Reply to Negative impact of therapy and "therapy speak"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]I do think there's a level of introspection that's unhealthy. I see it most in younger adults who don't have children yet. I even felt it in myself in my 20s. I felt untethered and had too much time to myself. [/b]

Now that I'm a parent it seems unreal to me how some young adults can cut off their parents for such minor things. Like a video I watched recently of a woman blaming her mom (always the mom...) for making her a people pleaser and saying that it was a trauma response. At some point you have to realize that your parents did the best they could do (absent REAL trauma like the ACE indicators) and everyone deserves grace. [/quote]

The bolded is part of growing up. You are confused and anxious for a while and then you figure it out. It's a phase.

Unfortunately some people get stuck in it. [/quote]

To be fair, I think sometimes the people who get stuck in it do so because their problems are more severe. So to use the example PP provided, lots of women grow up as people-pleasers because of the way they were raised, often with gendered expectations, and it's normal to feel frustrated by that programming when you become and adult and push back against it.

But smaller percentage of women (and men) develop severe people pleasing behaviors because they grew up in actually abusive homes where they had to walk on eggshells to avoid being physically or emotionally abused, or to convince their parents to engage in basic, non-neglect levels of parenting.

For the first group, it should be enough to recognize their parents did the best they could, look to improve in their own adulthood and as parents, and move on.

For the second group, their "people pleasing" is legitimately a trauma response, can be hard to de-program (because if you learned to people please in order to avoid being hit, or in order to help your bipolar parent stay functional enough to keep you safe, it is terrifying to stop), and they deserve empathy for working at it. And the parents they are cutting off may be genuinely abusive.

I guess it's possible for someone in the first group to try to act like they are in the second group, but if so, I assume they have big issues because why would you want to claim your parents were abusive? Why would you want to live as though you'd been abused and neglected as a child -- that's hard and horrible.

So as a rule, I try to give peopel the benefit of the doubt. If they say they were abused as a kid, I believe them. Because, again, why would you lie about this? Also, abuse victims are constantly told they are being dramatic, it wasn't that bad, and they should "get over it". So why be one more person saying this? Just accept that's their experience and they will deal with it as they need to.

(I was physically and verbally abused, and emotionally neglected, as a child, and I have not cut off my parents and actually have a pretty decent and empathetic relationship with them, all things considered, but I have empathy for people who decide that's what they need to do to recover.)[/quote]

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