I was in a psychologist’s office one cold and dark January evening. Our housekeeper/nanny was with the kids. She usually left when I finished work, but that day agreed to stay until I returned from my appointment. Still, I felt a little uneasy because it was the first time since my wife’s death that I would not be by the kids’ side for nearly two hours.
“What brings you to see me?” the friendly psychologist asked.
“My wife died of cancer a year ago,” I replied, “I have two young kids. We all had individual grief counseling for about a year but now need family therapy.”
“What makes you think you need family therapy?”
“We are getting along okay for now, but this is a hard time for our family. I see the potential for grave trouble ahead. My kids will enter their teens over the next few years. If parents don’t get it right, this stage of children’s lives can be challenging for any family, but it can be disastrous for our solo-parent family dealing with this terrible loss. We must learn how to be a functioning family without a mom.”
Dealing With Grief
A few months before this appointment, in a support group for recently widowed parents of young children, one of the group members had used the term “solo parent” instead of “single parent.” She explained that she used it to remind herself that, unlike many situations where one parent primarily raises the kids, if she is not doing well, her kids don’t have another parent for solace – emotional or material. Thinking of it that way was one of the things that drove me to seek family therapy.
Losing a parent during childhood is among the most stressful things that can happen to a child. And the death of a spouse is the most stressful event on the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory. The grief counselor I had worked with once said that the impact of a parent’s loss during childhood is most significantly influenced by how the surviving parent grieves and how they affect the family’s evolution. “If the surviving parent does well, the kids mostly do well.” she had said.
After about a year of grief counseling, I felt I could handle life and didn’t need any more talk therapy. But I also sensed danger. Clinical experience told me that the long-term effects of mismanaged childhood trauma and loss are hard to repair in adulthood, even with a lot of therapy. How would I ever know I had an incompetent solo parent until long after the damage was done? Any privilege due to my education and profession makes me no less human or prone to the human condition than those I have helped.
Why Family Therapy
I sought family therapy against this background of a catastrophic loss and the knowledge of its potential long-term impact. Why did I pursue family therapy over individual therapy for myself or one or more of my kids? Because I am partial to family work.
During my psychiatry training, I was involved in a project to develop and implement interventions for refugee families that had survived genocide. Our interventions were family-based. While researching them, I became familiar with the family systems model. The essence of the model is the idea that families function as a system and that family dynamics influence the health and well-being of each member. The model emphasizes the importance of understanding the family’s interaction and communication patterns and how they contribute to its overall functioning.
Later, while practicing in rural America and occasionally treating different members of certain extended families across multiple generations, I trusted this model to help me better understand my patients. Most people who undergo counseling or therapy do individual therapy. But emotional problems never stay confined to the person who is showing the most symptoms. Families often contribute to a person’s mental health condition’s difficulties. In turn, they are also most impacted by that person’s struggles. Unless there is abuse in the home, most people would be better off in counseling as a family.
Listening And Talking Better
A few months ago, I asked my kids, “Do you think family therapy has been helpful?”
When both said yes, I asked them how it had helped.
My younger one just shrugged and said she couldn’t explain it, but it had been helpful. The older one said, “At first, I couldn’t tell if it did anything. But when I look back at it over time, we get along better because of it.”
“What makes us get along better?” I probed.
“We’ve learned to listen and talk about our feelings. When something bothers me about anything you say or do, I can say it without losing my temper. I think the two of you can do the same.”
He is right. We were still hurting from our loss when we began family therapy. The kids had lost a confidant and had to adjust to having only one parent. I was trying to figure out how to listen and talk to my kids and how to help them without a co-parent. It was a shaky adjustment. We frequently found ourselves short on patience and understanding.
With family work, we learned to listen and talk better. We give each other space and time to manage our emotions when that’s what any of us wants. Asking for help without our egos getting in the way has become easier. We offer support to each other more often without being intrusive. I see my kids as more capable of autonomy than I would have without family therapy. They hear my concerns without reflexively rejecting them. As a result, our relationship has indeed grown stronger. Everything good that has followed in our lives over the past few years has resulted from listening and talking better.
One of the things I said to the therapist in that first appointment on that January evening was, “I am a mental health professional too. But I struggle with the tension between being a parent and being a therapist to my kids. But I don’t want to be their therapist. I want to be their dad and be better at it.”
From my perspective, that has been the most important benefit of family therapy – I get to be just their dad and a better one than I was a few years ago. Of course, I hope that it has also made my kids more resilient, but that’s something only time will tell. For now, we are doing well enough to say that we’ve dodged most of the landmines that were likely immediately ahead of us after our catastrophic loss. That’s enough for now.
