Family Therapy in Southeast Missouri
How do you know when you need therapy for challenging family relationships?
You have a complicated, challenging, or no-contact relationship with one or both of your parents. It’s been rough for a while. You are ready to detach from the toxic beliefs your parents gave you.
But life isn’t black and white, so figuring out what type of relationship is healthiest to have with your parent now is wearing you out.
Your inner thoughts are sounding something like, “Am I doing right by my kids? Making the right choices for them? I am worried that they will have trauma like I did. I yelled at my kid last night. Maybe I am no better than my own parents.”
Or, maybe you don’t have children. That doesn’t make the adult-child relationship with a difficult parent automatically easier to figure out. You are no less deserving of help to navigate your challenging family relationships.
How We Can Help with Challenging Family Relationships
We will unpack the yuck from your past with the challenging family member. Yes, it’s exhausting to remember the yucky stuff and tell the same story you’ve told a million times before. But we see it as “this is going to suck, but it’s the last time it will ever be this painful to talk about.”
Did your brain read that and say, “There is no use in going through the old stuff. No one can change the past.” or “I know why this relationship is challenging but I don’t know if my parent is capable of changing."?
Here is our answer to that:
That old stuff that no one can change? It taught you core beliefs about yourself like “I’m not good enough”, “It’s my fault.”, and “I can’t trust my own judgement.” Spoiler alert- you don’t deserve to carry around those beliefs about yourself anymore. Actually, 8 year old you didn’t deserve it in the first place.
We take that old yuck (or current yuckiness) with the challenging family member, and engage you in deep processing specific to rewiring your brain around those core beliefs we just mentioned. This means that the memories you have of your parent criticizing you for the way you simply just existed are still true- but, with help from therapy, those memories are now seen through the eyes of clarity, compassion, perspective, and curiosity.
Your whole body starts to get on board with the idea that always keeping the peace, avoiding hard conversations, and tolerating annoying family visit after another annoying family visit was never the path to being truly safe.
Reach out today for help with your challenging family relationship.
We are ready to hear from you. There is a lot of hope left.