Therapy Culture: Blaming One's Parents

I: They Mess You Up

I turned 14 in 2010, right when self-harm rates for U.S. girls began ticking up. I was part of a generation of teenage girls who came of age with the internet — with Tumblr, blogs, Snapchat and YouTube. With smartphones. With the compelling urge to self-punish or annihilate.

My teenage and young adult years were not bad, exactly, but they were tumultuous. I had been an emotional, moody child, and I became an emotional, moody teenager and then an emotional, moody young adult. I kept a handle on things, mostly, but there were intermittent crises: An eating disorder when I was 14, abetted by the angsty anorexics of Tumblr. A period of depression in my early 20s.

There was nothing special about my suffering. Nine percent of Americans, at one point in their lives, suffer from an eating disorder. Nearly 30 percent of American adults experience a period of depression. And there was also nothing special about the way I came to understand that suffering. I was one of the untold many who — with the help of counseling and the internet and therapy culture more broadly — came to see the story of my struggles as intimately tied up with the story of my parents’ failures, a lack of love, of acceptance, of foresight and help.

I was 14 when I saw my first therapist, a middle-aged woman who worked out of her suburban home office. My parents liked her because she specialized in adolescent eating disorders and accepted our insurance. I liked her because she had a cat.

Also, she was sympathetic to me. In our first session together, she suggested that my feelings, my pain, my not eating, were reasonable and rational reactions to my family’s religious beliefs and high expectations. “That sounds very controlling,” she told me, after I’d described the rules we lived by — the fights I’d have with my father over too-tight jeans, chores, daily prayers.

And maybe my parents were overly strict — that was certainly the interpretation favored by every therapist I’d go on to see during that period — though that was not the only reasonable interpretation of my situation. “If you have problems, you assume that it has to do with your parents — and sure, sometimes it does,” says Joshua Coleman, a psychologist and expert on familial estrangement. “But it’s also random good luck, random bad luck, genetics, cohort, siblings and other important relationships.”

The belief that adult struggles, especially our psychological struggles, are rooted in the events of our childhoods is a longstanding tenet of psychology. Sigmund Freud, for example, posited that obsessive-compulsive tendencies could be traced to overly harsh toilet training. A popular psychological theory in the mid-20th century suggested that autism was caused by a lack of maternal warmth (refrigerator mothers). Over the past half-century, as the genetic and biological elements of mental disorders have drawn more attention in the field, parents have taken less heat for serious psychiatric conditions and developmental disorders.

But Ashley Frawley, a sociologist, points out that parents continue to be blamed for their children’s hardships: “A voluminous academic literature has mined the minutiae of childhood experience to find the sources of personal and social problems in everything from how parents feed their children (bottle or breast, spoon or ‘baby-led weaning’) to how many words they say before an ever-lowering crucial age.”

Not all millennials or Gen Z-ers are in therapy, of course — though they seek out mental health counseling far more than members of other generations. But therapeutic and psychoanalytic ideas have invaded popular culture, forming the backbone of how we understand our own lives to such an extent that we may no longer even recognize them as therapeutic.

In her book “Saving the Modern Soul,” the French Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz critiques the therapeutic narrative, writing: “What is a dysfunctional family? A family where one’s needs are not met. And how does one know that one’s needs were not met in childhood? Simply by looking at one’s present situation.” It is as if every current difficulty — rather than being addressed on its own terms — is seen as an “X” on a treasure map, a clue to dig for childhood trauma that has been long buried.

Certainly that is how trauma is presented in videos on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, with hashtags like #innerchildhealing and #childhoodwounds. Many of these videos — including some by licensed therapists — suggest that viewers might have undergone childhood trauma without even realizing it. “Childhood trauma isn’t just being in an abusive household, being in a car accident or having a parent pass,” says one content creator, explaining that “feeling unseen, unheard” also counts.

Among the signs that you might be the victim of childhood trauma, according to these videos? You’re a people pleaser. You’ve been called an old soul from a young age. You procrastinate a lot. Having a hard time asking for help. Feeling awkward when people genuinely check in with you about your feelings. One video, with close to a million likes, cites introversion as a symptom that can be explained by flawed parenting: “Growing up is realizing that ‘strict parents’ are just abusive parents who robbed us of our childhood and turned us into introverts.” It’s one of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, on similar themes.

It’s easy to dismiss these kinds of cultural artifacts, particularly those that suggest leg jiggling is a symptom of buried trauma. But to do so is a mistake. Because when you are young and suffering and unsure of the cause of your pain and when you are presented over and over with a reason for it, it is actually very easy to believe that poor parenting is the taproot from which your romantic, social, psychological or professional issues grew. Especially since, in many cases, there’s an element of truth in it: Our parents hurt us, even when they love us.

The irony is that over the past several decades, American parents have been putting in more time and effort into being good parents. “They have given up hobbies, sleep and time with their friends in the hope of slingshotting their offspring into successful adulthood,” writes Dr. Coleman.

The relentlessness of modern parenting has been well documented: Working mothers in the year 2000 spent as much time focused on child care as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s. Since the last decades of the 20th century, upper-middle-class mothers, in particular, have embraced an intensive style of child rearing, devouring parenting books and advice, loading children down with toys to stimulate their development, choosing only organic foods and enriching extracurriculars and, today, PFAS-free diaper subscriptions.

And yet we adult children seem increasingly likely to find fault with our parents and perhaps to manifest this fault finding by cutting them out of our lives. In 2019, Karl Pillemer, a Cornell sociologist, found that 27 percent of adult Americans reported being estranged from a family member. (The true number is probably even higher.) The most commonly severed relationships were parent/adult child, and in most of those cases, it was the adult child who initiated the estrangement. Although data on this subject is limited (Dr. Pillemer’s was the first large-scale national survey on the topic), many psychologists and sociologists believe that this is becoming more common.

Some of today’s parent-child estrangements are a welcome result of a society that is more aware of physical and sexual abuse and unwilling to demand that people maintain relationships with those who have deeply harmed them.

But it is also true that many of today’s adult children often cut parents off for what a generation ago would have been viewed as venial sins. Anna Russell, who interviewed estranged families for The New Yorker, found that reasons for estrangement included that people “felt ignored or misunderstood by their parents or believed that a sibling had always been the family’s favorite. Several described a family member as a ‘classic narcissist’ or as ‘toxic.’”

Dr. Coleman, who counsels families experiencing estrangement, has seen children cut parents out of their lives because of financial conflicts, political differences or negative comments about the child’s partner. “There’s a lot of estrangements that actually happen to decent parents,” he told me.

A result of these changes is that parenthood looks more like a bad deal. For much of history, parent-child relationships were characterized by mutual duties, says Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. Parental duties might include things like feeding and clothing their children, disciplining them and educating them in the tasks and skills they would need in adulthood. Children, in turn, had duties to their parents: to honor and defer to them, to help provide for the family or household, to provide grandchildren.

Today, parents still have obligations to their children. But it seems the children’s duties have become optional. “With parents and adult children today, the adult child feels like, ‘If you failed me in your responsibility as a parent’ — in ways, of course, that are increasingly hard to define—‘then I owe you nothing as an adult child,’” says Dr. Coleman.

Which means that it now often seems like having a child entails an enormous amount of financial, emotional and spiritual investment, with a hovering possibility that your children will cut contact with you after they reach young adulthood and the growing likelihood that they will hold you responsible — for not only their suffering and struggles but even for your decision to bring them into the misery-inducing world in the first place.