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[quote=weathervane771][quote=Anonymous]I'll repost something I commented on the other failure to launch thread:

I am a therapist who specializes in "failure to launch" young adults. Most of the clients on my caseload have a Cluster B personality disorder (either BPD or NPD), or become very close to meeting diagnostic criteria for one of them. One of the key components to raising a failure to launch young adult is that they have very little sense of self and self-direction because their own desires, emotions, and wants have been railroaded by their parents during their childhood and adolescence.

A very common scenario in my therapy practice (in an UMC neighborhood not unsimilar to, say, Mclean or Bethesda in the DMV) is that the parents pushed their (temperamentally sensitive) kid to elite private schools or public schools in competitive, wealthy school districts so that their kid attends a T20 college. The innately sensitive kid is then pushed to a high-paying career path such as tech, medicine, or finance, and when they can't hack it, they move back home as a 22 year old (or a 26, or sometimes 30 year old), and the failure to launch spiral begins.

The parents usually alternate between intense pride and shame for their kid (this is called "splitting" by clinicians, and I see a lot of this black-and-white thinking on DCUM). On one hand, they are filled with intense pride that their kid is an elite college grad and feel as if it reflects on them as parents. OTOH, the parents have intense shame for their kid because he/she failed to live up to the high expectations that they placed on their kid.

But wait, you might be wondering, why weren't these parents able to pick up on the fact that their kids are characterologically more sensitive and thus not well-suited for a path of Harvard and then McKinsey? These parents are unable to notice their kid's sensitive nature because they lack emotional attunement (which, to be fair, many first-gen UMC people who had to "pull themselves by their bootstraps" are deficient in).

One of the first things I do as a therapist is to ask my clients to describe themselves, and ask my client's parents to describe their kid. Oftentimes I'll notice that both the failure to launch young adult and the parents are unable to provide an accurate, fully-fleshed out description of their kid to me because all parties lack the ability to "mentalize" -- in other words, be attuned to the emotional states of themselves and others.

It's actually quite sad when I ask parents to describe their adult child to me, and they'll say some version of "Oh, you know, she's smart and hard working." I'll ask if there are any other traits, and they'll just give me a blank stare. The parents are unable to mentalize any other personality traits besides "smart and conscientious."

And I really feel for these parents. It's difficult being in this situation. But I think even the most loyal and well-adjusted of children would admit that they would rather be understood than be loved but misunderstood.[/quote]

This is so insightful, thank you. I can relate to this as an adult child who recently crashed and burned in my *thirties* - currently picking up the pieces and working on it!

I was extremely high-achieving outwardly in STEM in NoVa growing up and had been trucking along on that career path until recently. I never ever shared anything about internal emotional states and distress with my parents while in school even though I was suffering immensely with binge-eating and other problems. They didn't put too much pressure on me but just missed these things. I used artistic outlets - writing, music - as the coping mechanisms that I desperately needed and hid all dysfunction.

There's a great book on this by Sahaj Kaur Kohli called "But What Will People Say?" She also has a good advice column in WaPo. It's written with a focus on children of immigrant parents but I found many of the points to be relevant to the DMV area more broadly.

Also re: the original post - I would caution against using "married with children" as a marker of "launched." This has actually been the biggest pressure-cooker issue in my family and has led to a lot of strife between me and my parents and a lot of issues in my personal life. Not everyone has a perfect linear trajectory into marriage and children (and these things do not automatically equal success).[/quote]

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