Your Family Story Is Complex. So Is Healing.

After two decades in practice, I noticed something I couldn't explain away. My relationship with my elderly mother was draining in a way that felt bottomless — I gave endlessly, and it was never enough. What unsettled me most was that I hadn't seen it clearly until my own children reached adulthood. When I examined how I related to them, I found something that surprised me: my thoughts about them were rooted entirely in what was best for their growth, their futures, their emotional and financial security, their wellbeing. I wanted nothing from them in return except to see them flourish.

That realization stopped me cold. Because I understood, perhaps for the first time in a felt way, that this was not universal. It is not "normal" for a parent to use the relationship primarily to meet their own needs — to offer little in the way of guidance, security, or genuine care — while expecting endless emotional labor in return. I began a year-long search: reading, reflecting, asking hard questions. My mother was not pleased. She wanted to know how we could move forward. She was not interested in looking back, acknowledging her impact, or doing any of the work that repair requires. She wanted resolution without reckoning.

So I looked for help. I sought out therapists who could support me through what I was experiencing — and I found that almost nothing existed. Most clinicians were compassionate but undertrained in the specific exhaustion and complexity that comes from being an adult child of a parent like mine. The guilt. The grief. The love that doesn't go away just because the relationship is harmful. The disorientation of realizing the family story you were handed was never quite true. It took a long time. There were many U-turns. But I found my way to a place of genuine peace and understanding — not by erasing the past, but by finally seeing it clearly.