Why My Kids Might Need Therapy

Odd title for a therapist right? Yes, thats partially to get your attention, but also because this idea I want to explain is something that often comes up in my work as a therapist. It may seem strange for a therapist to admit that his kids might need therapy. Am I letting myself off the hook by shrugging my shoulders in regards to my potential failings as a parent? Not exactly, but let me explain.

Often, in therapy, I am helping someone try to change a particular emotional or behavioral pattern that they’ve observed in their lives. The pattern can come in various forms. It can be that they notice that they have difficulty feeling or expressing anger, or a pattern of people pleasing, or alternatively, maybe they can become quite angry or upset over something that others in their lives are unfazed by. Maybe they notice self-sabotaging patterns of behavior whenever they want to pursue some goal or attempt to get healthy.

Whatever, the pattern, the question inevitably comes up. Why am I this way? For some people, they can point to a traumatic event or set of traumatic events in their childhood. Maybe their parent would emotionally lose control and hit them when they were upset, In this scenario, their present difficulties are easy to make sense of.

But for some of my clients there is a missing link. They describe mostly happy childhoods and relatively stable parents. So they keep coming back to this question; why do I struggle with being around or expressing anger, or people pleasing, or intense anxiety when I try something new or adventurous? I don’t have traumatic memories or abusive parents, so why do I act in some ways similar to others that did have abusive parents?

This is where my title becomes relevant as I try to explain something that helps make sense of this dilemma. As I’ve tried to work on my own difficulties with people pleasing and navigating interpersonal conflict, I’ve realized something. My children are probably going to struggle with these same difficulties. I hope that they won’t, and I hope that they will struggle less than I did, in part because I’ve worked at getting better with the above struggles, but ultimately, I think some of it will get passed on. How will this happen?

Most likely, it won’t be because I often yell at them when they do something that irritates me (hopefully right?!), but what may happen is that they may, in subtle ways, pick up on their father’s difficulties with conflict. Children are very emotionally attuned to their caregivers, and they want their parents to not be anxious. This is because children depend on us for survival. They need us to be “ok.” For this reason, if my children notice (perhaps even unconsciously notice), that even if I try to remain calm, I display little markers of anxiety when there is a conflict with them, or with someone they observe me having a disagreement with, then they may learn to feel a little anxiety themselves when navigating a conflict. They know something is amiss, and so they may also try to minimize those moments in their interactions with me to keep me “ok.”

Now, I say this, not to let myself off the hook. Because I have these difficulties, I have a responsibility as a person, and potentially as a parent, to keep working at this part of myself. Hopefully, because of that self work, I will pass on less of this difficulty to my children then I have with it. But, to some degree, I think it will still get passed on. It will be something that they will then have to work at it in their lives.

Explaining this to my client’s often results in an “aha” moment where they realize that there were all kinds of sublte ways they developed, across thousands of interactions with their parents, to have similar difficulties as their parents, or difficulties formed in relation to their parents difficulties. We also learn from what is modeled for us, even if we don’t take into account the generational transmission of anxiety I described above. This “aha” moment helps the person begin to notice the emotional pattern they have around a particular difficulty in their life and from that awareness, begin to make modifications to overcome those difficulties.

In closing, this process above helps us understand generational transmission of emotional patterns, or even generational trauma. I also hope that it helps humanize our parents. I hope, that if I do have children, that they will be able to share their disappointment with me, when they realize this process has occurred. This lets these difficulties become “talkable” and thus open to self-awareness, reflection and growth. I have a lot more to say about how to navigate these moments with children, but I think to keep this succient, I’m going to close here! I hope it is of help to you.