Good Parent, Bad Parent

Last week I wrote about reparenting in psychotherapy. I’ve used it as part of my practice since the beginning, about 45 years ago. Reparenting places a sizable burden of responsibility on a therapist, because it means committing in every way to being a loving parent to often deeply troubled people.

My patients have often grown up in families with neglect or abuse of one kind or another. In crucial ways, they didn’t get the help they needed to become capable adults. They carry around pain from their childhoods combined with pain from their troubled current lives. When I reparent them – become the “good parent” they never had – they have a fresh chance for something better.

With reparenting, something interesting happens. I get to see how my patients were as children. I get to see how they were treated by their parents and the ways they protected themselves, as best they could, from neglect and abuse. Because I take on a parent role (even though I’m the good guy) they get confused and end up thinking I’m just like their true parents were. It doesn’t feel good sometimes, but it’s an important part of the process of healing that they bring this confusion out with me.

Just last week, at the end of a session, I had a patient say, “I know you’re mad at me.” No, I wasn’t, I explained. Why did they think so? “Because I didn’t work hard and I made no progress,” they said. It was clear to me in that moment that as a child, my patient had needed to earn their parent’s love. Most of the time, nothing they did was ever going to be good enough.

So I had the opportunity right then to genuinely acknowledge my patient’s efforts. I stay with the truth. I’m not going to give false praise. My patient is working hard and doing their best. More importantly, they are a person of value and worthy of love and support. I was glad for the opportunity to give them that message.

Reparenting

I think the best description of how I approach being a psychotherapist is to say that I “re-parent” my patients.

When I was training in psychotherapy in the 70s, reparenting was part of the classic model. I believe our profession has moved away from taking on this role but I can’t imagine doing what I do in any other way.

The people who come to see me usually have significant problems. Their traumatic issues and experiences cut deeply into who they are and disrupt their lives and relationships. I would say that every one of them suffers from seriously flawed parenting. Growing up in their families of origin included either harsh discipline, neglect, alcoholism or drug use, or some type of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.

The people my patients loved and trusted and depended on for their lives – their parents – significantly betrayed them in some way.

There are important things they didn’t learn; they weren’t able to grow up in the right ways. They want their lives to be good but things keep going wrong for them in ways they sometimes understand and sometimes are completely confused about. They need to be reparented.

And I want to say, right off, that this role is a huge one to shoulder. To do it right, with integrity and humility, is very, very hard. The burden of responsibility to reparent my patients is as awesome a responsibility as being an actual parent of a child.

It was in the role of a parent with one of my patients last week that I needed to share one of the most difficult experiences of my life. My patient was at a critical turning point and needed to be able to learn from my example, like a good father helping his kids learn from his mistakes. Believe me, I thought about this very carefully. I don’t like sharing this story and I need to be absolutely sure that by sharing it I’m really going to help someone.

I decided to go ahead. As usual after telling this story, I ended up sweating, drained, and shaking inside. I had trouble sleeping that night.

I hope my patient heard me. Now I’ll see where he goes with it.