​Many people I work with grew up in households where one or both parents were struggling. It is almost never the case that the parents were bad or intended any harm to their children, it is more often the case that they struggled due to depression, poverty, their own histories of trauma, or something else that they themselves did not create or wish to have happen. Often they were working very hard to try to cope with their difficulties and trying to minimize the impact on their children, and tried very hard to be good parents. However, they usually could not protect their children from experiencing at least some of the impact of their struggles.

I have noticed that many people who grow up in these kinds of households experience similar challenges as adults. So much so that when I first begin working with a person and hear them talkng about issues such as guilt, feeling burdened by other people, and feeling fearful of burdening others themselves, I can ususally make a fairly accurate guess about the kind of home environment they experienced when they were growing up. Much of our work becomes about tracking connections between their struggle and their upbringing, gradually reducing the sense of guilt and responsibility toward others, and starting to express their own needs to be able to have more equal and satisfying relationships. Here are some of the common patterns I notice.

Firstly, many children in struggling households become helpers as adults. Children need to feel like their home environment is stable and predictable enough to be able to focus on the tasks of their development (education, making friends and learning how to be social, developing a sense competence in doing things for themsleves, building self-esteem etc.). If the home environment is not sufficiently stable, it makes it hard for children to focus on what they need to be doing. It's like if you were working in a building that was crumbling. It would be very hard to focus because you would be worried about the building around you falling apart. When the building is stable, you are able to ignore it and focus on your work.

When the home environment is not entirely stable, children will often compensate by taking on the role of the helper. The belief they (usually unconsciously) carry is that if they can prop up their parents then that will stabilize the environment, and they can then focus on their own tasks. What they don't know is that stabilizing the environment is usually beyond their capability. Children cannot heal their parents' depression, or resolve their trauma, or fix addiction, or reduce poverty or most of the others things that cause destabilization. The result is that they work harder and harder to prop everything up and increasingly take on the role of the helper. But rarely does anything get fixed, so they can end up feeling overwhelmed and unsuccessful, and sometimes carry this theme throughout their lives: worrying about the dependability of other people; working hard to take on the burdens and concerns of others; feeling that others may not be able to cope without the help; and trying to be the stable helper. They often feeling overwhelmed by the tasks they take on, unsuccessful at carrying them, and then either depressed themselves at their perceived failure, or angry at other people for allowing them to take on the burdens and not reaching out reciprocally to help.

A second thing that happens in this environment is that children often learn not to communicate their own needs. Often they feel that if they put their needs on their already struggling parents then it may crush them entirely, so they learn to repress their needs and focus on taking care of the needs of their parents. Because they also often experience carrying the needs of their parents as overwhelming, they can struggle later in life to reach out to others for support or communicate their needs to others. On some level they fear it will destabilize their relationships and the wellbeing of other people (as they feared it would for their parents) and that it will burden others to hear their needs in the same way that they felt burdened by carrying the needs of their parents. Much energy is usually going out to help others, but often little comes back, partly because they find it hard to ask for support, and appear to others on the outside as happy to take the burdens on.

A third pattern is that they often feel responsible for problems, so experience high levels of guilt. This happens because most children, when there are problems in the home and their parents are not functioning well, tend to blame themselves for the problems rather than their parents. This happens for a couple of reasons. Firstly it is more hopeful to blame yourself. This might seem strange, but if you really knew that you, as a child, were unable to fix your parents then that would be devastating because you would lose hope that the situation could get better. If you blame yourself then at least you have the hope of being able to fix the problem and feel like you have some control over doing so. Secondly it usually doesn't occur to children that their parents could be the source of problems. Parents usually seem larger than life and somewhat infallible to children, so it usually seems more likely to children that they themselevs are doing something wrong when there is a problem happening in the home.

As a result, children in this situation go through childhood carrying a lot of guilt about the problems in the household, even though it is not their fault, and go into adult life feeling the same way when problems happen in relationships. The automatic thought is usually "I've done something wrong" and it becomes hard to accurately judge who is responsible for what when a problem happens.

To recap, common patterns for adults who have grown up with parents who were not functioning well are that they often take on the role of the helper with other people in their lives, but frequently have a hard time asking for help themselves and can feel overwhelmed and unsuccessful in the helper role (though they often end up in helping professions such as nursing or social work and can do some amazing work and gain great satisfaction in these careers because they are so adept at helping); they can have difficulty communicating their own needs and often worry that depending on other people will burden them in the same way that they felt burdened as a child; and they often carry around a lot of guilt in relationships and have a hard time distinguishing responsibility in issues that arise in relationships.

Psychotherapy can be an excellent place to untangle this web. I find that in a reatively short space of time most people are able to begin understanding the connections between their upbringing and their current struggles, are able to reduce their sense of responsibility and failure, reduce their sense of guilt, reduce their fear of burdening other poeple, and begin reaching out for help to others, which results in less stress and more satisfying and close relationships.

​Here is a poem I re-read when I feel overwhelmed by suffering in the global world or among those I know. I love the phrase “we must risk delight. We can live without pleasure/but not delight.” The red bud in the icicle gave me both delight and pleasure!
- Judy Ryan

A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert

​Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

The most outstanding apology I have ever experienced began when some baggage handlers tore the handle off a piece of luggage on a flight to Okinawa, where my wife and I were living at the time. Upon our return, we wrote to the airline to ask them if they could repair the luggage, and we received an invitation to meet a representative at Naha Airport. I assume the airline’s head office told the rep not to reimburse us and to just apologize to the point that we would go away. And what an apology – he supplicated with abandon in a slowly-escalating horror during which the only question occurring to me became how to stop it. We escaped at the first opportunity. Mission accomplished China Airlines.

This reflects a surprising truth in therapy, and perhaps in life, which is that apologizing does not usually help resolve a rupture in a relationship. We are socialized to believe that the apology itself is the end-point of the conflict. It’s the thing you are supposed to want from the person who hurt you. “I’m sorry”, now everything is better. Consequently, when we hurt someone, we often jump straight to sorry as if it is the magic word that will make them feel okay. And it feels surprising when it doesn’t work. “I said I’m sorry, what more do you want?”

Saying sorry may work for minor everyday infractions, but it’s generally not an effective salve for relationship hurts. One way to understand the problem is that saying “I’m sorry” is not, at its essence, really about the person we hurt. It’s an expression of regret, and therefore more about the feelings of the one who caused the hurt. It assumes that what the injured person wants is the humiliation or shaming of the injurer. But we’re generally not that vengeful. When we are the one injured, what we want is more for the person who injured us to recognize their impact on us and to understand how we felt about it. How they feel about what they did is of secondary importance.

Saying sorry can also shift the work back onto the injured person. The pattern goes something like:

Injured: “You hurt me.”
Injurer: “You’re right, I’m really sorry. Can you forgive me?”
Injured: “Okay, okay, just don’t do it again.”

It becomes apparent that the person apologizing feels bad or ashamed about what they did and wants the person they injured to help them feel better. The actors switch roles and the apology prematurely ends the conversation, leaving the injured person holding onto difficult unexpressed feelings. It also deprives the injurer of the opportunity to demonstrate understanding and empathy for those feelings.

Of course we want reconciliation in a relationship after a rupture, but a better path to take as the injurer is to work to understand the impact on the person who was hurt, and to then demonstrate understanding of that impact. The amazing thing about this work is that apologizing at the end of it is not usually necessary. It’s not about you feeling bad, it’s about the other person feeling understood.

I remember a couple of years ago asking one of my clients to reschedule a regular appointment because I had another commitment. I then forgot about the new appointment, and received a call from him at the rescheduled time asking where I was. Fortunately I was just down the road, so I rushed back to the office and we sat down. I felt hugely embarrassed, especially because I had asked him to shift times for me, and then I was the one who did not turn up. In the past I would probably have apologized quite profusely and worked not to make the same mistake again. However, I took a deep breath and said, “I know I asked you to come at a different time because of my schedule this week, so I’m wondering what it was like for you when I didn’t show up and you had to call me?”

A friend of mine recently cut out a story for me the Newyorker about a monk named Ittetsu Nemoto in Japan who has been working change Japan’s suicide culture. He tried to reach out to people to help, but learned people need to be the ones to reach out to him. His experience is allegorical of whose agency is needed to create change. He tells a story about one man who traveled a long way on foot to reach him for help. Upon arriving at the temple, the man realized he no longer needed the monk.

Sometimes that happens in therapy. You work out a problem on the way to the therapist. I have a story about that.

I have a friend who is a little outside the mainstream. Let’s call him Donald. He likes to wear cowboy hats, his only phone is a landline, and while he has an internet connection at home he only ever goes online at the local library. Larger than life, kind of a genius, unlikely to put much value in your opinion. A bit paranoid perhaps, but who isn’t post-Prism. Earlier this week we had a difficult interaction that stuck with me until I began the drive to see my therapist.

I was chatting with Donald and another friend about farm life. It happens I know something about farms. I lived part of my life on a small farm with horses and cows. I made some point about isolation, and Donald chimed in to say, “What would you know, You weren’t born on a farm.” It is important to note that Donald was not born on a farm either.

I really did a very poor job of thinking it through. I had no plans for income, I did not try to find out whether or not I could transfer schools in the middle of my degree. I rode along with my girlfriend at the time whose approach to the move was more mature. I left feeling stifled by my mother and angry at her in a very self-righteous-teenager way. As we pulled out of the house and down the road, I remember turning on the radio and We Gotta Get Out Of This Place by The Animals was playing. So you get out of that place, and it turns out there’s a whole next step of getting into another place. The Animals never said much about that.

Concurrent with the unanticipated difficulties of moving , I was also unprepared for relationships, which were often permeated by a feeling that things were not going well. I reacted to this feeling by constantly asking if the other person was okay. Even if I received an assurance that they everything really was fine, I never really felt reassured. I often see variances of the same pattern reoccurring in couple relationships in counseling, so it seems to be something many of us experience. Why did I ask the other person if they were okay when I was the one feeling anxious? Why did reassurances not feel reassuring? Where did this feeling come from? I only recently began to understand some of the answers to these questions.
​
We have a hard-wired need to attach to other people. Perhaps this comes out of our historic need to belong to a community of people in order to survive. It also makes sense in terms of surviving as an infant since infants are totally dependent on other people to have their needs met. When we are not securely attached, life seems tenuous and fraught with risk. We get anxious, feel distressed, feel lonely. It’s usually reassuring to have someone to talk to, someone to be with. This can also be seen during times of trauma or crisis. People gather at funerals, the community comes together after a natural disaster. People seek comfort in companionship – the world feels more secure when we know we are able to trust in the willingness of other people to care for us.

So, what happens when our instinctive need to connect to people is formed in an environment in which our early efforts to connect or signal a need for connection are ignored or rejected? Imagine first your instinctual desire to eat. Hunger is your wired-in signal that you need food. What if you got enough food to survive, but much of it made you very ill. As an adult, you would probably develop an ambivalent relationship with food. You would still feel hungry and need to eat, but you would often feel anxious about whether or not the food was safe to eat, probably try to suppress your hunger in the first place to avoid the anxiety-provoking experience of eating, or seek repeated reassurances from others about whether or not the food is okay to eat. What couples with your instinctual desire for food is the level of trust you develop in whether or not food will be available and safe.

Human attachment works in a similar way. If we grow up in an environment in which our hunger to connect in a relationship is sometimes met, but often ignored or rebuffed, many of us naturally develop into adults with some related level of anxiety about the safety or reliability of relationships. We try to calm our anxiety about connecting in various ways: by seeking reassurance, by trying to avoid connecting to people, or by other means.
​
My mother did a superhuman job protecting us from very difficult circumstances, but to some degree I noticed the difficult circumstances. I did not want to add anything to a parent who already seemed overwhelmed. Sensing that our environment was unstable increased my reliance on the security platform of our relationship. But attempts to connect often met with an exhausted and overwhelmed, and sometimes irritated response. It became necessary to try to read the signs to work out when connecting might be okay.

I therefore learned to become more reliant on myself, to become my own secure base. That’s why moving seemed so easy – it doesn’t feel like taking a step off a cliff when you don’t feel like you are on solid ground in the first place. I didn’t expect to take all this baggage with me into other relationships, particularly when I had moved so far away from home. But moving involved leaving all the protections my mother provided, and I had to depend more on other people to survive, particularly people close to me. My anxiety in relationships after the move was a re-awakening of this early experience. In this new and somewhat tenuous and unpredictable environment, are you feeling overwhelmed? Are you able to reassure me? Are we going to be okay? It’s emotional really noticing the meaning of those old questions. Small suggestions a person seemed tired or overloaded ramped-up my anxiety, precisely at times when they were less able to give me the kind of reassurance I needed. Not getting the reassurance made me more anxious, and the pattern reinforced itself.
​
The good news is that this kind of attachment injury can heal. Repeated experiences of being able to connect to other people and feel reassured, and experiences of getting through difficult situations together, gradually reduced my anxiety. Added to that, the experience of being in therapy and building a space to explore and understand what the pattern was all about was tremendously helpful. I am now able to notice in the anxious moment that the anxiety does not indicate there is anything wrong with the relationship. It is more about old feelings surfacing – conjured by reminders of things past. Ghosts I can now dispel.

The most relaxing place in the world is a particular Korean sauna in New Jersey. The somewhat drab external appearance, a vast grey concrete wall in the midst of an industrial district, disguises an opulent labyrinth of self-care within. Due to the outward appearance, I did not expect much on my first visit to the sauna, but never have I been so relaxed. It’s a hot miracle.

When I first went to counseling, I expected it to be like going to the sauna in the comforting relaxation sense. For me, as it is for many other people, it turned out to be more like the sauna in the other sense - that the inside world of therapy can be very different than the exterior view would suggest.

I’m mostly in therapy to work on how I experience relating with other people. I worry about disappointing people so I tend to accept work that I don’t really want to do. I remember one time in Japan when I was asked to interpret for the Vice-Governor of Okinawa as he spoke with a visiting group of graduate students from a prestigious school in Tokyo. I knew it was going to be a problem, but it seemed very important and I didn’t want to seem like I couldn’t handle it. His speech (in Japanese) went something like:

“Welcome to Okinawa" (okay, no problem interpreting that)

“I am happy to see you today, how do you like Okinawa so far” (also fairly easy to interpret, hoping it will continue like this)

“I understand you are studying degenerate classical minima and instantons in quantum mechanics” (long very, very awkward silence).

I’m not really concerned about saying no to the person asking the favor, I’m actually playing something out in these situations that is much older. Something about feeling accepted, something about being worried about what it means if both of us can’t cope. Something that doesn’t really belong in the now.

The irony is that by trying to avoid disappointing people (who in reality would probably not be disappointed if I just said “sorry, but I can’t do that” as they would just find someone else), I ended up really disappointing them by accepting the request and messing it up. There is also a weirdly positive outcome, now I think about it, in that I have really had to develop an ability to pick up new things I wouldn’t otherwise have learned and quickly become adept at them in order to avoid making a mess of them. So now I’m relatively competent in several fields, but I’m still distressed about taking too much on.

So I wander into therapy looking forward to the relaxing experience of talking this out. Imagine my surprise when I realize the hard truth - therapy also involves a relationship where the same stuff plays out! I am not there bouncing my stuff off a reflective wall like I’m in some kind of relaxing version of racquetball. Racquetball on a couch with a cup of tea. No, there’s another person across from me, intruding on my comfortable space. So, when I put a thought out there, and she makes an interpretation I don’t agree with, how am I supposed to disagree with it? With all her training and experience. She is the powerful helper and I am the vulnerable helpee. How can she have the audacity to get things wrong!

Of course, that’s where much of the work actually happens. It turns out that good therapy is about noticing patterns in relationships outside the room, and then creating opportunities to supportively talk about those patterns when they arise within the counseling relationship. To finally be able to think about what is happening as it happens, without judgment. It takes some courage on my part, and also on the part of the therapist.

​Amazing and bizarre things happen in that space. The catastrophe I have been working so hard to avoid all my life, the one I imagine will happen if I say what I really think to people, keeps not happening.

I remember an experience I had in Japan when I was the only foreigner in a group of people being introduced. Somebody went along the line introducing each person in Japanese, “this is Kenji, this is Satoshi, this is Ichiro.” When they got to me they said, “this is gaijin.” Gaijin is the Japanese word for foreigner (literally “outsider”). I later complained to my friend about how disrespectful it felt. He responded, “That was the respectful way to introduce you.” In other words, they are not being intentionally rude, so the problem is with how you are experiencing it.

That brings up an important question. If an act is not intended to be disrespectful, does that mean the any experience of disrespect is due to a problem with the perception of the person who experienced it? I think most therapists would argue that impact trumps intent. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you intended to say, what counts is what people heard. If you gave a speech about bananas to a group and they came away thinking you talked about apples, you don’t blame the audience. You change your speech.

If it seems like an obvious point, why do we all get so confused when we start thinking about it in the context of sexism?

Driving home today I was stopped behind a car at an intersection. It had those stick figures on the back window representing the family. Dad, Mum and two kids. It struck me in that moment that all the stick figures I can remember seeing for heterosexual parents are in that gender order – man then woman.

What kind of impact would it have to put the sticker of the woman first?

I try to imagine what I would find myself thinking in that case. Is the man a step-parent to the kids? Is he a stay-at-home dad? Is it the woman’s car? Reflecting on those thoughts, I realize they each involve removing something: parental status, employment, ownership.

Then a very interesting thought occurs to me: I have never thought about the ways in which women are diminished by being the second sticker. Never considering that reveals how normative it is for us to see women as second-place.

This privileging and diminishing does not come out of the intentionally biased actions of any of us as individuals. We don’t put the stickers on cars in that gender order to intentionally place men in a superior position. It’s just how these things are done in our culture. Sure, there are individual men out there who advocate for the maintenance of male superiority. But the vast majority of us never asked to learn how to be sexist. It’s not a problem with our intent, we are all for gender equality.
​
The problem is that believing we are for gender equality means we fail to notice when we don’t have that impact, when we act in ways that spring from male privilege. And when we are confronted on acting on our privilege (being sexist), we respond that we’re not sexist. In other words, “I didn’t intend to be sexist, and I don’t see myself as sexist, therefore I couldn’t have been acting in a sexist way. The problem must be with your perception of me.” We start thinking that intent trumps impact. Here’s a nice example of how we do that:

How does this relate to therapy? If we don’t believe as therapists that this is the experience of women or people of color or gay people or immigrants or whoever else is in a marginalized group, then imagine how much we will miss about their experience. And not only miss things, but also dismiss their actual experience as a problem with their perception.
We need to start noticing the ways in which we act out on the sexism we have learned and to be receptive to hearing about it. To believe women when they tell us we are acting in a sexist way and try to work out what that might be. To assume that there are many ways in which we diminish women far beyond just the order of stickers on cars, and to start working to undo that. To stop interrupting women when they are talking. To assume women know what they are talking about even when we feel skeptical. We wouldn’t ask “What do women want?” if we listened to women in the first place. The list goes on.

When you think about how so much of therapy is about good listening, you start realizing how critical it is to understand this. Sexism is a lens we wear that we never asked for or put in ourselves, but which distorts how we see things. In order to begin really listening to and believing in the experience of women (not to mention people of color, lesbian and gay people, Jewish and Muslim people etc.), we must first acknowledge we are wearing this lens. None of us go into therapy as a career with bad intent, but the impact of practicing therapy without a clear understanding of oppression is almost certainly one in which we unwittingly do harm.

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I wouldn’t have begun to have any of these thoughts if it were not for the tireless efforts of many women over many decades working to open our eyes to how sexism really works in our culture. For training, check out The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. A good place to start is the Undoing Racism workshop, which teaches an analysis of the foundations of oppression that underlie racism, sexism and many other forms of prejudice.

​If you are anywhere near New City, New York, then join us at VCS for a weekly training for professionals on oppression analysis. Thursdays from 4:30-6:00pm.

Also check out The Everyday Sexism Project, which is an amazing place to learn about the many different ways in which women experience sexism on a daily basis. They are also onTwitter.

Before we lived at the foot of Mt. Taranaki, we lived in Te Kuiti. I have patchy memories of the small town. Walking barefoot from the pool in summer getting melted asphalt on my feet from the hot road. The corner dairy where I used to take my 50c pocket money to get pick and mix bags of lollies on Saturday. Driving out of town along State Highway 3 between the tall trees.

One memory that sticks out is when I made a magic potion. I must have been around five years old. I had a plastic bucket and a hose, and I crouched mysteriously around the side of the house adding various leaves, dirt, rocks, and other bits and pieces into the brew. Particularly unusual things were especially powerful – a red and green leaf, a dead bug, a buried broken bit of plastic. When it was ready I poured it over the plants in the garden – I just knew the next day something amazing was going to happen. Maybe a huge beanstalk with gold at the top – something like that. Obviously.

Do you remember doing things like that? Perhaps sitting at a table with a pencil knowing you can move it with your mind if you just get your focus right. Standing in the yard jumping and knowing you can fly if you can work our how to launch off the ground in the right way. For many of us, that confidence changes somewhere along the journey out of childhood. I certainly don’t aspire to be out in the back yard by myself at age 35 making magic potions. Okay, so I do a little bit. But more than that, I want to believe that I know what I’m doing in my work and my life.

One thing I have noticed in my work as a therapist is that many of us don’t feel successful when we are. I can reflect on my work and feel amazed at what I have done and am doing. Rationally, I get it, but emotionally I am not there. I often feel like I’m just winging it, I don’t feel confident, I suspect one day people will realize I have no idea what I am doing and the game will be up. I’ve just been faking it all along.
​
When I meet people seeking counseling for the first time I can often hear this within the first few minutes. People talk about where they are at in life, and their achievements in the face of significant difficulties are quickly apparent. Raising a family while holding down several jobs, working to rebuild after losing everything in a natural disaster, working from the bottom up in a company, fighting for a relationship after a trauma. But it is also quickly apparent they do not feel successful. They express self-doubt, concerns about how others see them, and refer to their successes as either having been lucky, or largely thanks to the efforts of other people.

Almost without exception, something happened very early on. Sometime between when we believed in magic, and when we became a young adult. Something that had nothing to do with our own competence, but everything to do with how we saw ourselves reflected in the eyes of others. Children have no way to measure their success objectively – we don’t read the newspaper for stories of other children to see how we compare. We learn whether or not we are any good through observing how others see us.

Being raised by a depressed parent, somebody who did they best they could, but who was not just not able to be emotionally present a lot of the time, I did not see a lot of joy reflected at my achievements. With no other way to measure how successful I was, I began to suspect I was not really achieving. Many of us also take on the role of carrying the depressed parent. We are never told that this is not our responsibility, and are not aware it is an impossible task. Doomed to fail at this first major life challenge, we carry this sense of failure forward into our adult lives. Challenges often seem too big to manage, we go into them anticipating we will be unsuccessful, and if we come out successful then we can only think that success must be luck or thanks to the efforts of somebody else.

Making the connection back to what happened in therapy can be a healing experience. We slowly realize we were not responsible, that the reflection we saw was clouded or distorted by something inside the viewer rather than ourselves. Those realizations often aren’t enough to make the feeling go away. In the midst of an achievement it still creeps back up on me. What changes is knowing in the moment that the feeling is untrue. It was never supposed to belong to me in the first place. It’s just a ghost.
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Even writing this blog, anticipating posting it, I can sense the feeling lurking: maybe I don’t know what I am talking about, somebody smarter will point out the flaws in my thinking. I should just delete the whole blog and then I won’t have to deal with the feeling at all. But I now face the feeling, grasp tightly my magic potion, and tell it “I hear you, and you are not a part of me.”