That "Blaming Your Parents" Bullshit

There is something singularly gutless about rejecting therapy as a tool to improve one’s life and something singularly contemptible about sneering at those with the courage to undertake it.

A common and particularly idiotic libel is that therapy is all about blaming one’s parents.

To begin with, with regard to many issues that merit therapy, upbringing doesn’t enter into it. If you have problems with procrastination, productivity, organization or even free-floating anxiety, a cognitive behavioral approach is almost certainly the best, and it has the advantage of being empirically based. Which is to say these approaches were developed after experimentation, the results of which are replicable and reasonably robust. A good introduction to this subject is Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It (2012). McGonigal is a professor of psychology at Stanford who created a wildly popular Continuing Education course entitled “The Science of Willpower.” It routinely maxed out in terms of enrollment—we’re talking a course that had to be moved to bigger classrooms four times until McGonigal had to teach it in one of Stanford’s largest lecture halls.

McGonigal has gone to town on this, writing a number of other books, including The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It (2016). More recently she has gotten into the psychology of movement; for an introduction to this, see The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage (2019).

However, many problems are relationally-based, and then it does become necessary to look at one’s upbringing. Not to blame one’s parents—that is self-defeating—but to understand the ways in which their parenting mistakes generated distorted thinking, mistaken beliefs, low self-esteem, and any number of other problems that play out primarily in relationships: with friends, family members, co-workers and, usually most prominently, intimate relationships (or at least relationships that ought to be intimate). The dominant means by which these issues are addressed is classic “talk therapy,” which essentially tracks back to psychologist Carl Rogers’ conviction that people have an innate bias in favor of healing, and that if given a supportive space in which to heal, that is what they will do.

It is futile to blame one’s parents, but common sense to hold one’s parents responsible for the basic ways in which one was taught to see the world and oneself. I myself am a parent, and I ask you: between myself and my daughter, which of us holds nearly all the power and who exerts an out-sized influence upon the other? The answer is obvious: I do. I hold the power; I therefore bear the responsibility. And there is no doubt in my mind that as hard as I work at being a father, I am making mistakes. I don’t know what mistakes I’m making—if I did I would take corrective action—but I’m making them nonetheless. And I can tell you where these mistakes basically occur: in the realm between the messages I think I am conveying to my daughter and the messages she actually receives.

I do have an advantage over certain other parents—my own, for example—in that I’m self-aware about my limitations, willing to question my parenting choices, and above all, willing to ask for advice from people who know what they’re talking about. (I have an additional advantage in that my daughter has a terrific mom and I have a terrific co-parent.)

I will talk another time about the problematic aspects of the way in which I was raised. For now I want to move on to the second necessary step: to be able to see one’s parents as fallible human beings with their own struggles and their own imperfect childhoods. In the case of my mother and father, both survived personal tragedies that would have destroyed most people. And if they made some serious mistakes as parents, they did remarkably well in others. I will instance only the importance they placed on learning and the way they modeled it in their own behavior. My siblings and I lived in a house filled with books. All three of us learned to love to read, and all three of us have turned out to be pretty bright people. And as far as this project is concerned: were it not for the example of my father’s commitment to realism, my mother’s extraordinary compassion for others, and the courage that both of them displayed, I would simply be unequal to the challenge of writing this book.

Then there’s a third step, which is ultimately the most important. Insight will only get me so far. The crucial question is: Now that I know what I know, what am I going to do about it? The way I generally phrase this to myself is, Where am I in all of this?

There is not a rigid sequencing from assessing the lessons one imbibed in childhood; to viewing one’s parents realistically and with empathy; to making new choices about how to live in this world. After a while there is a kind of working back and forth among these three steps. But there is no doubt in my mind that I am far more emotionally healthy than I was when I first embarked on therapy, not because I have transcended my core issues—that just ain’t gonna happen—but because I have learned to face them squarely. Consequently I have the ability to manage them. They no longer own me.

In May 1977, however, they came within a few minutes of killing me.