They silence this reproach at home, but in therapy, it appears almost at each session. This is the precise point of parental behavior that weighs the most on children and that they cannot formulate directly.
The figures speak for themselves. According to centers for disease control and prevention (CDC), mental health problems affect millions of children and adolescents. These data emphasize how the psychic weaknesses of childhood weigh on the future and to what extent the silence that surrounds them can prove to be destructive. For a long time, to speak of psychological suffering returned to carry an additional shame, that of stigma. Now speech circulates more.
In general, children often evoke in the office the feeling of being locked up in too rigid rules or too strict expectations. Many adults say that their parents remained present beyond childhood, how they still imposed their vision of professional choices, romantic relationships or the way of presenting themselves to others. Therapists speak of fathers described as distant or authoritarian, little available emotionally, and mothers sometimes too involved, unable to cut the cord. Consequence: independence difficult to build, a difficulty in trusting your own decisions and, generally, a damaged self -image.
And precisely, among all these secrets, a reproach dominates the others: that of feeling judged, underlines the American psychologist Aline Zoldbrod. Judged for his choices, judged for his desires, judged not to correspond to the image dreamed of by his parents. Behind each reoriented journey, each anger, each distance, this feeling returns as a constant. She explains why some children turn away, why others are exhausted to seek validation, why so many meetings with the shrink start with a simple sentence: “I have always been afraid of disappointing my parents.”
In addition, to another extent, some children report a form of negligence: parents absorbed by their career, physically or emotionally absent, leaving behind the feeling of having grown alone. Some describe a childhood punctuated by rules required, but never explained, where children’s word counted little in the face of parental injunctions. In adulthood, this contradiction becomes one of the heaviest injuries to appease. The confidences collected in therapy also evoke what is called “parenting”: these children who, very early on, took on an adult role, by supporting their parents, reassuring them, even by protecting them from their own weaknesses. An inversion of roles which also leaves lasting traces there!
