I work with a number of anguished parents who are surprised, hurt, and bewildered by changes in the way their adult children behave toward them. They describe relationships filled with coolness and irritation from their adult child and talk about being rebuffed when emails, texts, and phone calls go unanswered and responses to requests for dinner or birthday celebrations are ignored or refused. These parents feel pushed away and controlled by their children and clueless to understand this unexpected behavior. They come into therapy filled with a wide range of feelings, including rejection, anger, hurt, anxiety, depression, and helplessness.

Melanie came to see me because of difficulties with her oldest child, Barbara, 33, who is five years married with two young children.

“She was my first, and it was love at first sight,” Melanie said of Barbara. “We were so close. I don’t understand the change. It seems sudden, but I suppose it started after college when she became a little distant and there was some tension. Now I can’t say ‘boo’ to her without her becoming annoyed or angry. I’m always walking on tiptoe and never know when she’s going to have an outburst. She’ll yell and say awful things like I don’t understand her or I’m self-absorbed or the queen of criticism. I can’t imagine why she feels this way. I go from shock to crying to feeling outraged. I don’t know what she wants from me. Actually, it feels like she doesn’t want anything from me. It’s getting more and more difficult to get to see her or even get her to send me a picture of the grandkids or answer a text. When she ignored my birthday last month, that was the worst.”

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Melanie’s experience with Barbara is illustrative of what the distressed parents I work with describe: through adolescence they had close, loving relationships which became conflicted only after their children left home. The separation-individuation process which is expected to occur in adolescence didn’t emerge at the developmentally appropriate time. Without the benefit of individuation in adolescence, these children missed the experience of learning to navigate the power struggles and clashes with parents that are crucial for the formation of a sense of identity with feelings of autonomy and self-confidence. This experience is necessary to set the stage for feeling comfortably attached to the parent without fear of being controlled or influenced.

The Development of Saying Yes to Oneself

I have always been intrigued with the idea that 2-year-olds have to learn to say “no” before they can say “yes.” The “no” of the 2-year-old is a crucial component of the development of self. “No” is directed to the parent who engages with the child in a squabble. When there are wins for the child, their “no” is accepted, making it possible for the child to begin feeling authorship of their “yes.” “Yes” is a nod to the self, to one’s desires, needs, and drive toward autonomy.

During adolescence, this process continues. Now the parent has to shift from the position of benign authority they held with their younger child. They must find a balance between providing rules within a secure and safe framework and simultaneously allow room for the emergence of the adolescent’s “noes.” This means the child is given space to question and change the rules (although the parent will not always agree) as they move toward “yes,” i.e., developing their identity as autonomous adults.

The Adult Child’s Delayed Individuation Process

For some children, the struggle to individuate either begins or intensifies after adolescence, often during their late 20s or 30s. When this occurs, a strong need to pull away and extract oneself from the parental orbit feels necessary.

For parents who have not experienced the passionate conflicts of adolescence and may be known to happily remark “I got off easy,” their adult child’s fierce push to be separate can be heart-wrenching. When there is a delay or a reemergence of this struggle for autonomy, the parent is frequently taken by surprise and is unprepared for what may now become an intense process of individuation in which the adult child, no longer feeling required to adhere to the old rules, comes out fighting to claim a selfhood that will feel unfettered by parental influence. It can seem very sudden when a child starts to pull away, express anger, and assert themselves against the parent. Although the parent may be unaware of treating the child differently, what might have felt to both parent and child like interest or involvement in the past can now be experienced by the child as controlling or critical.

As I got to know Melanie and learned about the development of her relationship with Barbara, it became clear that Barbara was late in separating from her parents. Through late adolescence, Barbara never went through a stage where she pushed against her parents. When she went away to college, she remained close with frequent calls and emails. Between her junior and senior years, however, she and her parents fought over her decision to remain at college for the summer to take an internship. This was the first big disagreement with Barbara where Barbara’s wishes won out. Melanie wondered:

As I got to know Melanie and learned about the development of her relationship with Barbara, it became clear that Barbara was late in separating from her parents.

“I’m not sure about this, but I think things changed after that. She never lived at home after graduation. She stopped asking for advice, and I was so surprised when she decided to move to a neighboring state for grad school. Maybe I shouldn’t have said I thought she should stay local for school, save her money, and live at home. She had made up her mind, and I remember she got angry and said I shouldn’t tell her what to do with her life. I was shocked. I was only trying to help. Since then, she bristles or gets angry at any suggestion I make.”

Melanie was feeling profoundly rejected by Barbara. She felt helpless to know how to relate to her and how to change the increasing negativity she felt from her daughter. She felt controlled and without any clear sense of why this was happening:

“I can’t ask questions without her getting enraged,” Melanie said. “I asked if she took my granddaughter to the doctor when she had a fever and she told me to stop butting in! I’ve asked her such innocuous questions, like ‘Are you planning a vacation?’ Or, ‘Are you thinking about sending the kids to daycare?’ Every time I ask a question, she accuses me of criticizing her. I don’t get it. I just want to be a part of her life. She doesn’t want to let me in. Worse, sometimes I think she hates me.”

It seemed to me Barbara’s individuation process had been delayed. I assumed that since there was little conflict with her parents during adolescence, Barbara’s “noes” and “yeses” were probably mostly shared by her parents. Thus, in adolescence, Barbara would have felt no need to differentiate her wishes and needs from those of her parents. Now, as an adult, she had no developed sense of self with feelings of autonomy. So she still needed to individuate and take ownership of the “yeses” and “noes” in her life. This would give her a sense of agency and self-confidence, enabling her to feel less threatened by her mother’s opinions, wishes, and needs. Differences between them would simply be differences, not cause for concern about losing herself to her mother’s influence. She would not have to be worried about being controlled because she would feel in charge of herself.

Melanie began to understand that Barbara equated connection with influence. She recognized that Barbara’s experience of being constantly criticized became the rationale for pushing Melanie away:

“I think I get it. If I ask a question, like did she take my granddaughter to the doctor, maybe she hears it as my opinion: ‘You should take her to the doctor.’ Or maybe, she hears it as ‘I don’t trust you to know what to do’ so then she feels criticized by me. I see she is fighting being influenced by me. It’s like if she lets me in, she loses herself. If she lets herself feel close to me, it threatens her sense of self. I don’t want to be in her life to control or influence her, I just want to love her and feel loved. How is that ever going to happen?”

Facilitating Individuation for the Adult Child

Melanie’s feelings of helplessness were palpable. She was developing an intellectual understanding of what was going on with Barbara, but it is quite another thing to find a way to change the dynamic between them so their bond could be restored. I made the following suggestions to Melanie:

• Be mindful of the content of your communications. Questions can be interpreted as criticism, shoulds, or judgments.
• Find an opportunity to talk to Barbara without being defensive, and tell her you want to hear how you can be a better parent.
• Let her know you respect and admire who she is and what she does in specific ways, e.g., “I love that you’re always reading to the kids,” “It’s great that you’re learning to play golf,” “Can I have your recipe for meatballs?” or “Your home looks so lovely.” These communications contain the idea (no guarantee that it will be interpreted that way) that you have positive and admiring feelings toward your child.
• Let Barbara control the amount of contact. She is engaged with you in a necessary separation-individuation process that was not resolved in earlier years. When it becomes resolved, she will have a more positive sense of self. This will enable her to develop a strong and loving attachment with you. Once Barbara is secure in the positive feelings of who she is, there will no longer be a reason to fear being unduly controlled or influenced.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

When Mommy’s little girl grows up and goes off into the world to have her own life, struggles with issues of separation and difference may occur. Eye rolls, hugs, tugs-of-war, and tears are familiar to those who have witnessed or participated in mother-daughter relationships. Frequently, in this new phase of their relationship, mother and daughter are unprepared to deal with their differing needs for the amount, form, and content of contact. Moreover, the impact of physical separation between mother and daughter is affected by the degree to which each needs to feel connected, or to not feel rejected or disconnected.

When adult children desire to individuate and develop autonomy, they may struggle to trust their choices and may fear being unable to withstand mom’s influence. Often, to avoid feelings of criticism or incompetence, the daughter will pull away. (These may be the daughter’s feelings and may not reflect the reality that mom feels critical or entitled to continue her earlier, authoritative role.)

From early childhood, mothers and daughters tend to identify with each other. As the daughter moves into adulthood, both may have difficulty with the daughter’s developing an identity that differs from a past shared view of being alike. For some mothers, this can be experienced as a rejection of the mother’s character, worldview, values, opinions, etc. Daughters may have a similar experience. Although we typically think of the daughter needing to pull away from mom to individuate, some daughters who are ambivalent about developing a separate life and sense of self may find they are being pushed by a worried mom to do so. These mothers may try to influence what they see as necessary individuation by reducing the amount and nature of contact with their daughters.

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When Daughter Wants More Contact

Maggie began therapy at the age of 26 when her mother told her she didn’t think it was good for them to speak every day. She said Maggie should talk to someone to help her feel more confident and self-assured. Maggie sounded irritated when she told me she didn’t really want to be in therapy:

“I don’t see why I need a therapist. My mother has always been the one in my life who’s made me feel good about myself. She reassures me. I know my biggest issue is I wish I had a boyfriend. I know mom thinks I’m smart and cute and there is no reason for me not to find a man. I’m not so optimistic. There’s something about me that I can’t seem to find a relationship that works. It’s true; I don’t feel so good about myself. But if Mom hasn’t succeeded in helping me, I don’t know what you can do.”

I asked Maggie why she thought her mother wanted her in therapy. Maggie began to cry and barely managed to speak:

“This has never happened before. I guess I’m upset with Mom. How can she do this to me? I tell Mom everything. I rely on her for everything. She’s always there for me. Lately, she’s been pulling back. I feel so rejected. I don’t know what’s going on. She tells me I need to learn to rely on myself and trust myself. How can I do that if she rejects me? Doesn’t she know I need her input? I feel so abandoned. How can therapy help me? I just need my mother back.”

When you are the same or one, the relationship is symbiotic, with no space between the two. When you are two separate, distinct people, there is a space within which each can attach to the other. That may be the best contact of all.

Maggie and her mother had rarely experienced conflict:

“I always felt we were on the same page about things. She had great ideas and I was happy to do what she suggested. I took up piano, which we both love, and went to her alma mater when I decided on a college. I enjoy making her happy. I always feel safe that she knows what’s right for me. Now she seems to be telling me that what’s right is to be more on my own, have my own ideas. I do have ideas. They just happen to be the same as her ideas. How would I know what other ideas to have?”

Maggie decided to work with me and see if I could help her sort out her feelings about being more separate from her mother. She is beginning to realize she felt good as long as she was living the life her mother valued. She hadn’t recognized that she was so used to looking to her mother for guidelines for living, she paid little or no attention to her own wishes and desires. In fact, when we started working together, Maggie had no concept of her own unique needs, separate from what her mother believed would be good for her. The notion of differences between them was not part of her thinking or feeling.

Maggie has begun to think about how her reliance on her mother has limited her by preventing her from developing herself through her relationship to the world. She is considering that her mother may believe she had interfered with Maggie’s ability to individuate and was pushing Maggie away not to reject her, but so she could develop her sense of self. The challenge for Maggie is to move beyond her mother’s wish for her to individuate, and choose to grow her own desires and develop the capacity to feel self-confident and derive self-esteem from a variety of experiences.

When Mother Wants More Contact

Susan was beside herself. Her 34-year-old daughter, Isabel, who lived in another state, just had her first baby and wanted Susan and her husband to wait a month before visiting their new grandson. Susan had been seeing me for three years when she came into her session overwhelmed with feelings:

“I can’t believe this. You know how I’ve been so excited about going to visit Isabel and the baby and helping out. I assumed she would need me as soon as the baby arrived. I know she can bristle when I give her my opinions or suggestions about things. But I figured she doesn’t know anything about babies, so this was going to be different. Finally, she would let me be a mother.”

I asked Susan why she thought Isabel wanted her to wait. Susan let out a huge sigh and responded:

“I guess I should have anticipated this. Since she left home for college, she’s been keeping me at a distance. When I worried about her in college, she would take forever to respond to my contacts. I remember explaining that it’s a mother’s job to be concerned and she told me it made her feel like I don’t think she can take care of herself and I need to stop. She was partly right. I still don’t think she knows how to be a mother to a newborn and should welcome my input. But I fooled myself about this. I suppose I need to feel like I’m valued as a mother, and I do get worried that she is too independent and will get herself into trouble.”

I reminded Susan that she has been talking with me for some time about how distressed she is about Isabel. When she first came to see me, she was overwhelmed with anxiety that Isabel was about to make a mistake and marry Jake. She was hurt and angry that she had been given no clue that the relationship had progressed to the point of engagement. I recalled that early in our work she had told me she didn’t know why Isabel kept her out of the loop on everything, and I reminded her that we have been looking at that question in our work. Then I asked, “What have you come to understand about this?”

Susan shook her head sadly. “I know, I know. Isabel has to live her own life. Jake turned out to be great. I have to remember that my anxiety about Isabel’s life is about my own needs to feel like a good mother. When she was younger, I felt we were two peas in a pod and I always knew exactly what was right for her. That made me feel like a good mom. Now, she has such a different life from mine that I don’t always know who she is or how to be her mom.”

I recognized how painful this was for Susan, who wanted to feel like a good mother and desirable grandmother. I thought it important to remind her that lately she has been doing a good job thinking about what Isabel wants and being less intrusive. I told her I knew it was difficult to wait for Isabel to ask her on rare occasions for advice. I also hypothesized that perhaps becoming a grandmother triggered her feelings of wanting to be a good mother/grandmother and she was reverting to old patterns of wanting to be involved on her terms, not Isabel’s.

Hopefully, Susan will have an opportunity when she visits Isabel to practice what is so difficult to do: not attempt to influence Isabel’s thoughts and feelings. She knows the more she can admire and recognize Isabel’s differences, the more likely Isabel will learn to see her as uncritical and not controlling. Susan is working on this.

When mom and her little girl spend their early years thinking of each other as the same, the daughter’s seeking to separate can become a painful process for both. If the daughter wants to remain the child and not venture into the grown-up world, the mother who sees this as problematic faces the dilemma of how to help launch her daughter without creating feelings of abandonment and rejection. When the mother finds separation painful, she has to learn how to give her daughter space so they can attach in a new way.

Mother and daughter ultimately have to understand that being separate and different, rather than the same and enmeshed, facilitates a stronger experience of attachment: When you are the same or one, the relationship is symbiotic, with no space between the two. When you are two separate, distinct people, there is a space within which each can attach to the other. That may be the best contact of all.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

While new parents frequently seek the “right way” to parent, there is no one rule book. Rather, there are many, often contradictory, guides to parenting. The lack of certainty about how to raise and care for a child can create intense anxiety for a new parent. Some learn, soon enough, that they will figure out how to be good enough parents. Others never lose an overwhelming anxiety that each decision could have life-or-death consequences. The communication of high levels of parental anxiety frequently results in children whose anxiety controls, limits, and shapes their relationships to the world.

Anxiety is an internal state that is communicated in a variety of ways. The anxious mother holding her baby can unconsciously communicate her inner agitation through her body tension and facial expressions. The young child may sense a parent’s anxiety in the parent’s frantic behavior or speech.

Eventually the child becomes old enough to be the recipient of clear expressions of anxiety in the parent’s verbal communications. The child can experience the parent’s anxiety when told, “No, honey, you’re not old enough for play dates,” or, “I don’t care if your friends can stay out until 9. It’s not safe out there,” or in the parent’s intake of anxious breath every time the child goes down the slide or falls and bruises a knee.

Repeated exposure to parental expressions of anxiety teaches children to expect that they will be vulnerable in a risky world. These lessons are not simply intellectual. They are emotional communications which often have an unconscious component: the lesson to be learned is transmitted and received unconsciously. It is a very powerful communication.

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The Inability to Self-Soothe

When parental anxiety is communicated, consciously or unconsciously, the child’s defenses are put on high alert. If parents are overwhelmed by their own anxieties and can’t soothe themselves, it can be difficult to calm and reassure their children. Without an experience of being calmed as infants, children may not develop an ability to self-soothe. They may develop anxiety, which paradoxically functions as a signal that they are in protective mode. It’s as if the anxiety is evidence of vigilance toward pending danger and thus has a calming influence.

It would be risky to let go of this essential feeling by using rational thoughts to challenge the basis of the anxiety. Instead, anxiety can be put on temporary hold with behavioral distractions that anesthetize against anxiety but don’t alleviate the feelings.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Anxiety

Kate initially came to see me two years ago because she was unhappy with her work life. She is a painter with a master’s degree in fine arts working as an administrator in an art gallery. She was doing little painting, hated her work, and felt clueless about what she wanted to do with herself professionally. She was married with a 17-year-old daughter.

Through our work, we learned about Kate’s lack of belief in her ability to be a good painter and her intense anxiety about showing her work publicly. She described a history of feeling tortured when she painted and had anxiety attacks when she had to submit work to her professors. She acknowledged that even though she won several prizes for her art and was considered very talented by the faculty, “Putting my work out there feels like I’m walking naked in the streets where everyone can see my private parts.” She never was able to initiate the showing of her work and became filled with dread the few times she was persuaded to allow her work to be seen in public.

Talking in therapy helped Kate to paint more at her small studio at home. She began to allow herself to enjoy the experience after she learned to slow down her anxious feelings and use her thoughts to calm herself. But she was clear that she thought it best to leave painting to her personal enjoyment and figure out what else she could do with her life. As we began to look further at Kate’s history, her narrative revealed her to be a person with intense anxiety about almost everything in her life:

“I’ve always had terrible separation anxiety. I went away to college, but it was less than two hours from home. I drank a lot and smoked pot from late middle school until midway through college. I over-ate, I still do. I know I’ve used these things to get rid of my feelings. I think when I started to paint and could get into a kind of Zen place and not worry about any audience, it calmed me down. That’s what probably helped with my drinking and pot smoking. But as soon as my painting was up for judgment, I would freak out. Sometimes I would skip classes or feel sick and go home for days.”

I asked how her parents dealt with her anxiety and her homecoming. Laughing ruefully, she told me, “They didn’t have a clue what to do. I made them, especially my mother, very anxious. She always seemed so agitated when I was conflicted and anxious. It was as if she didn’t want to address my issues because she didn’t know what to do, and that made her a ball of anxiety. I would feel so helpless and angry, and I think she did, too. I soon learned not to come home when I was upset. That only made things worse.”

Then Kate went silent and became tearful. I waited as she slowly began to speak. “You know, I’ve talked mostly about me and my work life in my therapy with you,” she said. “I know that my anxious mother is not news to either of us and how much that has influenced me. But I’ve been ashamed to bring up the fact I’m just like her. My daughter Erica just turned 19. She’s finishing her freshman year in college …”

Repeated exposure to parental expressions of anxiety teaches the child to expect that he or she will be vulnerable in a risky world. These lessons are not simply intellectual. They are emotional communications which often have an unconscious component: the lesson to be learned is transmitted and received unconsciously. It is a very powerful communication.

Kate paused, then started to sob and shake. “I see what’s happening,” she said. “Erica is just like me—a ball of anxiety. She calls home a lot to talk to me, not her father. I know she can feel how anxious I am about her being away at school. I don’t know if she’s calling to reassure me that she’s OK or to check in to see if I’m OK. … I’m an awful mother. I know I don’t help her and only make her more anxious. The problem is I really am scared for her. I didn’t give her the tools to take care of her feelings. Like me, she doesn’t know how to use her thoughts to find ways to counteract her anxious feelings. Worse is when she tells me her anxious feelings, I feel like the best I can do is not share my anxious feelings with her. I feel totally at a loss to offer any useful, thoughtful, soothing response.”

I was familiar with the phenomenon Kate was describing: the intergenerational transmission of anxiety. Like her mother and now her daughter, Kate’s anxiety always lurks at the edge of her emotional life. It is on call to alert her to danger and can be summoned consciously and unconsciously to send out the signal to a loved one that he or she, too, must be vigilant. What else can a good mother do? How can she not warn her child of impending danger? Kate’s mother couldn’t contain her dread and needed Kate to feel it so she could become part of the team to defend against harm. Kate needed to be sure that Erica would be able to function in the world and protect herself from all the dreadful possibilities she was at risk of encountering. While often unconscious, it is a relief for an anxious mother to know that her child is on alert and aware of the many possible threats to her well-being.

Unlike her mother, Kate had become aware of the disadvantages of being unable to manage anxiety. Her recognition that Erica’s anxiety was intensified in the presence of her own strongly contributed to her wish to disrupt this harmful intergenerational cycle. Talking with me helped her use the rational thought that “if I soothe myself and lessen my own anxiety, I will be better able to help Erica with hers.” She was determined not to perpetuate the cycle of anxiety.

Kate has begun to talk with Erica about what she has learned about the intergenerational transmission of anxiety. They have had some honest and painful discussions about the ways they each make the other anxious and have needed the other to mirror their anxiety so they could feel better. Erica has decided to begin her own therapy, and Kate continues to work with me on becoming more comfortable with all her feelings and the feelings she evokes in others. She is slowly developing a greater tolerance for her negative feelings and the negative responses she has been protecting herself from for so many years. When she experiences the anxieties of her mother and daughter, she has started to think thoughts that help her to remind herself that she is a separate person with her own feelings. She can say to herself, “I’m not the same as you. I see you are anxious and scared, but I don’t have to be. These anxieties are not rational, and I don’t have to be in that irrational-feeling space.”

This is hard work for Kate, but the strong wish for her daughter to be free from the same anxiety that has debilitated her is strong motivation for Kate to continue her struggle for change.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

What is it that many people who struggle with individuating have in common? In many cases, it’s lacking the ability to like, admire, and value themselves. Without that capacity, they were deprived of the tools to forge identities as people with self-esteem who know what they want and how to get it.

For many of the people I work with in therapy, it is clear that their early family experiences contributed to making it difficult to say something like, “I’m a valuable human being. I like myself. I deserve admiration and recognition.” What these formative experiences tend to have in common are communications from loved ones that conveyed critical, devaluing, or untrustworthy messages that failed to provide necessary developmental cues that build self-confidence and self-esteem. In some families—in contrast to negative communication—the absence of positive communication failed to give the child the building blocks to become a person with good feelings about himself or herself.

[fat_widget_right]When I think about these childhood experiences, I remember hearing about many negative consequences that limited some people’s abilities to think well of themselves and to successfully navigate their relationships in the world. These children grew up with concerns about failure, worry about being spoiled, fear of shame and humiliation, fear of being seen as full of themselves or stupid, expectations of criticism, emotional neglect or lack of interest—sadly, the list can go on.

Some common family behaviors that interfere with positive self-feelings include:

• Parents who are critical
• Parents who are self-involved
• Lack of recognition for a child’s special talents
• Emotionally abandoning a child at a young age
• Lack of protection for a child from an abusive parent
• Disrespect toward a child
• Intrusiveness with a child
• Unrealistic praise for a child

Not every child who grows up in a family where he or she encounters these dynamics in a parent-child relationship has problems with self-confidence and self-esteem, but many struggle as adults to develop positive self-feelings that are best developed in early childhood. To illustrate the struggle to become individuated from family and learn to see oneself as valuable, I am going to briefly discuss my work with Oliver. He is a person I work with in therapy whose parents were unable to recognize his special talent of writing. In his case, their overall inability to recognize any of his fine attributes—his humor, kindness, or curiosity—were a serious detriment to positive self-experience.

Lack of Recognition for the Child’s Talents and Special Personhood

Oliver is a writer. At least, that’s how I think about him. If you ask him about himself and what he does, he will tell you, “I work for magazines and newspapers.” When Oliver came to see me, he was 29 years old and struggling to write his second novel. Three years ago, he had decided to destroy the manuscript of his first novel after it was rejected by a publisher. He vowed never to write another novel. But six months before he came to see me, he began work on a second novel. He found himself facing blank pages and unable to move forward with his work.

Oliver declared himself depressed when we first met. He was also angry with himself and his parents. In an early session, tearing up and ranting, he softly shouted, “I don’t know why I think I can write a novel. I should have listened to my parents. They never made anything of my writing. They never said it was good or bad. They discouraged me from pursuing creative writing, especially as I got older. They never read most of my work and they just kept focusing on how writers don’t make a living. Now I’m like them. I can’t seem to believe in myself. “

I asked Oliver how he managed to pursue writing with so little encouragement from his parents. He told me, “I had some teachers who really thought I was a terrific writer. Even as early as elementary school, teachers would proclaim how creative I was. I loved their praise, but it was never easy to fully believe. Still, by high school I was on the newspaper and the creative writing journal. I majored in English in college and even won awards for my writing. Even so, especially since high school, I’ve had a lot of self-doubt. I would always hand things in late because I never thought anything was good enough. When my novel was rejected, that was absolute confirmation.”

I responded, “It seems to me you don’t fully believe you can’t do it. Rather, you have some conflict about whether or not you have what it takes as a creative writer. You started another novel last year. What are your thoughts about how you were able to do that?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Even in high school I would love and hate working on the paper or journal. It was hard to believe my stuff was any good even when it got published. One day I think I have it, and the next I know I don’t and never did. When I was working as a fact-checker for a magazine last year, a friend of mine told me about a freelance opportunity to write some articles based on interviews with people in the tech industry. I decided to do it since it felt straightforward and didn’t need a lot of creativity. When I completed the assignment, I felt really good. It did seem creative, and I got good feedback. I think it gave me a high, and I started the new book. Since then I’ve crashed. Who am I kidding? I’ve been out of college for seven years now. I’m going to turn 30. Nothing is happening. Honestly, I don’t believe I’m much good at anything right now. I don’t have a permanent job, I don’t have a girlfriend, and my relationships with my family are awful. Thank goodness I have a few good friends. I can’t seem to get what I want and I don’t even know what that is.”

Oliver described his inability to believe he has the capacity to get what he wants from life. He doubts his ability to be a creative writer, and he is negative about himself and conveys no sense of valuing or liking himself. As we continued to talk, Oliver explained how his parents were short on praise and encouragement in most areas of his life. He sounded bitter as he stated, “It wasn’t only about writing. My parents were short on extolling my virtues. They weren’t really critical; they just never said anything very positive. They always commented about people having swelled heads or bragging if they said something positive about themselves. I guess I believed them and tried to be sure I kept the size of my head to a minimum.”

Oliver and I have work to do. My job will be to help Oliver recognize the ways in which these early communications affected the negative expectations he developed about himself. He needs to become aware of how the lack of admiration I believe it is important for all children to feel that their parents see them as special—certainly not all the time, but frequently enough. Being seen as special contributes to bolstering a child’s development of a positive self as he or she goes through all the challenging life experiences that raise questions about how special, valuable, or capable he or she is.and recognition from his parents—not just for his creativity, but for all his valuable qualities—interfered with his ability to see himself as a worthwhile, competent, talented man. As he increasingly recognizes the effects of his past on his present and it becomes real emotionally, Oliver will be more able to develop his self and feel as if he is not the person his parents defined, but rather a person of his own making.

It is vital for adults who struggle with negative self-feelings to be able to discover the ways in which old family dynamics sent messages both consciously and unconsciously. Parents function as mirrors for their children so they can see their reflections and learn about themselves, and it’s how children come to define and know themselves in their positive and negative aspects. When there is little positive reflected back to a child, the development of a poor self-image and low self-esteem is likely. It is extremely difficult to develop and believe in a sense of self that is contrary to the parents’ negative definitions of who a child is.

I believe it is important for all children to feel that their parents see them as special—certainly not all the time, but frequently enough. Being seen as special contributes to bolstering a child’s development of a positive self as he or she goes through all the challenging life experiences that raise questions about how special, valuable, or capable he or she is. When that is not part of a person’s childhood experience, the task as an adult becomes to learn how to provide it for oneself.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

Relationship issues and communication problems are frequent reasons many individuals and couples come to see me for therapy. One aspect of the work is to explore feelings and conflicts in relationships and empower people to engage with their partners with the aim of understanding and being understood. To do this, we look at what interferes with the ability to be empathic to the other’s experience. It would seem that understanding where the other person is coming from and seeing their point of view would not create difficult problems in relationships. However, it turns out not to be so simple. The loss of one’s sense of self in the process of engaging another’s feelings must be addressed.

The Risk of Empathy

As I engage with these people in therapy, I often discover that there is a limitation in the ability to be empathic in relationships, especially in situations where there is disagreement. Some believe that acknowledging empathy when there is conflict puts them at risk because the other will mistake their understanding for agreement. If that should occur, the empathic person can feel like their thoughts and feelings have been dismissed and negated. They fear that their expression of empathy will be seen as acknowledging the rightness of the other and they will be the loser. The feeling is not just of losing the argument, but a loss of some piece of the self.

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Glen and I were working on his feelings of helplessness with his partner, Alan. They had been a couple for six years, but to Glen’s disappointment, he could not get Alan to agree to move in together. Each time Glen suggested they give it a try, Alan got angry and told Glen to stop nagging him. He would say he loved Glen, but had no interest in living together. Glen would feel hurt and pushed away.

“He is so mean to me,” Glen said. “I don’t know why I stay with him when he repeatedly rejects me. Can I really believe that he loves me when he treats me this way? You know how scary it is for me to speak up for myself in my life. You and I have been working on that and now that I’m doing better and asking for more, what good does it do me? When I ask Alan for what I want, he still mistreats me.”

I asked Glen: “What do you understand about why Alan, who has stayed with you for six years, won’t move in with you?”

Glen replied: “He says that in his last relationship, living together was a disaster and he and his partner fought constantly. But just because it makes him anxious that our relationship will become like that is no reason to keep denying me what I know will be perfectly fine. I just think he wants to control me. He is talking about his history and absolutely refuses to see us as different. I get so hurt and angry. He can get really sad and even cries sometimes when he tells me how painful that relationship was. But he needs to get over it.”

Glen could see only his own point of view. It was very difficult for him to be empathic—to get him to consider what it would be like if he put himself in Alan’s shoes. He became very irritated with me.

“I don’t get it,” Glen said. “You have helped me to learn more about who I am and what I want, and now you want me to abandon my own thoughts and feelings and wear Alan’s shoes. I need to stay in my own shoes. Alan’s shoes don’t fit me. Maybe he should try my shoes on for size.”

I asked Glen to tell me more about what he thinks the downside would be if he could empathize with Alan. He had no trouble replying.

“If I let myself feel what it’s like to be Alan and recognize his worries and anxieties, it will legitimize his point of view. What I want will lose all meaning. I know I’m right about this. We have had this fight for almost six years and now he would win. I don’t want to be a loser. You know, for the most part we have a good relationship. We spend a lot of time together; we love each other; we have fun. But every time I bring up that if we don’t live together it isn’t a real relationship, we get into a huge fight. Then it feels like we are enemies and neither one of us will give in. I’m afraid that if I stop fighting for this, I will become helpless and powerless in the relationship and disappear. Sometimes I even think Alan would leave me if I gave in because he would think I’m a wimp with no sense of who I am or what I want.”

Glen mistakes allowing himself to understand how Alan feels about moving in together for agreement with Alan. He is stuck on the idea that he will be a “loser” if he is empathic. But his biggest fear is that being empathic means he will betray his own wishes and lose a part of himself.

Identification, Not Empathy

In contrast to Glen, Katy is concerned that she has too much empathy. She came to see me because she was feeling overwhelmed with feelings of having to care for her aging father and, at the same time, attend to her daughter who had just left for college and was having a difficult time adjusting. She described her emotional situation as follows:

“I am so filled with feelings I can’t breathe. My father is very sick with cancer. He’s scared and very demanding. I feel so much empathy for him. I’m frightened, too. We’re so close. What’s going to happen to me when he dies? I’m also on call for my daughter. She can’t seem to settle in at college. She calls me every day. I spend hours trying to soothe and reassure her. I know just how she feels. I remember when I went away to school and my parents would try to help me. She is such a mess. I’m such a mess. My father needs the same kind of soothing she does. I guess I do, too. My husband tries to help, but he thinks I’m over-involved. I don’t know how I could feel any other way. My father and daughter are both in pain, and I can’t help but share their feelings.”

Katy saw herself as a loving and responsible daughter and mother. She believed her response to her family members was the “right” way to feel. While she acknowledged feeling burdened by the demands made on her, she thought that “it’s my duty to give my all and do my best to make them feel better.” She recognized that for months she had given up much of her own life to devote herself to her family. Not only was she exhausted, but it was creating conflict with her husband: “He told me that I’m always anxious and preoccupied and that I’ve disappeared from our relationship. He says it’s OK to worry and help, but he accused me of being consumed with my father and our daughter. He keeps saying, ‘Where are you? I want you back.’ ”

Katy describes herself as feeling empathy for her father and daughter. These intense feelings, however, are not empathy. Empathic feelings occur when one can emotionally imagine what it is like to be in another person’s feeling state. Someone with empathy strongly feels what the other person is feeling but maintains a sense of being separate. In contrast, Katy is identifying with her father and daughter. She can’t maintain her separate self. The feelings she experiences are the same as the feelings her father and daughter suffer. She is identifying with them and taking on their feeling states. She cannot have her own separate, empathic feelings. Her sense of self is lost.

Loss of One’s Sense of Self

The therapeutic work with Glen and Katy could easily focus on the concrete problems each of them brings to their sessions. Glen and I could work on his becoming comfortable with Alan’s refusal to move in together. Or we could look at what makes Glen feel so mistreated and rejected when this occurs. And we do explore those issues. Katy and I could work on her anxiety and guilt about her conflicts and limitations in helping her family members. And we do work on these issues as well as on her relationship with her husband.

Empathic feelings occur when one can emotionally imagine what it is like to be in another person’s feeling state. Someone with empathy strongly feels what the other person is feeling but maintains a sense of being separate.

But the therapy with both these individuals has been most productive when we address the feelings of loss of self. For Glen, conflict in the relationship is exacerbated when he refuses to empathize out of fear of losing himself. For Katy, there is no room for herself when she identifies with the other and becomes overwhelmed and infused with everyone else’s feelings.

As we dig deep into the dynamics of these two relationships, we are left with the necessity of having to explore: What happens to me when I am faced with the other person’s feelings? Glen struggles with considering that he can try on Alan’s shoes and appreciate how they fit Alan, even if they are not his style. He is beginning to recognize that he can like the look for Alan, but know that he doesn’t have to change the style that is right for him. Katy looks at how she responds to her father’s and daughter’s feelings and is learning that she is not the same person as her family members. She is starting to recognize that she can set boundaries and still be a good and loving family member. It is not easy, however, to separate and feel for them, rather than become them.

As Glen and Katy come to understand what has interfered with their being empathic, they are in a better position to relate to their significant others in loving ways while retaining their sense of self.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

What I am going to describe is what can happen when children grow up and begin to realize that they are not living their lives according to their own wishes and desires. They start to recognize that their sense of personhood—who I am and how I must be—is based on expectations learned in their earlier relationships with significant others. In therapy, they engage in a process that allows them to discover the ways in which they are controlled by what were spoken and unspoken expectations and the consequences of noncompliance. This was the work with a person I’ll call “Annie.”

Annie began therapy by expressing strong feelings of confusion and unhappiness about her sense of self:

“I’m so unhappy. I don’t know who I am and I can’t figure out what I want. Or if I think I want something, I’m never sure if it’s me who wants it, or my mother, or my husband. Everybody thinks I’m so wonderful: sweet, kind, easygoing. They have no idea how sad and irritable I feel. I find myself getting angry at everyone, but they don’t seem to deserve it and I don’t know why I’m angry. Who am I, anyway? What is wrong with me?”

Annie, a 48-year-old recently married woman, began to tell me how, since her marriage two years ago, she has been feeling increasing dissatisfaction in her life:

“I don’t get it. I met my husband Steve three years ago. We had a very strong, instant attraction and immediately started to see each other all the time. It felt wonderful to be together. He was funny and smart and he made me feel special. He was always saying how kind and sweet and thoughtful I was. We got along amazingly, never argued or disagreed. My parents loved him. After five months we were engaged, and married about five months after that. I think something started to change for me when we were planning the wedding.”

I asked Annie if she and Steve had conflicts about the wedding. She responded:

“It’s funny. Steve wasn’t very involved in the wedding plans. Me and my mom really put it all together. I don’t know. Maybe it started when Mom was so clear about what kind of wedding it should be. She wanted a large, fancy wedding. I was not a young bride, and I thought something small and more intimate would be better. But she was so excited and kept telling me that she was going to give me the wedding that she and my father never had. So I agreed to the big wedding. I think I was very used to saying yes to my mother, so I don’t think I let it register that it wasn’t what I wanted. At the time, it didn’t feel like a big deal. Looking back, after the wedding I started to feel more irritated toward anyone who told me what to do. It didn’t even matter whether or not I wanted to do it. I just wanted to say no to everything and everyone. I stopped making sense to myself. I didn’t feel like the nice, sweet Annie anymore. “

Annie and I began to explore the “nice, sweet Annie.” I asked: “Who is she and how did she get that way?”

Half smiling, half crying, Annie recalled that her parents used to sing made-up songs to her about “sweet little, kind little Annie” who everybody loved. She began to sing to me: “She’s sweet and neat and very, very good. Just ask anyone in the neighborhood …”

This cute, little song became central to our work. Annie and I began to look at her associations and memories as we unpacked the meanings the song evoked. Annie spoke of her close relationship to her parents and how wonderful it felt to be so loved. She began to wonder if she associated all the approval, love, and appreciation she got from her parents with the expectation that she be a good, nice, sweet girl:

“I have this very strong memory—I must have been 9 or 10—where I remember begging my mother to let me go for a weekend with my friend Ellen and her family. My mother didn’t want me to go and, very unlike me, I yelled at her and told her she was mean. She started to cry. My father was in the room with us and started to berate me. He told me, ‘You’re mean. How can you be so hurtful to your mother? She knows what’s best. You need to listen to her.’ I was devastated. I felt like such a bad person. I’m pretty sure I was crying and ran up to my mom and tried to hug her. She pushed me away and left the room. I felt so ashamed and sorry. It was awful.”

Over many sessions, Annie uncovered many meanings and expectations of what it meant to be a good girl: “Good girls listen to their parents. They are polite. They don’t get angry. They work hard in school. They are helpful. They don’t upset people. They don’t disappoint people. They don’t make people angry. They’re cheerful …”

Annie began to recognize that she was expected to fulfill these good-girl requirements or risk painful consequences: “I think the memory of my dad telling me I hurt my mother is significant. It was one of the worst moments of my life. I think I spent the rest of my life making sure my mother was not upset, hurt, angry, or had any bad feelings. I think I not only made sure I wasn’t the cause of any of her bad feelings, but I took on the job of protecting her from anyone else making her uncomfortable or unhappy.”

The more Annie and I talked, the clearer it became that she has been feeling pressure and anxiety to conform to those old good-girl requirements with “Steve,” her new significant other. She began to emotionally understand that the expectations she attributed to Steve belonged to the relationships with her parents, her earlier significant others.

The more Annie and I talked, the clearer it became that she has been feeling pressure and anxiety to conform to those old good-girl requirements with “Steve,” her new significant other. She began to emotionally understand that the expectations she attributed to Steve belonged to the relationships with her parents, her earlier significant others. She explained: “I feel pressure with Steve to be compliant and make sure he doesn’t have any bad feelings. Now I’m beginning to think this is not so much what Steve wants, but more about me and my parents. I think this is how I believed I had to be in any loving relationship. I’ve started to talk with Steve about this and I’m feeling less pressure to be the ‘good girl’ with him.”

Annie was beginning to make efforts to let Steve know her wishes even when she thought he would not approve. With Steve, she was becoming more comfortable allowing herself to discover her needs and wishes and to ask for what she wants. Her relationship with Steve is developing into an attachment that repeatedly confirms that she can experience acceptance and love in the face of not always being the “good girl.” This is helping Annie with her most noteworthy transformation: her evolving strength to tolerate her mother’s bad feelings and emotional withdrawal.

In contrast to her relationship with Steve, it is much more difficult to express her own opinions, needs, and desires around her mother. The old beliefs that she is responsible for her mother’s bad feelings and required to protect her mother from hurt and disappointment were internalized at a young age. Ideas about what is required of a good daughter are not easily transformed. Annie can acknowledge intellectually that it is not her job to keep her mother in an emotional comfort zone. She recognizes how her impulse to respond to her mother’s unspoken requests for soothing is triggered when her mother calls her to report an emotionally upsetting reaction to something. She is aware that when her mother is upset by something that occurs between them, she immediately feels responsible for causing the bad feelings and needs to act quickly to make her mother feel better.

She explained:

“I know I am feeling more anxious around my mother because now I’m aware of my conflict between wanting to take care of her feelings and wanting to be free to know what I want and be able to express it. Since we’ve been working together, I am much better at knowing what I want, but it mostly still feels too risky to not protect my mother. I feel like I must soothe her. I’m so afraid of her hating me. She can get very cold when she feels hurt, angry, or disapproving. It’s so scary to think of losing my mother.”

When Annie’s “good girl” behaviors toward her mother began to change, it was difficult for her to consider the possibility that her mother’s old responses could also change. It was helpful for Annie to accept that if she took small steps to express her own voice to her mother, she could test if there could be any change in her mother’s old emotionally abandoning responses. Annie has discovered that while her mother can get cold and dismissive, she recovers after rejecting Annie and can shift to being a more loving mother.

Annie continues to work on developing the ability to assert her individual self to her mother. She now understands that she has not only been protecting her mother, but has also been protecting herself from feeling emotionally abandoned by her. She knows she can’t significantly change her mother, but she has been slowly changing her own ability to withstand the intolerable fear of being abandoned and losing the emotional connection with her mother. Most essential in this process has been Annie’s growing ability to feel her emerging strength and resilience as she increasingly believes in her capacity to survive abandonment and be less frightened of asserting her own wishes and needs. This bodes well for her ability to develop and express all of her self states to others as she allows herself to engage more fully in the world.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

In my psychotherapy practice, I work with many young adults who come into treatment as they recognize that they haven’t developed the necessary emotional tools to succeed as an adult in the world of work and relationships. In the media and in society, I believe that the emphasis on youth frequently leads us to overlook the experience of parents who become increasingly anxious and depressed as they watch their adult children struggle to create satisfying lives.

Parents often come to see me because they are uncomfortable with their feelings about their adult children. Typically, they worry that their children will never be successful or happy, and they are confused about whether they and/or their child are responsible.

Eric was suffering when he came to see me. He felt his 27-year-old daughter, Holly, was ruining her life and it was causing him great pain. In our first session, he seemed tormented as he told me that Holly “lived in a fantasy world.”

“She’s been in one rock band or another since middle school and through college,” Eric related. “She plays guitar and she’s good. But so are a lot of kids. She majored in education, and I thought she’d be a music teacher. But since she graduated college, she hasn’t pursued teaching and says she isn’t interested. She keeps auditioning for bands and sometimes gets a gig, but nothing permanent. My wife and I think she’s depressed. We agreed she could move back home after college, but that was more than four years ago. She makes very little money and barely seems to get by on what she makes playing music. I don’t think she is ever going to grow up. She doesn’t seem very happy. My wife and I keep arguing about whether we should give her an ultimatum that she has to get a real job or we won’t keep supporting her. I don’t know … I just don’t know what to do. I think I’ve become more depressed than Holly.”

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Eric’s situation was familiar to me. Many parents are caught between their desires to love, nurture, and protect their children and their fear that their children don’t have the skills, drive, or emotional strength to enter the adult world and figure out who they are and what they want for themselves. More significantly, these parents frequently find it exceptionally difficult to make demands and behave in ways that evoke their own and their children’s bad feelings. Eric was angry with himself and with Holly. His ambitions and hopes for her were mixed with his feelings about himself and the kind of parent he was and had been.

“I always supported Holly’s musical aspirations,” he said. “I took her to lessons, went to her rock performances, let her bands practice in our garage. I loved every minute of it. I suppose I thought that maybe she’d become a professional, maybe even shared her wish that she’d become a rock star. Now I wonder if I lived in a fantasy world also and didn’t give Holly enough of a taste of reality. Maybe I didn’t help her with reality in other ways. She was always so busy with her music and her friends that my wife and I didn’t ask very much of her. We pretty much said yes to almost everything: music camp, expensive instruments, drove her everywhere. She never had to pay for anything, and we’re not rolling in money. We never even gave her chores, which drove my wife crazy and we fought about that. Maybe I just let her off too easy and now I don’t think she can take care of herself. The problem is, I don’t want to take care of my grown-up daughter as if she were still a child. I feel angry at her and I hate myself for feeling this way.

“No matter how I look at it, I’m a lousy father. If I cut her off, I’m not doing what I should and that makes me bad. But I’m already a bad father because It’s my fault that she doesn’t know how to be a grown-up in the world.”

Many parents are caught between their desires to love, nurture, and protect their children and their fear that their children don’t have the skills, drive, or emotional strength to enter the adult world and figure out who they are and what they want for themselves.

After many hours of talking with Eric about his relationship to Holly, we began to understand how he and his wife, Ella, had unwittingly undermined Holly’s ability to make her way in the adult world. As I learned about Eric and the early years with his daughter, a picture of two loving parents who were smitten with their daughter emerged. Both Eric and Ella had been raised in very strict, cold families. Eric told me that he and his wife were drawn to each other when they realized that neither of them was raised with feelings of recognition or appreciation from their parents. Eric remembered talking with Ella about how they would be different and give their children extra attention and make them feel special and perfect. In talking with me about this, Eric wondered aloud.

“Maybe we went too far in the other direction,” he said. “Everything that Holly did we delighted in. We oohed and aahed over everything. The smallest thing—a smile, a scribble, a sound—was enough to get us to be gleeful toward her. We were in love. I suppose we went overboard. We married late. When we realized that we would have only one child, we got even more enthusiastic and involved with Holly. We scheduled any activity she asked for; we tried to nurture all her interests and pretty much praised everything she did and made no demands. Now I’m always so irritable with her. I feel critical, but I don’t want her to know. I don’t want to upset her. It’s awful.”

It became clear that Eric and his wife had never set limits for Holly and that they hadn’t helped her develop a sense of herself that was realistic—i.e., that had both positive and negative aspects. I suggested a hypothesis to Eric: “I think it’s likely that if Holly only received praise, she knew, if only unconsciously, that she wasn’t so completely and totally fantastic. If she couldn’t believe that she was so terrific, it would have been difficult to develop a balanced view of her strengths and weaknesses. If Holly couldn’t trust the good stuff, she probably had a great deal of uncertainty about her abilities. She even might have leaned toward thinking more negatively about herself. I think it is very likely that she is quite anxious about whether she has what it takes to make it in the adult world.”

I asked Eric what he thought of my hypothesis. After some silence, he replied: “Yes, you have put into words what I haven’t been able to put together. It hurts, but it’s a relief to feel that this all makes sense and maybe now we can figure out how to make things better for all of us.”

While my hypothesis made sense to Eric and he wanted to find more productive ways to relate to Holly, he found it very difficult to change his behavior toward her. He agreed there would have to be limit setting, but he could not get comfortable with what limits and how to implement them. For example, he thought it would be a good idea to ask Holly to start paying some rent (his wife agreed). But he obsessed about how much, when to begin, and how to bring it up. As we explored his difficulties, some of his resistances became clear.

“I know I should ask for rent, but I’m sure Holly will think I’m mean. I hate that she’ll feel like I’m not supporting her musical aspirations. I don’t want to make it more difficult for her to pursue her music career.”

Eric and I spent many sessions exploring his conflicts. He had to come to terms with his feelings of meanness and get to a place where, even if it didn’t feel good to him, he could believe that setting limits was helping his daughter by giving her the opportunity to see that she could take care of herself and succeed in the world. Some of the questions I asked Eric to consider were: What is it like for you if Holly thinks you’re mean? Do you think you’re mean? What would you have to tolerate if Holly did think you were mean? Eric also had to reconsider what actually was and wasn’t supportive of Holly’s music career. I asked: “How do you conclude that asking for rent means you’re not supporting her career? Can you consider that (even if she didn’t like it) paying rent could help Holly see herself as able to take care of herself and might give her the confidence she needs to make it in the very competitive world of music?”

Eric is wrestling with these and many other questions. He and his wife decided to give Holly three months notice to begin to pay rent. As expected, Holly was angry and hurt. She cried and accused her father of not thinking she had what it takes to be a musician. Eric stood his ground (although he reported that he felt like a bad father). He is also working on being aware of his gushing about anything his daughter tells him. He is trying to be more honest with Holly when she acts entitled or does something irritating.

Eric and I continue to work on the difficult feelings that emerge as he asks Holly to be a responsible adult. He is increasingly able to appreciate that this is having a positive effect on Holly. She is paying rent and is talking about substitute teaching. At the same time, she has formed a new band and is writing more music. Without withdrawing all of his involvement, Eric is trying to let Holly become her own cheerleader. The more he sees her taking charge of her life, the better he feels about his limit setting and the more able he is to set limits. This should lay the groundwork for Holly to become more of an adult and for Eric to feel like a “good enough” father.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

“It’s taken me a long time to get here,” Jessica lamented in her first session. “I don’t know what my problem is. I just feel unhappy. Something is missing in my life, but I don’t know what I want or what it could be. I’m a 46-year-old married woman. My marriage to Peter is fine and I like my job as a speech therapist well enough. I feel boring and bored and maybe have more anxiety than I should. What do you think is wrong?”

Jessica’s statement at the start of therapy began our quest to understand Jessica’s sense of emptiness. In our sessions, her talk was tinged with melancholy. Jessica said that when she looked in the mirror she saw “a not very attractive, aging, unsatisfied woman who feels empty.” Apart from Jessica’s sad demeanor, she brought urgency to the sessions with her intense desire to find out “what is wrong with me?”

Jessica grew up in a suburb of a large city as the younger of two daughters. Her parents divorced when she was 9 years old. Her father quickly remarried and had a child with his new wife. Jessica had vivid memories: “I was crying and my father was hugging me. He said he was moving out because he and my mother had too many problems to stay together.” A tearful Jessica continued: “I remember thinking, ‘How can he leave me?’ I couldn’t stop crying and ran to my room.”

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Jessica and her sister saw her father weekly for a little more than a year, but when he became involved with his wife to be, their visits became less frequent. She recalled, “It was never the same after he left. I never saw him alone and I couldn’t hold onto the feeling that I was special to him. I lost that when I lost him.”

Jessica tried in our sessions to recapture what growing up was like. She wondered if she had been sad even before her father left: “I think I’ve always been sad. Maybe our whole household was sad. My mother was not an energetic or happy person. She often seemed far away. I think she was depressed after my father left and she definitely became more anxious. I was always anxious, too. My sister, who is five years older than me, always did her own thing. But I was very attached to my mother. I felt a strong need for her, and it must have gotten more intense after my father left. She wasn’t very affectionate, and I was very clingy. I remember we used to play cards a lot and we’d go shopping together. I wanted to be around her. I didn’t have a lot of friends. When I went to high school, I started to make friends, but I was always nervous around them. I felt different and not part of the group, so I didn’t do as much at school or with them as I now wish I had.”

When Jessica left home for college, she became somewhat more engaged with the world. She had her first date at the end of her freshman year and dated occasionally throughout college. For the most part, she focused on her education. The college and graduate school Jessica chose was two hours away from home. She spent most weekends and school vacations home alone with her mother (her sister had married and moved to California).

Jessica recalled her conflicted feelings about going home: “I missed my mother when I was away at school, but I don’t know what I missed, exactly. Going home was pretty boring. My mother wasn’t very interested in what I was doing. Whenever I was excited to tell her about my classes or my patients when I was in grad school, she seemed to change the subject. I don’t know what it was, but being around her made me anxious about school and dating and I guess about most everything. Still, after grad school I moved back near my mother and got a job as a speech therapist. When I think about it now, I don’t get why I went home. I think I felt my mother wanted something from me, but I don’t know what.”

I asked Jessica to talk more about her experience with her mother.

“It’s hard to describe,” she said. “I felt so ambivalent about her. I loved her desperately but always felt something was missing in our connection. I wanted her to tell me I was terrific, to give me the feeling she was interested in me and my life. I wanted to feel like she took pleasure in what I did and who I was, but she never did. If anything, I made her feel good. I felt she needed me, but I didn’t know what she needed me for. She was very sensitive, and I was very anxious around her. It didn’t take much for me to feel I had hurt her. She seemed like a pretty lonely person. I think I felt I was supposed to do something to make her life better. She seemed to like it when I was around, but she never seemed to want me very close to her. It was confusing because I also needed to be with her, but it never made sense to me that I felt that way.”

Jessica was beginning to recognize that her mother was limited and couldn’t provide her with feelings of being special that she desperately needed and longed for. Jessica also began to appreciate the consequences of her strong feelings that she would hurt her mother by being special or fulfilled.

Tears started to flow: “You know, she died too young. She developed heart problems and became very sick when I was 32. After that, I spoke to her every day and visited as much as I could, even if I didn’t want to. All my energy was focused on her. She was very depressed, and I was very careful not to make her feel worse by telling her anything that was good in my life.”

Jessica’s mother was ill for four years and died when Jessica was 36, 10 years before she came to see me. During her illness, Jessica’s mother was a constant companion in Jessica’s mind.

“I got more anxious and very depressed,” Jessica recalled. “My mother was dying, and I felt totally helpless. I was so worried that I would say or do something that would upset her. I was preoccupied with thoughts about what I should be doing for her and what she would think about my life. Sometimes I still catch myself wondering what she would think about me. I’m very sad that she never got to meet Peter or know that I married. But sometimes I think marrying Peter was a betrayal of my mother. She never felt very good about herself. How would she feel if my life went well? I think it would hurt her. She might think I was arrogant if I said I had a good life or expressed excitement about my accomplishments. I’d feel like I was being mean to her.”

Even now, after the death of her mother, Jessica still expresses a strong need for her mother: “Since my mother died, she is in my head more than ever. I find myself wondering what she would think about everything: would she like something I bought or would she be OK with my coming here?”

“What kind of response would you want from your mother now?” I asked.

Jessica began to sob: “I wish she would give me a big smile and look really delighted with me. I don’t think I ever got that from her.”

As we continued to explore Jessica’s relationship with her mother, it became clearer that her mother had been unable to provide Jessica with the basics for developing positive self-feelings and a sense of being valued, admired, and recognized. Jessica’s mother couldn’t mirror Jessica’s excitement, enthusiasm, and good self-feelings back to her. Consequently, Jessica infrequently experienced these feelings as part of herself. This left a space inside Jessica, which I believed was what Jessica described as “something missing.” Growing up, Jessica did not know that her need and longing for her mother was her effort to find her missing good and valuable self in her mother’s experience of her.

Jessica was beginning to recognize that her mother was limited and couldn’t provide her with feelings of being special that she desperately needed and longed for. Jessica also began to appreciate the consequences of her strong feelings that she would hurt her mother by being special or fulfilled. We spent many sessions talking about all the ways Jessica had held herself back in her life. She became aware of how her relationship to her mother governed her choices and kept her trapped in patterns of behavior, thought, and feeling that interfered with her ability to enjoy life, engage with people, and ultimately feel self-confident and pleased with herself and her life. She began to understand how, unconsciously, she had lived her life to assure that if her mother contrasted her life to Jessica’s, she wouldn’t feel threatened by finding too much “good stuff” in Jessica’s life. Jessica wondered if she was only able to find a partner and marry after her mother’s death.

Jessica and I worked hard exploring her attachment to her mother. Now she has emotional knowledge (knowledge with feelings attached, not just thoughts) about that connection. She knows she connected to her mother by becoming like her: she internalized her mother’s sadness and duplicated the absence of her mother’s good internalized self-feelings. She knows that her sadness about her missing good self-parts was a kind of mourning for the absence of a nurturing mother and the good feelings she was never able to obtain from her.

Now Jessica is freeing herself from protecting her mother. Now she can be there for herself. She can nurture her missing parts and change her internal world. She will be able to own a new sense of self-confidence and self-esteem and follow her own wishes, get her needs met, and feel special.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

It is not unusual for well-meaning parents to use their influence to try to mold their children into their ideal of a “successful” person. But when parents are not welcoming of the child’s own wishes and desires, the child can become trapped in following the dictates of the family blueprint for his or her life. If the message to the child, either directly or subtly, is that differences and conflict are unacceptable, the child may become emotionally unable to express and tolerate conflict with parents. When negative feelings cannot comfortably be expressed in a direct way, they often find an unconscious outlet in behavior. Specifically, the child may unconsciously deprive the parents of what makes them feel like good parents by sabotaging his or her own success.

Fred felt unsuccessful. He was 29 years old and felt like a failure in his relationships with women and was confused about how he felt about his work life. He described a sense of dissatisfaction and discomfort: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I feel crappy all the time. I’ve been dating Sally for three months, but I don’t really know what I feel about her. I don’t know how I feel about my job. I know I don’t like going to work. I don’t think I’m a very good lawyer. I don’t know if it’s the firm or me. Probably me. I’m stuck and clueless about what I want and I can’t unstick myself from the status quo.”

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As I became familiar with Fred’s life story, I learned that from the time he was born, his parents assumed he would follow his father and become a lawyer. Fred understood this from an early age. He described how his father would tell him that when he grew up they would work together. Fred’s parents guided him through all the “right” extracurricular activities, private schools, and college prep tutors to make sure he would get into the best college on his path to law school.

“They insisted I be on the debate team in high school. I actually didn’t like debating because my father typically engaged me, especially at dinner, in what felt like some kind of test or debate about current events,” Fred recalled. “He explained that this was necessary to help me hone my skills to be a lawyer. He always seemed so excited when he talked about my future as a lawyer. Even if I wasn’t sure, I knew that I could rely on him to know what was best for me. I pretty much didn’t think about it. I went to law school after college. Then my father got me a job at his friend’s law firm. He said he thought I should work there for a few years before joining his firm. So that’s what I did. I’ve been there for three years. I almost got fired after I messed up with a couple of clients. It really upset my father and he told me I need to stay there before I come work with him so I can turn my mediocre performance around.”

Fred seemed quite resigned to his situation.

“I can’t imagine what else I could do with my life,” he said. “My parents have done an amazing job of preparing me for this career. If I ever say that I’m not good at this or that and maybe I should think about something else, my mother gets teary. She says things like, ‘I don’t know what I did wrong that you don’t have any confidence in yourself.’ My father just gives me a pep talk, but it always sound like he’s disappointed in me. I usually end up feeling guilty and then I just don’t want to talk about it with them. But no one can help me figure anything out as well as they can. So I keep talking.”

As I listened to Fred during our sessions, I was very aware that there was inevitably some reference to a critical or disappointed comment from one or both of his parents. I remarked to Fred: “I notice that your parents sometimes respond to you with upset, disappointment, or criticism. How does this impact you?”

The more I talked with Fred, the better I understood how frightened he was of losing his parents if he were to express anger to them. If he asserted his own ideas, he feared being abandoned emotionally. He had never been given the tools to develop and have confidence in his desires and needs, and he didn’t have the internal resources to know what he wanted.

Fred looked surprised: “That’s how they keep me on the straight and narrow.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“They want me to stay on course—to become a better lawyer, to settle down and have a family,” he said. “I can’t seem to get it together to do that.”

“Do you ever wonder if that is what you want or do you ever let yourself have fantasies of being on your own path?” I wondered.

“I don’t really let myself go there,” Fred replied. “They know what’s best. I don’t like to get into disagreements with my parents. It upsets them and then it upsets me.”

“What’s it like for you to be upset when you have disagreements with your parents?” I asked.

“It’s scary,” he said. “They sometimes get angry with me. I feel like I’ve done something terrible to them—really hurt them. My father gets cold, and my mother cries. I feel so guilty and it feels like I’ve chased them away.”

The more I talked with Fred, the better I understood how frightened he was of losing his parents if he were to express anger to them. If he asserted his own ideas, he feared being abandoned emotionally. He had never been given the tools to develop and have confidence in his desires and needs, and he didn’t have the internal resources to know what he wanted. He relied totally on his parents for direction and reassurance that he was OK. His parents have fostered his dependency by making it too frightening for him to assert himself against their wishes for his life. My understanding of the relationship between Fred and his parents became central to our work.

I was concerned about the consequences of Fred’s inability to express any anger or disappointment to his parents about their role in directing his life. His inability to extricate himself from their involvement was interfering with Fred’s ability to become a separate person who knows what he wants and how to get it. My thoughts about Fred and his relationship to his parents led me to the hypothesis that Fred’s lack of “success” in life was an unconscious expression of his negative feelings toward his parents. I thought it reasonable to consider that as long as Fred was “unsuccessful,” he would be depriving his parents of good feelings. They wouldn’t be able to take credit for their successful son. Perhaps this was the safest way for Fred to express his discontent without having to manage the consequences of directly disclosing his feelings. He couldn’t tolerate acknowledging to himself or to his parents that they had interfered with his ability to become a “successful” person who could make choices and assert what he wants.

I believed my hypothesis was probably correct, but I was certain that Fred wasn’t ready to consider it. I was open to the possibility that other hypotheses would emerge as we continued our work. For now, we had to focus on how Fred could get more comfortable with his anger so that he could stop his unconscious attacks on his parents and himself.

Assessing our work, I was clear that we would have to continue to go slowly in order for Fred to make progress. He relied so heavily on his parents for good self-feelings that I didn’t want to prematurely interfere with the importance of them in his life. I felt it was important to express appreciation for their intentions and not to criticize his parents. Cautiously and slowly, I hoped I could help Fred consider that in spite of their well-meant help, he hadn’t been given the opportunity to develop a sense of self and an identity that might be different from what his parents wished. Hopefully, Fred’s anger at the consequences of his parents’ behaviors could be titrated so that in very small doses he could allow himself to tolerate the feelings and gradually be comfortable with them.

As Fred and I move forward with his treatment, there has been some movement toward better self-feelings. Fred continues at the law firm and occasionally reports feelings of satisfaction about his work. He is still anxious about his next evaluation, but is talking less to his father about his worries and more to Sally, who he continues to date. In our session last week, he expressed some irritation toward his mother when she teared up because he told her he had plans with friends when she invited him for dinner.

Fred and I have been spending more time in our sessions talking about his uncertainty in his relationship with Sally. I have suggested to Fred that he might be disappointed with me for not helping him get clearer about his feelings and what he wants. While Fred hasn’t committed to expressing that I’ve disappointed him, he has responded: “You know it’s me, not you. Well, maybe you could do more.”

It may not seem like a significant response, but this was the first time (I’ve asked before) that Fred has considered my being a disappointment to him. I believe that Fred’s ability to express negativity toward me and get comfortable with his disappointment (and any other negative feelings) will be useful in helping him tolerate these feelings with his parents.

Eventually, I hope Fred and I get to a place where I can tell him about—and he can consider—my hypothesis that his unconscious anger is operating to defeat himself and his parents.

Small steps can lead to big ones. We will keep talking.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

I recently overheard a young woman bemoaning that her 2-year-old was “too chubby” so she was going to put her on a diet. This started me thinking about people who are unaware of the negative consequences that result from anxieties about how their children appear to the world, especially their weight, body type, and demeanor.

“Teri” began therapy expressing anxiety and depression, mostly about her appearance: “I was an overweight kid, and everyone always made fun of me. I lost a lot of weight by high school, but it was only after I went away to college that I could reinvent myself and feel a little better about how I looked. But I kept on worrying if people liked me. Now I’m a 43-year-old woman and I’m still upset all the time about my weight and my looks. My doctor tells me that I’m not overweight, but I see all those thin, beautiful women out there, and that’s not me. I can’t lose the 15 pounds I keep trying to lose. My husband tells me that I have a great body. But how can that be when I’m not a size 2?”

Over a number of months, Teri expressed many worries—not only about her physical appearance, but about what people thought of her. Then, about eight months into therapy, Teri began to sob: “The worst thing right now, maybe worse than my gaining two pounds, is … she hates me. My daughter Marni hates me. She should. I’m a terrible mother.”

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Teri hadn’t spoken much about her 15-year-old daughter. It certainly isn’t unusual for mothers and daughters to be fighting as daughters try to separate during adolescence. I wondered if this was typical mother-daughter separation dynamics, if this was more of Teri’s intense need for positive response, or if something else was going on. I asked Teri to tell me more about why she thought she was such a terrible mother.

“I can’t get it right,” Teri said. “I think Marni is depressed. She always looks unhappy. She’s alone on the computer or watching TV a lot. She goes to a great private school with really great kids from good families. But her friends are so nerdy. She doesn’t care about joining teams or clubs or about much of anything. I can’t believe my daughter doesn’t care at all about what she looks like or how other people think about her. We fight about everything: where she goes, her spending, her friends, what she eats, what she wears. She’s getting fat. I can’t stand it. I don’t like my feelings; mothers shouldn’t feel this way. But Marni isn’t the daughter I imagined I would have.”

I responded to Teri’s distress: “This sounds so painful for you. I can see how difficult it is for you that Marni isn’t interested in what is so important to you: to have a particular appearance and to be well liked by everyone. Since childhood, nothing has been more vital to you than being thin and popular. Marni is rejecting this as having value for her.”

Teri responded: “It’s true. It’s scary that she doesn’t understand the trouble she’ll have if she doesn’t make herself socially desirable. You know my family didn’t have much money. Thank goodness my husband and I do well enough. I thought that I could make my daughter happy if I bought her nice clothes, sent her to a prestigious school, and gave her advantages. But somehow it doesn’t matter. I think she’s miserable.”

It made sense to me that Marni, like her mother, hadn’t developed a positive sense of herself. I believed that she experienced Teri’s worries about her as statements about how she wasn’t measuring up to Teri’s standards. This could affect her self-esteem and self-confidence and make her anxious about asserting herself in the world. She was also probably struggling with separation and individuation, trying to be different from her socially anxious mother.

I was concerned about Marni, but I was also concerned for Teri, who loved her daughter and whose anxieties about her mothering were causing her to become more depressed. Knowing that Teri had been ridiculed and had a lot of social anxiety from elementary school on, I thought it would be helpful if she could connect her early experiences with the feelings she was having about herself and her relationship to Marni.

It certainly isn’t unusual for mothers and daughters to be fighting as daughters try to separate during adolescence. I wondered if this was typical mother-daughter separation dynamics, if this was more of Teri’s intense need for positive response, or if something else was going on.

We spent a great deal of time talking about her memories and associations to this time in her life. She spoke about how her mother was an anxious woman with no friends: “I was the center of her world. My father was away a lot, traveling for work. Mom had very little life of her own. She hardly ever left the house. She was always scared of people. I remember when I first went to school, I cried and cried. She told me I would be OK, but I have a very clear memory of her crying and looking scared.”

“Did you eventually settle in and get comfortable?” I asked.

“No,” Teri said, “I was always scared and the other kids knew it. They tortured me. They would hide my books, call me ‘fatty’ and be mean. I would tell my mother about it, but it would upset her so much, so I eventually stopped talking to her about it.”

“What would she say to you?” I wondered.

“I don’t exactly remember,” Teri said, “but I know she always told me that I had to smile, make friends, and be nice to people. She said I wasn’t fat and that I looked fine, but I knew I was fat and that I didn’t dress like the other kids.”

Teri began to cry: “You have no idea what it was like. I was always left out of things. I never had the right look, never got chosen for the team until the end. I finally just became a loner. I was pretty miserable. I guess I was depressed. Wow, I so don’t want Marni to have to go through these things. I’ve never quite put it together before. Of course, I knew I didn’t want Marni to be fat or unpopular because people make fun of you. But as I’m remembering how terribly painful it was for me, maybe I have gotten crazy about how I don’t want it to be that way for her.”

As I listened, I realized that I didn’t know what Teri actually knew about Marni’s experiences. I asked: “Do you think she has been ridiculed like you were?”

“I suppose not,” Teri said. “She has more friends and isn’t really fat like I was, just a little overweight.”

“Are there other differences that you can see between your childhood experiences?” I asked.

“You, know, I’ve never thought of this before,” Teri said, “but I complained to my mother all the time until I realized she couldn’t help me. But Marni never complains about how she is treated by her peers. Hmm … maybe she is having a very different experience than I did. She does seem more OK with her relationships at school than I was. I don’t think she gets mistreated, but I do think she’s depressed.”

“If you had to guess, what do you think she is depressed about?” I asked.

“Well, I get depressed when I feel bad about myself,” Teri replied. “I suppose she could be feeling bad about herself.”

“What do you think could be going on that she would have bad self feelings?”

“I don’t know,” Teri said. “She never puts herself out there so she can receive special good attention or notice or recognition. She does get very good grades.”

“What about negative attention?” I asked. “Does she ever feel criticized?”

Teri became silent and started to cry again: “Oh, no. It’s me. I’m her biggest critic! I’m always on her, telling her what’s wrong with her. I knew it; I have been a terrible mother.”

Teri’s sobbing increased, and then, amid sighs, she asked, “What do we do now?”

This was a turning point in Teri’s therapy experience. She was becoming emotionally related to her traumatized child self. As she became increasingly able to emotionally remember her painful experiences, she could consider that the way she related to Marni was intended to protect her daughter from having similar traumatizing experiences. This realization allowed Teri to begin to let go of her “bad mother” feelings and accept that she had tried to be a good one.

Slowly, Teri began to feel less anxious for Marni and more able to see her daughter as someone with her own ways of being in the world. The more she could distinguish her own history and anxiety from Marni’s experiences and feelings, the less anxious each felt. Teri began to see Marni’s relationship with her friends differently. She noticed that, although Marni was alone, she was often on her cell phone or computer talking and laughing with friends. Now Teri could consider that being a good mother meant being attuned to her daughter’s life from her daughter’s point of view. When Teri could distinguish her own subjectivity from Marni’s, she had fewer critical thoughts and was more open to seeing Marni’s experiences as different rather than bad. This meant Teri was projecting less of herself and was beginning to see Marni as a more separate person with her own subjectivity.

Growing up, Teri’s family had not provided her with a view of herself that gave her the internal resources to develop a positive, confident sense of self. She needed to look to externals for positive reactions in order to feel good about herself. Recognizing this, Teri could appreciate how important it is to express positive feelings to Marni about whom she was and what she did in the world.

Teri understood that she had been projecting her standards for popularity and appearance on Marni, and now she had to give Marni the emotional space to develop her own thoughts about how she looked and appeared to the world. This facilitated Marni’s separation-individuation process, as the absence of her mother’s critical projections left more room for Marni to develop her identity, self-esteem, and confidence.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

When I think of the people I work with in therapy, it is astonishing how many have had to grow up fearing a parent’s powerful responses if they fail to maintain their parent’s emotional equilibrium. Shame, anger, hurt, retaliation, and emotional and physical abandonment are just some of the serious consequences for children who attempt to be themselves in some families.

When subjected to these forms of physical and emotional mistreatment, children learn to protect themselves by becoming acutely sensitive to the feelings of their caregivers. To keep themselves safe, they quickly learn that they have the responsibility to soothe and get rid of their parent’s anger, hurt, uncertainty, confusion, and any other intolerable and unwanted feelings the parent may experience. If they can’t prevent unacceptable parental feelings, they must fix the parent’s feeling state through apology, soothing, or even acceptance of the parent’s lashing out with shaming, humiliating treatment.

If the child is unsuccessful at this, the parental assaults, sometimes subtle and other times powerful, convey many messages: “It’s your fault I’m hurt, upset, sad, etc.”; “You have failed in your responsibility to make me feel good”; “You are a bad person.” Most prominent is the message: “To safeguard my feelings, you must be who and what I need you to be.”

This has many repercussions for the development of the child’s identity, sense of self, and agency.

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Living in Fear

Cynthia, 47, is married woman with an 11-year-old son, Jason. She describes herself as having been depressed and anxious for as long as she can remember. She attributes her severe anxiety to her relationship with her mother, who lives nearby. Cynthia explained why she decided to seek therapy:

“I have always been anxious and depressed. But I just can’t take it anymore. I’ve been careful around my mother my whole life. I’m so afraid to hurt her feelings or get her angry. I bend over backward to sound cheerful, never ask for anything, tell her how wonderful she is. Even when I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong, I always apologize. Now she is doing with my son what she has always done with me. She’s trying to run his life. She gets all weepy or angry and makes him feel like a bad person when he doesn’t go along with what she wants. My life goal has always been to keep my mother happy. I know I never let myself think about or go after what I wanted for myself. Now I can’t let her do that to my son. But it’s just so scary to try and protect him. She will tell me what a horrible mother I am and then get icy cold to me. I don’t think I can withstand that rejection. I probably am a terrible mother.”

Working with Cynthia, I soon discovered that her life was organized around her need to be vigilant. She rarely made a decision or undertook a meaningful action without obsessively worrying about how her mother would feel and respond:

“Jason has been begging Howard (her husband) and me to let him go to a travel camp this summer. His best friend is going, and they would mostly be going to some national parks out west. Howard thinks it’s a great idea. But I know my mom will think it’s dangerous and that he’s too young. If I don’t do what she thinks is best, my mom will be so hurt and upset. I’ll be the one who has made her an anxious mess. Then I will be a wreck. It scares me that I’m actually more worried about her feelings than about whether this is a good idea for Jason. I’m always thinking ahead about how everything will be seen by her. Her feelings rule my life. I know if I agree to let Jason go traveling, I will be attacked and then get the cold shoulder. It’s wrong that I’m more afraid of my mother making me feel so rejected and like such a bad person than I am about whether this is OK for Jason. I think I am even more afraid that if we send Jason to the camp, my mother will start on Jason like she has in the past. When he wants to do something that she doesn’t approve of, she gets that distant, frigid look and tells him that he is being mean to her and doesn’t love her. I don’t know what to do. I’m frightened all the time.”

In our therapeutic work, we began to realize how Cynthia’s vigilance was designed to protect her from the painful and frightening consequences of her mother’s behavior toward her. As we uncovered and explored Cynthia’s memories and associations, Cynthia became aware of how terrified she was of her mother. In one session, Cynthia began to cry and tremble as she recalled:

“I remember when I was in kindergarten—oh, it was so awful. I had peed in my pants, and the teacher was very kind. She called my mother to bring me some fresh clothes. All I can think of is my mother’s face when she showed up.”

Cynthia began to sob: “She looked so angry and scary. She took me into the bathroom at school and yanked my clothes off. She yelled at me and with a twisted face said something like, ‘How could you embarrass me like this? You are disgusting.’ I felt so ashamed and humiliated. I kept crying and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ ”

The more we talked and the more memories that Cynthia recalled, the clearer it was that Cynthia’s mother terrified her. Not only did Cynthia have to protect herself from repeated shaming, she always felt at risk of being abandoned by her mother emotionally and sometimes physically. Cynthia described how she knew she had to be good:

“One time, I must have been about 7 or 8; we had a housekeeper who gave me a present for my birthday. When my mother learned about it, she made me give it back. Then she screamed at me for taking something from someone who had no money. And yelled things like, ‘What kind of person are you?’ Then, as usual, she told me I had embarrassed her and that I didn’t deserve to have her for a mother. I think I remember being stunned. Then she slammed the door to my room and left the apartment. I was all alone. I don’t remember how long she was gone, but I was so frightened. I never knew what would set her off. But I soon understood that I was always in danger of being rejected or shamed and humiliated.”

Impact on Separation and Individuation

It is easy to understand how Cynthia’s fears necessitated compliance with her mother. The only means she had to protect herself was to live in her mother’s shoes and anticipate her wants, needs, and demands. Growing up, her emotional life was stunted. The constant need to be prepared to prevent or soothe her mother’s destructive behaviors had a huge mental and emotional cost.

Because Cynthia needed to be available for her mother’s use, her head was always preoccupied with anxieties about what her mother wanted and how to provide it. This left no emotional space to discover her own wishes and desires. Indeed, it would be dangerous to be too aware of being separate from her mother: to even know her own needs would run the risk of conflict and the painful consequences that would follow. This left Cynthia as a person who has no sense of herself as a person who knows who she is or what she wants.

As long as Cynthia succeeded in regulating her mother’s emotional state by keeping her feelings positive, Cynthia could stay safe. She could shield herself from the pain inflicted by her mother’s outbursts of terrifying feelings and reduce the risk of being rejected, as when her mother became cold and abandoned her emotionally or physically.

As Jason is getting older, it is becoming more difficult for Cynthia to maintain her disconnection from her own undeveloped self. While she has not had much opportunity to become a separate, individuated person, there are nascent wishes and dreams for herself that are beginning to emerge and grow. Her awareness of the destructiveness of her mother in relation to her son has helped her to emotionally understand what her own experience with her mother has been like and what the consequences have been. This has made it more difficult to ignore the steadily increasing volume of her own needs.

Cynthia is slowly becoming less afraid of her mother and of her own emerging, differentiated self. She wants something different for Jason: “I am going to try and fight for him. It is getting more scary to think that he is going to repeat my history than that I am going to be rejected by my mother.”

Cynthia understands that the power and hold of the early fears of her mother and the terror of shame and rejection are not easy to overcome. But the desire to help her son provides powerful motivation as she struggles to differentiate and separate. She knows that her challenge is to become less afraid so she can tolerate the feeling that she is harming her mother and will lose her if she asserts herself. Cynthia is committed to developing herself and learning who she is and what she wants.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

Sometimes, though, being too protective and/or rigid can backfire and the teen will rebel. The key is to create a balance between dependence and independence as the adolescent slowly transitions to adulthood, typically between the ages of 10 and 25.

While many parents underestimate their teen’s readiness for certain privileges and freedoms, most teens overestimate their readiness to take on certain privileges and responsibilities. I typically tell teens that “freedom equals responsibility,” meaning that one needs to demonstrate responsible behavior before expecting to have certain freedoms. For example, if I am to have the freedom of driving a car, I need to demonstrate that I am responsible enough to follow traffic laws, have my driver’s license, car insurance, etc.

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Parents and teens often experience a push/pull in their relationships when deciding what freedoms are appropriate for the teens to have, which can create a lot of stress within the family system. The fact a teen is motivated to push for more freedom and independence and the parent’s task is to guide and protect the teen means there is often discord. This is a normal part of the process of transitioning from adolescence to adulthood. The transition is a period of regular readjustment and can intensify conflict between parents and teens.

Parents are responsible for instilling values in their children about what is right and what is wrong. Given that teens often feel a sense of entitlement to make their own decisions about issues that impact their lives, it is important for parents to have clarity about the contexts in which they will exercise their authority and in which contexts they will allow more freedom. While teens undoubtedly will make mistakes, parents need to trust them to make some of their own decisions and to learn from their missteps.

There is no way for parents to know for certain if their teen is going to make the wrong choices. The chances of a teen making the right choice are increased when parents believe in the teen’s ability to do so. That said, trust must be earned—and in order to earn trust, teens must act responsibly. In order for teens to grow up, they need to have the opportunity to experience the freedom of making their own decisions (age appropriate) and the opportunity to learn from mistakes. When parents place a certain level of trust in their teen, the teen will be more likely to respect the parents as well as their rules.