Why Therapy May Actually Make It Harder For Parents To Repair Relationships With Grown Kids, Says Psychologist
ChristiLaLiberte | Canva It’s important not to have a therapist who is primarily a supportive listener if you hope to eventually get close to your child again. Many parents enter therapy because of deep sorrow and anger about their estranged or difficult relationship with their adult children. Unfortunately, sometimes, therapy makes the situation worse instead of better.
If your therapist is primarily a supportive listener and does not challenge you on your perspective and worldview, you end up in an echo chamber. This makes you feel victimized by your adult child instead of empowered to empathize with yourself and with them in a way that can transform your relationship.
Therapy for estranged parents, while it should be compassionate and empathetic, should, in my opinion, not primarily focus on comforting you or validating your perspective
Why therapy sometimes makes it harder for parents to make amends with their grown children
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There are many support groups, in person and online, that can serve to support you emotionally through the deep pain and loss associated with estrangement. Instead, therapy for estranged parents is most productive when it opens you up to the possibility that perhaps you can change in new ways that you have been closed off to recognizing.
What should you look for in a therapist if you hope to reconcile with your adult child? First of all, a therapist who is not scared to call you out on your own contribution to the dysfunctional relationship. You and your therapist need to take a hard look at what you have likely brought to the table without knowing or meaning to, and learn to address your own contribution to the parent-child relationship with self-compassion and clarity. This therapist cannot be afraid to look back into your family of origin.
Remember, you learned your own parenting style from your parents, and their parenting was massively impactful on you. Even if you committed to parenting 180 degrees differently from them because you felt they were dysfunctional. If you engage deeply in therapy, with an eye on going as far as you can into your own childhood, it can lead to growth and self-development, even beyond changing your perspective on the specific parent-child relationship that brought you to therapy.
Ideally, therapy can give you a new perspective on your own estranged relationship with your child
It can also give you a clearer handle on the reasons behind it and help you empathize with your child in a new way. It can guide you in reaching out to your adult child using new and different language that shows how deeply you are committed to a healthy, long-term relationship with them and to maintaining a healthy dynamic if they choose to re-establish a relationship with you.
Additionally, and this may be more impactful than you realize, you need a therapist that you can be happy to tell your adult child that you are seeing, because you can share that your work is heavily focused on the parent’s self-awareness and accountability. Often, a therapist who is a “peer” is not considered a good choice by your adult child because they assume this peer will take more of a “friend” approach than a challenging one, and, as I am discussing, they are often correct.
Find a therapist that is very direct and straightforward. If you are not open to seeing how your own communication style, family history, and behavior have contributed to your estrangement from your child, therapy is unlikely to help you with eventual repair. I have only seen parents repair relationships with their estranged children with effort, open examination of their own issues, honest exploration of the multiple variables contributing to the estrangement, and a commitment to introspection and change.
There are very few parents who magically reconcile with their adult children without having to own any of their contribution to the discord and antipathy in the relationship. If they do, it is usually because the adult child’s own therapy or introspection has allowed them to forgive the parent and move forward. However, the conflict often recurs in the absence of an accompanying change in the parent’s way of interacting.
Remember that no matter how direct and practical therapy may be, it's not a magic bullet
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You need to be motivated to look inward at how you think about parent-child relationships, love, communication, empathy, and more. Without a deeper overhaul of your conceptions of healthy relationships, you may well reconcile with your child, but this reconciliation may prove short-lived. There is no point in repairing any relationship, whether it is a marriage, a friendship, or a family relationship, if you don’t have the skills to keep the relationship going in a healthy, mutually respectful, and enjoyable way moving forward.
Therapy needs to focus on ways you have communicated with your adult child in the past, and concrete, different ways to engage moving forward. Hopefully, therapy will help you point to specific things you have done and ways you have engaged that made estrangement more likely, and to engage in nondefensive, open, and loving ways moving forward that pave the way for a more genuine and less stressful relationship with your adult child.
The concepts of openness, empathy, and respect are integral to repairing your relationship with your child, and should be discussed in therapy. In my practice, I hear so many adult children say that their estranged parent is not open to hearing and understanding their perspective and does not respect them.
If you find yourself thinking, “My child’s perspective is wrong, and I shouldn’t get blamed for things I didn’t do,” then therapy should focus on changing that frame. There is a saying, “Would you rather be right or married?” In parent-child estrangement work, this can be tweaked to be “Would you rather be right or have a child?”
If you put your pride over your relationship with your child in the past, therapy can help you understand why
Fortunately, in my clinical experience, changing in deep ways and owning your part in family dysfunction is very hard in the short term, but leads to positive transformational change long term. Deeply introspecting about and openly admitting your part in your conflict with your child will feel like you are getting a huge monkey off your back.
Among the older clients I work with, nobody has ever told me that they wish they had saved face more or kept their guard up even higher in relationships. But sadly, the opposite is true: many people in older age wish they had seen their flaws more clearly at a younger age so they could work on them earlier, had openly admitted their missteps in relationships, and had asked loved ones for forgiveness for these mistakes.
At a certain age, many people realize that the more open-minded and compassionate you are, the closer your relationships are. Conversely, the more defensive you are, and the more scared you are to look inward, the more your life is characterized by shallow connections, failed relationships, lost friendships, and, of course, ruptures and estrangements with your children and other family members.
Short-term, it feels comfortable and even empowering to feel that you “don’t let anyone walk all over you,” like the “professional victim” I describe in the video below, but, long-term, most people wish they had been more loving, warm, flexible, and receptive to feedback.
It is useful to think of yourself as two people: a parent who deeply yearns for a connected, loving parent-child relationship, and a person who unintentionally obstructs and sabotages this relationship through fear, anger, and defensiveness. You may be frightened of confronting your role in your estrangement, because you feel that openly owning how you have hurt your child will lead to intolerable pain and regret.
That may impact your choice of therapist and choice of what to discuss and what to avoid in therapy. But I will be honest: Your relationship with your child cannot change unless you change. Therapy should help you grow more self-aware, more objective, more empathic, and more likely to have a relationship with your child that feels positive to both of you.
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice, Best Life Behavioral Health.
