A client I am working with at the moment told me during their last session, “I don’t want to sit here and slag off my mum and dad”. I understand that, and of course, we live in a society where there can often be a perception of expectation of loyalty and respect for our parents. I had to reassure my client that this was neither my wish nor intention (although as a Person Centred Counsellor, I was also a little curious as to why the client started talking about their experiences as a child, without the likelihood that there could be no discussion of their parents).
Of course, I have had other clients that want very much to talk about their parents; to ‘slag them off’ and apportion blame. They want to use their session as a form of catharsis to vent themselves of the anger and rage they feel towards their parents for the oppression and lack of understanding they received as children; to understand the abuse that can take many forms at an emotional, physical or sexual level. I am not here to judge; merely act as a conduit for the release of the frustration and resentment that some clients need to purge themselves of.
To help my understanding of any client, I often draw on my own experiences, and then adapt them as required. From this, I recognise that as a child, amongst other things, I needed love and encouragement, freedom to make mistakes and comforting when I had made them. My present day perception of my upbringing was that these qualities were not always present. I have no doubt that my parents loved me, but without suitable role models of how to be good parents; both came from fairly dysfunctional families themselves, they weren’t always able to quite get it right.
As a child, we often place our parents on various pedestals. Parents and caregivers are the people we first encounter, who feed us and clothe us, provide our first teachings and appear as omnipotent beings who are in the centre of our lives. What we don’t see at the time is the mistakes they make, or recognise that at times they get it wrong. We fail to appreciate that they are making it up as they go along, and in our idol, early childhood can often be spent in awe. But we are human too, and as an emotional being, we develop feelings when our needs aren’t met.
The relationship that we have with our parents is like no other. There is a saying that we can choose our friends but we are stuck with our families, and where we might choose to remain with a friend whilst recognising their faults; where we might base the relationships with others on the way in which they treat us, it is rare that we have this choice with our parents. Of course, in today’s society of divorce and reconstituted families, we may get to choose between them, but invariably, we have to stay with one or the other and it is only in our later lives, we can decide on the amount of contact we have.
So we have to live with their mistakes, and can often find the confusion between love and resentment, between loyalty and distrust, hurtful and difficult to bear. As children, we rarely understand our caregivers in the way we see and decide upon our significant others, with all their foibles, in later life. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” is the famous quote by Philip Larkin, which goes on to say “they don’t mean to, but they do”, and for what it’s worth, I have never met a parent who has looked down at their screaming bundle of joy and declared that they were going to cause suffering, distress and disharmony.
We are all individual, some cope with their childhood better than others, some are so damaged they live in loathing. As a profession, we are not here to judge either you or your parents, merely to aid an understanding that has often been lacking from one of the most significant relationships in your lives, because it is only through that understanding, that we can learn to accept our parents for who they are, warts and all, and in doing so, develop an awareness of who we really are; why we act and react in the way that we so often do, repeating patterns of behaviour that we have often developed in our childhoods.
I appreciate for some it can feel disloyal, to talk about mum and dad, and how you might have felt about their influence on your childhood and upbringing. I appreciate it may seem disrespectful to talk about the mistakes they made, but discovering them for who they are, often for the first time, can bring at best, a richness to a relationship that has never before been felt or, depending on your perspective, at best, an opportunity to let go. No, we’re not here to slag off your parents, nor are we here to blame them, unless that’s what you need to do, we’re here just to understand.
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