This is why I insist that parents need support: they’re healing themselves, they’re healing their children, they often need to heal some parts of their marriage, and for many parents, they’re also supporting the physical + medical needs of THEIR OWN aging parents in the background! And ha, not to mention if they’re employed 🙃🙃 This is why family therapy is so important. We MUST begin by supporting the parents so that they can lead the healing of their family. In the family therapy that I have been extensively trained in and practice, Emotionally Focused Family Therapy, we divide therapy into two phases: 1) parental openness 2) child vulnerability. We do not bring the child and parent together until the parent is open to the child’s needs and vulnerability. This protects the child from getting hurt further and sets the parent up to successfully work with their child. I decided to role play this particular dyad 1) bc I see it in around 1/3rd of mom-daughter dyads that I’ve worked with 2) I also saw a good bit of this in the comment section of that viral post about parents taking accountability. More than one comment outright said, “they should validate me.” Lol. My aim is not to attack mothers or fathers. It is to show where things go wrong and how that creates pain that then becomes a legacy of pain when we pass it down to our children. Family therapy involves examining our own relationships and experiences as children, identifying the pain that we have there, and working to heal both our own pain and that of our children’s. And this is what the work looks like right from the first parent session. #familytherapy #family #mom #dad #kids #dysfunctionalfamily #childhood #childhoodtrauma #cptsd #trauma #nocontact #nocontactwithparent #relationship #telationships #communication #attachment #attachmentstyle #attachmentissues #anxiousattachmentstyle #avoidantattachment #anxiousattachment #therapy #therapysessions #therapytiktok #therapist #mentalhealth #skit #roleplay #fyp #foryou #parenting #parenting101 #parentingtip #parents #parent #parentifiedchild