Ephemeral post: My simplest parent statement ever

I've recently worked with two teenagers, a girl and a boy, whose parents punished them for feeling bad. Bedroom doors removed – yes, taken off the hinges; video games and cell phones confiscated; friend visits prohibited. The girl's bedroom door was removed and she was forbidden from seeing her friends after she made a suicide attempt. The 16-year-old boy, parking his father's manual shift vehicle, didn't know (or possibly didn't remember) to put it in first gear. It rolled back and bumped the car parked behind it and got a minor dent. His father, furious, prohibited him from driving for a year. Worn down by years of similar punishments-by-neurotic-revenge, the young man tried to hang himself. "My parents didn't actually care, it seemed," he said. He called 9-8-8, an ambulance arrived and took him to the hospital. When he came home a week later, his parents locked him down.

 

In the news today, one reads about several high school bullies who drove a 14-year-old girl to suicide.

 

I tell my clients that "therapy is a non-judgmental process. The rationale is that everything that comes from the person – their thoughts, feelings, words, behavior, their nature itself – is valid. There are always legitimate reasons – not necessarily socially acceptable ones – for any behavior. The reasons have to do with pain, sometimes deeply buried pain, and my primary job is to find it and help mitigate it."

 

I don't tell my clients that I don't judge their parents. I do judge them. Parents who are bullies and whose children are bullies should be in jail or should be court-ordered to counseling, at least half-a-year of it as adjudicated Domestic Violence perpetrators are. The only exception is for the most part fantasy: The parent comes to therapy because he knows he is a problem and wants help. I’ve seen that happen fewer than half-a-dozen times in twenty-four years.