Lori Gottlieb | The Atlantic

Dear Therapist: How Do I Deal With My Hostile Sister?

2024-12-23T07:00:00-05:00

Dear Therapist,

This holiday season, I’ve been navigating some major challenges with my older sister and my boyfriend. The difficulty started last winter, when my boyfriend wanted to buy an investment property in the state where I’m from and my sister currently resides. My sister became very upset with me and my boyfriend for investing in a place where she lives. We received angry phone calls and disparaging text messages from her. We were shocked at her response. I have yet to make up with my sister as she never apologized, but I have been cordial with her when around the rest of our family.

Recently, my sister told our immediate family that she was pregnant. She had previously had two miscarriages, so we were all quite excited. While my boyfriend and I were visiting home, he asked my parents if my sister had told our extended family about her pregnancy. Unfortunately, he was overheard by one of my aunts. We immediately requested that she keep mum, and my aunt never told anyone. But when my sister shared her news with the wider family, this aunt mentioned that she’d already known because she had heard my boyfriend mentioning it to my mom. This resulted in angry text messages from my sister about me “taking her thunder” for this announcement.

I’ve since blocked her on text and social media, but as we head into the holiday season, I’m unsure what to do. My mom is guilting me about my boyfriend not spending the holidays with us, but he doesn’t feel comfortable around my sister.

I would love your thoughts on how to deal with this situation without making it worse, while also protecting myself and my partner from unwanted hatred from my sister.

Dear Reader,

Feeling caught between family loyalty and your relationship with your boyfriend is a challenging position to navigate, especially during the holidays. You’re being pulled between your mother’s desire for family harmony, your sister’s emotional demands, and your boyfriend’s legitimate need for respect. This kind of triangulation is exhausting and can lead to resentment on all sides. The key is to stop trying to be the mediator and focus on transparency with all parties—and then directly communicate what kinds of requests you’re willing (or not) to meet.

To help you figure out the limits you’d like to set, you’ll need to consider the family dynamics underlying the recent tension. What stands out in your letter is how quickly a series of relatively minor incidents escalated into a profound family rift. You say that this conflict “started last winter” with the real-estate investment, but such intense reactions rarely emerge out of nowhere. The vehemence of your sister’s response to an investment you and your boyfriend made suggests that she struggles with unspoken feelings, possibly around sibling envy or competition or perceived abandonment as you spend time with your boyfriend. Sometimes it’s safer to get angry indirectly—in other words, to direct your anger at someone adjacent to the person you’re actually angry with. Your sister appears to be channeling her feelings toward you into conflicts with your boyfriend, perhaps because at this point in her life, she sees your happiness while she feels unimportant, invisible, or overshadowed.

I see this too in her reaction to the pregnancy announcement: She felt that you were stealing her thunder. Of course, for someone who has experienced the pain of two miscarriages, controlling the narrative around a successful pregnancy might feel like one of the few aspects she owns on an otherwise uncertain journey. Even so, your boyfriend didn’t intend for others to hear his question, and you took immediate steps to contain the information—so the fact that your sister hasn’t realized that her reaction was disproportionate to the harm and has made no attempts to apologize for her outburst indicates that deeper sibling wounds are at play.

[Read: Couples therapy, but for siblings]

Meanwhile, your mom is playing an unhelpful role by asking you to make things right despite the way you’ve been treated. Sometimes well-meaning parents try to alleviate sibling tension by encouraging one sibling to take what they see as the smoothest path to ending disharmony without holding the other sibling responsible for her part in creating it. The thinking goes: It’s easier to pressure the more reasonable and adaptable party to accommodate the difficult one than to address the underlying problematic behavior. Your mother might believe she’s promoting family harmony, but in reality, she’s enabling your sister’s behavior while unfairly burdening you with the responsibility for maintaining family relationships.

Your boyfriend, for his part, is entering this family system as an outsider. But if your relationship with him continues to grow, he will become part of your family—and these early patterns of interaction could set the tone for years to come. Your boyfriend’s desire to avoid the holiday gatherings is understandable, but it’s worth considering the long-term implications of this decision. Complete avoidance, while providing temporary reprieve from conflict, might inadvertently cement a rift with your family and make future reconciliation more difficult.

With this context in mind, let’s consider what you might do.

First, with regard to your sister, I encourage you to shift your perspective from “protecting myself and my partner from unwanted hatred” to “understanding and potentially healing a wounded relationship.” This doesn’t mean enduring abuse; instead, it’s about getting to the core of what’s causing it with the hopes of eliminating it. Being “cordial when around family” and blocking communications might reduce immediate stress, but something else needs real attention. Neither you nor your sister has created space for the difficult but necessary conversation about what’s really going on here. Your sister hasn’t apologized or explained her intense reactions, and you haven’t had the opportunity to express how her behavior has affected you and your relationship with your boyfriend. This pattern of avoidance—managing surface interactions while letting the underlying tensions simmer—can lead to exactly what you’re seeing: Each new incident becomes charged with the accumulated weight of unresolved feelings. Until both you and your sister are willing to have an honest, potentially uncomfortable conversation about your relationship, these cycles of conflict will likely continue to escalate.

[Read: What if you just skipped the holidays?]

Consider writing your sister an email that acknowledges her feelings without accepting blame for perceived wrongs. You might say something like “I miss our relationship, and I know that you’ve been feeling hurt. I’m sorry that recent events have created such distance between us. I’m truly thrilled about your pregnancy, and I think these times of transition present an opportunity to bring people closer. I’m hoping we can find a way forward by having a conversation that feels safe and respectful for both of us, with the goal of understanding what’s bothering each of us.”

If she’s willing to do this, you can start the conversation by expressing your genuine interest in repairing the relationship: “I’ve been surprised by what’s been happening between us. I want to understand more about what’s upsetting you in our relationship, and I hope you’ll try to understand how I’ve been feeling too, so we can clear the air and communicate more calmly and openly in the future.”

To your mother, you might say: “Mom, I understand you want everyone together for the holidays, but right now that would create more tension than joy. I know you’d like me to fix this, but this is about something going on between me and my sister—not my boyfriend, not you—so the most helpful thing you can do is to let both of your daughters try to work this out as the adults that we are, no matter what choice gets made this holiday season and no matter what our relationship looks like going forward.”

You can then talk to your boyfriend about how he envisions his relationship with your family, and what steps he feels comfortable taking now to work toward that vision. Perhaps he would feel comfortable attending part of the holiday gathering for a limited time, or participating in some family events but not others. Often, small, manageable steps toward engagement are more sustainable than either total avoidance or forced togetherness, and taking these steps would demonstrate a willingness to engage with the family while still maintaining healthy boundaries that work for him. Remind him that your goal is to support his decisions about maintaining his own limits while ensuring that your relationship with him doesn’t become collateral damage in this family conflict.

Remember that you can’t control anyone’s behavior, but you can control your response to it. If your sister isn’t willing to engage respectfully, you can leave the door open: “I care about you, but I won’t accept hostile messages about me or my boyfriend. I’m happy to have a calm conversation about our relationship when you’re ready.” If your mom continues to guilt-trip you about your boyfriend, you can say, “I know it’s hard to see your daughters not getting along, but I’m done discussing this. Please don’t bring this up again.”

By having these conversations directly with each party, you release yourself of the burden of being assigned to single-handedly fix a complicated family dynamic and allow yourself to focus on a more reachable and healthy goal: making clear, thoughtful decisions that are in the best interest of your relationship with both your family and your boyfriend, even if they disappoint some people in the short term.

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Dear Therapist: No One Wants to Host My In-Laws for the Holidays

2024-11-25T07:00:00-05:00

Dear Therapist,

My husband and I have been together for five years. In that time, his parents have separated and are now divorcing. My husband and his two sisters are not particularly close with either parent because of their less-than-ideal childhood.

As adults, my husband and his siblings have established their own holiday traditions. My husband spends most holiday time with my family, and his siblings spend theirs with their in-laws. Before the divorce, my brother and his siblings would all get together with their parents for a simple dinner or gift exchange every year (for both Thanksgiving and Christmas), but now there’s no plan to bring the different parts of the family together.

In recent weeks, both parents, who each live by themselves, have started hinting at not wanting to be alone during the holidays and hoping to potentially join our plans. Neither parent seems willing to host—they just want the invitation. My sisters-in-law have made it clear that they won’t be inviting their parents to their plans with their own in-laws. This leaves my husband feeling like the onus is on us to “take care” of his parents by including them in our plans, which are really my family’s plans.

What’s the right move here? Ask my family to include them knowing that it shakes up our dynamic, or figure out how to navigate his parents truly being alone for the holidays?

Dear Reader,

I empathize with the fantasy that there’s an objective “right move” in this situation, but the reality is that different choices will have different consequences, none more “right” than the others. The best you can do is reflect on the options and, with the clarity that comes from reflection, choose the one that feels best for now.

I say “for now” because whatever you do this year isn’t what you have to do forever. Your extended family is going through a significant transition, and at this time next year, and in the years to come, the dynamics will shift and settle. Eventually, your husband’s parents might be fine attending a gathering together, or one or both might find a new partner and have other places to go. Holiday plans that make sense this year might look completely different in the future.

That should take some pressure off, because if whatever you do this year doesn’t work out as well as you hope, you can view the decision as nothing more than a well-intentioned and temporary experiment.

To help you design that experiment, let’s first think about the bigger dynamics at play. The reason you and your husband feel so conflicted is that your question touches on a complex intersection of family loyalty, emotional boundaries, and holiday expectations—each of which, by itself, is weighty and fraught. Add to this some painful childhood history, and it’s easy to feel confused and pulled in different directions. Even so, your family had come up with a viable solution, and now this divorce has transformed what was once a manageable annual gathering into something even more complicated.

[Read: The only two choices I’ve ever made]

I want to emphasize the impact of this divorce not just on your holiday plans, but on the family as a whole. Although your husband and his siblings aren’t particularly close with their parents, I imagine that they’re still dealing with the emotions of what’s known as “gray divorce”—a divorce that occurs later in life and that creates unique challenges for adult children. Many people assume that parental divorce affects adult children less significantly than young children, but it can be just as destabilizing, in different ways. Many adult children find themselves in exactly your husband’s position—managing their parents’ emotional needs while trying to maintain their own family structures and traditions.

On a deeper level, a late-in-life divorce signals a fundamental shift in family identity—even if your husband’s parents were less than ideal, he saw himself as being part of an intact family—and he has some adjusting to do. For one, he may be experiencing role reversal, in which adult children tend to take on a quasi-parental role and feel responsible for their parents’ well-being. He may also be feeling pulled back into certain unhealthy family dynamics that he would rather avoid. Notice how the divorce has highlighted different coping strategies among the siblings. Your sisters-in-law have chosen strict boundaries in upholding their in-laws’ traditions, whereas your husband feels pulled toward accommodation. This divergence can lead to resentment reminiscent of long-standing family roles (for example, was your husband historically the “responsible” or “peacemaking” child?). And finally, he may be feeling stuck in the middle of his parents’ newly separated lives, forced to navigate competing needs and perceived obligations.

For all of these reasons, you might want to have a conversation with your husband about his emotional response to his parents’ divorce. What does it bring up for him? How does it affect his relationship with his siblings and whether he feels alone or supported as his family goes through this change? What’s driving his sense of responsibility to “take care” of his parents? Is it a genuine desire for connection, is it simply guilt, or is there also a sense of real compassion? Once you understand more about how he feels, the two of you can have a candid conversation about the three interconnected challenges you as a couple are facing: your husband’s feeling of obligation to his parents, your commitment to your own family’s traditions, and the broader question of how much responsibility adult children bear for their parents’ emotional well-being.

[Read: Couples therapy, but for siblings]

If you can have these conversations with grace and empathy—for each other, for yourselves, and for his parents—you’ll likely find that they not only help you understand each other better, but that the options are less binary than you presented in your letter.

For instance, you can ask his parents to join your family without “shaking up” your family dynamic by not focusing so much on whether his parents are having a good time, and just letting everyone be. You can choose not to invite his parents to your family’s holiday gatherings but also not leave them “truly alone”—by calling or doing FaceTime instead, perhaps including some real-time virtual cooking or gift-opening. Alternatively, you can still do the simple dinner and gift exchange you’ve always done with both parents by telling them that if they don’t feel comfortable being in the same room together, they can always say no—but that’s what you’re able to offer given that you have two families to consider, and three celebrations are just too many. Or you can decide that doing another simple dinner and gift exchange isn’t that burdensome (because, as you say, it’s “simple”) and invite them individually for a version of the traditional plan—or schedule even shorter, separate visits with each of them.

As you become more flexible with the possibilities, remember that the goal isn’t to solve their loneliness but to help them adapt to their new reality in a healthy way. Maybe that involves connecting them with community resources or social groups for divorced seniors, encouraging them to build their own new traditions and actively engage with their existing social connections while pursuing new ones.

All of these are valid ways to experiment with creating holiday celebrations that balance compassion for his parents with respect for your own family’s needs and joy. As you do this, keep in mind that part of “taking care” of your husband’s parents is helping them build independent lives post-divorce—and that this is one of the most caring things adult children can do.

Dear Therapist: I’m Worried About My Brother

2024-10-28T07:00:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

My younger brother and I are both in our 50s. He met his wife about 16 years ago, and they got married in 2014. This is her third marriage, my brother’s first. They have one child together, who’s 13, and his wife also has three other children, each from a different earlier relationship.

From the beginning, their relationship has been beset with problems. She accuses him of cheating on her, wanting to cheat on her, looking at other women, and lusting after other women on television, in restaurants, and when out walking the dogs. Things will be fine for a while and then the whole thing starts back up again. Over the course of this relationship, he has given up his hobbies and fallen out of contact with his longtime friends, and seems allowed to do things only with her and her family. I have watched as my brother has changed from a healthy and happy man to a shell of his former self.

Every time she gets upset, he has to jump through more hoops, make bigger gestures, and flagellate himself more until she relents and stops punishing him. He has come to my house twice in the past year and stayed, because she told him she wanted him to leave. I have continually emphasized to him the importance of seeking professional counseling but he says she refuses to consider it, because the problems all come down to him and his (alleged) wandering eye. My brother is a kind, gentle, considerate man, and this hurts him deeply.

I fear that my brother is the victim in an abusive marriage, and I don’t know how best to support him. I have told him repeatedly that he always has a home here and he can move in and stay for as long as he wants. I have also reassured him that his daughter wouldn’t be the only one in her friend group with parents who have decided to split up.

I care about him very much and want him to be healthy, safe, and happy. Our mom and I both worry that his wife will end up breaking him to the point that he would harm himself. How can I help him?

Dear Reader,

Your letter paints a troubling picture of your brother’s marriage, so I understand why you’re so concerned about his well-being. The situation you describe is indeed alarming, as it bears many hallmarks of emotional abuse: the constant accusations, the isolation from friends and family, the gradual erosion of your brother’s sense of self, and the cyclical nature of conflict and reconciliation, also known as “the cycle of abuse.”

In this cycle, things are calm for a time, but never for long. The tension builds and builds until there’s an explosion, followed by another period of calm, of promises, of temporary peace. Each time, the price of peace becomes higher. Your brother must make bigger gestures, offer greater sacrifices, diminish himself even further. This is painful to witness, especially when it involves someone you love.

Clearly you care deeply for your brother, and your desire to help him end this suffering comes from a loving and compassionate place. But I want to tell you something that might be hard to hear: You can’t save your brother from this relationship.

This doesn’t mean, however, that you’re powerless to help—far from it. But it does mean that you need to reframe how you think about your role. Once you accept that no matter how much you want to rescue him, your brother is the only one who can decide to change his situation, you’ll be able to support him much more effectively.

[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]

So what is your role? First, you need to understand his situation better so you can appreciate what he’s up against. Start by educating yourself about his experience so that you can understand why he engages in behaviors that seem baffling to you—such as his tolerance of his wife’s behavior and repeated begging for forgiveness for crimes he didn’t commit. You might feel that what he should do here is obvious: He’s in an unhealthy relationship and should get out. But bear in mind that abusive relationships frequently create a warped reality for the person being abused. Your brother has likely internalized many of his wife’s criticisms and may believe he truly is to blame for the problems in their marriage. This warped view makes leaving incredibly difficult for victims.

Think of it this way: Your brother and his wife are locked into a dance where the music of their relationship has become a monotonous dirge of accusation and defense. The steps go like this: His wife searches constantly for evidence of betrayal. Every glance becomes a crime; every interaction becomes a transgression. And your brother? He hears the music of confusion, self-doubt, shame. So he does his part of the dance: constantly attempting (and failing) to prove his innocence. Unfortunately for him, he’s trying to prove a negative—how do you show someone the absence of something? How do you demonstrate faithfulness to someone who has decided that you are unfaithful?

What makes this dance hard for you to watch is that the qualities you admire in your brother and that could make him a wonderful partner to a different person—his kindness, consideration, gentleness—have become the very things that his partner is using to manipulate him. The more he accommodates, the more his wife demands of him.

You say that this dynamic has been present since their relationship’s beginning, so instead of trying to convince your brother that his partner is mistreating him, you might get curious—and help him get curious—about what has drawn him to such a partnership in the first place. She seems to have come into this relationship with a history of relational instability—three children from three different relationships, prior to a fourth child with him. If she didn’t work through the issues that led to those relationships ending, she entered this current relationship with a suitcase full of previous betrayals (perceived or real), abandonment fears, and unhealthy communication patterns. But instead of unpacking this suitcase, she handed it to your brother and said, “You carry this. You are responsible for all of it.”

[Read: Couples therapy, but for siblings]

At the same time, your brother came into this relationship with his own suitcase. You say that he and his wife dated for six years before marrying, and even after having a child together they waited another three years to get married. I wonder if part of him had doubts about whether he wanted to be in this relationship, and another part of him preferred the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty. What in his own history led him to make that choice, to confuse controlling behavior with evidence of being needed, or to decide that the relationship he had—with all of its intense volatility—was “safer” to stay in than to leave so he could find something else?

Another way to support him is to encourage his curiosity. Your instinct might be to focus on his wife’s behavior, but a more helpful role is to provide a safe space for him to explore his own. Instead of saying “Your wife is abusive and you need to leave,” you can try “I’ve noticed that you seem unhappy this week. How are you feeling about things at home?” You can also gently challenge the narrative that he has internalized. When he blames himself for their problems, you might say something like “That doesn’t sound like the brother I know. The person I know is kind and loyal. I wonder if there’s another way to look at this situation?”

Whenever possible, you can float questions (not all at the same time) that help him reflect: “Do you ever feel lonely?” “Have you seen so-and-so lately?” “Do you miss doing (insert favorite activity)?” “What would be different if you weren’t worried about her reaction?” After another fight that ends with him at your house, rather than suggesting couples therapy, you might say, “Maybe you’d find it helpful to talk with a therapist on your own, even for just one session.” If he worries about his daughter, you might ask, again with gentle curiosity, “What do you imagine she’s learning about self-worth or loving relationships as she observes the two of you staying together?” He may not be able to answer these questions aloud, but you’d be helping him begin to consider an alternative narrative to the one he is carrying around. Just as important, you wouldn’t be trying to control him with what you want him to do and think, as his wife is—you’d be allowing him to go inside himself and access his own thoughts, feelings, and desires, which is a crucial step in a process that includes questioning, awareness, and finally, if he chooses, action.

As you open up this space for him, remember that just as your brother is overly focused on his wife’s unhappiness, you don’t want to be overly focused on his. Supporting someone in an abusive relationship can be emotionally exhausting and shouldn’t come at the expense of seeking support (such as therapy) for yourself. Your brother is fortunate to have such a caring sibling, but if you want to model healthy boundaries in a relationship, make sure you’re taking good care of yourself too.

Dear Therapist: I Ran Into the Man Who Raped Me

2024-09-30T07:00:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

Seven years ago, when I was a college freshman, I was sexually assaulted. This experience deeply traumatized me beyond what I could cope with at the time. I did not want to press charges or involve authorities, because I’d had a bad experience telling someone in power about a prior sexual assault. I eventually processed what happened through a lot of therapy and some medication.

I moved across the country and thought I’d never see the person who assaulted me again. But recently I moved back to where we both went to college. When a friend invited me to join a Spanish-practice group, I noticed that the meetup link said “organized by” and then it said his name. At the time, I assumed it was a different person because the name is common.

I showed up, and although the guy looked like my rapist, I still wasn’t sure it was him. I had mostly forgotten the details of that encounter years ago. After the meeting, I looked him up online to see if the details matched. I also asked my friend to send me his Facebook profile, which I couldn’t open: “content unavailable.” If it wasn’t him, why would I be blocked? It was him.

I immediately told another friend I’d made at the group about what had happened. That friend was stunned. Now I don’t know how to proceed—do I expose him to the group? Does he deserve to have a leadership role if he’s a rapist? Has he changed?

Dear Reader,

I’m very sorry that you were assaulted, and I’m glad you were able to process this trauma with the support of a therapist and medication. Sexual assault leaves many survivors with numerous psychological wounds, and although each person’s experience will be different, some common effects include anxiety, a sense of helplessness, depression, sleep disturbances, low self-esteem, withdrawal from social situations, flashbacks, amnesia (such as forgetting details of the encounter), difficulty concentrating, and a hesitance to trust in relationships. These effects can last for years if untreated, but even if treated, they can be triggered anew by something in the present—the scent of a particular cologne while walking through a department store, a song playing at a party, or, most obviously, running into the assaulter in person, as you did.

To figure out what to do, let’s consider how you feel, because clarifying your feelings will help you understand why you might take a certain action and whether doing so will contribute to your well-being.

[Read: The bad science behind campus response to sexual assault]

Let’s say, for example, that seeing this person again made you angry. Anger is a common reaction to a boundary violation (in this case, the assault itself) or a gross injustice (his “getting away” with the crime by becoming a well-liked leader of this group). If that’s your primary emotion, I imagine there’s a part of you that wishes to punish him by telling people what he did, which might lead to him being shamed and socially ostracized.

Although dealing with anger by hurting someone who hurt you is a natural impulse, the question is, if he were to be socially shunned by your disclosure, would that help you heal? Would you feel some relief because justice of sorts was served? Empowered because you were no longer silent? If so, that’s important information. But another possibility is that you could feel good in the moment for hurting him in some way—given how significantly he hurt you—but not feel any less angry, or experience any real sense of relief, in the long run. In that case, this might not be the action to take.

What I’m getting at is that whatever you decide to do should be viewed through the lens of this question: What outcome will be best for you going forward? And the corollary: What didn’t you get back then that might be helpful for your emotional well-being now?

As you reflect on these questions, let’s explore some other emotions besides anger that seeing him might have evoked. Did you feel afraid? If so, will you feel safer by choosing not to go to this group and finding another one like it? Will outing him to the group decrease your anxiety because doing so might protect both you and others he encounters from future harm? Here you’ll have to weigh your intent to warn others of this person’s potential to be a repeat offender with the fallout of his reaction. Will your anxiety increase if he denies what you tell others he did, sues you for defamation (if, say, there’s no “proof” of the rape), or decides to get retribution by ruining your reputation in this city you’ve just moved to? How will you feel if some people in the group continue to embrace him or doubt your credibility? These questions present another opportunity to anticipate the consequences of the various actions you’re considering and determine which would best support your well-being.

[Read: Abuser and survivor, face to face]

Given that he’s in the same city, you might also fear running into him again in another setting. In that case, you can reflect on how you would feel about talking with an attorney about the pros and cons of getting a restraining order, reporting him to the police, or filing charges. You say that telling someone in power about a prior sexual assault was a bad experience (I imagine it made you feel helpless and unheard), but given the therapy you’ve done since this assault, you might feel that doing so would be worth that risk now—or you might not. Sit with any anxiety you experience to determine what will make you feel calmer, safer, and more at peace.

Another feeling to explore in the aftermath of seeing him is that of isolation. Some people experience a profound sense of loneliness after a sexual assault. They hide what happened to them out of shame or confusion (“Did I somehow have a role in causing this?”), minimize the assault (“It wasn’t really that bad, so people might dismiss me if I tell them”), or avoid social situations because of depression or the worry that something similar might happen again, which isolates survivors further. Some people imagine that nobody will understand the impact the assault has had on them, or that friends will view them differently, so they try to go through their days as if everything is fine—then feel isolated from all the pretending. When the rape occurred in college, I don’t know whom you told besides your therapist, but it sounds like telling this new friend in the group felt validating. If you’ve felt isolated in your experience, sharing it with others you trust now could make you feel less alone as you take in this unexpected encounter with your rapist. You don’t say whether the friend who invited you to the group knows what happened in college, but perhaps confiding in her will also help you feel supported in whatever choices you make about how you handle this situation within the group.

Lastly, you asked if your rapist has changed, and I wonder again how the answer will affect you. If he has, do you hope that he will show remorse and offer a genuine, meaningful apology that would aid in your healing? In this case, you might gather some supportive friends for both emotional and physical safety to help you approach him. But if you do approach him and he can’t acknowledge what he did and how he hurt you, how will you feel after learning that perhaps he hasn’t changed at all? (While you don’t know whether he recognized you at the meeting—just as you weren’t sure it was him—if he did recognize you, I’m not hearing that he’s made any attempt to make amends.) With some self-reflection, you’ll be able to determine whether approaching him will give you a sense of agency (something stolen during a sexual assault) even if he denies what he did—or whether the question of who he is now doesn’t feel relevant to your well-being.

The beauty of taking a rigorous “feelings inventory” is that it offers the ultimate freedom that no one can take from you—the ability to choose for yourself what feels good to you. By being thoughtful about your emotional needs and anticipating which actions might get you closer to meeting them, you’re creating a way of being in the world that will help you figure out not only how to handle this upsetting situation but, just as important, how to show up in future relationships with a newfound sense of self-awareness and the confidence to act on it.

Dear Therapist: My Relatives Don’t Believe My Parents Were Abusive

2024-08-26T06:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

I was abused by my parents as a child and have limited contact with them now. I did try in my early 20s to have a relationship with them, but I saw no change in their behavior. In addition, they both flat-out deny the things they did, including dragging me by my hair from a dead sleep in the middle of the night down three flights of stairs, throwing me in the basement and locking the door, telling me repeatedly to do them a favor and kill myself, and beating me.

I try to maintain a relationship with my aunts, uncles, and cousins—who themselves have some problematic behaviors—but I find doing so difficult because they, too, tell me that my childhood wasn’t that bad and that I should love my parents unconditionally. They will invite my parents to events I will be at without telling me. If I find out and say I will not attend because I do not want to see my parents, they will tell me I’m being difficult. They will also bring up my younger sister, who has always been and continues to be my parents’ favorite. While her childhood was by no means easy, she did not experience as much abuse as I did and was shown much more loving behavior. For example, my father would spend one-on-one time with her as a child, something I never got. Meanwhile I was sent to live with an aunt and uncle because my parents “needed space.” My relatives will claim that my childhood couldn’t have been that bad if my sister is able to have such a good relationship with my parents.

I realize my parents will not change, and because I cannot accept their behavior, I have chosen to have limited contact with them. I would prefer to have no contact, but that is difficult while trying to maintain contact with my extended family. How do I maintain a relationship with my extended family without feeling so hurt or unheard?

Dear Reader,

I’m sorry for all you had to endure growing up, and for the repercussions you’re left to struggle with as a result of your parents’ behavior. I’m also sorry—but not surprised—that your family is minimizing, if not outright denying, your abuse. That must feel absolutely maddening to you.

Unfortunately, your situation is all too common, for reasons inherent in the nature of child abuse. Although the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says that more than 3 million cases of child abuse are reported each year, that is surely an undercount. If the abusers are family members, as tends to be the case, other adults in the picture aren’t likely to report their relatives to authorities; children, for obvious reasons, can be afraid to speak up. Complicating the situation further, perpetrators of child abuse might not even recognize their behavior as abuse. Because society is so poorly educated about what constitutes child abuse, physical and verbal abuse can, in some people’s minds, be mistaken for “discipline.”

Because of all this, many children suffer alone, with nobody to turn to for help. Some children blame themselves (“If I were a better child, they would treat me well”) while others realize that their parents are damaged and hold out hope that once they reach adulthood, they will be free. Except, as you’ve seen, abuse leaves trauma behind, and the effects ripple throughout the family system for years—which explains the bind you’re in now.

[Read: Can children be persuaded to love a parent they hate?]

You say that you want to maintain a relationship with your extended family while also feeling seen and heard, but the truth is you might not be able to have both. More likely, you have a difficult choice to make. As we explore each option, let’s bear in mind that your goal is to hurt less. What actions might get you closer to a less painful situation?

Your first option would be to try one last time to have a conversation with a relative who you think might be most receptive—perhaps a cousin your age, or the aunt or uncle who took you in when your parents “needed space,” considering they must have known something was amiss in your household. Given that you shared with your relatives the reasons for your parental estrangement and they’ve dismissed your experience as being “not that bad,” I don’t know how much hope there is that they’ll really hear you this time. They seem to have repeatedly ignored you and denied reality, which makes me think that—for their own reasons—they’re emotionally invested in believing the narrative that your childhood was different from what you experienced. Taking that into account, let’s think through how to talk with them in a way that validates that relative’s experience as well. You might say something like:

There’s something I’d like to talk about with you, and I know this is delicate, but I really value our relationship and I feel that having an open discussion about this will bring us closer. I know that you want to maintain a relationship with my parents, and I don’t want to interfere with that in any way. But I also feel dismissed when I share the truth of what happened in my childhood. I believe that if you really imagine what it was like for a child to be dragged by her hair, locked in the basement, beaten, or told to kill herself, you would have empathy for that child’s experience. But because the people who did this are people you love, I understand that you might feel as if you’re stuck in a challenging position—that if you acknowledge my experience, you are somehow betraying them, or that believing me might even make you feel differently about them.

Please know that I genuinely want you to have whatever relationship you’d like with my parents, and I’m not here to disrupt that at all. But for me to have a relationship with you, it’s important that you acknowledge what I experienced and respect my request to let me know in advance if my parents will be at an event so that I can make an informed choice about attending. You might believe that love is unconditional, but I believe that love is a verb—we act lovingly toward those we value. In that spirit, I hope that you hear my request with the loving intentions behind it, because I think having this understanding will make our relationship more meaningful and enjoyable for both of us.

Acknowledging the awkward position your relatives might find themselves in as they try to navigate simultaneous relationships with your parents and you could help make them feel less defensive and also more heard and seen in the way you want to be. It can’t be easy for them to reconcile the people they want to believe your parents are with the reality of what you’re telling them. Giving their predicament some validation might make it easier for them to receive your request with more openness and understanding, and instigate a shift in their behavior.

[Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?]

If, however, they remain unreceptive, a very difficult choice awaits you. I appreciate that you might get some good things from being in a relationship with your extended family, and that you’d be reluctant to give those things up. Sometimes people make the calculation that having hurtful relatives is better than having none at all. You can, if that’s how you feel, accept that they won't change but gain some benefit from maintaining these relationships in more successful ways—perhaps best done one-on-one instead of at family occasions where your parents might be, or by not engaging in conversations about what did or didn’t happen growing up and keeping things on a more superficial level. But a second option is available to you, and, given the depth of your ongoing pain, maybe it’s worth considering.

Let me frame that choice this way: Your relatives are at best enablers and at worst accomplices to your parents’ abuse. By denying what actually happened and saying that you’re the difficult one, they are gaslighting you, and gaslighting is itself a form of abuse. They have made you seem like the problem instead of your abusive parents. You might have transferred your desires for support and validation from your parents onto your other relatives, but they have shown that they, too, refuse to acknowledge your parents’ actions. In fact, they insist that you love your parents unconditionally despite what they did to you and then disregard your wishes to keep yourself safe from their presence.

Unless you can drastically alter your expectations of them, you will continue to feel hurt and unheard, which could be the compromise you settle on—but it might also be too much of an emotional price to pay. You distanced yourself from your parents after realizing that they wouldn’t change and you could no longer endure their behavior. Similarly, you may decide that the only way to take care of yourself is to apply the same standard to those relatives who are causing you ongoing pain.

This won’t be easy. Breaking with your parents maybe seemed more warranted, because your parents’ abuse was more pronounced. But just because your relatives’ behavior is subtler doesn’t mean it’s less insidious or harmful in the long run. Most people who were abused carry a deep wish that someone in the family will “get it”—see them and acknowledge their experience. Yet sometimes that validation and support won’t ever come from the family and has to come from another source that you have the agency to create, often referred to as a surrogate family or family of choice—a family that understands that love does come with conditions, which makes it all the more precious.

Of course, sometimes people who cut off ties with their parents can retain or even strengthen ties with extended family. But many also find they have to break up with the whole dysfunctional crew to save themselves. If you make that choice, you’ll have to grieve a series of tremendous losses: of the childhood you deserved, of the validation and support from other relatives who should be there for you, of the sense of safety and emotional security that comes from being part of a healthy family system. But you might ultimately gain an emotional freedom from the kind of pain the current situation repeatedly exposes you to—the benefits of which you may not even be able to imagine.

Dear Therapist: I Inherited Unwanted Family Secrets

2024-07-29T06:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

Everyone in my grandparents’ generation of my family has died. Now the Boomers are also starting to pass on and we Gen Xers are inheriting all the unwanted family secrets.

Secrets such as your paternal grandmother was raped by your great-great-uncle. And your maternal grandmother was a Jew who escaped the Holocaust, changed her name, and fled to America under false pretenses. One uncle was secretly into BDSM. Another, secretly gay. Your abusive father suffered from schizoaffective disorder.

What does it mean when your inheritance is every conceivable kind of secret quashed under generations of shame and guilt?

Some of these secrets I am glad and humbled to learn, such as my family’s Jewish roots. But then there are the wincing anachronisms, like an unspoken shame over a gay uncle. And the implications of some secrets are truly awful: Is there a relative out there, born of incest?

Why me? Why any of us kids? And when it’s my turn, am I to become the speaker of the secrets of the dead? Is that a legacy I want to own for myself or my son?

Dear Reader,

I can imagine how overwhelming it must be to learn of this family history and not know what it means to be its custodian going forward. You don’t say how these secrets are being communicated in your family—are these deathbed confessions?—but secrets devoid of conversation and context can weigh heavily on their recipients because they come with a set of never-asked and never-answered questions. You’re left trying to make sense of them in a vacuum.

Part of your inheritance seems to be that, in addition to the secrets themselves, you’ve received them without attention paid to some important considerations. These considerations include: Am I sharing this information for my benefit or that of someone else? Have I considered how the person I’m sharing this with might feel and what the value is of sharing this now—or at all? It sounds as if you weren’t given those considerations, so let’s start with some context that might help you make sense of these secrets.

[Read: The questions we don’t ask our families but should]

The first thing to understand is that secrecy is usually rooted in shame—will someone important to me, or to the society I live in, judge me or my family if I reveal the truth? Secrets can be about anything, but common stories involve mental-health conditions, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, an affair, adoption, addiction, sexual orientation, suicide, incest, abuse, or financial impropriety or failure.

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison” because of their deleterious effects, the greatest of which is alienation. Secrets isolate the keeper of the secret and lead to ongoing lies in order to keep it hidden, a pattern that in turn pushes others away. In addition, when some family members know the secret and others don’t, the former group develops an unspoken bond while the latter group feels excluded, even if they can’t pinpoint exactly why. This leads to distance and distrust, and if the secret is discovered or shared years later, there can be deep-seated anger at having been deceived all this time. For example, an older sibling might know that a parent’s “business trips” are actually rehab stints for alcoholism, and dismiss the younger sibling’s suspicions about their father’s drunken behavior—only to acknowledge this reality to their younger sibling decades later. The younger sibling, having been gaslit for an entire childhood, might harbor tremendous resentment toward that sibling for the rest of their life.

Secrets can be felt so deeply in a family dynamic that they result in a huge range of mental-health challenges—eating disorders, anxiety, and depression, to name a few—for those who perceive that “something is off” but don’t know what that something is. Worst of all, secrecy can create a culture of secret-keeping—children living in a household with family secrets tend to keep secrets themselves, not only while growing up but in their adult relationships as well, which can be a serious hurdle in forming genuine and trusting connections with friends or romantic partners.

In your family, the clumsily handled revelation of these secrets has left you feeling burdened (“Why me?”), confused about what having this family history “means” for you, and uncertain about what to do with this knowledge going forward. Let’s take those in order:

Why you? Because some people struggle with mental-health issues, make bad choices, and go to great lengths to hide their histories or true selves—and these people are a part of most families. You might feel alone in your situation, but please know you are far from alone.

What do their difficulties or behaviors say about you? Absolutely nothing. Just as you can’t change the past, you also aren’t responsible for it. Moreover, you are your own person, making your own choices in life—what came before you is part of your story, yes, but these are not your deeds.

Are you to become the speaker of the family’s secrets? Yes, but not in the way you experienced—as a heavy burden, dumped on you without consideration or context. Secrets lose their destructive power when they’re spoken about as comfortably in daily conversation as any other topic—and by doing so, you can choose to become a model for the next generation.

For instance, let’s say someone makes a comment about gay people around your son. You might say something like, “I had an uncle who was gay and he felt he had to keep it hidden. There was such discrimination, and that must have left him feeling very lonely his whole life. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to anyone we know.” By talking with compassion about something that your family found shameful, you’re teaching your son not only about the importance of being upstanding with his peers but also about the benefits of living authentically rather than hiding in secrecy. Similarly, if the Holocaust comes up in your son’s history class, you can let him know that one of his relatives had to change her identity in order to come to the United States and avoid being killed. If your son wonders why you weren’t close with your father, you might explain that your dad suffered from a mental-health issue that led to him being frightening to you at times. (All mental-health conditions, as with any physical-health condition, should be disclosed to the next generation of biological children because they need to be aware of their genetic history, especially given how much more researchers now know about prevention and treatment.) And although you might not think there will be an organic way to bring up rape and incest three generations removed from your son, conversations about consent, shame, or patriarchy might lead to you saying something like, “I was stunned when I found out that this awful thing happened.”

[Read: The secret-police files that revealed my family’s history]

What’s different about the way these pieces of family history will be received by your son is that now there’s no burden. They’re facts shared in a context of trust and empathy, so you’re modeling (in a developmentally appropriate way—be aware of your child’s age) that no topic is so shameful that it’s completely off-limits.

This doesn’t mean that you become so invested in not having secrets that you fail to model privacy. Your uncle, for example, deserves privacy around his personal sexual turn-ons. Likewise, everyone gets to choose their own level of privacy. Say your son wants to know something that you don’t feel like sharing—perhaps he asks how much money you make, and you feel he’s too young to responsibly handle this information. You can respond with, “It’s not a secret—but it feels private to me, and we’re all allowed to choose what we keep private. When you’re older and understand more about how money works, I’ll feel more comfortable sharing this with you.”

You have a great opportunity to create a new family culture around shame and secrecy, and it sounds like you might even have some relatives to join you in this mission—your fellow Gen X family members who are wrestling with the same issues. Imagine if all of you work to change the way these secrets live in your family, to talk openly about them with one another and—using the guidelines I suggested—create a new legacy for future generations in which “family secrets” become a thing of the past.

Dear Therapist: I’m the Golden Child, and My Siblings Resent Me for It

2024-06-24T06:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

My beloved dad died four months ago, leaving me to settle his estate and manage my mom’s affairs. I had no idea what went into closing an estate. Dad had asked me to take on this role more than a decade ago, so getting it wasn’t a surprise—the surprise was its breadth and challenges.

Despite the rigors of this chapter—in addition to my grief over losing my 87-year-old dad—I’ve found it healing to honor the requests he laid out. His primary goal was to take good care of my 84-year-old mom, to whom he was married for 64 years, and to whom I’ve never been close. I’m her middle child and oldest daughter, and she’s told me several times throughout my life that Dad preferred me to her. My older brother and dad never got along. My dad wanted a big-man-on-campus-type son (being a quarterback, showing interest in cars and girls, having a family, playing golf), but my brother has been none of those things. He moved states away after college and has never married. My younger sister also felt unseen by Dad, and skipped town to build and focus on her own family.

I am the “golden child” who never wanted the job. Since his passing, I’ve sold the family home, settled the estate, and moved my mom into the retirement home she’s always wanted to live in. Naturally, this has been a tough transition for her, so I try to visit every weekend to help with errands, doctor visits, etc. My siblings, who are much closer to Mom emotionally, rarely visit her or ask me about the status of the estate (although they’ll inherit a sizable sum in the future). Instead, I get seething resentment. My sister has repeatedly challenged me about the house’s closing price (too low, she believes); my brother called me “the Führer” last week, accusing me of loving my new role. In the meantime, I’m arranging Dad’s celebration of life (no one else stepped up), and picking Mom up at the ER after she’s done an Ambien-inspired walkabout from the home.

I’m exhausted, bitter, and this close to being over it.

Is it possible to honor my dad’s wishes, look out for my mom’s best interests, and salvage my sibling relationships? I love them both, but their lack of support—and inability to see that I didn’t ask for this role—is starting to make me wonder if I need to let the salvage efforts go.

Dear Reader,

The difficulties you and your siblings are experiencing are both frustrating and common. The death of a parent and the financial and logistical decisions that follow can bring deep-seated childhood feelings and sibling dynamics to the surface. That’s what seems to be happening here, and once you understand the emotions at play, you’ll have a better sense of how to decrease the tension and make these relationships more congenial.

Let’s start with the general premise that most people, even in adulthood, have a central question they ask themselves regarding their parents: To what degree, and in which ways, do my parents love me?

In childhood, the answer to this question for those who have siblings is usually inferred through observation and comparison. How does Mom or Dad treat the other children in our house? Are our parents more or less affectionate, doting, present, critical of, delighted by, or displeased with me than they are with my siblings? Do they value the qualities my sibling has over those that I have? Which parent is my ally and can be counted on to have my back? Which parent serves this function for another sibling, leaving me feeling misunderstood and unseen?

How these dynamics play out informs the feelings that siblings bring with them into their adult relationships with one another: lingering perceived injustices; a sense that one child was somehow favored (sometimes birth order or gender lead to differential treatment, even if parents aren’t aware of these biases); or a belief that if one sibling was “easy” while another made things difficult for the parents, the easy one is entitled in adulthood to more emotional or logistical support—or even inheritance—as reparation for the time, energy, and focus denied that sibling while the parents focused on the challenging one.

[Read: The plight of the eldest daughter]

Keep in mind that while preexisting family dynamics might quietly (or not so quietly) brew beneath the surface for years, when the death of a parent is added to the mix, earlier issues don’t tend to recede—they become amplified by grief, a tectonic event experienced differently by each sibling based on the respective relationships they had with that parent.

In your family, many if not all of you seem to bear unspoken resentment related to your father. If your mom believed that your father preferred you to her, she might have felt resentful toward you, which could account for the lack of emotional closeness you describe. Similarly, you say that your brother and sister felt unseen by your father, which likely caused some resentment on their part, especially when they saw him delight in you. And as much as you enjoyed a close relationship with your dad, you also might have had some resentment toward him for having been placed in the role of “golden child,” giving everyone else in the family reason to resent you.

I’m pointing this out not to blame anyone in your family but to shed light on a pattern that you’re all still dealing with. As you and your siblings process the death of a father with whom you each had very different relationships, these old resentments have become front and center.

But you can break out of your old roles. Your father has passed, your mother is aging, you and your siblings are well into midlife: This time of great change is ripe with opportunity for the three of you to see one another as the adults you’ve become, separate from your childhood identities.

You can start by relinquishing the “golden child” role. You say you didn’t ask for that designation, and if you truly don’t want it, you can dethrone yourself now. Consider that you weren’t the golden child only while your father was alive; by being named his executor, you remain the golden child after his death, and your siblings are reacting to that. When your sister questioned you repeatedly about the sale price of the house and your brother called you the Führer, they were probably feeling as unseen as they felt by your father, but this time by his living proxy—you.

I don’t know what “salvage efforts” you’ve already tried, but you might start by sending your siblings an email that looks something like this:

Dear Siblings,

I know there’s been tension between us since Dad died, and I realize that some of this isn’t new. I’d really like to change this, because I love you both and want us all to have a better relationship. I’ve been thinking about how things have gone in the past few months, and I want to apologize for not including you both in a way I feel you should be. It’s our duty to honor Dad’s written wishes, but I’m not the expert here, and I want to know what’s important to each of you and how you’d like to be involved so we can work as a team. I’ve realized that we’ve all had different experiences in our family, but we have a chance now to create our own relationships as grown-ups. Maybe the gift that will come of Dad’s passing is that the three of us can get to know one another better and become closer as we navigate through this time in our lives.

Can we talk about what matters to each of us and how we can communicate our needs and wishes so that everyone feels included and heard?

Love,
Sister

If your siblings are willing to share their desires with you, you’ll want to do much more listening than talking—and when you do talk, speak from a place of curiosity instead of defensiveness. Keep the conversation present-focused rather than rehashing the past. Notice when your own resentment comes up, and how you can turn that resentment into a calm request, such as “I’m feeling overwhelmed planning Dad’s celebration of life/taking care of Mom, so can we figure out a solution together?” Your siblings might welcome the opportunity to participate more, but if not, the three of you can problem-solve as a team: With the help of the inheritance, perhaps you could hire an event planner, or enlist a friend or other family member to help with your mom’s weekly needs. Maybe the staff at her retirement community has a recommendation for a reliable person who can take on some tasks and lighten your load. Whatever the solution, the most important element is that your siblings’ resentments will decrease because they feel included in the process and that their opinions matter; and your resentment will decrease because you’ll receive fewer criticisms that stem from their feeling unseen. You’ll also be functioning as a unit, so you won’t carry all the responsibility alone.

[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]

Ultimately, the three of you will have to make your own peace individually with the relationships you’ve had with your parents. But together, you can make peace with one another as the soon-to-be-oldest generation in the family that you’re becoming.

Dear Therapist: A Son I Didn’t Know Existed Just Found Me

2024-05-27T06:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

My wife of 31 years and I are currently dealing with an issue that I thought happened only in books and movies, but boy, was I wrong.

I recently received an email that started out “This is going to sound strange … but I think you know my mother?” Well, I did know his mother, because I dated her as a teenager and young adult, and now I have a 35-year-old son I knew nothing about as well as five grandchildren (confirmed through DNA)!

The emotions were difficult at first, going from frustration, anger, guilt, and anxiety to hopefulness and wonderment about the possibilities. Both my son and his wife want to develop a relationship with me and see how things go, for which I’m thankful. To be honest, I’ve cried more in the past two months than I have in the past 35 years combined! I think by now I have let go of the anger and guilt I felt about, in a sense, abandoning a son, losing out on years of that relationship—feelings made more intense by the fact that he had a difficult childhood. My wife and our four children have responded amazingly. They talk, text, and play online games on a regular basis with their newly discovered extended family, and to my delight, they are building relationships.

We have been planning a cross-country trip to see my son, his wife, and their children in person, but planning this trip has brought back some long-buried trauma for my wife. The breakup with my son’s mother was less than amicable—she ended it and left me devastated. She tended to “come around” from time to time, even during the early days of my new relationship with my wife. This made my now-wife extremely uncomfortable, and I did not react like I should have (or would now) to reassure her that I in no way desired to be reunited with this other woman.

Even though my wife is supportive of building a new relationship with my son and his family, she is worried about joint family functions where my son’s mother might also be present. In fact, she has forbidden any interaction between my son’s mother and me (a decree I agree with and support), and she has also asked my son to keep the relationships completely separate—meaning not talking with his mother about anything we might say, do, or experience together. I brought up the fact that there will be life events where even unwanted interaction is nearly unavoidable—graduations, weddings, etc. She agreed that these are important events but is unmoved in her position. She says she would refuse to be in the same place as my son’s mother. My oldest granddaughter is a freshman in high school and will graduate in a few years—an event I would not want to miss, assuming the relationships continue to develop as I believe they will.

I don’t blame my wife and completely understand that I handled things badly decades ago.

How can I help her through this in a loving, supportive way?

Dear Reader,

How wonderful that your family has embraced this surprise discovery in such a supportive way. Adding more love to what sounds like an already large and loving family is a beautiful choice, and has the potential to be immensely rewarding. Still, introducing new family members into an existing system can be complicated for each person involved, and because your letter focuses on your wife’s discomfort, let’s consider her perspective.

There are two layers to what your wife might be experiencing. First, like you, she is adjusting to a new and unexpected reality. Not only is she inheriting an ex-partner of her spouse’s and a stepson, which can be challenging for any relationship, but she’s also been stripped of the freedom of choice that comes with knowing that they were part of the package from the start. Had this information been available to her before you decided to marry, she would have had the choice to accept (or not) the people you came into her life with. Of course, your son’s existence was news to you too, but you’ll need to allow for different emotional reactions to the news. For instance, whereas you felt guilt and anger related to not knowing about him earlier, along with giddiness and gratitude about the possibilities that lie ahead, your wife might feel a mixture of excitement for you and anxiety about how these new people will affect her marriage and your relationships with the children you had together. Moreover, because she wants to support you as you navigate this relationship with your son, she might not feel comfortable sharing any worries about what the presence of this adult child might bring to your already established family.

[Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?]

Now add to this the second layer: the history both of you share, ostensibly around your son’s mother. I say ostensibly because the pain your wife carries (what you’re calling trauma) has little to do with your son’s mother and everything to do with you and your wife. What happened between you seems very understandable: You were devastated by a breakup, met someone wonderful soon thereafter, and were still dealing with residual feelings that prevented you from setting appropriate boundaries and prioritizing your new girlfriend’s (now wife’s) comfort. Because you were young and less experienced in relationships, what started as a lack of attunement to your own feelings and those of your new girlfriend became a wound of mistrust that was never properly repaired. Your ex-girlfriend might have gone away, but the trust issue between you and your wife didn’t, because some 30 years later, she still feels threatened. And although she believes that the solution is once again to make the ex-girlfriend go away (by having no contact and forbidding the mere mention of your family by the son), the solution is in fact to process the breach of trust together—the very same solution that should have been pursued back then.

This might look like sitting down with your wife, taking her hands in yours, looking into her eyes, and saying something like: “I love you beyond measure. Being married to you for the past three decades and raising our wonderful children together has brought me more joy than I could have asked for. The last thing I ever want to do is hurt you, and it pains me to think about how deeply I did so when I was young and didn’t know what I know now about relationships. I was in the throes of what felt at the time to be a traumatic breakup, and I also knew I had just met the most amazing woman when I met you, and I didn’t have the maturity then to figure out how to handle these two big events coinciding in my life. I take full responsibility for not protecting our relationship, and I’m deeply sorry for how painful that was for you. If I could go back and handle this differently, I would—but the good news is, I have an opportunity to handle it differently now, having learned a lot from our long, strong marriage. Can we talk about how we can work together to create boundaries that also reflect the trust we’ve built over the past several decades?”

You can start by asking more about her experience and her fears so that you can treat them with care this time around: How is she feeling about the discovery of this grown son and his wife and children? What are her concerns about how their being in your lives might affect you, her, or your children? What does she imagine will happen if you and she see your ex at a grandchild’s graduation or wedding? What can you do this time to reassure her that your feelings for your ex are a thing of the very distant past while also allowing for the reality that having a relationship with this son and his family will create conditions in which you will all be at some events together? How do you as a couple repair the trust issue from the past in a way that doesn’t involve asking a grown man not to freely talk with his mother about his own life?

[Read: Can you ever really escape your ex?]

Keep in mind that adjusting to these new relationships will be a process, but being able to articulate feelings without issuing ultimatums (this goes for both of you) will create a safe and healing experience this time around. You can’t predict everything that will come up, but you can be intentional about the choices you make together. You’ll need to take things slowly, talking openly to find ways to balance the needs of your marriage with the needs and feelings of the other people around you—people who also have a lot at stake in this situation. For example, attempting to ostracize your son’s mother by not being in her presence or insisting that her son edit what he tells her sends your son the message that his mom is “bad”—and given that he’s half made up of her, he may well internalize a sense of “badness” about himself. In addition, his mom will come up in conversation if he has questions about the story of how he came to be and what happened between his parents, which he has a right to know. As you become acquainted with him, you’ll also learn how long he’s known about you, how he found out, and why he chose to contact you now—all topics that will involve his mom and about which you should be open.

You might also have questions you need to process yourself, such as why your ex-girlfriend didn’t tell you about your son, and you may want to have some conversations with her about his early life. But this time, each step will entail open dialogue about your respective needs and concerns, and you and your wife can set boundaries you negotiate together. Engaging in these discussions builds the trust that was missing the first time around, and strengthens the already solid bond you and your wife have created. Having a second chance to get this right at this time in your lives might just be an extra gift that the discovery of your son brings your way.

Dear Therapist: I Flipped Out at My Brother, and I Regret It

2024-04-29T06:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

My older brother and I are both in our 30s and have gone through periods of being close and periods with a lot of conflict. The general pattern is he says something mean or belittling to me, and in response, I get angry and scream, and my upset is always disproportionate to the situation.

I have struggled throughout my life to manage anger appropriately, and my family knows this. Thanks to therapy and an anger-management group, I no longer react this way with other people, and I am able to communicate my feelings and resolve conflict like a mature adult. But with my brother, I react automatically and rapidly, before I can think logically or process the situation.

Several months ago, my brother was visiting from out of town after our elderly great aunt died. The day after the funeral, we were at our parents’ house for a dinner with extended family, and before guests arrived, I was helping my mom put food and drinks out while my brother and dad sat on the couch watching TV. He told me it was too early to put the soda out and I said something like, “Knock it off, c’mon. Do it yourself if you want it done differently.” I wasn’t yelling, and we were both still calm at this point.

Then I turned to grab my coat and leave the house to pick up my cousin at the train station. My brother said, “Are you going to stomp out of the room and have a tantrum now like you always do?”

I lost it. I was livid that he would mock me for an issue he knows I’m working on. I proceeded to scream at him at the top of my lungs for 10 to 15 minutes. I can’t remember ever feeling angrier. Still, however insulted I was, I know my screaming was out of line and it really upset my parents too.

For the rest of the time he was in town, my brother refused to acknowledge me. He didn’t even look at me when I said, “Have a safe trip,” as he left for the airport. We still haven’t talked (normally we catch up on the phone maybe once a month and text now and again).

I know my behavior was wrong. I regret it immensely, and also appreciate that screaming so loudly for so long is abusive. But I also want him to understand how hurtful it is when he makes fun of me for something I really struggle with. His silent treatment feels more like a way to make me feel lousy than it does him setting a boundary. And no one in my family thinks he’s wrong, because after all, my reaction was so extreme.

How can I apologize for my behavior while also emphasizing that his insulting comments make me feel small and like he doesn’t respect me? I know my apology will be lost on him if I emphasize the latter too much.

Dear Reader,

I’m not surprised that you have trouble managing anger around your brother, because family—the people with whom we experience our earliest emotional wounds—can trigger those old wounds quickly and viscerally, making it hard to step back and reflect in the moment the way we might with friends or colleagues.

When triggered, a person has an out-of-proportion reaction to something that internally connects to their past (an unresolved hurt, for example), leading that person to say or do things they regret. But despite the regret, a common tendency is to blame the person who evoked this big reaction and to feel like the wronged party in the interaction.

Yet what’s interesting about triggers is that they can be part of a reciprocal process: One person behaves in a way that triggers the second person, and the second person then behaves in a way that triggers the first. It’s like a dance in which nobody changes their steps, performing it the same way every time, unless someone walks off the dance floor.

[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]

Here’s how your dance went in the incident you described: Your brother made a comment about waiting to put out the drinks, which triggered feelings in you (of not being appreciated, or of being criticized). You responded with an abrasive reply, which triggered feelings in him (anger at being snapped at, when he feels that all he did was offer an innocuous suggestion). He reacted to his anger by lashing out at you with a provocative jab, triggering your shame. Then the dance came to its familiar ending: You screamed, he withdrew, and you’re both still furious with and hurt by each other. That’s the performance you’ve done together over the years.

If you want to repair your relationship and not just get past this one incident, it will take more than an apology: You’ll need to lead your brother in a new dance. And for that, you’ll have to learn some new steps.

This might be easier if you begin by asking yourself this question: What unresolved hurt from my past am I reminded of by this current situation? You say you’ve had a lifelong struggle with anger, and in children, anger can be a sign of feeling helpless or powerless. I noticed in your letter that when your brother made the provocative put-down that led to your screaming, your father witnessed it but didn’t say anything to your brother—in other words, he didn’t protect you. And now, although your parents are understandably upset by your screaming, they don’t seem to be upset with your brother for provoking you.

Perhaps this was a pattern growing up—you feeling injured with nobody to protect you—and that would certainly help explain why these sorts of incidents set you off so easily. But I want you to consider another dynamic possibly also at play here: that your brother might have felt just as powerless as a child, and in order to make himself feel more powerful, maybe he sought to play on your insecurities and shame you. You then felt powerless (nobody was there to tell your brother to treat you with respect), so you would scream in order to defend yourself (and take back the power). If this is the case, the answer to the question of your unresolved hurt is that the people who were supposed to protect you didn’t, and as a child, you sometimes didn’t feel safe and cared for.

I don’t know the particulars of your childhood, and you may find a different answer to that question, but once you find it, you can begin to make a shift. Instead of expecting what you didn’t get from your family as a child (and feeling enraged in those moments), you can start learning how to provide it for yourself as an adult. I think of this as going inside of yourself when triggered, instead of letting your anger erupt on the outside. That—the going-inside instead of out—is your new dance step. With the help of your therapist, practice the new step (noticing that you’re being activated, breathing, asking yourself what you can do to comfort yourself in the moment, such as imagining enveloping your injured younger self in your loving adult arms) until you have the choreography down.

[Read: What’s the smallest amount of therapy that’s still effective?]

As the cliché goes, it takes two to tango, and when you refuse to do the old dance with your brother, eventually he’ll realize that he’s dancing alone, get bored, and stop. That’s the beauty of learning a new dance. Your freedom comes not from controlling his steps, but from leading with yours.

Do you need to apologize for what happened before you get back on the dance floor? Yes, but you might frame it less as an explanation for your behavior and more as an invitation to create something new that will help him feel safe around you. You could write him a letter like this:

Dear Brother,

I’m very sorry for yelling at you when you were in town. It must have been tremendously upsetting to be on the receiving end of that, and I completely understand why you might need some space. I really care about our relationship, and my hope is that when you feel comfortable, we can have a fresh start. I’ve spent these months thinking about our relationship, and a therapist said something that resonates with me: Family members often do a dance—one person triggers something old in the other person, that person responds in a predictable way, the other person responds in an equally predictable way, and nothing changes until someone realizes this is an old dance from childhood and decides to change their steps. I want you to know that I’m going to change mine, and I’m inviting you to try this new sibling dance with me. I know you might be skeptical at first—after all, we’ve done this same dance for decades—but I hope you’ll take me up on the offer soon and see that we can be different together as the adults we are now.

Love,

Sister

Then you sit back and, no matter how (or if) he responds, you keep practicing your new steps, because that’s how you give yourself what you truly need.

Dear Therapist: I Don’t Want to Take Care of My Aging, Homophobic Parents

2024-03-25T06:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

I’m an eldest daughter in my late 20s, and when I was a teenager, my relationship with my parents significantly broke down. I left for college thousands of miles away, anticipating long-term estrangement. They were homophobic, telling me I had to break up with my girlfriend if I wanted to continue to have a relationship with them, and I was not willing to do that.

We avoided full-blown estrangement, but our relationship has puttered along without an emotional connection. I text and call my mother a few times a month. I try to text my father and younger brothers, but receive a reply only once or twice a year. My brothers live at home as young adults, so I’m aware of what they’re up to, but I don’t have an open line of communication with them.

My conversations with my mother have made clear to me that she and the others are expecting me to eventually move home and provide eldercare. This is unsurprising because my childhood role in our family was the Responsible One. When our relationship was good, my mother and I spent significant amounts of time caring for her mother, my grandmother, and I found this work profound and meaningful. The idea of breaking that chain of care pains me, but I can’t imagine providing the level of care my parents are expecting without feeling significant hurt as old wounds reopen. They claim to now accept my sexuality because I’m engaged to a woman and that “proves you were serious,” but that doesn’t fix their terrible reaction to my high-school girlfriend, or their assumption that I was not mature enough to know myself.

My parents both grew up with physically abusive fathers and put significant effort into breaking the cycle of physical violence and raising my brothers and me with more financial security than they ever had. They have no close friendships and have always struggled socially. They are textbook emotionally immature adults but cannot see it, and disapprove of therapy.

Anxiety about the future is eating me alive. I just want to make a decision and stop living in limbo with these emotionally stunted but well-meaning people. Our casual contact as I plan my wedding has ranged from pleasant to passive-aggressive, with no victories or valleys better or worse than that. What do I owe to adults who are trying their best, but whose best hurts me?

Dear Reader,

Contemplating caring for elderly parents creates anxiety for many adult children, but what strikes me about your letter is the consuming intensity of your anxiety at this moment. You and your siblings are in your 20s, and it sounds like your parents are relatively healthy. So I’m curious about why this anxiety regarding the future is “eating you alive” right now.

My guess is that the timing has something to do with your upcoming wedding. Big life transitions—leaving for college, moving to a new city, getting married, or having a baby, to name a few—tend to bring old issues we haven’t processed to the forefront. I think the reason the eldercare question is so present for you is that this new phase of life you’re about to embark on—creating a family of your own—is making you ask a bigger and more global question: What kind of relationship do I want with the family I have so much painful history with?

In order to figure this out, you’re going to need to confront some of the pain that still sits between you and your parents, starting with their reaction to your sexual orientation when you were in high school. You say that they “accept” your sexuality now because they’re interpreting your marrying a woman as a sign of your being “serious,” but there’s a significant difference between believing who you are and embracing who you are. I imagine what you’re really longing for is more than mere acceptance; it’s a deep acknowledgment of how much hurt their initial reaction caused you, and a genuine apology for having made their love contingent on you being someone you’re not. It would entail their taking full responsibility with a sentiment that might sound something like this: We are so sorry for our behavior and the profound effect it has had on you. We were wrong, and we see that now. We love you unconditionally and are so excited that you found the person you want to spend your life with. How can we begin to repair this with you?

Realistically, they probably don’t have the capacity yet to express themselves in this way, but you can guide them there, showing compassion and patience as they learn. When family members are willing to make repairs, many ruptures—even extremely damaging ones—can be healed. The key word here is willing. I’m glad that your parents worked hard to break the cycle of physical violence they grew up with, and now they have the opportunity to create a healthier emotional environment for current and future generations. Most important, you have the opportunity to practice emotionally healthy communication and model it for the family you’re creating in your marriage.

[Read: The parenting prophecy]

You say that your parents disapprove of therapy—maybe because talking about feelings makes them uncomfortable or because they’ve internalized some cultural stigma surrounding it. Some parents are hesitant to go to therapy because they worry that they will be blamed or considered bad parents, though this is a misconception and not something a therapist would do. It’s possible that once communication opens up in your family, they might be more receptive to the idea of therapy, but regardless, you can start some long-overdue conversations with an email like this:

Hi Mom and Dad,

As my wedding approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about our family and how this milestone presents an opportunity for us to have a more open, close, and connected relationship. I feel very lucky to have found the person I want to spend my life with and to have the experience of feeling loved and valued for who I am, and I’m so looking forward to this next chapter of my life. I want you to know how much I admire the work you’ve both done to raise my brothers and me differently than you both were. I know that you didn’t want to inflict the pain you endured as kids on us, and that doing this took a tremendous amount of effort. I’m so grateful for that.

I also realize that despite not having had good role models, you did your best to show me love. Yet I still experienced a lot of pain, especially around your reaction to my sexual orientation and the resulting distance between us that persists to this day. I’m reaching out now because just as you wanted to create a healthier family when you got married, I want to do the same. You wanted to end a cycle of physical violence, and I want to end a cycle of feeling emotionally distanced for being who I am. If I have kids one day, I want them to know that they are loved without contingencies, and that I will never give them ultimatums about how they can love and be loved when they choose their partner.

Recently I’ve thought a lot about the pain and distance in our family, and I believe that unless we address it, we’ll drift further apart than we already have, and that makes me sad. I know we can change our family dynamic so that it feels warm and loving for all of us, but it would have to start with some honest conversations and your willingness to understand the impact of what has happened between us over the years.

I have no intention of blaming you for what happened in the past. Instead, I’d like to foster some understanding and healing around it, along with a more genuine, close relationship.

Would you be interested in continuing the work that you did as parents to end an unhealthy cycle, and have a conversation with me in which you listen openly to how I feel so that together we can create an even stronger family to pass on to the next generation?

Love,
Your Daughter

[Read: The changing ways parents react to their kids coming out of the closet]

Once you reach out, remember that your parents have choices about how they respond to your invitation to do some family healing, and that you have choices too—including about how you might care for them as they age. They can view you as the daughter who doesn’t appreciate their efforts at good parenting, or as the one who helped bring this family closer. They can see you as the ungrateful daughter who (despite having a full life of her own and other siblings available to help) didn’t take sole responsibility for their caretaking, or as the loving daughter who generously provides whatever level of care feels comfortable. (There are many ways to show care that don’t involve moving back home with your parents, such as offering support in care coordination, calling to check on them, taking them on enjoyable outings, or reviewing their bills.) They can choose not to educate themselves about sexual orientation and continue to make hurtful comments, or they can love you unconditionally for the courageous woman you are, who went thousands of miles away to college in order to stay true to herself, and delight in what makes you happy going forward.

By offering them an open line of communication and the chance to do better, you’re giving your parents a gift that they can accept or reject—and no matter the outcome, that’s a gift for you too. Because instead of sitting in your anxiety and wondering about the future, your honesty—not only with them but, most important, with yourself—about what you need for your own well-being will lead you to the answers you want when the time comes.

Dear Therapist: I Miss Having Sex

2024-02-26T06:30:00-05:00

Dear Therapist,

I’m 70, nine years a widow, financially stable, no children, no parents. I have family and friends, near and far. I live alone. I used to love sex, but menopause brought on physical changes that inhibited me. Four years of topical estrogen have, my doctor says, fixed the problem. I went through an initial period of really enjoying the novelty of asexuality (my goodness, the time it frees up!), but that’s changed. I miss sex.

Last night at dinner, my niece said, “You’re buff!” While I have no illusions that time has not passed—this buff isn’t the same as it was when I was a competitive athlete—I feel certain there’s someone who would be as happy to have a physical relationship as I would be. But how to figure out who?

The trouble is, I don’t know if I will again be able to enjoy intercourse. If I can physically enjoy it, it was my favorite part of sex, and I would target my search that way. If I can’t enjoy intercourse, I’m experienced in other options, and might well prefer another female as a lover.

I don’t want to be a purse or a nurse, and I don’t require a relationship to enjoy physical intimacy. I’m looking not for a partner, but for a playmate. I hear about hookup culture with the younger crowd … Could I just ask the 30-something rock-and-roll drummer flirting with me in the sauna at the gym if he would do me a favor?

I bet I’m not the only senior widow wishing she knew how to handle this. Can you help?

Dear Reader,

You’re right that you’re not the only senior—widowed or otherwise—wondering how to navigate her sexual desire. Part of the challenge has to do with the way our culture views “older” sex. Many people assume that those past middle age no longer care about sex, and if senior sex is acknowledged at all, it’s generally thought of as either funny or cringey. Of course, bodies change over time and medical realities come into play for both men and women (erectile dysfunction, vaginal atrophy, mobility issues, various illnesses), but studies show that many older adults are still sexually active. The majority of respondents to one poll of 65-to-80-year-olds said that they are interested in sex and that sex is important to their quality of life.

Moreover, touch is important for well-being throughout our lifetime. Touch can lower blood pressure and stress levels, and boost moods and immune systems. There’s even a commonly used term for when someone is not getting enough touch: skin hunger.

Still, misconceptions about sexual desire in older adults result in people talking about it only in the privacy of a therapy room, in a letter to an advice columnist, or, more commonly, nowhere and to nobody. Therapy clients have told me that after their partner died, they felt they could talk about everything they missed about their partner and all that they grieved for—the emotional and spiritual intimacy of partnership—but not the physical loss and longing. Yet they missed the intimate physicality of their spouse just as much. With decades of life left, they wondered, what were they supposed to do with these cravings they saw as taboo? Well-meaning friends suggested that they take up hobbies, get a dog or cat, and stay socially connected, but nobody gave them guidance on how they could get their physical needs met.

[Read: The friends who are caring for each other in older age]

Isolated in this way, many widows like you experience what has been called “sexual bereavement”—the loss of sexual intimacy when they’re predeceased. In a survey of older women in the United States, a sizable majority reported that they anticipated missing sex with their partner if their partner were to die, and would want to bring it up in conversations with their friends—and a higher percentage yet would want friends to mention it first. Even so, more than half of participants reported that they wouldn’t think to ask a widowed friend about that aspect of their loss.

I provide this context to emphasize that your question is common and your needs are valid—as is any way in which you feel comfortable pursuing them.

So let’s think about how to get your needs met. It sounds like your ideal situation would be having a “friend with benefits.” (This noncommittal arrangement can mean different things to different people, and as a result, this would need to be explicitly defined between you and your “playmate.” More on that later.) There are many places where you could potentially meet this person. You could join a dating site for widows and widowers or one for older singles—most of which have an option to indicate what you’re looking for, ranging from “marriage” to “not sure” to “nothing serious” to “hookups.” You can go to MeetUp.org and meet new people while doing activities you enjoy—some are specifically for singles and certain age groups. You can take dance lessons (where, presumably, you’ll meet dance partners who could turn into something more), join a tennis or golf group (as a former competitive athlete, you might appreciate a setting where you’ll be able to find more active singles), or take up a hobby or new interest that exposes you to people outside your immediate circle.

There are also travel groups and cruises for mature singles, which tend to be very social. And if at some point you want to make a change in your living arrangements, you might consider a vibrant retirement community where, contrary to cultural assumptions, many people find casual sexual partners. Finally, let your friends know that you’d like some companionship—and they can interpret that however they choose. This way, as they encounter other singles, they’ll have you on their mind for an introduction. You might also reach out to old friends or former lovers who are single, even if they live in a different city (perhaps that’s preferable?), and go pay a visit.

Of course, your partner could be any age (and, as you say, any gender), and you’re already wondering if there might be interest from the 30-something drummer at your gym. You can absolutely ask him, but remember that he’s not just “doing you a favor”—if he’s interested, you’d be doing one for him too. Asking from a place of confidence and self-worth matters, because it will enhance your experience.

[Read: Your friends don’t all have to be the same age]

The key with anyone you choose is to be honest in advance about what the relationship is and is not. Whether you’re writing a profile for a dating app or meeting someone out in the world, you should explain up front that you’re looking for satisfying sex without long-term partnership. You should tell the person before your clothes come off that it’s been a while since you’ve had sex and you need to go slowly to see how it feels, and that you’re open to exploring other avenues besides intercourse. The point is, you’ll want to communicate your sexual needs and preferences as well as your emotional ones.

Remember, too, that no matter who you’re with, it’s very important to practice safe sex, and to hold your boundaries around safety if your partner isn’t on board. Many older adults who are now divorced or widowed aren’t up to speed on safe-sex practices; aren’t tested for sexually transmitted diseases as routinely as younger adults by their doctors (again, cultural misperceptions contribute to this); aren’t thinking as much about safe sex, because they associate it mostly with pregnancy, which is no longer relevant; and are more susceptible to contracting diseases, including STDs, because their immune system weakens with age. You can look online for videos to educate yourself on safe sex for seniors. You can also keep yourself safe by meeting new people in public places, letting a trusted friend know where you are, and having sexual experiences (at least initially) at a hotel or somewhere other than your home or your partner’s.

Many people find later-in-life sex to be incredibly liberating and even transformative. They tend to be more open to owning their desires, more willing to ask for what they want, less worried about the laughable moments in a sexual encounter, more curious to experiment and try something new, less self-conscious about their bodies and less judgmental of others, and more inclined to focus on fun and pleasure without the pressures of work and family that can affect a sense of playfulness in earlier life stages. This could be an exhilarating journey of self-discovery, and you sound more than ready for the adventure.

Dear Therapist: My Daughter Tried to Confront My Ex-husband’s New Wife

2024-01-29T06:30:00-05:00

Dear Therapist,

I was married to my husband for 35 years when he left me for his therapist. My eldest daughter was so shocked and hurt by this that she called the woman at her work to ask her how she could do this to a family. The woman wasn’t there; my daughter spoke with her boss. The woman was asked to resign.

My ex was very close with this daughter in that their personalities were so similar. But since this happened, he has more or less cut our daughter off. He texts her short greetings on her birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas and sends gifts at appropriate times, but it all feels very empty to my daughter. He went to visit her once in the six years since our divorce and said his reason for the visit was to receive an “apology for what you’ve done to my wife.”

She feels she has done nothing wrong and refuses to apologize. She told him that his wife owed her an apology for destroying her family. She has a 2-year-old daughter herself, but he has little interest in his grandchild.

He treats our other daughter with love and cares about her children. He pays for her to come visit him and stays in close contact with weekly phone calls. It breaks my heart that he can be so cruel to one daughter and so kind to the other. In the beginning of this mess, I tried to get him to put himself in her shoes and understand she called the woman out of love for him and not for the purpose of getting her fired, but it has made no difference.

Should I try to do something again or just leave it alone? My daughter is in pain.

Dear Reader,

This is such a tragic situation with a legacy of ripple effects—not only for your daughter but for your entire family. To be clear, therapists who have romantic relationships with their patients have breached the profession’s code of ethics, and the typical consequence for those who do this is that they lose not just their job but also their license to practice. I mention this first because whether the information came from your daughter or elsewhere (presumably the facts would surface at some point), the result would have been the same. Your daughter didn’t harm this therapist—this therapist harmed herself with her poor judgment and unequivocally unethical actions.

Many people—including you and your daughter—might wonder how a father could become so blinded to this objective reality that, even six years later, he continues to view the situation backwards, insisting that your daughter is at fault and owes his wife an apology. His distorted thinking shows how an emotionally unstable therapist can allow normal emotional processes to run amok in the therapeutic work, and then abuse her position of authority to convince your husband that she has done nothing wrong—and has, in fact, been wronged.

[Read: These teens got therapy. Then they got worse.]

Here’s how this works: In therapy, two dynamics typically emerge—transference and countertransference. Transference occurs when a patient directs feelings related to a person in their lives (for instance, a parent or sibling) onto the therapist. These can be positive or negative feelings, ranging from anger to adoration. Transference generally occurs outside one’s awareness. If, for example, you have a problematic relationship with a family member or another important person in your life who you feel is controlling, you might transfer those feelings of being controlled onto your therapist whenever she suggests an intervention for you to try. Romantic or erotic transference can also occur, which means that a patient believes he’s in love with his therapist. This can happen when a therapist reminds a patient of a past romantic partner or love object, or when an earlier need is being fulfilled by the therapist—unconditional acceptance, a safe environment, emotional intimacy, feeling seen or valued or protected. With this kind of transference, the therapist is often idealized and perceived to be the perfect partner. Transference can be very useful if the therapist helps the patient identify this process as a way to gain insight into underlying feelings and to understand where these feelings are actually coming from.

Meanwhile, therapists are trained to monitor their own feelings of transference toward the patient—what’s known as countertransference. A therapist whose patient reminds her of her impossible-to-please mother might start to feel helpless and begin to resent this patient. Or a therapist might overidentify with a patient who struggles with a similar issue to one that the clinician dealt with in the past (divorce, an alcoholic parent), and become unable to disentangle the patient’s feelings and experiences from her own. As with transference, countertransference needs to be brought to light and processed. But unlike with transference, therapists process their countertransference away from their patients. They go to supervision to get professional feedback from other clinicians (or they go to their own therapy) to monitor their own countertransference and avoid muddying the clinical work they’re doing to help their patients. If the countertransference can’t be managed through supervision or their own therapy, therapists are ethically required to refer the patient to another clinician.

Your ex-husband’s therapist, however, neither helped him understand what his romantic transference was really about nor managed her own countertransference. What’s worse, once she married your ex-husband, instead of using her training and knowledge to help him navigate the fallout by saying, “Here’s the effect our being together is going to have on your family, so let’s take responsibility for the pain we’ve caused and try to heal this,” she put her former patient in an impossible bind. Choose between two people you love: me or your daughter. What a terrible dilemma, in which the only way for him to please his wife is to alienate his daughter.

[Read: I still get called daddy-mommy]

This outcome doesn’t seem like collateral damage; it feels like willful manipulation, a continuation of the behavior she exhibited as your ex’s therapist. She must know, for example, the deeply damaging effect a father’s rejection will have on his daughter and also his granddaughter, and how that wound will pass through the generations (what’s known as intergenerational trauma). I’m sure she has a sense of how parental abandonment affects a formerly loved child who experienced years of a strong father-daughter attachment, especially when that daughter feels not just abandoned by her father but also utterly betrayed and gaslighted by him. This former therapist must also know about the lasting impact of sibling favoritism and the profound consequences it can lead to, including anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem—and the tension that this imbalance can create between the siblings themselves, another factor that affects emotional well-being. (A good sibling relationship is correlated with greater lifelong happiness.) In other words, given her training, she must be well aware that her choices to become romantically involved with her patient and then alienate this person from his daughter have widespread consequences for innocent people: a damaged father-daughter relationship; the potential sibling conflict, including resentment from the abandoned sibling and a sense of guilt from the one who remains in favor; a granddaughter who won’t know her grandfather; a wife betrayed in a traumatic way and left to helplessly witness her daughter’s ongoing pain.

You don’t say what your ex-husband was struggling with before he became involved with his therapist—perhaps he was depressed or anxious or had issues in your marriage—but going to a therapist is an inherently vulnerable act, and in this state of vulnerability, he seems to have fallen prey to her influence. Yes, he’s responsible for his actions, but in a different dynamic, one that didn’t involve his therapist, he might have seen more clearly the pain his daughter is in—and been motivated to help alleviate it. But given his wife’s influence, I don’t think he’ll be able to hear anything you might say if you attempt to speak with him.

Instead, here’s what you can do: Reassure your daughter that she’s done absolutely nothing wrong. Explain to her that her father’s behavior reflects everything about his own struggles and nothing about her. Remind her often that she is a person worthy of deep parental love, and that she has yours always and forever. Suggest that if she wants to attempt to reach her father, she might write him an email letting him know that his absence in her and her daughter’s life feels like a tragedy for all of them, including him, and that she hopes they can find a way to heal while there’s still time. (Your daughter might not trust therapists much, but if her father is willing to go to therapy with her—and she gets to choose the clinician—there might be an opportunity for something new to happen between them and for him to get some perspective free from the pull of his wife’s gravitational force.)

Your job as her mom is to hold two truths at the same time: You can’t help her father see something he isn’t willing to look at, or prevent his actions from hurting her. But you can offer your daughter the most precious gift a parent can give—your loving presence—and know that although it won’t erase her pain, it will still be more than enough.

Dear Therapist: How Do I Talk to My Boyfriend About His Ex?

2023-12-25T06:30:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.

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Dear Therapist,

I’m in a new long-distance relationship with a man I was with in our early 20s (we are now 38 and 40). I plan to move out of state to be with him in a few months. Things have gotten very intense very quickly—something we have both been aware of and are okay with.

However, he has an ex whom he broke up with about a year and a half ago. Their breakup was tumultuous. When she came up in conversation about a month ago, I asked, “If things had gone differently that night, do you think you’d still be together?” He answered with a pretty confident-sounding “Yes.” Just “yes.” He also described her as having been a “mother figure” to his 10-year-old son, and described her children as being “like siblings” to his son. They were together for three years, although during this time they did break up and get back together. She also cheated on him, but he was adamant about making things work after that.

Since that conversation, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that there’s some lingering emotion he hasn’t processed. I asked him that same night if there was anything left that I needed to be worried about, and he paused for a moment, then said, “It’s buried.” I didn’t like the sound of that. Between that and the “Yes,” I became fully obsessed. I’ve Googled her and found her social-media accounts; I also discovered that her name is on the roster of employees where he works. I don’t think she still works there, but he has never mentioned that she ever did, which I find odd given how much I’ve asked about their relationship.

I’ve never told him how much that “Yes” bothered me, until tonight. We were on the phone and I said it had stuck with me and been nagging at me since. His response was “Well, if things hadn’t ended tragically, they probably wouldn’t have ended.”

I’m thrown for a loop and told him as much. He said it was a poor choice of words, but I find these responses extremely unsettling. I see them as evidence that he still has “buried” emotions (which he insists he does not, calling this another poor choice of words) left over from that relationship.

Am I being unreasonable? I know it’s not healthy for me to be so stuck on this, but I have a very strong intuition and I can’t seem to move on. What do you think of his “Yes” and of his saying that things wouldn’t have ended if not for that one crazy night? Should I let it go, or is that as wild of a thing for him to say to me as I think it is?

Dear Reader,

I feel for both of you as you struggle with the ghost of your boyfriend’s ex—each in your own way. Your boyfriend likely has feelings about her and their relationship that he doesn’t know how to manage, either in his own heart or with you; and you feel anxious because you believe that his having feelings about his ex and their relationship threatens your relationship with him.

Answering whether you’re being “unreasonable” or should “let it go” won’t ease your anxiety. What might, though, is finding a way to communicate about his ex that allows him to talk about his past without worrying about your reaction.

Keep in mind that everyone brings their past into their current relationships, and just because you might not have a former partner on your mind doesn’t mean that you’re starting this partnership with a clean slate. All of our history in relationships—including interactions with the family members we grew up with and experiences in important friendships—shapes the way we love, whether it’s how much we’re able to trust, how vulnerable we can be, how much closeness or space we can tolerate, or how directly or indirectly we communicate what we want or need.

[Read: The scariest part of a relationship]

From what you describe, it sounds as if your boyfriend was drawn to an intense and volatile relationship, not because he consciously sought out that dizzying roller-coaster ride, but because it felt familiar to him on a level outside of his awareness. Although he suffered what must have been painful breaches in the relationship—they broke up and got back together; she cheated on him and he pushed to stay—he also gained a family, with his ex as a mother figure to his son, and her kids having a siblinglike relationship with his. Losing this kind of familial bond might have felt intolerable to him, which could explain why no matter how hurt he was, he fought so hard to stay. I have a feeling that something about this dynamic reflected a version of what he experienced growing up, and might be part of the reason the two of you are having difficulty talking about the complicated feelings he has about his ex: He worries that his honesty will threaten your bond, and because of his history, he might find the possibility of another loss so anxiety-provoking that he will do anything to prevent that from happening.

But you also bring a way of interacting to this relationship. You don’t say what your history is, but two things stood out for me in your letter. First, your reliance on your intuition, and second, the way you reacted to his initial answer about whether he would still be with his ex had the nature of the breakup been different. Instead of sharing your feelings directly with your boyfriend, you went straight into detective mode, Googling his ex and hoping to solve this yourself. I wonder if when you were younger, you felt you had to manage uncertainty or anxiety in this way: Something unspoken was in the air, the people around you were uncomfortable discussing it, and, guided by your intuition, you were left to get the information yourself.

So what does this mean for your relationship? Your boyfriend might be worrying that if he says too much about his feelings, you’ll leave him; you might be worrying that if he withholds relevant information about his feelings, he’ll leave you. Neither one of you wants to be hurt or to hurt the other person, but the strategies you’re each using aren’t helping either one of you feel secure in this relationship. I’d suggest having a different kind of conversation and slowing things down. You say that you’re both comfortable with the pace and intensity of your relationship, but intensity can get in the way of forming a deeper connection rooted in a more intentional process of getting to know and understand each other.

[Read: Attachment style isn’t destiny]

To broach a new conversation, you’ll need to get clear about what your concern is regarding his feelings for his ex and that relationship. Are you worried that if he misses aspects of what they had, they’ll get back together, or that he won’t have room to love you fully while still grieving his loss? Or that he will always compare your love with theirs—that he won’t love you as much? (Even though his “love” for her might have been a re-creation of a pattern from childhood that drew him to an unstable but intense attachment.) You need to understand your fear so that you can open up the conversation in a different way, one that makes space for him to share his true feelings instead of shutting down or saying what he thinks you want to hear. You could start with something like this.

Honey, I know talking about your ex has been hard for us, and I think that I haven’t made it easy because, to be honest, I feel jealous and threatened, imagining you’ll leave me and get back together with her, even though that’s not your intention. I think it’s important for us to be able to say things from a place of honesty even if they make the other person uncomfortable, because doing this will make our relationship stronger. For me, guessing what’s going on is more anxiety-provoking than hearing directly what you’re thinking, feeling, or struggling with. I think I’ve given you the impression that you shouldn’t think about your ex, or miss her, or be grieving the deep connection and blended family that you lost with the breakup. I don’t know if you’re saying “It’s buried” because thinking about the breakup will be too painful for you, or too painful for me—or both. But having complicated feelings about this is completely understandable, and I realize now that your feelings of loss don’t reflect how you feel about me—that you can miss aspects of her and still love me—so I hope we can talk about this more openly as we move forward together.

Give your boyfriend some time to process what you’re saying, and to take in your reassurance that his honesty will bring you closer. Then see how he responds to your invitation. If the two of you can begin to talk more openly about his lingering feelings about that relationship and any omissions—such as why he didn’t disclose that they worked together—or if he realizes that he still has more to process and is willing to do that with a therapist, this bodes well for your relationship. If, however, he doesn’t seem interested in understanding what went wrong in that earlier relationship, such as how one argument could end a three-year relationship that he believes would have otherwise survived, or why it was so volatile in general, then you have useful information without having to go sleuthing. It’s one thing to have unprocessed feelings and actively work on them; it’s another to decide to ignore them. At that point, you might ask yourself not whether you should let go of his comments, but whether you should let go of a relationship with someone unwilling to work through difficulties you encounter together.

Dear Therapist: I Don’t Want to See My Mom This Christmas

2023-11-27T06:30:00-05:00

Dear Therapist,

I am struggling to set a much-needed boundary with my mom around Christmas.

I’m a divorced mom of one, and my ex-husband and I split the holiday. My daughter is either with me on Christmas Eve and then goes to her dad’s on Christmas afternoon or vice versa, depending on the year. We’ve been divorced since she was little, so we’ve been doing this for years.

Our parents live near each other, about three and a half hours away, and we both go down to see our own moms for Christmas. My mom is toxic and guilt-trips me big-time whenever I inform her that I don’t want to come visit. Last year her reaction was so bad that I became physically ill: ocular migraine, anxiety so intense I could barely speak, etc. I caved because I just couldn’t handle her nonsense.

My daughter will be 13 this year. I’ve always dreamed of a Christmas Day we could just enjoy at home, creating our own traditions. I’ve never really been able to do this, because of the split household and the lack of boundaries with my mom. This year my ex-husband has a work gig on Christmas Day, which has presented me with the opportunity to stay home and enjoy the day with just my daughter and our cats. My daughter is getting older and the years of having her at home are numbered. As of right now, my mom thinks we will be down on Christmas for our “fancy dinner.”

I buckle because I’m a people pleaser and can’t handle the guilt trip. Last year she said, “I guess adopted children just love differently” in response to my saying I’d like to stay home and maybe hang with a friend instead. I’m 42 and I struggle to say no. So how in the world can I set this much-needed boundary with my mom? I have zero desire to visit. It ruins the day, and I love Christmas.

Dear Reader,

Many people struggle to express what they want to their family members, and this is especially true during the holiday season, which comes with heightened expectations layered upon old patterns and wounds. Issues around gift-giving, visiting, travel, and hosting tend to be not just about the question at hand, but about feelings related to how individuals in the family have felt loved, prioritized, controlled, or appreciated. Because of this history, often there’s a fear of how unpleasant the conversation might be, so people either avoid having it entirely (which creates more resentment), or initiate it in a way that sounds uncaring (which creates more conflict).

For this reason, before I suggest how to set this boundary, let’s consider the way you’ve framed your holiday dilemma. You describe your mom as “toxic” and her expression of perceived rejection as “nonsense.” You might understandably find her behavior frustrating, but as soon as we begin labeling people and their reactions, any compassion for their experience diminishes and we become dismissive of their feelings. This doesn’t mean that your mom’s feelings should supersede yours. It just means that you will get better at stating your wishes when you can make space for both.

To do this, you’ll need to hold two things at once. First, as an adult, you absolutely have the freedom to spend Christmas as you wish. Second, it’s natural that your mom would want to spend this day with her daughter and granddaughter, and that she would feel especially disappointed not to at a time when it seems as if most people will be with family. For her, the “fancy dinner” tradition might be something she never had as a child and wanted to create with her own daughter (like your wanting to create a tradition with yours). Or Christmas might have been a happy time that she looked forward to every year, and looks forward to even more now that her family has moved away.

In addition to whatever personal associations your mom has with family holidays, in our culture the holidays take on extra significance because their commercialization makes them inescapable—the seasonal music at the grocery store and the mall, the ads during a TV show you were enjoying, the decorations on neighbors’ homes as you walk down the street. If your holiday isn’t coming together in the way you’d hoped, it’s easy to feel left out of something that seems to include every other person.

Given her comment about adopted children and parental love, she might also have her own long-standing feelings of “otherness” for not being able to have a biological child, if that was the case (many adoptive parents are made to feel “othered” by society), and those feelings may inform her perception of being othered once more (“Everyone else is spending Christmas with their families—yet again, I’m different”). The point is that there are many reasons she might feel anything from sad to excluded to abandoned at the idea of not spending Christmas with you and your daughter.

[Read: The new question haunting adoption]

To be clear, none of this is your responsibility—asking you to consider her feelings isn’t the same as guilt-tripping. What I’m encouraging instead is the practice of what’s called mentalizing: imagining her internal experience while also being able to hold on to your own.

Why does this matter? It’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing a parent in a binary way—they’re good or bad, healthy or toxic—and in doing so, we become narrow-minded ourselves. In reality, her feelings are reasonable, and so are yours. By acknowledging this, you might still disappoint her, but you can approach her with empathy so that your boundary is presented less as a rejection and more as an invitation to connect with some flexible alternatives that you can both enjoy.

Considering your mother’s feelings and your own together can help you come up with an arrangement that works for you and, with that clarity, set a compassionate boundary. You might, for example, decline the usual celebration but offer to visit her the week after. Or you might decide to go for New Year’s (or, in the future, for Thanksgiving) instead of Christmas. Or you might do neither, and send her something that arrives on Christmas so she doesn’t feel forgotten, along with a heartfelt card: “Merry Christmas! We love you and are thinking of you! We’ll FaceTime you later!”

As you decide what feels comfortable, don’t forget to check in with your daughter—does she enjoy the “fancy dinner” with her grandma, or does she want to stay home with just you? She’s old enough to have a preference, and by including her in this decision, you’ll be modeling for her that you care about how she wants to spend the holidays, and that she’s not there just to satisfy your needs. Remember to frame this without complaining about her grandma, which puts her in an awkward bind between two family members. It can be as simple as “Because your dad’s away this year, I thought it might be fun to relax at home this Christmas, and we can see Grandma on such-and-such date instead. Does that sound good to you, or would you rather go to Grandma’s that day?”

[Read: The unspoken wedge between parents and grandparents]

Now, as for setting the boundary with your mom, you could send an email that goes something like this (I’ll call your daughter Jane for simplicity):

Hi, Mom.

I want to let you know that this holiday season, Jane’s dad will be away, and we have the opportunity for the first time since the divorce to stay in one place and not juggle homes this year. We haven’t spent a single Christmas together in our own home, just the two of us, without the usual three-hour drive and splitting Jane’s time. Jane is 13, and I only have a few more years with her here, so we’re going to spend Christmas at home, the two of us.

I know you feel disappointed, and I completely understand that. As a mom myself, I imagine I’d feel the same way if Jane wanted to spend Christmas away from home. But as difficult as that would be for me, I’d also want Jane to spend the holiday in a way that works best for her. You once said something that surprised me—that “adopted daughters love differently”—and I found that comment confusing because that’s not how I feel, and my being adopted has no bearing on how I decide to spend the holidays. At some point in her life, Jane will choose to spend Christmas with her partner’s family, or with her dad, or with her friends, and despite how much I’d want to see her, I’ll know that I’m giving her my love by supporting her wishes, and that she’ll feel closer to me because of that. That’s what I hope happens with you and me—that you can love me by honoring my wishes, and know that loving me in this generous way makes me feel closer to you.

Of course, we would still like to see you, and wonder if we can find another time to come visit the following week to celebrate together. Let me know your schedule, and we’ll figure something out.

With love,

[Name]

Once your boundary is communicated, your job is to manage your own response, not the other person’s. Your mom might send her usual dose of guilt, but remember: Just because someone sends you guilt, doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery. You can reply, “Mom, I know you’re disappointed, but I’m not discussing this further—let me know another day we can come visit the following week, otherwise I have to go now.” Alternatively, she might show her hurt by not responding, or talking badly about you to relatives, but that’s beyond your control. Part of setting a boundary is deciding how you will respond, and if you stay home with your daughter but still feel guilty, that’s something you’re doing to yourself. Instead, I hope that you’ll give yourself a long-overdue gift for Christmas this year: a beautifully wrapped box of self-compassion.

Dear Therapist: I Cannot Support My Mother’s Marriage

2023-10-30T07:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

My mother has been in a verbally and at times physically abusive relationship for more than two-thirds of my life. After my parents split up when I was a child, my dad had custody, but during visits with my mom, and a brief time living with her, I witnessed physical violence and sexually inappropriate talk, and was verbally abused myself by this man. Sometimes the police were involved, but my mom always dropped the charges. I suffered immense trauma, which to this day has still not been validated by her; at times she has even denied that certain things happened.

After many years of therapy in adulthood, and a really bad incident that led to her boyfriend’s arrest a few years ago, during which I provided emotional support to my mom only for her to later return to the relationship, I chose to no longer have any contact with this man. I also set boundaries around my relationship with her for the first time. At first, there was a huge strain on our relationship, and although it has never been the same, we have been able to begin to rebuild over the past couple of years.

Now my mom has announced that she is going to marry this guy, and wants me at the wedding. I cannot fathom being around this person or supporting their marriage. But I am also heartbroken by the idea of missing my own mother’s wedding, and I am worried about what that will do to our relationship.

While almost every part of me says do not attend, there is this ever-present worry. Any advice is welcome. I am at a loss on what to do here.

Anonymous
California

Dear Anonymous,

I can understand why this decision feels so difficult for you, and I hear the ways in which you feel pulled into a situation that makes you doubt your instincts. On the one hand, you seem to have clarity about what’s right for you; on the other, you’re unable to act on this clarity. This is something that I suspect your mother struggles with too, so I want to begin by helping you understand the choices she makes, so that you can examine this pattern in yourself and free yourself from it.

Abusive relationships are tricky to understand from the outside, because, the thinking goes, why would a person decide to stay with (or repeatedly return to) someone who harms them? I imagine that you have had trouble making sense of your mom’s decisions for your entire life, but her decisions don’t make sense for this reason: Abusers typically control their victims through emotional manipulation, which in turn results in distorted thinking in the abused.

Examples of this distorted thinking might include defending the abuser (“He’s going through a hard time” or “He really loves me and feels so bad about this”). An abused person might even start to believe that she caused the abuse (“If I didn’t trigger him, he wouldn’t act this way”) or minimize the behavior (“He lost his temper, but don’t we all?” or “It’s just words; that’s not really abuse”). Perpetrators also prey on their victims’ sense of self-worth, accusing them of being problematic (“You want more affection? You’re so needy!”); attempt to induce guilt (“See what you made me do!”); and degrade their partner by telling them they’re undesirable (“You’re leaving? Who else is gonna want you?”).

[Read: The particular cruelty of domestic violence]

Manipulation can also contribute to fears about leaving. The abuser might threaten the victim’s safety if she were to leave. Some people in abusive relationships worry that they’re putting their children at risk if they leave the children’s father (“My children may suffer if I take away their dad” or “If I leave and he gets time with them alone, I don’t trust that he won’t hurt them”). Others have real concerns about financial stability for themselves and their children. Still others have significant terror about being alone, because their sense of self has been so diminished.

To make matters worse, many abusers try to isolate their victims, so that the person being abused doesn’t get perspective on their distorted beliefs from people outside the relationship. An abuser might criticize their partner’s friends or family, dissuade their partner from spending time with them, threaten the partner if she shares “private information” about their relationship with outside parties, and convince her that nobody else understands the deep love they share and that the only person who has her back and best interests in mind is her abuser.

Many people who gravitate toward abusive partners and have trouble leaving also have histories that push them in this direction. For instance, a person who grew up witnessing abuse might not know what healthy love looks like, may feel some kind of loyalty to the abuser (“He had an alcoholic father, and his mother died when he was young, so I don’t want to abandon him”), or might subconsciously act out a childhood desire to “fix” an abusive parent by believing she can fix her abusive partner (“If I just love him enough, he will change”).

Finally, being controlled, manipulated, and physically or emotionally harmed causes trauma, which also contributes to self-doubt, confusion, and an inability to trust one’s own instincts.

What does any of this have to do with you? Not only were you forced to witness your mother’s abuse when you were a child, but you were abused by this man too, and the person who was supposed to keep you safe didn’t do so, because she couldn’t extricate herself from his abuse either. As a result, a part of you has internalized the same self-blame and lack of self-trust your mother seems to experience. Instead of asking How can I take care of myself?, you’re asking How will my mother feel about this? You’re experiencing “ever-present worry” over making a choice that protects your emotional well-being—just like the ever-present worry your mother likely has about making a healthy choice that will upset her partner.

[Read: The most misunderstood concept in psychology]

Unlike your mother, though, you have protected yourself in a way that she couldn’t. You went to therapy, processed your trauma and grief, and gained clarity on what you need to feel safe. You cut off contact with the person who abused both of you. You set boundaries with your mom that you weren’t able to before, even at the risk of upsetting her. Your hard work has led you to this point, and it sounds like what you need now is to continue to listen to your own voice and give yourself permission to remove yourself from an unhealthy situation, even if your mom won’t give herself that gift.

So let’s reframe your question: You aren’t just asking if it’s reasonable to take care of yourself by not attending your mother’s wedding. You’re asking if it’s reasonable to take care of yourself by not attending the wedding of someone who has abused both you and your mom.

This is what I hear you say loud and clear in your letter: Yes, I know it is.

Now you just need to say this to your mother, and you can do this in an email. It might look something like this:

“Dear Mom, I love you very much, and, as you know, it breaks my heart that you’re choosing to be with someone who hurts you when you deserve so much more. Although this may upset you, I’ve decided not to attend your wedding, for two reasons. First, it will be too painful to watch someone I love set herself up to be continually mistreated. I can’t celebrate this with you. It will require my exterior to not match my interior, and I’m not willing to do that. Second, I have my own pain from this man’s abuse, and being around him brings up that old trauma. I don’t want to put myself through that. I know this decision might disappoint you, but I will disappoint myself even more if I go. I hope one day you learn how to not disappoint yourself either. I’m glad we’ve begun to have a more honest relationship with each other in my adulthood, and I believe that this honesty will continue to bring us closer. Thanks for respecting my choice, even if you don’t agree with it. Love you, [NAME].

Then press “Send,” take a deep breath, and congratulate yourself for taking another important step toward removing yourself from the cycle of abuse.

Dear Therapist: My Mother Is Rewarding My Brother’s Bad Behavior

2023-09-25T07:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

I am the older sibling; I have a younger brother.

My brother is incarcerated. When he is released, he will be in his late 50s and will have no assets. As a felon and a sex offender, he will probably have difficulty finding a good job. He will move in with my mother, assuming she is still living. My mother has chosen to leave her mortgage-free home and its contents to him, and to divide the rest of her assets equally between us. There are no conditions in place, such as leaving the property in a trust, to deal with his possible recidivism, marriage, or financial irresponsibility (he has a history of foreclosures).

The rest of her assets are not much, because she has spent so much on his legal fees and continues to support him financially while he is in prison. She is making significant improvements to her house, which will be his house. The value of his inheritance will continue to increase, while her liquid assets will continue to decrease. In the meantime, I am the one providing her with the everyday help and support she needs.

I am struggling with feelings of hurt and resentment. She is rewarding him—generously—for his very poor choices and behavior. I never felt entitled to an inheritance, and if she were traveling around the world and spending it all so there was nothing left, I think I’d be okay with that. I know it will cause her a lot of pain if I tell her how I am feeling, and I don’t want to add to her burden. She is still grieving the loss of my father, coupled with her emotions about my brother.

Can you help me frame this in a way that helps me overcome my bitterness? I’m not proud of how I’m feeling.

Anonymous
Seattle

Dear Anonymous,

Everything you’re feeling is completely understandable, so much so that if you’d said you had no feelings or were completely at peace with the situation, I would raise my eyebrows. I’m starting there because you’re asking me to help you “overcome” the way you feel—bitter, resentful, envious, unseen, unappreciated—when what will help you most is to welcome those very reasonable feelings without judging yourself, and then use them to take action.

I don’t know the particulars of your situation—how early in life your brother’s behavioral issues began, what the age difference is between you, how long your mom (or both of your parents, before your father died) has been supporting your brother through the consequences of his behavior even before he became incarcerated—but I imagine you’ve had feelings about your family’s relationship with your brother for quite some time. Perhaps your brother’s behavior in some form or another has been challenging since childhood or young adulthood. A common dynamic in families with a troubled sibling is that the parents are so focused on navigating the crises at hand that they don’t notice—or have the bandwidth to address—the burden placed not just on them, but on any other children they have.

In families where one child has a chronic illness that feels all-encompassing, a similar dynamic emerges. An intense focus on the sick child stretches the parents’ financial, emotional, and logistical resources so thin that the healthy siblings try to do the opposite: not ask for much, stay under the radar, and be as accommodating as possible. In the case of a sibling with a behavioral issue, however, the other sibling—you—faces added burdens: Maybe you were embarrassed by your brother, teased about him, or even scared of him. Maybe he acted out in ways that harmed you, and you didn’t get the emotional or physical protection you needed, or were afraid to ask for it. You might even have hated him or wished he didn’t exist and then felt ashamed for these thoughts, not knowing how normal a response this was.

[Read: When a sibling goes to prison]

Sibling relationships are complicated, even under the best of circumstances. Siblings can be our protectors, rivals, tormentors, playmates, nurturers, co-conspirators, mentors, role models, and/or cautionary tales. They are, in most families, the only other people with whom we share a particular set of parents, a unique household environment, and years of experiences during a formative time in our life. For these reasons, a sibling relationship can have a lasting impact into adulthood. For you, this might include a sense of being overlooked for being the “good” child while your sibling gets “rewarded” for being “bad.” If there’s a history of this pattern, now it’s being illuminated by your mother’s inheritance plans.

I have a feeling, though, that underneath this sense of injustice is a long-standing loss you might not have grieved. Recently, you lost your father and whatever role he played in your life, but even before that, there were other losses: of the brother you didn’t have, the sense of peace that was taken from your family by your brother’s behavior, the stable family you deserved. Many people who have problematic siblings yearn for the closeness of a sibling they will never have. They don’t feel like an only child—they feel like a child whose sibling has died. The shadow of this lost sibling looms large in their daily life and sometimes feels inescapable, like when someone in an otherwise enjoyable social situation innocently asks, “Do you have any siblings?” If your brother is incarcerated, not only might you feel anxiety, shame, or resentment at that moment, but you’re also experiencing the loss of the hoped-for sibling all over again.

What does this have to do with your mother and her decision regarding the inheritance? Your feelings about your sibling can’t be separated from how you feel about the relationship your mother chooses to have with him. It might be easier to be angry with your brother than with your mother, but it’s okay to be angry with her too—and to talk about your feelings with her. That doesn’t mean yelling or accusing. What it means is letting her in on what’s going on inside you.

Your conversation will go better if you can imagine her experience before you approach her. Instead of thinking of her choice as “rewarding him” for his “poor choices and behavior,” recognize that what she’s actually doing is honoring her unconditional love as a parent—the same unconditional love she has for you. You might think, Well, yeah, but I would never be in my brother’s situation. I would never do what he has done. That’s a false comparison. Your mom is demonstrating that she will be there to protect her children, full stop. Her decision to give him the house doesn’t mean that she loves him more or condones what he’s done. She’s simply acknowledging a grim reality: Her child, who has likely long had challenges functioning in the world, needs a roof over his head, and, given how hard it is for someone with a criminal record to find a home or a job to pay for that home, she’s taking care of him when she can’t be here anymore. She’s filling a need that she imagines you don’t have. Except that you do have needs—and that’s where your conversation can begin.

[Read: The longest relationship of our lives]

You might say something like “Mom, I want to have an honest conversation about us as it relates to my brother. I’m bringing this up because I love you and I know how much you love me too, and I don’t want my silence to get in the way of our close connection. Let me start by saying that I can only imagine how hard this situation has been on you as a parent, and I admire the fierce, relentless love you’ve shown us children as our mother. It takes a lot of resilience and grace to do what you do, and I want you to know that I see and respect that. At the same time, I feel like the pressing issues with my brother have taken so much attention and focus in our family that I haven’t shared my feelings at times with you, and I’m hoping I can do that now so that we can be closer.”

Then you might say something to the effect that even though it seems like you’re doing well, the situation with your brother has affected you too. Give a few examples of your experience without blaming him or your parents—just this is how it has felt for me. Then you might say that you’ve been thinking about the dynamics in the family and her decision to leave the house to your brother, and you’re feeling hurt and overlooked, and you want her to know that. Reassure her that you’re not blaming her or even asking her to necessarily do anything about it. You’re just opening up a dialogue and letting her know how you feel, because holding it inside has been painful, and sometimes you need a compassionate mother too.

A few things to remember: First, the initial conversation is usually the hardest, so if it doesn’t go well, remember that you’ve still opened the door for more open communication to follow. Especially if these topics have never been discussed, you and your mom might need to adjust to this new way of relating to each other. Eventually, you might even find some connection in your mutual grief. Second, the benchmark for a successful conversation isn’t dependent on her reaction or what she does or doesn’t do with what you share; the conversation is successful if you show up and share your truth with kindness.

By welcoming your feelings, processing your grief (possibly with the help of a therapist), and communicating honestly with your mother while she’s still around to hear it, you’ll do more than find a different way of framing your feelings. You’ll find a way to live with your feelings while also moving forward.

Dear Therapist: I Feel Tremendously Guilty for Not Taking Care of My Aging, Alcoholic Mother

2023-08-28T07:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

I am the adult child of an alcoholic mother, and now I am a mother myself. I love my mom, and we have a very close (albeit tumultuous at times) relationship. My upbringing wasn’t by any means all bad. My family was incredibly dysfunctional and maybe a little toxic, but also loving and supportive in our own weird way.

Still, my life has been defined, influenced, and certainly scarred by my mother’s drinking, behavior, and mental-health issues—denial being chief among them. In my late 20s, I gave up trying to help her and went about the business of breaking out of the chains and cycles of my family. Distancing myself from my mother and family was heart-wrenching, but I am living a healthy, positive, and deeply fulfilling life because of what I did.

I am now 43 years old with a 3-year-old daughter, and we live a few thousand miles away from my family. I own my home and work full-time, and I’m a single mom by choice. Life is wonderful, except for the fact that my mother, now 72, is deteriorating both mentally and physically. Her living situation is awful. She’s something of a hoarder, her house is dilapidated and dirty, and her drinking has begun to take a toll on her health in myriad ways. Recently, while highly intoxicated, she fell down the stairs in her home.

She has been asking me for years to move home, and I’ve always been very clear that I would not. But now I am so conflicted. I feel this tremendous guilt for no longer taking care of my mother. I know she needs me. But when I had my daughter, I made a promise to her, and to myself, that she would never grow up in the chaos that I did. I want to protect her from that. I don’t want her to see her grandmother like this either. But am I just sentencing her to a different type of damage? The damage of teaching her to walk away from family in their time of need, and of denying her a relationship with a grandma who, despite being deeply flawed, loves her? I don’t want that for her either.

I just don’t know what to do. For me, when it comes to my mom, the damage is long done. But my daughter has a clean slate. How can I protect her without also harming her in the process?

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

Growing up with a parent who struggles with addiction can affect a child in many ways, and the repercussions can persist into adulthood. In addition to the sense of chaos you say you experienced, there is often also confusion, especially around knowing what responsibilities belong to the parent and not the child. Many children of alcoholic parents become what’s called “parentified,” which means that the child takes on a caregiving role, whether that’s attempting to keep the parent safe or fending for oneself when the parent isn’t able to function as one. Clarifying appropriate roles and boundaries can be an ongoing struggle.

Then there’s the question of how to love this parent who might at times be attentive and caring, and at other times frightening, unpredictable, unavailable, or out of control. A child can experience an array of feelings toward this parent, ranging from anger to compassion, along with a sense of guilt that leads to a tendency to put others’ needs above one’s own. This is another pattern that can be hard to let go of later on.

[Read: When kids have to act like parents, it affects them for life]

Given the ripple effects from a parent’s addiction, many people consider substance-use disorders to be family disorders, because they affect the entire family system. You seem to have come to this realization in your late 20s, and I can imagine how challenging it must have been for you to leave that environment and carve out a full, healthy life of your own. Making that choice took tremendous courage, and it sounds like you accomplished your goal of ending the family cycle you hoped to break out of.

A strong sign of your healing is that rather than seeing your family as all good or all bad, you’re able to hold its contradictions. You view your family as both “supportive” and “dysfunctional.” You understand that having a “close” relationship with your mom doesn’t erase how “tumultuous” it is, or vice versa. Getting to a place of “both/and” requires hard work, especially when a person grew up with some trauma.

What’s interesting, though, is that instead of looking at your current options with that same expansiveness, you present your choices as binary. In your mind, they look like this:

If I move home, I’m a good daughter.
If I don’t move home, I’m a bad daughter.
If I let my daughter have a close relationship with my mom, I’m damaging her.
If I don’t let my daughter get close with my mom, I’m either protecting or damaging her (but not both).
If I move home, I’m modeling family loyalty and compassion.
If I don’t move home, I’m modeling selfishness.

In other words, you’re setting up this situation as either you help (by moving home) or you don’t (by not moving home), and each of these choices has a single, clear consequence for you and your daughter. But what if there’s a way to care for your mother while also caring for yourself and your daughter?

Let’s start with the guilt you feel when you tell yourself that you’re abandoning your mother. I want to begin there, because alleviating this guilt seems like the biggest factor pushing you toward moving home. Not only is your sense of abandoning your mother an old, faulty narrative left over from childhood, but avoiding guilt is rarely a good reason to make a big life decision. By contrast, you have very reasonable and compelling reasons for staying where you are: maintaining the hard-earned, happy, stable life and family you created and not going back into the chaos. The part of you that broke free from the family dysfunction is the same part of you that knows going home isn’t a viable option for you and your daughter.

Given this, let’s think instead about whether you might be able to care for your mom without upending your family’s life. I suspect that recent events have surfaced the part of you that feels like a child worried about her inebriated mom, and that child is used to making a choice about whose needs matter more. The dilemma you might have faced as a child was that in choosing your own needs, you would leave your mom’s needs unmet. But once you dispel that binary framework, you might see that taking care of yourself doesn’t mean abandoning your mom.

Here’s why: Even if you moved home, you couldn’t accomplish what I believe you imagine you would. Nobody can help your mom get treatment for her alcoholism if she’s in denial about it, or is aware of it but doesn’t want to face it. With a job and a young daughter, you couldn’t be there 24/7 to make sure she doesn’t fall down the stairs after drinking, or stop her from hoarding. Most of the things you can do to help her can be done from either city, such as offering her information on treatment programs, therapists who specialize in addiction, or local 12-step meetings (all of which she will likely reject); hiring someone to come in and check on her or clean the house; suggesting that she move to a one-story home or communal-living situation that might be safer as she ages; interfacing regularly with her medical team; and having groceries, meals, or other items she needs delivered to her doorstep. (Of course, some of these things can cost a lot of money, and although I don’t know your financial situation, moving closer to your mom won’t change that you’ll need to outsource much of this work if you plan to maintain a job and have time for your young daughter.) Once you let go of the childhood fantasy of saving your mom, you will see that part of being an adult is letting go of the hope of finding a perfect solution and accepting—and working with—what is.

[Read: Gen-X women are caught in a generational tug-of-war]

Meanwhile, you and your daughter can still visit your mom and have a nice relationship with her—but in a way that feels stable and safe. Rather than moving home and sending your daughter the message that it’s okay to give up your sense of balance for people who live chaotic lives, you’re ending the generational cycle of dysfunction by being a reliable, sturdy mother who maintains healthy boundaries with a flawed but loving family member. You’re showing her that you can have compassion for someone’s challenges without being sucked into them, and that you get to set your own limits based on reasonable wants and needs in order to create the possibility of a healthy relationship (“We’re happy to visit you, but not when you’ve been drinking”).

I’m sorry that in some ways you had to parent yourself growing up, and that you struggle to entirely trust yourself as a result. But you know the answer here—and I know that you know it. You just have to access the voice of the magnificent, healthy parent you’ve become, and let yourself listen to the soothing words of this wise, resilient mother who moved away in her late 20s. Your daughter is lucky to have her—and so are you.

Dear Therapist: My Husband Had a Relationship With His Best Friend

2023-07-31T07:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

I have been married to my husband for a year, and we dated for three years before that. He had been married for more than 20 years to his ex-wife, and they have a kid together. I have heard about many of his former girlfriends before his first marriage, and I know he had one girlfriend after his marriage ended and prior to dating me.

He also has a best friend, a man who lives next door to us. A few weeks after our wedding, I was looking for a place in the filing cabinet to stash some papers I’d brought from my prior home, and I saw a paper stuck in the roller wheel. It said “[name of his best friend] loves [my husband’s name].” I wanted to find out what this was about, so I invaded his privacy. I found many cards and love notes from this friend to my husband dated about 12 years prior to our wedding.

I cried and was in shock. I spoke with my husband, and he said that after his divorce from his wife of two decades, he was hurt. He didn’t want a woman but wanted a companion. I found out that he spoke with several men during that time frame—about four years—until he fought to overcome his feelings. He made his best friend move out of his house, but the friend still lives next door to us, on my husband’s family’s property. I have to be reminded every day of what went on between them. They had sex when they were together, and now when I look at the two of them, that’s all I can envision.

I know it was about 10 years before I came into the picture, but I’m bitter. My husband says he has no romantic feelings for his friend at all anymore. My husband is an only child, and he says this best friend is like a brother.

This all bothers me so much. It’s been over a year since I found out, and I still can’t seem to accept my husband. What can I do to get over this? My husband is loving and kind to everyone. He is good to me and my daughter and loves family, both his and mine. But I keep seeing his past mistake. He says it’s his past, and happened before I came along. Still, being reminded daily is hard.

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

One of the most jarring experiences in a relationship is learning that something is not as it seemed. The discovery of a secret can leave you reevaluating everything you thought you knew about your partner, and make you question both your sense of reality and the trust you thought you shared.

For you, there’s the added layer that two secrets were revealed at once. First, that your husband’s closest friend is also his ex. Second, that your husband has had relationships with men. And although both facts have left you feeling confused and betrayed, it will be important for you to consider your reaction to each of these discoveries separately in order to figure out how to move forward and heal from these deceptions.

On the first point, your husband had a romantic relationship with the person you knew only as his best friend, and you’re reeling from a lie of omission. Putting gender aside for a moment (because we’ll discuss that next), you weren’t told that someone very close to him and present in both of your lives as your next-door neighbor has a sexual history with your husband. This isn’t a “Whoops, I forgot to mention it” oversight, but a deliberate attempt to prevent you from finding out. I say that gender isn’t the issue here because even if this person were a woman, I imagine you would feel betrayed had you not been told that his closest friend who also lives on your shared property is also his ex.

It makes sense that you feel bitter after your trust has been breached. And although you had a conversation about what you discovered and your husband came clean about his history, more has to be done to repair the damage from his dishonesty. For instance, has he shared with you why he didn’t tell you about his romantic involvement with his best friend, and what steps he will take to be honest in the future? Has he taken full responsibility for keeping this from you, regardless of his reason? (There’s a difference between “Yes, I lied, but it was because of X” and “I lied because of X, but regardless, I never should have lied, and I’m committed to being honest with you in the future.”) Have you shared with him how untethered his holding of this secret makes you feel as you begin your marriage together, and what your expectations are, going forward, regarding honesty?

When you have conversations like this, you’ll need to listen from a place of curiosity and compassion, which doesn’t mean that you aren’t holding him accountable for deceiving you. Instead, you’re creating an environment that can incubate more trust between you. He might, for example, say that he was afraid to tell you because he believed you would feel threatened by the daily presence of an ex and want him to end a friendship that’s very important to him, and he felt stuck between disclosure and losing his best friend. He might say he was worried that if you knew he was attracted to men, you might reject him or even leave him (and given your reaction, he could have been right). In turn, you might tell him that his hiding relevant information about an ex with whom he interacts regularly has left you wondering what else he might be hiding, and questioning whether you can trust him: Has he shared the full extent of their past and current relationship? Are there other secrets unrelated to this person that he’s still hiding?

As you talk, make sure you’re being completely honest not just with him, but also with yourself. You will need to reflect on what will make you feel safe in the years ahead and communicate that to him. This might include a full accounting of his relationship with his best friend so that more aspects of the story don’t come out later, his sharing any outstanding lies of omission with you now so there are no more surprises (you might frame this as “If there’s anything that I will want to know, now is the time to tell me, because telling me later will likely make it impossible for me to trust you again or stay with you”), and going to couples therapy to work through this together. These are just suggestions—you will have to decide what you truly need, and ask for that.

You might also discuss your feelings about the current living arrangements. What might not have been a problem had there been no secret to begin with could be a problem now, because your trust has been fractured. Perhaps you’re comfortable with their continuing friendship but would prefer that the ex not live next door, or maybe you’re fine with this proximity given how long ago they were romantically involved. Something to think about as you answer this question is what you mean when you say that “being reminded daily” of your husband’s ex is hard. Which reminder is hard for you: that he had a romantic past with an ex who’s in your lives, that he deceived you about it, or that the ex is a man?

This brings me to the second secret—your husband’s attraction to men—which seems more complicated for both of you. Neither you nor your husband appears comfortable with his sexuality. You say “he fought to overcome his feelings” after dating the ex and talking with several men over a four-year period, which indicates shame or denial on his part, and your disapproval and judgment come across in your calling his dating a man “his past mistake”—something you don’t say about any of his former girlfriends. You each seem reluctant to acknowledge that your husband has been attracted to both men and women, and you’ll need to examine what your husband’s sexuality brings up for both of you so that these feelings don’t contribute to more secrecy.

You might start by exploring why you “can’t seem to accept” him and clarifying any misconceptions or assumptions you have about bisexuality. Maybe you believe that it means he will always miss being with men and therefore might cheat on you—which is not how sexual attraction works. Just as you will always be attracted to other people, so will he; the key is that neither of you will act on those desires if you both choose to be in a monogamous relationship. You can ask him to share with you what his experience is as someone attracted to both men and women so that he can clarify what his sexuality means for him. You can talk about your respective histories with cultural or family stigma regarding same-sex partnerships, and how those views might evolve so that there’s space for your husband to be loved fully by you as his authentic self—a man who seems to be attracted to both men and women, and who is in a monogamous marriage. If you force his authentic self into hiding, you will be encouraging more secrecy and causing your husband to feel shame for who he is. You might need to spend some time trying to understand (perhaps with the help of a therapist) how it is that the man you love and are attracted to becomes someone else in your mind—someone you view with aversion—because he has a history with partners of his own gender.

Sometimes we don’t talk about the very thing we need to discuss most, because once a truth is acknowledged, we can’t un-acknowledge it. Right now you’re both acting as if your husband isn’t attracted to men, and wasn’t even when he was having sex with one (instead, you write that he wanted “a companion” while reeling from a divorce). If you want a marriage based on honesty, avoiding the truth won’t be helpful.

Here’s that truth: Your husband’s romantic past is part of who he is, just as yours is part of who you are. We all want to bring our full self into a marriage, and to be loved and accepted for who we really are. Now that the secrets are out, instead of denying what they mean about the person you married, embrace the truth together, in all of its complexity and discomfort, so that you can build this new marriage with the trust and openness you desire.

Dear Therapist: I’ve Been Dumped by My Friends

2023-06-26T07:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

For 20 years, I have made an effort to reach out to two close friends from high school. I’ve texted to make plans whenever I’ve visited our hometown (none of us lives in the same place). I’ve sent Christmas cards. Our families all know one another. Sometimes I’ve visited my friends’ parents when I’ve passed their houses while walking my parents’ dog. Everyone’s life moves on, but I caught up with my friends when I could. These were old friends, people I could fall back into sync with even after years because of our shared history. Or so I thought.

Last year I found out that one friend I’ll call Jess was getting married when I saw the wedding invitation on the coffee table at my other friend’s house. The invited friend (I’ll call her Jane) told me the wedding was very small. I felt left out, of course, but I let it go.

Jane got engaged a few months later. The wedding is in four months, but I haven’t been invited. I invited both Jess and Jane to my own wedding five years ago. Neither one came, and at the time I didn’t think anything of it. People are busy, and they would have had to travel.

Now it seems to me that these women who I thought were my friends—close friends!—just weren’t that interested in my wedding, or apparently in me either. It seems certain that Jess will attend Jane’s wedding, just as Jane attended Jess’s last year. And neither one invited me. Or even made an excuse about whatever the constraints (if any) were. Even a lie would have been a gesture.

I feel like I stepped onto an elevator and there was no floor. I am devastated. I thought my formative years were characterized by supportive relationships that had stood the test of time. But I was wrong. My friends moved on. They kept each other in their orbits and forgot all about me.

I have never really had “friend drama” and it won’t be starting now, either, because I’m not asking any questions about this. There is nothing either of them can say to mollify me. Their actions speak for themselves.

When you read the midlife-friendship advice columns, they’re all about “Reach out! Be the one to make plans! Don’t keep score!” I reached out. I was flexible. I didn’t take things personally. It didn’t work. I’ve been dumped by my friends. And you can’t make new old friends.

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

You write that nothing your friends might say would mollify you because you feel that their actions speak for themselves. But because you wrote to me about your distress, I’d like to offer another perspective.

The short version is: I suspect that your assumptions about these friendships aren’t quite accurate—and it’s these assumptions, more than what your friends have done, that are causing you to be in such great pain.

Let me explain. I understand how excluded you feel, and how not being invited to either of their weddings made you question the decades-long bond you believed you shared. In your mind, you were a good friend who nurtured these relationships, and you made a consistent effort to show how much you valued having these women in your life. Now, however, not being invited to their weddings makes you wonder if your friendships were a sham, and if the warmth you felt toward these women has been, unbeknownst to you, completely unreciprocated.

Of course, the sting of being left out is human and understandable. But the larger meaning you’ve attached to normal feelings of rejection is getting in the way of seeing the full and nuanced scope of these friendships clearly.

Let’s back up and consider some context. I don’t know what your dynamics with these women were like in high school, but in any friend group, and especially groups of three, typically not everyone will be equally close. Some people just connect more naturally with each other, and these differing levels of connection don’t make the other friendships in the group less worthwhile. The fact that you have all kept in touch for the 20 years since graduation is a testament to the strength of the connections that you do share. Someone can like you very much but not feel as close to you as she does to someone else, and that shouldn’t in any way diminish your relationship and the enjoyment that this long friendship brings to your life.

Even if you were all equally close when you were younger, many friendships change after high school for a variety of reasons: distance, different interests, life paths that leave you having less in common. Much of what bonded you as teenagers—shared experiences, mutual friends, similar daily routines—might not be relevant anymore, or enough to keep a friendship together. But yours have endured, just in a new form.

It sounds like you understood and felt comfortable with the changing nature of friendships when neither Jane nor Jess came to your wedding. Perhaps you were disappointed not to see them but, as you said, you “didn’t think anything of it.” You didn’t react the way you’re reacting now, which is to question your entire friendship with both of them. At the time, you were probably more concerned about whether people more active in your adult life would be there to celebrate with you, so the absence of your high-school friends didn’t devastate you.

Learning that you weren’t invited to their weddings changed your perspective retroactively. You interpreted this to mean that they lacked interest not only in being at your wedding, but also in you as a person. I’d like you to challenge that assumption. There’s no evidence that Jess and Jane don’t want to be your friend or that they’ve “forgotten all about you”—in fact, you were visiting with Jane at her home when you saw Jess’s invitation. If these women didn’t want a friendship with you, they wouldn’t see you at all. You say you’ve been “dumped” by your friends, but they haven’t gone anywhere.

You’re also assuming that because they didn’t explain why you weren’t invited—you say you’d even be more satisfied with a lie—this means they don’t care about you. I want to suggest instead that they might have avoided mentioning not inviting you in order to spare your feelings—because you do matter to them. Similarly, when you saw the invitation to Jess’s wedding, Jane explained that it was a small wedding so you would understand that this wasn’t a rejection. Wedding guest lists can be tremendously difficult to navigate, and with two extended families and friends on both sides, lines have to be drawn such that people will inevitably be excluded.

The part you’re having trouble with is acknowledging that there are different kinds of “close” friends. Some are considered close because you came together at a formative time in your life, and nothing can replicate that bonding experience. Others are close because you’re involved in one another’s lives in a significant way in the present. Still others are close because despite seeing one another only every few years or decades, you easily pick up where you left off.

You’re right that “you can’t make new old friends,” but you don’t have to. Sure, you could declare the friendships over and pull away because you’re hurt, but that doesn’t sound like what any of you want. Instead, now is a good time to look at the big picture over these 20 years, consider what you value in these friendships and want for their future, and share that. You might say to one or both of these friends, “I’m thrilled that you’ve found your partner, and I’d really love to meet your new spouse next time we’re in the same town.” Or: “I know you’re not able to invite me to your wedding, but I’d still love to be a part of your life in the future, and it would mean a lot to be included in celebrating whichever milestones make sense as our families grow.”

In doing so, you’d be nurturing these friendships by having the flexibility to accept that friendships are fluid over time.

Clearly, these women matter to you, and I believe you matter to them. Right now the only thing standing between you and these friendships is your own hesitancy to embrace them.

Dear Therapist: How Can I Get My Stepdaughter to Dump Her Dead-End Boyfriend?

2023-05-29T07:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

My stepdaughter is 35 years old and has been in a relationship with a 38-year-old man for five years. He is an only child with odd parents and is a bit odd himself. It takes so much patience to deal with his idiosyncrasies—such as his food habits, for example.

He comes to our house for holiday meals and never brings anything, but comes with containers to take food home. He never buys gifts for my stepdaughter. They have been going to weddings of her friends, but it doesn’t occur to him to think of marriage or making a commitment to her.

She bought her own condo three years ago, but he seems content with a tiny apartment. She is sort of resigned to this dead-end relationship, but I need a good way to convince her that she can move on. Help.

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

Many people can relate to your dilemma of anxiously watching someone they care about make what seems to them like a bad choice in life. Understandably, you want your stepdaughter to be happy, and your concern comes from a place of love. But love, especially in parenting, can be complicated, because sometimes love can lead us to confuse our own desires and values with those of our children. This is true when they’re young and doesn’t necessarily get any easier as they move through adulthood and the consequences of their choices become more significant.

You asked for a good way to persuade your stepdaughter to move on, but the more important question you need to answer is how you can express your love by offering the support that serves her best. This is where gaining clarity on the line between her feelings and yours comes in.

Specifically, I notice that when you describe your stepdaughter’s boyfriend, you don’t say who is bothered by him and his behaviors. For instance, whose patience is tested by what you call his idiosyncrasies—hers, yours, or both? Has she expressed frustration that he doesn’t buy her gifts, or are you assuming she feels as you might in this situation? Do you know that marriage “doesn’t occur to him” when they go to friends’ weddings based on her sharing that with you, or are you simply guessing because they aren’t engaged? Once you distinguish any assumptions you might be making from what your stepdaughter is actually experiencing, you’ll know how to support her well-being.

Let’s say that she has discussed with you her unhappiness over the various issues you mention in your letter. In that case, the most helpful thing you can do for her is to simply listen and ask nonjudgmental questions, while keeping your opinions to yourself. If she says, “His idiosyncrasies are hard to deal with,” instead of responding with “I know, I think he’s very odd!,” you can say, “Have you considered talking to him about your frustration?” If she says she has but he’s unwilling to be more flexible, instead of saying, “See, that’s why you should leave him!,” you can say, “That sounds really hard. How are you feeling about that?” Similarly, if she says, “He never buys me gifts,” instead of calling him a cheapskate or selfish, you can say, “Have you told him how you feel about this?” If she says she hasn’t, you might ask, “What’s keeping you from being open with him?” If she says she has but his response feels invalidating (“I don’t believe in gifts”), you could say, “I can imagine how hurtful it must feel when you’re with someone who doesn’t respond to what you need.”

This is called supportive reflection, and you can apply it to all of her complaints. If she makes a comment about his not having her level of ambition or lifestyle preferences, instead of insulting his choices or character, you could say, “How are the two of you working through this difference?” And if she expresses concern about his interest in marriage, you can ask, “Are the two of you talking openly about your goals and his, and whether they align on a timetable that realistically works for both of you, given that you’ve spent five years together?” If she shares that she’s “resigned” to staying in a “dead-end relationship,” you might say, “It breaks my heart to see you in a relationship that isn’t making you happy. I wonder if seeing a therapist might help you see your worth more clearly.”

One mistake many well-meaning parents make in trying to protect their children from wasting time with someone they view as the wrong partner is becoming so aggressively critical of the partner that their children no longer feel comfortable voicing their own ambivalence about the relationship. Instead, the children wind up feeling an even stronger need to defend their partner and hide any issues that do come up and for which they might otherwise want your guidance and support. Moreover, if they eventually get married, they’ll always know that their parents think that their spouse (and perhaps the mother or father of their future children) is a loser.

By listening and asking questions, you’re directing these concerns back to your stepdaughter so she can give them some thought herself while also implying that instead of telling you what she doesn’t like, she should be talking about these issues with her boyfriend. If she and her boyfriend can’t communicate openly and take each other’s needs seriously—or if their needs and desires are incompatible—they will be far better off confronting these realities together rather than using that valuable time to vent to you. Most important, you’re reflecting back to her that she is worthy of being in a fulfilling relationship that aligns with her needs and life goals, and, by implication, that if that isn’t possible with this particular person, she deserves to find it elsewhere.

Remember that even with your support, your stepdaughter might not change her mind. We can’t protect our children from the mistakes (perceived or real) they make in life, but we can always provide supportive guidance along the way and make sure to be there for them if things go badly.

However, if the concerns you write about are yours alone, the best way to support your stepdaughter’s well-being is to take steps to contain your own anxiety about her choices. Although the kind of relationship she’s in might not appeal to you, you’re going to need to get genuinely curious about why it appeals to her. Find out what she likes about her boyfriend by trying to see him through her eyes and take in the entirety of who he is. Ask her what she loves about him so you can get to know him better. Listen more closely for the positive stories she tells about him and their relationship. Most people are not all good or all bad, and focusing on his positive aspects, if he does make your stepdaughter happy, will help you offer the kind of love and support you seem eager to provide.

Dear Therapist: I Won’t Marry Someone With a Mountain of Debt

2023-04-24T07:00:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

I have been divorced for four years and have three children. My youngest is a senior in high school, and my middle child is in college. I have worked very hard to put my life back together after my divorce. I work full-time and own my own home, and I have worked with a financial planner to create a financial plan to ensure that my home is paid for before I retire. About a year ago, I was diagnosed with an aggressive autoimmune disorder that may not allow me to work as long as I had planned, so I have modified my budget accordingly.

I met my boyfriend online about a year ago. After 20 years in a marriage with a husband who was emotionally and physically abusive, I was so happy to meet someone who was so kind and caring. I have had an extremely hard time speaking up for myself or asking questions because of my marriage. My ex and my father were yellers, intolerant of opinions that didn’t align with theirs. I have been seeing a therapist and working on self-esteem issues.

My boyfriend’s wife had passed suddenly just under a year before we met. He has two adult children, a grandchild, and another grandchild on the way. About two months after we met, he shared that he had “large outstanding student loans” with no plan to ever repay them. I also noticed that he had bought an expensive car and expensive clothing, despite stating multiple times that he did not make much money. He also mentioned that he was upset that his daughter did not move into his house, because he was planning on her income to help share the bills.

I immediately freaked out. My gut was telling me to run, but I was worried about losing someone who seems like a really sweet guy. I really enjoy being with him, and we share many common values and interests other than spending habits. We talked, and he explained that his wife had managed the finances and that they had been “talked into” maxing out their student loans. He bought the new car because he could not bear to drive his wife’s car, although he said it was completely fine. I explained my fears, and he seemed to make some changes. He filed for student-loan forgiveness and sold his new car, but made what seemed like a quick decision on a used car that lowered his monthly payment very little.

He did not share the amount of his debt, and I did not ask. I have a sound understanding of finances and offered to help him or recommend blogs I found useful, but he did not take any interest. I know he was ashamed, and I did not want him to feel worse. We had agreed to take the relationship slow. We typically split the cost of any dates that we have.

Recently, he has been talking more about moving in together and marriage. I love him, but I do not want to take on his debt. Also, he has been buying expensive baby items for his grandchild and the coming baby. I have not said anything, because I figured it is his business. I had mentioned before to him that if we were married, his student-loan-repayment amount would likely increase. He did not respond. He also talked about planning vacations, but I had a feeling that he could not afford those, so I suggested other, low-cost options. He has been showing me possible houses we could move into together. I summoned all of my courage to ask the amount of his outstanding student loans and was shocked to learn that it was $130,000. If I hadn’t asked, I do not know when or how I would have found this out. He used to be a teacher and recently went back for a second graduate degree, and is in a position making about $50,000 a year. He did not share whether he has credit-card debt, and I did not have the guts to ask, but I have a feeling that he may.

I know that I should have asked for clarification on his debt picture before we had a chance to fall in love. Now, after learning the full scope of his debt, and considering his push to move in and get married despite agreeing to take things slow, I am terrified. Other than loan forgiveness and getting a roommate to help with expenses, he does not have a plan to manage his debt. I don’t doubt his love for me, but I do not want to be the roommate he finds to help with his expenses.

I do not know if I should continue the relationship or end it. I am fine with dating, but I’m not fine with marrying someone with a mountain of debt and no plan to make any lifestyle and spending changes to manage the debt.

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

Money is a topic that can evoke intense emotions; as a result, it’s a source of disagreement in many relationships. We all come into our adult relationships with feelings about money that we might not even be aware of. The way money was handled in our family of origin tends to shape our values (money is “good” or “bad”), attitude (relaxed or anxious), spending habits (what’s “worth” saving or purchasing), and ideas about what money represents (love, guilt, shame, burden, power, freedom, security).

On top of this, money can be difficult to talk about in our culture. Even between close friends who discuss “everything,” how much one earns can be off-limits. Because open conversations about money are socially taboo, most people don’t have experience talking about it until they’re forced to, such as when they’re considering living together or getting married. But many people also come into relationships without the communication skills necessary to broach sensitive issues more generally, making the task of discussing money with a partner doubly challenging.

So let’s start with the communication piece. I can understand your reluctance to ask questions given your past experiences with both a father and an ex-husband who yelled when you attempted to speak up, and you’ve carried that hesitance into your current relationship. In your letter, you mention several instances in which you had concerns but were too afraid to voice them: First, when your boyfriend said he was in debt, and you refrained from asking the amount. Second, when you saw him buying items you didn’t believe he could afford, and you figured it was “his business.” Third, when your boyfriend offered no response to your comment about his student loans increasing should you marry, and you chose not to ask for one. Fourth, when he suggested taking a vacation you felt he couldn’t afford, and you suggested other options without directly sharing your concern. Fifth, when he revealed the amount of his student-loan debt, and you suspected additional credit-card debt but “didn’t have the guts to ask.”

I’m flagging these interactions to help you see that although you’re no longer with a person who yells, you still shut yourself down. What do you imagine will happen if you ask for more information? The one time you did, your boyfriend answered your question and even seemed amenable to change (he sold the car and filed for student-loan forgiveness). So what is the fear? That he won’t like talking about this? He might not, but people in successful long-term relationships learn to tolerate the discomfort. That he’ll get irritated and leave you? I don’t see any evidence of that from your earlier conversation, but even if he does, that’s useful information in and of itself. That you’ll learn something that will make you anxious about the relationship? Possibly, but you’re already anxious from the not knowing. You might want to reflect on what’s underneath this avoidance in the current situation and make sure you aren’t conflating people from the past with your boyfriend in the present—because you’re going to need to have a conversation.

I often suggest to couples that before sitting down to talk about money or any highly sensitive topic, they try writing down what they want to say so that when they do have the conversation, they don’t get flustered and can stay on track. In your case, you might write down what your worries are, followed by a list of what would help alleviate them. It could look something like this:

Worries About Marriage If You Remain in Debt With No Plan to Pay It Off

I’ll lose my sense of security that I worked so hard for, and this loss will make me feel resentful.
Your choices will affect our lifestyle, such as what kind of house we get and where we go on vacation, as well as my ability to work less and take care of my health needs now and to retire earlier than I had planned given my medical situation.
If your behavior affects my finances, I might not be able to help my children in the ways that are important to me, such as paying for their college or helping them with a down payment when they want to purchase a home.
I won’t trust you with money, and I’ll start to feel more like your parent than your partner, which could create conflict and weaken our emotional connection.

Needs I Have If We Move In Together or Get Married

You will work with a financial planner to create a budget and a concrete strategy that allows you to pay off your debt and live within your means, and you will follow through on this daily.
We will keep our finances separate (and/or I will manage the finances, and/or we will both hire an outside party to do this and meet with this person monthly, and/or we will meet with an attorney and create a comprehensive prenuptial agreement so I am not at risk).
If you go over our agreed-upon budget, you will stop using credit cards and use only cash.
Should I continue to make more money than you, we need to have clarity on what each of us will contribute to the joint expenses.
There must be full transparency about spending and debt, and we will both talk openly about money on a regular basis.

These are just suggestions, but the point is, until you and your boyfriend agree on some financial parameters, nothing is going to alleviate your fear of moving forward. The only way to see if you can get on the same page is to bring your feelings and needs about money out in the open and see how he responds.

This kind of conversation will also be helpful for creating space to honestly discuss other issues in your relationship, such as where he is in the grieving process (he met you shortly after his wife suddenly died, which might be informing the pace at which he wants to get married again), how living with an aggressive autoimmune disease affects each of you, how your history makes it important to take things slow and ensure that your needs are prioritized, and what you can both do to foster a relationship in which, instead of avoiding uncomfortable conversations, you learn to bring them up early and often.

Remember, too, that he seems to have very different views about money than you do (and a different level of experience with or interest in it, given that his wife took care of their finances), and you’ll need to see how much you both can bridge the gap and navigate the disparity. For instance, you say that you’re fine with dating but not with marrying him if the current situation continues, and he might need to compromise on his desire to move in with and marry you, and settle for a dating-only relationship in separate homes if he chooses not to change the way he handles money. Similarly, you might decide that a certain number of changes on his part bring you in close-enough alignment to move forward (while still legally protecting yourself, of course), even if you’d prefer, in an ideal world, that he were more naturally like you with money management.

Lastly, I should mention that we all come into relationships with baggage of some sort (difficult family members, childhood experiences, medical conditions, personality quirks), and a sad reality is that in today’s world, a great number of people are saddled for decades with significant student-loan debt. The potential deal-breaker isn’t so much the baggage—in this case, the debt—as it is whether you can agree as a team on how to handle it. Someone who won’t discuss it, or who says he’ll make changes but doesn’t follow through, or who has no interest in making the daily changes you need—any of this should give you pause. What you’re essentially asking for is safety, trust, and security—and having this conversation, no matter what the outcome, will provide that.

Dear Therapist: We Set a Deadline to Decide About Marriage, and We Still Don’t Know

2023-03-27T07:30:00-04:00

Dear Therapist,

My boyfriend and I have been dating for about a year and a half. About six months in, I could tell he was uncomfortable with the subject of marriage—he is divorced and a bit jaded by the experience. A year into dating, we sat down and talked. He said he didn’t know whether he wanted to get married again, whereas I knew I wanted to get married one day. We agreed that two people should know whether or not they want to get married after two years of dating, so one year from that conversation was going to be our deadline.

Since then, we have tried to determine if we are suited to marriage with each other. There is so much that is going well. He treats me very well, and does romantic, kind things that I imagine only someone who truly cares about me would do. We were friends before we started dating, and I treasure this friendship and love the time we spend together.

However, marriage as a topic still makes him uncomfortable. We are now six months away from our deadline for the marriage decision. When I ask him to imagine a future together, he says he can’t think about that, because he’s so focused on his job.

We haven’t talked about some big things, like whether we want to have kids, or to live in the suburbs or the city—things I believe we should discuss to be able to make the decision to build a life together. I try asking questions like “What kind of sports would be fun to watch our kids play?” or “What country have you never traveled to that you have always wanted to go to?” and he always says, “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.” So I say, “Think about it now!” and he just says he doesn’t know again, or that he can’t think that far into the future.

I am 30, and I don’t imagine that in six months he’ll suddenly be able to think about the future in the way that I need to. So I have been slowly preparing myself to be disappointed by what happens at our two-year deadline.

My friends think I am just delaying an inevitable disappointment once the deadline is here. Is two years an arbitrary deadline, and should I give him more time if he is not ready? Or did I already give him too long, and should I try to get him to decide these things now? Am I wasting my time?

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

I can hear how anxious you are about what might happen when your deadline arrives, but I want to suggest that the deadline is almost beside the point. You’re right that you and your boyfriend haven’t talked about “some big things,” but the biggest thing you need to discuss is the pattern going on between you two.

The pattern looks like this: He avoids. You collude with his avoidance by attempting to bring things up obliquely. He feels pressured and avoids more. Hoping for an answer, you push him (“Think about it now!”), and the one clear answer he gives you—that he doesn’t want to think about the future—leaves you feeling anxious. The more anxious you get, the more you push for an answer, and the more he shuts down and says, “I don’t know.”

So the cycle continues, with you becoming ever more anxious and trying to get information that he isn’t able or willing to give you. Maybe he truly doesn’t have an answer, but it’s also possible that he does have an answer and fears you’ll leave if he shares it with you. Or maybe he suspects that you’ll stay with him anyway, which creates a different dilemma for him: He knows this isn’t fair to you and doesn’t want to hurt you, so he convinces himself that he doesn’t know the answer when indeed he does.

Avoidance is an attempt to cope with discomfort by not having to cope at all. I see both of you engaging in avoidance—if we don’t voice the truth, we can pretend it doesn’t exist. But the truth doesn’t change based on your ability to acknowledge it. The truth is still there, even as you both avoid it. At the one-year mark, you both spoke your truths: You want to get married; he might not want to marry again. Then, like turtles pulling their heads back into their shells, you both decided, subconsciously or not, that you would buy some time by setting a deadline, but without any real plan for how to use that year to understand more about yourselves and each other. Your plan has been I hope he decides he wants to get married in a year. His plan seems to be: I hope she’ll stay with me even if I haven’t figured it out by then.

But the two of you don’t know how to be honest with each other. And that matters far more than the question of whether you should give him more time, as I imagine your goal isn’t just to get engaged but to have a happy long-term marriage, and honest communication is the core of a happy marriage.

All of this is to say, more important than the answer at the two-year mark is the talk you need to have right now. You might approach your boyfriend by saying something like this:

Honey, I love so much about our relationship, and I also feel like we have some difficulty talking about sensitive topics together. I want to have a real conversation about how I’m feeling and learn more about how you’re feeling about us and our future—not just about marriage, but about how we interact with each other. When we talked after a year of dating about my wanting to get married and your ambivalence around it, I thought that setting a deadline would help me contain my anxiety and give me the comfort of knowing I wasn’t wasting my time. That hasn’t really worked, because I’m just as anxious about our relationship as I was then. I’m starting to realize that even if we hit the deadline in a few months and you propose, I won’t feel completely comfortable, because as much as the marriage question weighs on me, so does the fact that we both avoid having hard conversations with each other, something we’re going to need to get better at in this relationship or any relationship we’re in.

I don’t think we’re going to learn how to have healthy, open conversations by doing nothing, and I think the next few months would be much more helpful for us if we could use the time to go to therapy, either individually or as a couple. I think we’ll learn a lot about ourselves and each other and make more informed decisions about our compatibility by getting some clarity with some outside help. How do you feel about that?

Note that you’re not asking him to answer a question about the future—something he doesn’t want to think about. You’re asking him how he wants to spend time with you now—either getting help to improve communication between you (whatever the outcome), or continuing to avoid self-reflection and keeping things in an ambiguous holding pattern that leads to anxiety and frustration.

Through therapy, he might be able to articulate what makes thinking about the future so hard for him. He might gain a better understanding of what it is about his history—whether it’s his childhood or his previous marriage or something he hasn’t shared with you yet—that stands in the way of him getting in touch with what he wants. And if he is in touch with what he wants, what is it about marriage that gives him pause? Similarly, through therapy, you can learn why your communication style has been as avoidant as your boyfriend’s, and on a practical level, therapy can help you figure out not what deadline to give him, but what deadline you’d like to give yourself so that you’re taking care of your own needs, regardless of what he does or does not decide.

By asking him to be proactive with you in the present instead of passively waiting out the deadline together, you’ll learn what kind of commitment he’s willing to make to this relationship now instead of at some future date. This is important information, because if he’s not interested in addressing the current issues you two have with avoidance and communication, or in doing some self-reflection, you’ll have the answer you’ve been looking for. Better yet, you’ll have finally asked the right question.

Dear Therapist: My Daughter’s ‘Brother’ Is Actually Her Father

2023-02-27T07:00:00-05:00

Dear Therapist,

When I married my husband, he had two adult children, and I had none. We both wanted to have a child together, but my husband had a vasectomy after his second child was born—too long ago to get the procedure reversed.

We didn’t want to use a sperm bank, so we asked my husband’s son to be the donor. We felt that was the best decision: Our child would have my husband’s genes, and we knew my stepson’s health, personality, and intelligence. He agreed to help.

Our daughter is 30 now. How do we tell her that her “father” is her grandfather, her “brother” is her father, her “sister” is her aunt, and her “nephew” is her half-brother?

My husband and I are anxious, confused, and worried about telling her. This is also hard on my husband, because he wants our daughter to know that he will always and forever be her father.

Thank you for any advice you have to offer.

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

I’m glad that you and your husband have decided to tell your daughter the truth. As you think about how to have an honest conversation, keep in mind that there are two truths your daughter will be absorbing simultaneously: First, the person she calls her brother is her biological father, and second, the people she calls her parents have deceived her for 30 years.

I point out the latter not to place blame but to prepare you for how your daughter might feel, even if you believe you had good reasons to hide the truth. In fact, I’m certain that you and your husband kept your daughter’s paternity a secret because you felt this would protect her—from confusion, shame, or societal judgment. It’s also possible that you were (consciously or subconsciously) trying to protect your husband, too, from a fear voiced in your letter—that if your daughter knew the truth, she might not think of your husband as her father in quite the same way as she does now.

I have deep compassion for the position you’re both in. At the time your daughter was conceived, 30 years ago, many parents who used a sperm donor were strongly advised by physicians not to share this information with the child, based on the belief that secrecy was better for everyone involved. However, in the years since, many children conceived in this way have said that instead of protecting them, secrecy left them feeling unmoored, angry, and betrayed.

Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison,” and in fact, secrets can literally make us sick. This applies to everyone in the family—you and your husband, who have held the secret inside; your stepson, who likely has feelings about his biological daughter being treated as his sister, and who might be perpetuating the lie with his own partner and child; your stepdaughter, who either feels the burden of carrying this secret or was also kept in the dark; and, of course, your daughter, who might sense, somewhere deep inside, that something she can’t name has always felt off.

Family secrets have a way of being felt even if they’re unspoken: Many people who grew up in a home with family secrets say that they always had a sense that something was not as it seemed, and that this resulted in chronic unease. What people don’t realize is that in trying to protect a child from whatever danger they believe the truth would pose, they’re likely making that child feel less safe than they would if they knew the truth.

You don’t say why you’ve decided that now is the time to be honest—maybe you realized that your daughter might someday take a DNA test “for fun” and you’d prefer that she find out from you instead of a lab report; maybe you feel she should have access to an accurate medical history; maybe you’ve simply come to see how important it is for her to know the truth about who she is, and for the entire family to live authentically at last. Whatever the reason, and however challenging this revelation might be, know that you’re doing the right thing.

With this context in mind, how do you tell your daughter? First, state the facts as simply and clearly as possible: We have something important to tell you, and we wish we had told you sooner. When we wanted to have a child together, we discovered that wouldn’t be possible. We considered our options and decided to ask your brother to be our donor, because we felt it would be safer and more desirable to choose someone we knew who shared your father’s DNA.

Then apologize and take full responsibility for not telling her the truth from the beginning. Don’t make excuses or ask for her understanding; tell her you can imagine how shocking this must be, and that you feel terrible for denying her the right to know where she comes from and who she is. If she asks why you kept this a secret, tell her what you were afraid of without in any way defending or justifying your decision. Reiterate that if you could do this again, you would be honest from the start. Tell your daughter who else knows, so there are no secrets remaining in the family. Make sure to communicate that you’re aware that you betrayed her trust, and that it might take some time to rebuild. Tell her that this should never have been a secret, and that, because this is her story, you encourage her to share it with whomever she wants.

The key is to talk as little as possible and not make this about your feelings. Instead, check in with her about how she’s feeling, and ask what you can do to support her. She might feel anger, grief, betrayal, relief, or a combination of these—so it will take her some time to process the news. This is simply the first step in what will be an ongoing conversation, so be sure to let her know you’re happy to talk more anytime. If she doesn’t bring it up again, you can gently check in with her every once in a while. And if you or your husband are uncomfortable discussing it once the secret is out, seek counseling on your own so that your discomfort doesn’t make your daughter hesitant to talk openly and honestly with you both.

You should also tell your stepson and any other family members who know the truth that you’re sharing it with your daughter, and that they should be respectful of how she wants to handle her story. Ask your daughter if she wants your support in talking with the person she knows as her brother, or if she would like to seek individual or family therapy (in any combination) to help integrate this new information into her sense of self and navigate the complicated family dynamics. Meanwhile, show interest in and compassion for the feelings your stepson might not have felt free to express when his true relationship with his “sister” was shrouded in secrecy. Remember that even though he was an adult when you asked him to be your donor, he still may not have fully appreciated the implications of being the biological father of someone he would call his sister—someone he’d be forced to lie to.

As you free your family from its long-held secret, you might feel less anxious approaching your daughter if you remember that there will be many conversations to follow, so no single conversation has to go perfectly—and that the truth, no matter how messy, is what makes people feel safe and connected. You clearly love your daughter, and we owe honesty to the people we love.

Dear Therapist: Can I Cut My Mom Off From My Children If She Won’t Seek Therapy?

2023-01-30T07:00:00-05:00

Dear Therapist,

My husband and I are planning to have children in the very near future, and I have concerns about my mother’s ability to be a positive influence in their lives. Is it inappropriate to ask her to see a therapist as a condition for being present in the lives of my children?

My mother is often emotionally immature, reactive, and self-centered. When we have a difference of opinion, she views it as a personal judgment. My parents, who are still married, live several states away, and I currently limit contact with my mother. I see her on holidays and call her once a month. I’m closer with my father.

Growing up, I was heavily parentified by my mother; my father tried to stop this, but was largely absent. My father has matured as he has aged, and sincerely wishes he had done better in many areas. My mother cannot handle any conversation that alludes to her less-than-perfect motherhood, and has not matured since my childhood.

I’ve worked hard in therapy to heal my own wounds, and I already feel immensely protective of my future children. I am concerned that my mother will be a harmful presence for them, and that she will disregard my parenting plans and do as she wishes (this is a frequent pattern in our relationship). She was a kindergarten teacher for years, so views herself as an expert on childhood matters. But she lashes out when she doesn’t get what she wants; name-calling and belittling are still part of her repertoire. She is deeply insecure and has an unhealthy relationship with food and her body, which wasn’t fully responsible for my 15-year battle with anorexia, but certainly added fuel to my fire. I don’t want any of this around my children.

At the same time, my mother loves children and has endless energy. She dreams of being a grandmother, and can be tender and kind with little ones. She instilled a love of reading in me by reading to me each night. In many ways, her childlike nature would make her an incredible grandmother.

Is requesting that she do some therapeutic work of her own too much, or is this a reasonable demand?

Sincerely,

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

You sound like you’re already on the path to becoming the kind of mother you deserved to have. You’ve worked hard to heal through therapy, and you’re being intentional about how you want to parent. By doing all of this, you’re already protecting your future children.

However, motherhood—or even the anticipation of it—often brings to the surface old childhood wounds. When this happens, it’s important not to let the helplessness you felt when you were young distort the fact that, as an adult, you have agency that allows you to protect yourself more effectively.

I say protect yourself because the best way to protect your children is to be a sturdy presence that makes them feel safe. Your mother going to therapy is not the thing that will determine whether they have a healthy, happy childhood; it’s the confidence you have in your role as their parent.

Before I get to what that looks like, a quick word about giving someone a therapy ultimatum: Therapy can help people only if they’re motivated to change. In order to be motivated to change, a person needs to see that there’s a problem. Your mother doesn’t seem open to that possibility; by your account, she hears feedback as criticism, and lacks willingness to consider other perspectives. Therefore, even if she acceded to your “demand” to seek therapy so she could see her grandchildren, she’d likely spend her time there complaining about you rather than looking inside herself. The bottom line is: You can (sometimes) coerce someone to go to therapy, but you can’t force them to grow.

The good news, though, is that there’s a difference between blackmail and boundaries—and that’s where your agency as a parent comes in. You get to decide what behavior is acceptable and what isn’t now that you’re an adult and are free from your parents’ control.

You can start setting the stage for your boundaries by sharing some general expectations in a letter. Because your mother might feel singled out if you address this only to her, I suggest addressing it to both of your parents. And keep in mind that most people respond best to hearing what you like about them and want more of. So your letter might go something like this (let’s call you Jill and your husband Jack):

Dear Mom and Dad,

I have some exciting news, and because Jack and I are giving so much thought to this, I want to share it with you in this letter. We’re planning for children in the very near future, and we can’t wait to experience parenthood! Jack and I have also been talking a lot about the kind of family we’d like our kids to grow up in, and I thought I’d share that with you both too.

One thing that’s important to us is that our children have close and enjoyable relationships not just with us, but also with the rest of the family. We know that you’ll both be incredible grandparents, and our kids will be so lucky to have you. Mom, I know how much your students adored your kindness, abundant energy, and sense of childlike fun. To this day I still treasure our time reading together when I was growing up, and I attribute my love of reading to you. Dad, the open conversations we’ve had have really moved me. Jack and I feel so grateful that our children will get all of this and more from loving grandparents.

Jack and I are also looking forward to growing into our roles as parents and figuring out what works best for our family. We know that you have valuable opinions, but we’ve decided that it’s important for us to find our own way. We will, of course, ask you for guidance if we feel we need it. I know, too, that we’ve had our differences, but I really want our children—your grandchildren—to see us, the adults, all get along well, modeling warm, healthy family relationships for them. I’m sure you want this too, so I know we’re on the same page. But I mention this because I’m asking that if we do have any tension between us (and what family doesn’t?), we have patience, give each other the benefit of the doubt, and, above all, discuss whatever the issue is respectfully and away from the kids.

These are just some initial thoughts as we get ready to move forward, so it might sound premature, but I’m so excited that we’re planning this and I wanted you to be among the first to hear what we’re thinking.

It means the world to us that we have your support in our goal of family harmony as we become parents. Get ready to be called Grandma and Grandpa!

Love, Jill

Notice that this letter highlights the attributes you genuinely value and hope your parents will share with your children, and sets the stage in a big-picture way for the dynamic you want your growing family to have: one where your autonomy as parents is respected, and everyone prioritizes family harmony. It might feel insufficient to you because it doesn’t address your more specific concerns, such as name-calling, belittling, and your mom’s relationship with food. Nor does it outline the pain they caused you. That’s because bringing those things up is likely to be counterproductive—your mom might not be able to really hear you, and your dad might be too conflict-avoidant to back you up. I suspect they’ll be more likely to absorb a message that puts you all on the same team and steers them toward the positive behaviors you want, because they won’t be on the defensive.

The second phase of boundary-setting will happen once your kids are here. For instance, if your mom lashes out when she feels judged, you can remind her that it’s very important to you that the adults model respect for one another and that you’re happy to discuss the issue privately. You can let her know that name-calling isn’t something you allow in your house—not to you, your husband, or your kids. If it continues, you can let her know, with kindness, that unless she’s able to avoid name-calling or criticism, you’re going to pause on the visits, but will be happy to resume them when this request is met.

Still, not every instance of bad behavior by your mom has to mean that you step back from the relationship. If she talks about food or her body in ways you don’t like, you can explain why you’d prefer she not do that, but it may not be a reason to keep your kids away from her. Remember, your children are not you—they have you as a mother, someone with self-awareness who has worked hard on her own issues. So if your mother makes her usual comments, that’s a great opportunity to talk with your kids about the different ways in which you and their grandmother think about food and bodies.

The point is that as you grow into parenthood, you’ll start to see that as much as you’d like to, you can’t protect your kids from the world—they’ll be exposed to all kinds of views, opinions, and personality types. The key difference between your childhood and the one your kids will have is that they’ll be able to learn from the way you handle situations with a maturity that your parents didn’t and perhaps still don’t have. Although cruelty is never okay, it’s not the worst thing in the world for your kids to see some of your mother’s more immature behavior, because they will witness you kindly setting boundaries, and develop the capacity to understand people as not all good or all bad. They’ll learn early on that you can enjoy someone’s attributes while also finding some of their habits annoying.

In the end, it won’t matter whether your mom goes to therapy or not. What will matter to your children is that you have—because you, not your mom, are the one raising them.

Dear Therapist: How Do I Hold Boundaries With My Sister at Christmas?

2022-12-19T07:00:00-05:00

Dear Therapist,

My parents and two sisters live in the city I grew up in. I moved away to start my own family and get some healthy distance from the often boundary-less existence I had growing up. It was a great decision. I love the life my husband and I have created.

I miss my parents and love when they visit. I also enjoy when one of my sisters visits with her daughters. It’s great for my children and important to me that they all have those relationships. However, I don’t want much of a relationship with my other sister. She has borderline personality disorder and has been delusional at times about her health. She also has gotten very angry in front of my kids, and it’s been scary for them.

The problem is my family is very close and my parents said they can’t visit me for holidays unless I make up with her. This sister and I have an ongoing fight where she tells me I’m cold and unfeeling and we should be closer, and I explain that I can’t let my guard down with her unless she gets some help. Then she tells me I’m gaslighting her.

My other sister fakes a relationship with this sister to placate my parents and to allow this sister to have some time with her children (because this sister has no children).

My question is: How do I hold my boundaries and still get to see my parents for at least some holidays?

Thank you,

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

I’m glad to hear that you’ve found a way to create some healthy distance from your family while also remaining close with them. Making that decision was a first step toward establishing the life you wanted for yourself and mitigating what you experienced as a “boundary-less existence.”

As you’re seeing, however, geography won’t remedy the situation entirely. The antidote to a lack of family boundaries involves two intentional steps: setting clear limits and then communicating them directly.

Before we consider how you might approach your parents about these holiday visits, let’s look at the situation more closely. First, I can understand how upsetting it must be for you to have your parents interfere in your adult relationship with your sister. What they’re doing, essentially, is insisting that you have a certain kind of relationship with your sister, one that makes you uncomfortable. At the same time, I can also imagine how hard it must be for parents who love all of their children to see what they perceive as one child excluding another. I mention this because you say that your family is close, and it’s clear that love is motivating some of this conflict. But there’s a difference between closeness and enmeshment—the latter is where boundaries get blurred.

In enmeshed families, emotional independence is discouraged. For example, if a child makes a choice with which the parent disagrees, the parent will use guilt, shaming, or manipulation to get the child to do what the parent wants. Often, the parents believe they’re preserving the family’s close bond, but instead they tend to create resentful people-pleasers.

Growing up in a household with blurry boundaries, you might not have learned to differentiate between what you needed and what others around you did. By moving away, you began to gain some clarity, but perhaps you still struggle to pinpoint exactly what you’re asking for. In order to set a boundary, first you have to identify what you need, then you communicate those needs in a way that someone else can hear. So my question is, what is the boundary you’re trying to set?

Your parents are saying that they won’t visit for holidays unless you “make up” with your sister, but what does making up mean? Instead of a specific rupture you might try to repair, you and your sister have a recurring disagreement about the nature of your relationship overall: She wants to be closer than you want to be. You say that you “don’t want much of a relationship” with your sister, but are you clear about what that means? Do you want to see her only when you visit your hometown? Only in the company of others, but not one-on-one? Are birthday good wishes or the occasional friendly email or phone call okay? Are you interested in seeing whether a better relationship with your sister is possible by setting specific boundaries, such as: If you raise your voice, I will end our visits.

Once you’re clear, you have two boundaries to communicate: one with your parents, and one with your sister. For your parents, you might send them a letter that goes something like this:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I love you both so much, and it hurts me when you say that you won’t visit for holidays. I understand how upset you must feel to see your daughters not get along. At the same time, we are both adults, and I feel like you’re hoping that by depriving my family of your company during holidays, I’ll do something that magically “fixes” the relationship between us sisters. I’m sorry to say that there’s no easy fix for years of mutual disagreement and discomfort between us. I know you wish that you could do something to create closeness between us, but as much as you’d like that, you can’t heal other people’s relationships. What you can do is love us both for who we are.

Part of loving me is caring about my well-being and trying to understand my experience. By boycotting my family for holidays, you leave me feeling like the story in our family is that I’m the villain and my sister is the victim—that I’m rejecting her. I know that she has struggled deeply in her life, but she’s not the only one who has suffered. Siblings in families where one child struggles often appear “fine,” so nobody wonders about their needs. But her struggles have taken a toll on me, too, and now, as an adult, I need to create a relationship with my sister that takes my own emotional health into consideration. Your visiting—or not visiting—won’t change this. It will only leave me feeling angry that we’re all missing out on joyous times and celebrations that we can’t get back.

What I’d like most this holiday season is for you to love me as I am—a full-fledged adult capable of making choices worthy of respect, even if they’re different from the ones you’d like me to make.

Your parents might respond to this letter by starting a long overdue conversation about the dynamics in your family, which will hopefully lead to their acceptance that they can’t (and shouldn’t try to) control what happens between their adult daughters. They might also respond by defending themselves, adding more guilt, or invalidating your pain. Either way, you can maintain your boundary by saying in a kind tone: I love you so much, but causing me pain won’t help my relationship with my sister—or with both of you. I hope you’ll reconsider what it means to love me.

Writing this letter will be good practice for the letter you’ll write to your sister, letting her know what your limits are. If you’re having trouble defining them, a conversation with a therapist might help. Depending on what you decide you need, your letter might go something like this:

Dear Sister,

I know that we’ve struggled to find a way to be together that feels comfortable for both of us. I understand that you want to be closer, and that you feel hurt that we’re not. I also feel hurt, often when we’re together, and when I’ve expressed that certain behaviors push me away, we seem to argue even more. The last thing I want to do is hurt you, just as I’m sure you don’t want to hurt me, but the reality is that we keep hurting each other, and I’ve wanted some space as a result.

I don’t want to continue arguing with you—it’s not healthy for either of us—and I don’t think we’ll ever agree in our arguments. What I hope is that we can be around each other in a respectful, calm way. The more positive experiences we have together, the more likely it is that we’ll naturally become somewhat closer over time. If, however, we continue to have painful experiences around each other, I’ll need to have more space, and the possibility of getting closer will become less likely.

I’m writing to you to share my experience and create some mutual understanding. What you do with this letter is up to you, but I hope you see it as a heartfelt invitation to take small steps to see if we can have less conflict and more connection when we’re together.

Your sister might appreciate your letter, but it’s also possible that she’ll feel defensive and blamed, and won’t take the boundary-setting well. Remember, though, that by writing this letter, you will have asked for what you need, and that boundaries are an agreement you have with yourself, regardless of what the other person does. You can choose to respect your own boundaries by seeing your sister with whatever frequency and under whatever conditions work for you, while reiterating to your parents that no amount of pressure or blackmail or threats of holiday abandonment will convince you to abandon yourself.