17 September 2012

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You’re Just Going To Ask Me About My Parents, Right?

Short answer: not really.

Less-short answer…

The legacy of so-called classic (or Freudian) psychoanalysis is that, from the outside (where most people stand in relation to talk-therapy) the process seems to be nothing more than talking about our parents. Regardless of whether, like me, a therapist practices a modern (or evolving) approach or whether they prefer the classic perspective, this perception from the outside can be difficult to undo.

After all, most (but not all) of us spend the first 17-21 years of our lives under the same roof as our parents. Whether they be our birth-parents or our adoptive-parents, all of us were raised by others until we could fend for ourselves. This makes an indelible mark on us. Patterns for how we perceive others are etched by our self-with-other relationships from an early age: from parents, caretakers, siblings, friends, and strangers.

I suppose what I am getting at is that our relationship with our social environment is inevitably affected by social influences from childhood (and continuing onward). This can be a little frustrating for the individually-driven client who wants to get to the bottom of something, who, upon being asked a question relating to their childhood feels disappointment that all the attention is now going to be put on how well they got along with their parents in the past and not what’s going on with them right now.

I do believe that the present is everything: what’s bugging us today is the whole reason we seek therapy to begin with. But the present is informed by the past. No matter how much we aim on keeping things focused on the here-and-now, context is king, and context is a past-tense thing. Therapy is not about your parents, it’s about you, so once any applicable information (or feeling) is provided from your childhood it should be viewed within the framework of the here-and-now, within the framework of today and not simply a meditation on yesterday. Your past contributes in shaping the way you see and react to things, so it is always good to explore previous experiences in order to make present conflicts clearer. Parents and caretakers play a role in this, but it is just a that: a role in the larger picture of you.