Will Your Relationship With Your Parents Change After Therapy?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

When people come to me with requests for relationships or problems in the family, I usually immediately warn that if someone comes with problems in a relationship, then ideally each of the couple should go to individual therapy and together to couple therapy. With a family, the same algorithm, if there is still a child, then work with a child psychologist is also added.

Yes, it is costly, but it is this scheme that is officially recognized and working.

Why?

A family or a couple is a closed system in which you have your specific role, perform a certain function for the system.

If you come to therapy, most likely the role and, as a consequence, the behavior that presupposes acting out this role, which you learned, led you to some kind of crisis and you want to avoid it. But often the behavior we still agree to change, but not the role, and even more so we are not ready for all the consequences that such changes can trigger. But this is impossible. It is precisely how we think and act that leads to crises. Changing thoughts automatically changes actions. The role, function and dynamics in the family or couple system naturally change, as in any system. But how this will change is very hard to imagine. The consequences can be positive or negative for the system. Destroy it.

I am very skeptical and cautious about schools, as a rule, this is tz. mystical or esoteric unrecognized offshoots, such as family constellations, where the message is given that if you now work in a group, in the field and change something there, this will affect the relationship in general in a couple or family. But naturally only in a positive way.

Any group work, as well as non-group work, affects us. Maybe add insights, and maybe you will find resources in yourself, you will begin to build interactions differently. But you need to remember that this is always a lottery and an uncontrolled process, no one at the exit knows what you will get regarding others. But often people come to therapy in order to alter something in themselves, in order to influence another.

Such parapsychology only feeds people with the illusion that if they fix something in themselves, then the whole system will be corrected. Rooting a myth.

This is a naive and childish view that often leads to frustration. Not so long ago I watched the statement of a popular singer that her father had ceased to be an alcoholic. She publicly associated this act with her work on herself, including work in constellation groups. People see such statements and the myth that “I can influence another” develops, strengthens and takes root. Although this is a very, very primitive attitude that takes roots even at the age of one year, when the child feels that he influences the world with his reactions: he smiled - she smiled, cried - the mother came.

An adult understands that a system is a complex mechanism of mutual influences, dynamics, functions.

"I am influencing as much as I am influenced by mechanisms from outside."

Family therapy was just discovered as a result of observing an interesting pattern: upon returning home, patients with schizophrenia who managed to achieve remission within the walls of the clinic received another attack of exacerbation.

If family members are not ready to go to a family therapist, and a person comes from the fact that he suffers in such a system, the only possible process of separation is seen, since a family is a more complex mechanism than a couple and it is practically impossible to influence it by changing only one element.

In general, most of the clients I work with have not finished the separation process. They are loyal to the family system and often do not feel like a separate part. In a healthy family, the child begins to separate from about 12 years old, until he becomes independent. He feels himself to be both a part of his family's resources and a separate system. Unfinished adults - children are very sensitive to family issues, love, warmth. They did not receive these resources, therefore they could not separate smoothly, they are constantly in search of love and warmth with the most toxic possibilities. Therefore, the children of alcoholics and drug addicts hold on to their families, and as observations have shown, they do not want to go to care homes, or to a new family. They want to stay with those who beat and humiliate them, so that maybe someday they will receive love.

Having matured, they carry with them a bag of installations from childhood, holding on to them with a stranglehold.

Separating such an adult child is a mandatory step in therapy. Many times I started by working with them at the level of attitudes, but there are so many toxic representations about life that sometimes my whole life and all my hands are not enough. Therefore, now I try to first separate the client from such a family, and then the process with the attitudes is easier.

But not everyone is ready to part. Separation is fraught with deterioration in relations. You stop being a good boy or girl for mom and dad. Where to be good is to be comfortable and fulfill all the whims of the parents, sometimes mutually contradictory.

Without separation, without rebellion, without conflict, it is impossible to reach a healthy level. Sometimes when the family is too toxic, it can mean little interaction. After all, a miracle does not happen like this singer. Dad will not stop being an alcoholic because I have pumped something in myself, and mom will not stop constantly humiliating and criticizing, because now I know my worth.