Anyone reading this knows that life as an estranged parent or grandparent comes with emotional distress. We counselors are taught an ever-expanding repertoire of tools to use in our collaboration with the patient. In an initial session, I’m doing more than just gathering background; I’m trying to get a handle on how someone thinks. If the person in the other chair is a raconteur, you can bet I’ll be thinking of tools from narrative therapy to try. Someone speaking in concise, pragmatic terms will be taught more-direct tools from cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, solution-focused brief therapy, and many more.
I am not aware of any approaches to therapy that treat the patient as some passive, powerless vessel. If we are to elicit change, it starts the patient having at least some dominion over their emotions. If someone has negative automatic thoughts (NATs), we’ll address those unwelcome visitors.
But what if they’re not unwelcome?
I recently had a grief work session with someone who lost a family member. As it happens, the anniversary of their passing is significant, and in the case of this patient, sometimes crippling.
If you’re familiar with the bullseye chart from the last column, this patient and the person who passed were “inner circle” close. A relationship such as that comes with abundant shared memories. Years later, the patient reports feeling tasked to preserve what memories remain, even if painful.
This approach affects the anniversary, as the patient puts aside their own emotional wellbeing to accept whatever the day brings, good or bad.
The patient pushed back during our discussion about how choice plays into the anniversary’s impact, working to avoid a plummet to emotional depths felt like a betrayal, and uncomfortably like relinquishing memories.
Ultimately, though, this either/or approach is a false dilemma. Choosing not to engage to the point of distress is not akin to kicking the visitor out of your home. We can acknowledge the memory, and even indulge and interact with it. However, there is no betrayal, no breach of duty here if we choose not to indulge every memory nuance.
Furthermore, estrangement, unlike grief from a death, can leave us with memories that the departed person may actually wish will cause suffering. Dreadful as that sounds, it’s reality, and by choosing to let that particular memory stomp around upstairs, we acquiesce to ill intentions. With all we’ve done, all we’ve given, all we’ve sacrificed to parent a child, are we also beholden to martyr ourselves per the EACs resentments?
No.
