Parental baggage and the dangers of social media tips

A client seeks therapy to address childhood baggage and mixed feelings about parents, emphasizing the need for nuanced healing and avoiding blame.

A 27-year-old male client in his first session tells me, ‘I want to use therapy to deal with my childhood baggage. I want to discuss the relationship with my parents, and the mixed feelings I have towards them. I want to stop blaming them for my miseries. Can I work through my unhealthy patterns without hating my parents?’

Parental baggage and the dangers of social media tips

Unpacking childhood, the way it has impacted us is a theme that shows up in therapy sessions consistently. Ambivalence or mixed feelings towards one’s parents and siblings are themes that are invariably present in one way or another for most clients. Therapy sessions are a safe space for clients to unpack the influences on their life. At the same time – the idea is to use sessions to talk about how parental behaviour and actions have shaped who we are and acknowledge how in our adulthood we can work on ourselves to address unhealthy patterns which may no longer be serving us. Most of us, in some ways, have had unmet needs in childhood, but there are also those who have had severe childhood trauma and abuse which have left scars that are deep and debilitating. They interfere with our capacity to function and build a full life. So, the process of therapy needs to be nuanced to these realities, and it also has to be at a pace that the client is ready to process. Equally, these sessions must factor in the ambiguity that the client may carry towards their parents. At the same time, we need to be mindful that the work of processing and how to negotiate complex emotions navigate doesn’t descend into blaming and shaming, or make people feel like victims. The real goal always is to help clients come back to the present moment, deal with familial ruptures and work towards adaptive healthy patterns which emerge from a space of authenticity.

My worry though is that we are living at the time when social media are full of messages and information about how our parents’ attachment styles continue to impact us in adulthood. The culture of overgeneralization and overapplication of what people are reading on social media to their own past is dangerous. It can lead to confirmation bias and even faulty beliefs. The client I mentioned at the start of this piece told me that watching stuff online made him angrier and he fretted over why should he be the one spending time in therapy to deal with what his parents had done.

“Information is not knowledge,” Albert Einstein had said and it applied to pop psychology too. If we need to address the emotions, beliefs that are bubbling in us – then the deeper work must go beyond unpacking the reasons. It requires sitting with information, our feelings, making room for patience, an exploration of our values, ethics and a recognition of what moving forward means for us. It means recognizing that no matter what you try sometimes your parents may not acknowledge or have the capacity to recognize how their actions or absence may have impacted you. We also need to remember that if we have not done the inner work, then in moments of parental loss, our grief gets more complicated, and the ambivalence continues to last.

We all spend large parts of our adulthood-- in therapy or not-- trying to figure what do we want to do with our childhood baggage that often continues to replay in our lives even years later. There aren’t any easy or necessarily right answers, certainly the internet doesn’t have it. Yet, yet as a part of being compassionate to our own self we need to choose to do the inner work so that life feels less fraught. When and how is always up to us.