As a Family Therapist I Teach Parents to Give Their Children Space to Feel and Express Difficult Emotions

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22 February 2016

The following is an excerpt from the new bookThe Journey of the Heroic Parentby Brad M. Reedy (Regan Arts., 2016):

When I signed up to be a therapist, I thought it was my job to make people happy. I was good at listening, offering insight, and presenting my unique perspective to family and friends. I was good at solving problems. I thought these skills served me in being a “healer.” Not only was the notion that I was going to fix what others couldn’t fix in themselves self-centered and arrogant, it was diametrically off course. Like many of us who enlist in the business of helping people, I was ready to solve the world’s problems and rescue people from their pain with my unique gifts. Then I went to school. Life happened. And I went to therapy.

I realized that my job was not to make people happy but to help people feel sad. My intent is not to inflict injury or cause pain, but to help people to feel. It is my job to help others learn how to feel their pain and sadness in order to rid themselves of paralysis in moving forward. (Ironically, I realized that much of the wisdom I had to offer people was forged from the pain I felt growing up.) It was not my job to take away a person’s chance to learn and find meaning in their suffering. Viktor Frankl wrote in his harrowing memoir of Auschwitz that trying to find happiness was the sure path to meaninglessness and unhappiness. Rather, it is our task to give our suffering meaning and learn from it— this process ascribes value to it. As Thich Nhat Hanh explains,

"Many people aspire to go to a place where pain and suffering do not exist, a place where there is only happiness. This is a rather dangerous idea, for compassion is not possible without pain and suffering. It is only when we enter into contact with suffering that understanding and compassion can be born. Without suffering, we do not have the opportunity to cultivate compassion and understanding; and without understanding, there can be no true love."

I can think of many examples of working with people where my impulse was to give them a “look on the bright side” story or “reframe” a difficult situation to bring them to a happier, more peaceful place. This tactic is often reinforced by the person’s relief from his pain, but it misses the essence that a life fully lived will involve some suffering. Eventually, I came to believe it was my job to help people authentically suffer so that they could heal. Carl Jung explains, “Neurosis is a substitute form of legitimate suffering.”

One rainy day in the wilderness of Utah, something happened that crystallized this idea of authentic suffering. I was sitting on the log of an old broken-down fence with one of my students. Adam had experienced a difficult morning. He had some problems with peers in his group; they had been bickering over chores, which eventually led to Adam earning a time-out from the group to calm down and reflect. I had the notion that part of what was going on with Adam had nothing to do with his fellow group members and the chores he had been assigned, but rather something from outside his wilderness experience. Something else was nagging at him, pulling at him, hurting him. The arguments with his peers were a detour, a distraction.

So I sat with Adam and asked him how he was doing. There were long pauses and moments of silence as I waited for him to speak. Eventually, through quiet sobs, he started to talk about his mother. She had died a few years earlier and his father was raising him alone. Despite deep love for his son, his father often did not “get” Adam. He didn’t connect with Adam like his mother had. Adam’s wound was intense and primal. The disagreements with his peers echoed feelings of isolation and alienation he had felt in the absence of his mother. In the wet and quiet space, Adam poured out his loss, aching for his mother and wishing that she were still in his life, wishing she were there that day, wishing he could write her, wishing he could look forward to seeing her at the conclusion of his program, wishing he could hug her and share his progress with her.

As the lump in my throat began to grow and tears filled my eyes, I realized I didn’t have anything to offer Adam in the way of “Look on the bright side” or “Let’s look at this differently. Let me help you see this loss as something positive.” I felt utterly powerless. What could I say or do to help Adam? I had no answers for him, no way to bring his mother back to him, no way to talk him out of his pain. I had been working with Adam to discover his anger and pain, and suddenly it was spilling out in the rain, near this broken fence, with me. What a disservice it would have been to him if I had tried to take that authentic suffering away. The only thing I had to offer was myself, sitting there with him, crying with him in the rain.

Therapists call this “containment.” Parents call it “unbearable.” Yet containment gives our children a sense that they are okay. As therapists and parents, we must challenge ourselves. We mustn’t let our desire to alleviate Adam’s pain—to avoid our own empathic misery—interfere with Adam’s need to feel, hurt, grieve, suffer, love, and survive. I had to put aside my instinct to rescue Adam from his difficult emotions, help him not feel “bad” or sad only to selfishly rescue myself from feeling bad.

Deep down, it is at the very core of our nature to want to help someone feel better when they are suffering, to take it away. Yet in this instance, the most amazing thing happened. In the midst of absolute impotence, I realized that I felt utterly connected to Adam. What I knew I had to do in that moment was to put my arm around him while we sat side by side on that fence, in the rain. I told him that I was there with him and that I was so sorry that he had lost his mother; I felt his pain and suffering alongside him. We cried for a long while together. We felt powerless and sad, and entirely connected.

Whenever I think about what it is to be a therapist, parent, adult, listener, or confidant in somebody’s life, I am reminded of Adam’s story. I think about how we can’t offer anybody happiness, nor is it our job to make people happy. It is, however, our job to offer love, to offer the intimacy of our companionship when someone we care about suffers. This is what it means to truly be there for someone, to be in someone’s life, to be truly intimate and connected with him in meaningful ways.

So in order to help our children and others learn to negotiate, manage, and ultimately heal, we can offer them our vulnerable selves. In fact, their healing starts with self-love that often grows from being found and loved, and leads to the ability to overcome life’s challenges. This is a crucial ingredient in building resiliency.

This authenticity and connection is a key contribution to resiliency in our children. Therefore, it is critical for parents to learn how to allow their children to authentically suffer and manage difficult emotions, to be there with them in ways that will be connected, and to help them avoid anesthetizing themselves from their pain and from the consequences of their behavior. Teaching children to feel also creates the ability for them to recognize emotion in others, thus increasing the capacity for empathy.