I was a kid. Patterns in adult life were laid down way back then. Choices I make now can be traced back. No crying now. Just knowledge of why. Best of all, acknowledging those patterns & why I have them, gives me a choice to continue them or change them.

Cognitively dissecting the childhood memories probably doesn't do anything, indeed. But there are also emotions hidden, probably cut-off. By talking about those things you might stumble upon these hidden emotions. They also come into therapy via transference - all these emotions towards your T that do not make sense to you are probably someway related to the hidden and forgotten emotions from your childhood.

As una said, you don't know the things you don't know and as HT said, because you don't know, part of life is probably inaccessible to you. Getting access to these hidden feelings and processing them helps to start to know things you don't know yet and thus become more full of yourself, more able to contribute and also get back from the world, enjoy more and be sad more, love more and hate more - in other words, become more alive.

Ultimately rehashing my childhood unfairnesses and sorrows was detrimental. I learned nothing new, mother was sure mean, and it distorted childhood memories. I wish I’d spent my room time digging up fun and silliness which were just as present as the anxieties.

My therapy was a PhD in how to be a depressive, living in the saddest, most unsuccessful, powerless moments of life.

It left me with, if anything, a diminished mindset and no skills to be a positive partner, colleague or friend.

For me there have been two benefits in this neighborhood, but not prompted by my T telling me something. The first one is that seeing things as they are (in the present) is an important value for me, I believe in making an effort to reality check in situations that involve other person and anything that might distress me or piss me off. I try not to distort other people's behavior or motivation or intention, and check in with people to see whether my beliefs are true. In order to be able to do that, I needed to be able to see things as they WERE. None of my work involved "blaming" my parents but labeling what happened and acknowledging the reality of it and in general not being in denial that everything was fine in my childhood and I'm fine now was the impetus to seeing things as they ARE now more clearly. I think there's no logical connection between calling what is so obviously neglect, neglect, and "blaming" the parents. I actually think that's a stereotype and a superficial analysis of what therapy is about. Although parents are responsible for the choices they made, even if it is true they are responsible for the problems they create in their children, also not an obvious logical link), everyone with a problem is responsible for a solution. For me part of the seeing things as they were was also developing some understanding for the pressures my parents were under and the limits they had as individuals on what they could see and what they could do. It is trite to say they did the best they could, but widening the lens to see them as whole people operating under difficulties is kind of the opposite of blame. So my therapy had the side effect of un-blaming my parents and as a result, I have had much better relationships with them in the past couple of decades than I did as a younger adult.

But the other thing that helped me in this vein was to understand how what happened in my childhood affected me-- which it did in all sorts of way. It colored the way I intereacted with people for a long time and still does from time to time. It seemed like there was piece after piece, or that onion layer analogy thing. The messages about not talking about things were particularly powerful, and it wasn't until I had relationships with healthy people who actually talked about what they felt that I came to realize this. For me this was some of the most important work that I did and it needed to begin with seeing what really happened in my childhood. I denied and minimized and rationalized and intellectualized what happened for the longest time, and made little progress. And the "what happened" was not limited to events, but the family pathologies around the events, and the dynamics that surrounded them, such as the silencing, the internalizing, etc. I couldn't link it up to my life in the present until I did. And then my world cracked open and I was able to begin to change and reap the benefits of that change. A friend of mine explained this as like a snake (not my favorite animal) shedding its skin and leaving the old one behind, free to roam around in the world with a new one. Free-- that's what it feels like. I feel free now. I like my freedom.

I don't say this with disrespect, and apologize if it comes across as anything but "this is how I see it." I can't possibly know what's true or right for you but there are some pieces of your experience in and out of therapy that resonate within me. But this thing you say "my father killed himself when I was a child and then I lost my mother because I had to cut her out of my life but I'm over it all", I just think that's b.s. Maybe you're at least partway done grieving, but the meaning of these two things as a collective seems like a big deal, powerful.

You're an orphan. And you have no problems with that? No need to page Dr. Freud.

For what it is worth -- very well nothing, maybe less than that -- I find this statement extremely harsh and unkind. It hurts me. . .that's certainly my issue, because I'm not Lrad. Maybe it doesn't hurt Lrad, maybe it's helpful to her. But if it were me, I would have to numb out what feels like attacks, and so wouldn't be able to process what you may be trying to say, with what may be an intent to be helpful.

People are different. As you point out about yourself, I, too, can't possibly know how your statement may impact somebody else. But just FYI I thought it possibly might be useful to know how it comes across to me.? If not, please ignore this or I apologize, too.

My parents are both dead, so I'm an orphan. But with them dead it's very real and very apparent that I was an orphan a long time before they actually died. That's been a real toughie, yes.

I understand where your T is coming from.

Have you asked your therapist this question?

This is what I want. I’m just not sure how to get from here to there. I guess like someone else said, you don’t get there by processing these things cognitively which is maybe what I’m doing. Not really sure at this point how to do it any other way though.

I love this explanation. I guess I’m entertaining the idea that maybe it’s possible that I don’t know what I don’t know. But in the back of my mind I’m still wondering if it just wasn’t all that complicated and maybe it was exactly how I remember it. It’s confusing.

This is interesting. Some of my reactions in therapy have been truly weird to me and out of character. They might sort of make sense in the context of what my therapist is trying to tell me. I’m still trying to process that, I guess.

Not a military brat, but we moved every year or 2 of my life, both within the U.S. and to other countries. It’s just the way it was. I thought it made for an exciting story as people always think that’s interesting. But my T tells me most parents would do that to their kids. I’m not so sure.

I think so, but apparently I need to hear things a jillion times before they sink in. Maybe I’ll ask him again this week.

I said what I said to Lrad because I thought there was some possibility it might be useful to her, and maybe not saying it would be the bigger problem. I think there are a wide range of acceptable ways to say what you want to say. You have standards and I have my own. If I were to answer you in a thread I might say things a different way. I personally would not feel a need to scold someone who tried to explain her motivation because it isn't up to your standards and it wasn't written to you, but I take the approach here to take what works for me and ignore the rest.

How is telling the truth an attack? Telling somebody, "your a liar" - thats an attack. Telling somebody "i dont believe you about this" is not the same as saying "your a liar". You are just telling what you hear. If the person is not ready to hear it, as often happens on these pages, it still doesnt make it an attack. Intent (motive) is lacking. It may be a venial sin, but the lady's not for hanging.

Thank you for understanding me. The people I appreciate most on this board are those who tell the truth as they see it, and acknowledge it as just that, not fact and not for all people in all time. I don't always agree with people who tell their truths/truthiness, but I appreciate that they do it.

I know from my personal life it takes guts to tell the truth. It does here too. I've benefitted the most from threads where I've done so and anyone who doesn't like it or tries to shut me up won't be successful.