Therapy Works: Toxic Messages and Self-Protection

“This will Not Stay Inside of Me and tell me a lie about life, about me.”

The following are actual words spoken by an actual parent claiming to be actually caring for their adult son/daughter, when the child, working up their strength to be assertive with this parent — note: assertiveness is respecting ourselves AND respecting the Other — had mentioned, fairly mildly, that they were unhappy with a behavior of the parent. Here come the words:

”I have no memory of ‘jumping all over you.’

And … can you allow me a little grace?

Sometimes I feel very overwhelmed and frantic. Today was a terrible day!

I’m sorry if I hurt you, but I’ve been hurt too. (This is a particularly egregious, ugly time to use the word “but,” it really saps any meaning from the prior statement of being sorry about hurting the other person)

Can’t we just move on?

If you feel I’m asking too much, well, I’m sorry, I’ll try to do better in future.

Please let it go! I already try so hard not to upset you, but I will try even harder”

Yikes, there is absolutely nothing about the statement contained above that connotes genuine remorse or care for the adult child who has challenged this parent. Instead, there is this twisty turny, “poor me” victimhood language which invites one not to care about the adult child who is confronting the parent’s bad behavior. Instead, the language is full of a sense that the parent is the one who is working so hard and should be celebrated and appreciated for dealing with a difficult, too-sensitive adult child.

Therapy won’t always be on the side of the child or adult child in a family of origin. However, a parent normally has a privileged position of power in the family and speeches like the one above are Very Hard for children and then adult children to be able to shake their heads clear and not be overwhelmed by parents’ vulnerabilities/entitlements/etc. Therefore, it is often the case that therapy will help someone clear the mists brought on by interactions with a difficult parental caregiver.

I’ve had a patient who had a parent with a decades long pattern of arriving at family events and then leaving precipitously, often with a hint that the parent was angry, discontented, about some interaction. The patient I was seeing did a LOT of work INSIDE of themselves to get to a place where they wrote a note to the parent that was short and simple, “I was hurt when you left my wedding early.”

Wouldn’t it be a lovely thing, and not too hard to imagine, if the parent in this case would read that brief note and say something like: “I hear that you felt hurt when I left your wedding. Your wedding was an important day and I feel badly that my behaviors, in any way, made it seem like less of a special, full day for you.”

Instead, the parent in this case went off on a litany of reasons why they, the parent, were “hurt” by things the adult child had said or done over years of experience. Crummy huh? And the patient of mine really was feeling quite low, quite devastated, by this parental reaction.

[By the way, this is a general rule to keep in mind. If someone is toxic enough to walk out of a wedding, to treat you poorly in an interaction, one is wise to approach such persons with a Very Strong Supposition that having them be good listeners who will hear us out and respond with mutual respect is highly unlikely. In other words, we sometimes need to guard our hearts and not spend much energy hoping we will get Good Things to come from relationships with people who have had a history of being problematic/toxic.]

Hearing my patient describe this interaction with the parent, I was physically uncomfortable, I held my stomach and reported honestly to the patient, “I feel like vomiting.”

To my mind and heart this is a very cool thing about the environment of therapy. The patient I was working with, who was writhing with emotional pain, checked up in that moment. “Yes!” “I want to vomit!!” And this is what the patient is in the process of doing. Taking these harmful messages from the family of origin and growing increasingly able to process and digest them within oneself and, when the messages are destructive and putrid, one’s emotional response system learns to throw these messages back outside of oneself. To vomit! … “This is Not Me.” “This will Not Stay Inside of Me and tell me a lie about life, about me.” “I choose to use my voluntary and involuntary muscles to push these kinds of messages about me and about life up and out of me — I had to absorb them as a child, but No More!”

This patient still reports, quite some time after this interaction, that the work they are doing inside to help them identify and protect their own hearts from toxic family of origin messages is well captured by the notion that sometimes they “just want to vomit!”