Two kids

 

In one week, two teenagers, age 15 and 18, said to me, respectively: "I don't think my family cares about me." "I don't think my mother likes me." Of course, these parents would say the opposite. They would insist on it. Imagine a surrealistic movie where the contesting parties were in a formal debate before an audience. The child, who has never felt any love in her neurotic and personality-disordered home, citing a vast litany of evidence of mistreatment, indifference, callousness. The parents citing all they've done for their teen through the years, topping it off with the magical argument: "I love you." There will be no such debates, though. The arguments live in the home where there are no rules against saying: "I don't believe you feel that way," as there would be in a debate. And in the home or at the podium, the child will always be the loser, even if she scores the most points.

I believe both of these teens. They are not dramatic, they are not lying. Their life has stripped them of artifice. Their descriptions of their parents' chronic indifference and self-centeredness leave no appeal. "Ask your father" for money for college. "Ask your mother." Mother and stepfather frequently go out to dinner, always leaving her home to scrounge through the refrigerator. The younger one's mother generating insanely twisted arguments: "I left (home, abandoned the family) because you're angry at me and might get suicidal if I was here." "My mom won't talk to me, because she thinks I'm upset." A mother's silent streak. Can you feel the ocean-deep sick emotion creating its own otherworldly logic?

I once thought there would be a certain state of being "home free" once the child left for out-of-state college. Certainly, better than being stuck in the prison for three more years, saddled with depression that makes any form of escape – friends, extracurricular activities, books – too difficult, too heavy to manage. But my college student, in California, is still lost, and during summer still comes home where she's treated to blithe indifference and thrown between bickering parents, neither of whom wants to help her have enough money to pay her bills.

I do reach out to the parents. Like guest stars, they make the rare appearance for a parents-only session. Six months later they return, showing me they have learned nothing. But – they are willing to hear the same lessons again. About empathy, about not being a solipsist, about "the power of the language of acceptance" (Gordon). Sometimes this second dose makes a little difference. But remember: The real problem is the parent's character, which will not change though this or that tidbit of a behavior may change.

Depth therapy says – knows – that people are deep. Their history-formed roots don't heal with bright thoughts, advice and humor. Children change when their parents change.