Therapy Isn’t About Blaming Your Parents
You can grow up in a “good home” and still have relationship issues, money issues, body image issues, confidence issues, and more. Maybe your parents weren’t outright abusive or neglectful. That’s great! …but it doesn’t mean they didn’t make mistakes that affect you now. You probably internalized some negative and unhelpful things, because your parents were human. It doesn’t mean they were bad parents, it just means they weren’t perfect, because none of us are perfect. In my experience, the biggest things clients struggle with that have origins in how they grew up have to deal with money, body image/self-worth, and relationships. Today’s post is about relationships.
We learn about relationships by watching the adults around us during our formative years. This can be our parents, grandparents, close family friends and etc. Humans develop socially by observing and mimicking others, i.e. the child that learns the word ‘shit’ when someone drops something on their foot and blurts it out in surprise and frustration. The child quickly learns the context of the word, and that it will elicit a reaction from adults.
We don’t always just replicate what we see, but the first relationships we see and experience heavily influence our expectations and behaviors in relationships when we are growing up. Some of these expectations and behaviors are strengths, and others cause conflict, anger and resentment in our relationships. Many of my clients talk about having a conflict with someone and then realizing they are behaving just like their mother or father, and hate it. This is a common experience, and therapy can change that.
We look at where our negative stories, insecurities and issues come from in order to better understand them, so we can start to change them. Sometimes it’s hard. It’s almost always uncomfortable. But it’s definitely worth it, if you want to stop repeating the mistakes your parents made.
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