Don't Blame your Parents

The recent death of Alice Miller, an influential European psychoanalyst, revives a question that has nagged people for decades, whether or not they’ve been in therapy: To what extent are our parents responsible for our own psychological problems?

Dr. Miller, in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, spotlighted the effects of childhood abuse and trauma on people’s emotional development. The headline version of her work is this: Blame your parents for your psychological problems. It’s a pretty simple, powerful idea, and one that has taken root as a stereotype of what happens in psychotherapy: An adult patient and his or her therapist sit around talking about how the patient’s parents are at fault for the psychological problems the patient is facing.

But this isn’t true. The lesson that I and most other psychotherapists have drawn from Dr. Miller and others is that adults’ psychological problems can indeed be rooted in childhood trauma. If a patient comes in wanting to address self-defeating behaviors, one step of the therapy process is to understand where and how these behavior patterns developed. Some of that may be traced to a patient’s parents or to other circumstances of one’s early life. But exploring how something started isn’t the same as blaming. And what gets explored in psychotherapy isn’t just what other people did, but also how the patient reacted to that, understood it at the time, and interprets it now. In other words, other people’s actions are only one part of the puzzle.

Furthermore, re-examining long-ago events isn’t the point of psychotherapy; it’s just a step. The ultimate goal, if you’re in therapy, is to change your life now. Reflecting on how you understand and interpret your past can help you better see why you’re engaging in counterproductive behavior in the present. Do you find yourself fighting with your coworkers or bosses over and over again? Do you keep having the same unsatisfying and destructive relationships with romantic partners? If so, that’s not your parents’ fault. What it may be instead is your treating people today as if you were the same person you were when you were a child. The responsibility is on you to take your awareness of what drives your behavior and use that to change.