On talking about ones upbringing

Many people like to come to therapy and talk about their childhood, week in, week out. It a cliche about psychotherapy that one simply perseverates about ones upbringing for years, hoping to arrive at a “eureka” moment. Many on the CBT side of psychotherapy dismiss the idea of reflecting on ones childhood entirely. However, at my first time at a workshop at the Beck Institute, Dr. Aaron Beck said to us, “We have something to learn from all approaches to psychotherapy.”

I think that what we have to learn, in particular, about our parents and their effect on our behavior is that, just as we learn to talk by imitating our parents, we also learn to emote by imitating them. That means that, had we grown up imitating entirely different parents, we would have entirely different emotional dispositions. That, in turn, means that our problems are not immutable; we can pick a new style of emoting, and gradually change. It’s not easy, but it is important to not get stuck in the idea that we are predestined to be a certain unhappy way because our parents were.

If you want to talk about your childhood, let’s use that to figure out how you can pivot away from it and live according to your own values.