Why does my therapist want to talk about my parents?
Your therapist wants to talk to you about your parents because your parents had a significant impact on how your brain developed.
This article has three parts:
Your parents affected the way your brain developed
Seeing your parents clearly
Seeing yourself clearly
Your parents affected the way your brain developed
Most human brain development occurs before the age of 15. Some of your brain function was determined genetically, before you were even born.
When you were young, your brain was hyper-focused on adapting to the peculiarities of your parents. You depended on them for love, for guidance, and for survival. And your brain paid more attention to them than to anything else.
When you were born, your brain was like a computer without an operating system. You had some basic functionality, but you didn't know how to deal with people. Specifically, you didn't know how to get other people to do what you wanted.
You paid a lot of attention to how your mom and dad tried to get each other to do what they wanted, and how they tried to get you to do what they wanted.
Whatever strategies they used are probably the ones you use.
We all want to not be like our parents, but that's easier said than done. You are working against genetic predisposition and years of training. It's not impossible, and it starts with understanding parental blindness.
Seeing your parents clearly
Before the Industrial Revolution, child mortality was extraordinarily high, and many children did not survive to adulthood.
Childhood was a survival problem.
Your chances of surviving childhood increased dramatically if your parents were intensely invested in your well-being.
Children who rebelled against their parents, or who did not do a good job of earning their parents' favor, were less likely to survive childhood.
Children who ran away from home had less chance of surviving and passing on their genes to their offspring than those who stayed home and accommodated their parents' weaknesses.
Our brains are designed to accommodate our parents, not to stand up to them.
One way our brains do this is by turning our R-rated childhood experiences into PG-rated childhood experiences.
It's like you have a filter in your brain that turns the worst things your parents do into things that don't seem nearly as bad.
It does that by removing the intentionality of your parents' behavior. If your mom or dad did something bad to you, like hit you or yell at you, your brain interpreted it as something they were doing for your benefit, or something they did accidentally without meaning to hurt you.
The reality is much darker.
Parents who yell at their children and hurt their children do it on purpose. They do it because they want their children to feel bad. They want their children to suffer. That is the purpose of the yelling and the physical abuse.
When you are young, your brain is designed to protect you from the reality of why your parents do what they do. As an adult, it's important to go back to your actual visual memories and create new interpretations of why your parents did what they did.
If you don't do this work, you will filter your own behavior through the same optimistic filter you granted to your parents. You will see yourself as much less cruel and much less intentional than you actually are.
Seeing yourself clearly
Your brain made a lot of assumptions about your parents when you were young. It assumed that they cared about you, that they were invested in you, and that they had your best interests at heart. To a certain extent, those assumptions were accurate, and to a certain extent they were not.
As you go back and revise your assumptions about your parents based on actual evidence, you will find yourself more capable of seeing yourself clearly.
The filters your brain developed to deal with your parents have been making it hard for you to see yourself clearly. As you dismantle those filters, you start to have a clearer picture of what you're actually like.
Specifically, you can get a clearer picture of what it's like to be married to you or to be in a relationship with you.
You probably underestimate the negative impact you have on your partner in the same way you underestimated the negative impact your parents were having on you.
As you learn to revise that picture, you become a better partner. You become kinder, warmer, and more loving. You become more capable of allowing another person to disapprove of you and to disagree with you.
You become capable of having a better relationship.
