Healthy, confident children are encouraged to be themselves.

Looking at my siblings and me with our mother (I’m sitting in her lap) brings about lots of feelings, and most of them are quite sad. We were not raised to be ourselves, were compared to one another, and who pleased our parents the most was the winner. I propose a different way of parenting. Photo: BeckyWhetstone.

People don’t know much about raising healthy children, and the reason I know is that I have dealt with thousands of people over 20 years who are now grown and not doing well. Like a tangled cord contorted and looped around in numerous directions, whether they realize it or not initially, a client presents themselves to therapy hoping to become untangled. A therapist examines the signs and symptoms of how and why their life isn’t working, much like a puzzle to be solved. Much of the therapy process is rethinking, unlearning, and creating new stories and meanings concerning what their family and culture taught them, and start back at ground zero. For example, if a child learned that taking care of yourself is selfish, and now you are 32, miserable, and never take care of yourself appropriately, that belief must go and be replaced by a new understanding that self-care is the number one most important thing any human can do. Getting to that place requires skilled conversations: we go over obstacles that stop a client from functioning in the best way for them, look at its history, and examine whether it works for the client, and if it fits with who they are now.