TRANSCRIPT
Back when I was a therapist, I worked with quite a few parents, often parents of young children or sometimes very young children. What I told my clients in general is that in this relationship and in your life, you are the most important person to me. This is what you’re paying me for. I am on your side.
But what I said in many cases, especially with parents of very young children, is there is one exception. That exception is that many times when I talk to you, I’m not thinking about what’s best for you first. Always, I’m thinking about your children. So anything I’m saying to you, I’m putting through the lens of how will this translate into your relationship with your children.
Because what I feel is that you hire me as a therapist. You’re hiring me not just to help you, but you’re hiring me to help your children. So I am NOT going to side with you against your children if it means that anything that I’m saying to you could potentially harm your children.
And what I found is that pretty much all the parents I worked with, actually all that I can think of, when they heard my explanation for the exception for when I’m not fully on their side, that I’m thinking of their children too, they were grateful and they were relieved. Because deep down, what I found is even in the areas in which they were flawed, underneath it, they wanted to be on their children’s side. They wanted to do right by their children.
I came to that determination that any client of mine who had children deserved me to be on their children’s side as much as I was on the client side. That came to me because of my own history, and I want to tell a little story about it.
When I was a teenager, my dad went to a therapist. I actually still remember that therapist’s name, even though it was over 30 years ago. He would go to this therapist, and he would pay him a lot of money. He saw him once, sometimes twice a week, I think.
What would happen is he would sometimes, because he told me this, he would go to that therapist and he would talk about his relationship with me with that therapist. According to my dad, what he came back and told me—and often he told me in a rage, and he told me with different diagnostic terms and psychological terms—is that his therapist really did not like me very much. This therapist pathologized me, and his therapist was not taking my side in my conflicts with my dad. He was universally, according to my dad—and actually I believe my dad from what he said—he was taking my dad’s side. He was supporting my dad in my conflicts with my father.
What I remember, not only how much it hurt me, but how he was wrong. That therapist was wrong. He would say terrible things about me, and I remember I would say to my dad, “Hey Dad, let’s call the therapist Bill.” I would say, “Dad, I have a message for you to send to Bill. Tell Bill to go himself!” I would say, “That’s my dinner! How could you talk that way about my therapist?”
I said, “Look at how your therapist talks about me! Your therapist is a grown man who understands psychology, and he’s spouting a bunch of crap about me. He doesn’t understand what’s going on in our relationship. Why don’t you tell him what’s really going on? Why don’t you tell him how you’ve really treated me? Do you tell him that you hit me sometimes? Do you tell him the horrible ways that you talk to me? You have no right to talk to me that way!”
He’d go off on me again. It would get him so worked up. But what I remember learning is when a therapist doesn’t, at some fundamental level, side not just with their clients but with the child of their clients, and doesn’t really put effort into understanding the ways in which the parent is harming the child, in which the parent-child conflicts are the results, often to a very large degree, if not almost universally, to the inherited emotional problems, the psychological problems, the intergenerational problems of the parent, then the therapist is not doing their job.
I remember thinking, even at the time, but certainly later, more and more as I became a therapist, I thought, “Why would a therapist do that?” I had my ideas. One of the reasons I thought of, even back at the time when I was a teenager, is my dad used to tell me, “I pay a lot of money to this therapist, Bill. I pay him a huge amount of money every week.” I remember thinking, “Yeah, you’re paying this therapist to you. You’re paying this therapist to tell you what you want to hear. You’re paying someone who will universally be on your side, no matter how bad your behavior is toward other people, even toward your own children.”
You’re paying your therapist, and I later learned the term to narcissistically gratify you. I think that’s so common. One reason is if you, patience as a therapist, if you narcissistically gratify them, if you always take their side, you tell them how good they are, they keep coming back because it makes them feel good. It gives them comfort. The only thing is, the only problem is they don’t grow. They don’t change. They don’t have someone who’s challenging them.
Now, in my dad’s case, I really do question if he was actually open to being challenged at all. I think he probably would have just quit. He would have quit therapy. He would have stopped paying that therapist. That therapist would have lost that one or two times a week slot where he was getting a full fee cash payment from this big guy. But does that make the therapist feel good about himself? How could he have felt good about himself if actually what he was doing was supporting someone who was causing harm to someone else?
Now, I’m not saying I was a perfect teenager. I was a brat in some ways. But underneath being a brat, really what I was was I was someone who had been victimized by my father. I was someone who had been traumatized by my father, abandoned and violated in all sorts of different ways. And as a teenager who still needed my father’s love, I didn’t know how to maneuver myself.
So what happened is my anger, my frustration, my sadness, it came out in strange ways. Sometimes direct confrontation, directly calling my father on his bad behavior. It usually didn’t do anything positive for me. It just made my life worse. So by being a brat, in a way, I was expressing my dissatisfaction and my pain without doing anything that would fundamentally upset the system too much.
And so what it did is it gave my dad an excuse to hate me, to be mean to me, to be even more cruel to me. And it gave him an excuse to say bad things to me with his therapist. Maybe even he gave his therapist an excuse to side with my dad against me. But was just their fists that primitive? I don’t think so.
I think a lot of times, really, the therapists sell out their ethics to keep their relationship with the client—a fake relationship, not really a healing relationship, but a financial relationship. And so for me, when I became a therapist, it was actually very, very important for me, in a gentle way, in a respectful way, from the very beginning of my relationship with my clients when they were parents, to make it clear and to do it through action that I was actually siding with their children.
So when they would come in—’cause it happened all the time—people would come in and they’d want to complain to me about how bad their children were, how bratty their children were, how immature their children were, how much their children acted out, how much their children disrespected them—all the things that children are known to do. What I did instead of just saying, “Yeah, you’re right. You need to set better boundaries with your child,” that’s not the easy thing to say. This is the easy way: “You need to discipline your child. You have to do timeouts.” That’s the easy thing to do. That does nothing to solve any fundamental problems. That really doesn’t help the child grow in a fundamental way.
Instead, what I would say is, “What is your part in…”
This, what are you doing to contribute to your child’s behavior? What did you do in the past that in some way harmed your child? And I would want people to look at themselves. What I would find is if people knew that I really cared about them, my clients knew that I really cared about them, that I really had their best interest at heart, that I really was looking at them as traumatized people who had been harmed in their own relationships with their parents way back when. What I found is, again and again, people were much more open to having the therapy be a safe place where they could look at the things that they had done to harm their children.
And what I found, again and again, is it motivated people to even more strongly, in a more healthy way, look at what had been done to them and to see how they were playing it out in their relationship with their children. How they had been harmed by people who had power over them, their own parents, and how now that they had power in a relationship with their children, were acting out often those very same dynamics. Sometimes in different ways, sometimes they express themselves differently, but it was fundamentally the same dynamics.
And for me, what I saw with my clients is they were grateful. One of the main reasons they were grateful is they saw how this benefited their children. Their children became healthier. Often, their children became less bratty, so-called bratty. They became more mature, they became more kind, they became less troubled. They also realized, the children realized that, oh my god, I’ve got a parent who’s more here for me.
Also, what I found, again and again, is when parents really had a safe place to study their own misbehavior toward their children, that the parents became more aware of their children’s perspective. Often, what I found is parents were so frustrated, they have lost their ability to empathize all that much with their children, especially if their children were angry at them, acting out, being difficult, all the things that children can do when they have problems.
So what I found is when the parents found safety in therapy, not just to look at what happened to them, but safety to be calm and to look and study their own life more objectively, with my help, with my support, that they could be more on the side of their children. And that actually, when they were more on the side of their children, they became better parents. Their children became happier, their children became healthier.
And some of my clients, the parents of these children, found that their self-esteem went up. They felt better about themselves. They felt like, wow, I’m doing my most important job of my life, which is being a parent, in a better way. And I’m so sorry to say that that never happened to my father. He never had a therapist who did that. He never had a therapist, I guess, who was able to do that. And I understand, guess what, it’s hard to do that.
I did have parents sometimes who really were angry at me. How could you take my child? Sign my child’s a brat, my child this, this, this, this. And sometimes it was like, yeah, I had to take an onslaught. That’s why therapists get paid, why they don’t want to do it for free, because sometimes people do get very mad at therapists. They can act out a lot of anger at therapists, and it’s a job of a therapist to take it, to be calm, to be loving in spite of this onslaught.
Actually, sometimes what I found is that the way that parents were angry at me, that they acted out toward me when they expressed all their frustration and rage at life, in their dissatisfaction in their relationship with me, that in itself—and I would point this out to people—that was a big clue to the very dynamics that they were playing out with their children. And it gave me a lot of empathy for their children, a lot of ability, more easy ability to step into the shoes of their children and say, hmm, this is what it must be like to be in a relationship with this parent. Except a little more difficult to be a child than it is to be a therapist, because the therapist, psychologically, emotionally, in the relationship, has more power. But still, it gave me a lot of clues.
But what it required is that I had to stand up to my clients. I couldn’t just them and make it easy for them and tell them, you’re great, what you know, you’re such a wonderful job, you’re doing awesome all the time, your kid’s a brat, your kid’s the problem. And I think back again to that therapist, Bill, as I call him, and how he didn’t stand up to my dad, and he didn’t challenge my dad. And you know what? I think that therapist must have had a pretty easy job working with my dad. But you know what? Deep down, a therapist couldn’t have felt good about himself because, you know what? He actually didn’t help my dad. He didn’t help my dad grow. He didn’t help my dad grow and change. He didn’t help my dad become more mature, and he didn’t help my dad become a better father. In fact, he helped my dad become a worse father.
And the end result is it really contributed to the rupture of my relationship with my father because I couldn’t help my father grow and change. I tried, but I wasn’t in a position to do it, and his therapist was. So I think it’s so important for therapists, when they’re therapists for parents, to really consider the side of the child again and again and again, and to be very open about it with their clients.