Whether postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety, new moms are told to look out for mental health issues after having a baby. Of course, this is important—a diagnosis can be integral to getting new moms the help they need. Particularly at the six- or eight-week checkup, providers like obstetricians, general practitioners, and pediatricians all use diagnosis to get their new parent patients to a therapist, psychiatrist, or special maternal mental health organization. However, you don’t have to wait for postpartum suffering to get so bad it qualifies for a diagnosis before seeking help. 

To be clear, a diagnosis can be very helpful for new moms. It’s a way to categorize pain and suffering, which can give moms a framework to understand their struggles. Learning that there is a word to encompass these experiences—that they aren’t completely unknown and un-categorized—can be a relief. Postpartum suffering can seem amorphous and abstract and thus, scary. A diagnosis can make it more comprehensible and permit new moms to seek help, particularly in our society that divides everything into binaries like sick or not sick, suffering or not suffering.

Suffering during maternity, though, is not so black and white. New moms may not feel depressed or anxious enough to fit within the bounds of a diagnosis, but they may still feel off and not quite themselves. These same moms may hesitate to seek help, which can limit the care they receive or lead them to minimize their experiences of suffering both to themselves and others. The truth is new parenthood is a time of pain—normal, transitional pain that can seem manageable (though still quite painful) and extreme pain that feels very unmanageable. Both deserve help.

Suffering is not unusual postpartum: That doesn’t mean it isn’t serious

Often the time of maternity is hard. Just how hard, though, can be surprising, especially when it’s not the idyllic mix of hard and blissful we’re frequently sold. Transitions in life are usually stressful and messy, and the transition to parenthood, no matter if this is your first child or third, is a challenging one. You can feel unconnected from yourself, your baby, your partner, and your life. You can lose creativity in how to get through the day or period of maternity leave. You can feel more dissatisfied, ambivalent, lonely, sad, worried, stressed, and ungrounded. You may feel a loss of control over your body and the changes taking place or sad about the state of the world in which you find yourself and your kid. Many things can come to the surface at this time, including (but certainly not limited to) how you feel about giving and receiving care, your finances and career, your relationship, sex, your friendships, your family, your body, your identity, and your sense of safety in the world. These can also feel more severe than they had previously.

This is all suffering, which I use to mean pain that does not let up. Whether feeling a well of sad, mad, flustered, listless, unable to shake off or understand the pain, or just plain shitty, this suffering can be difficult to square in the supposedly happy, joyful time of new parenthood. 

Growth hurts: Suffering can be a normal part of the transition into parenthood 

These experiences of postpartum suffering are so normal. Why? Because you’re growing a new part of yourself (the self) and doing it all while you’re sleep-deprived, learning new baby care skills, and consumed by this new person who is completely dependent on you.

Most growth is at least a bit painful. During puberty, we experience physical growing pains. When we transition to financial independence in adulthood, we work more hours, scrimp and save, and grind through jobs we don’t love to get to what we want. The first time we break up with someone (or the 30th), it hurts because something is changing indefinitely. Growing requires us to learn, not get, be bad at something for a while, learn from our mistakes, and come to terms with our place in this process of change and grieve the change. We usually have to feel a decent amount of pain (no pain, no gain) to move into an updated way of being. 

New motherhood is no different. You’re taking on a new role with someone quite new to you and literally entirely dependent on you. That alone is a lot to take in. Your relationship with your partner also previously had a rhythm that was instantly disrupted and you’re both trying to find your new wavelength. Then, there is the often more unexpected part of postpartum suffering: just how much of your own childhood, how you were parented, and your relationship with your parents comes up during this period, more than any other time. So too with your partner’s relationship with their own family. It can be overwhelming to take care of a new baby, yourself, and a partner, as well as sort out your new role as a parent and as a mom when you, too, have a mom.

Waiting for a diagnosis can overlook and exacerbate this normal but serious suffering

While new moms can experience extreme suffering that far surpasses this normal transitional suffering, only relying on a diagnosis before seeking help can drive new moms to push down their transitional suffering. Any amount of suffering benefits from help. There’s no reason to suck it up and bear through. In fact, getting help earlier prevents suffering from accumulating and becoming bad enough that it fits a diagnosis. It’s similar to a physical injury: When an injury, which may have easily healed with some minor heat, stretching, and massage, is ignored, it can turn severe enough to need intense physical therapy or surgery. Similarly, emotional suffering, when not processed, can transform into anxiety and depression as you avoid talking about one thing and another and another. Like an injury too, our capitalist culture often rewards pushing through pain in order to not inconvenience others or slow down “progress” (i.e. school, jobs, the economy, families). There can be pressure to avoid feeling the full weight of transitions because that requires slowing down.

But slowing down is sometimes necessary and this is where therapy comes in. Therapy is a place where you can unpack and understand suffering, take it seriously, and be curious about it so you don’t get stuck in these unprocessed feelings. When you avoid working through suffering, it can turn into something more severe.

Therapy can help you make meaning from what your suffering is trying to tell you 

Suffering is more than just a symptom on a list. It’s telling you that something is at work, often that you’re experiencing something you could not plan for or predict. Maybe baby care is harder than you thought it would be or you were blindsided by a medical issue for you or your baby. You might be underdeveloped around certain requirements of parenthood like being depended on entirely and flooded with care and responsibility. Maybe you need time to process the past experiences that came up, whether events that happened during conception, pregnancy, and birth or the impact of your childhood on what you’re feeling now. 

Therapy can help you listen to what your suffering is telling you. Is this a new pain? An old pain? Is this a known pain you didn’t feel (or allow yourself to feel) before? Then, with a therapist, you can find a way to make use of the suffering. What do you need to know more about related to new parenting? What do you need to be more curious about? What do you need to understand more about yourself or your partner? What do you need to shift focus or perspective on? What has internally changed for you during this transition? Therapy can help you grieve the permanent changes occurring during this transition (for example, that you’re no longer childless without a dependent or the changes to your relationship/relationships) and determine a way forward with more understanding about yourself, your partner, your family, and your growth into this new role.

–Rachael Benjamin

The post Welcome to Motherhood: You May Thrive, but You’re Going to Suffer Too (And That’s Okay) appeared first on Tribeca Therapy.

If teaching our children to suffer doesn’t seem like a crowd-pleasing, headline-grabbing parenting tip, I get it. Suffering is, well, suffering. The belief that suffering not only can be avoided but should be avoided is so powerful that the very idea of suffering as something that needs to be encouraged feels possibly abhorrent. For those who are socially conscious, suffering evokes a feeling of inequity. Suffering in the world is callously ignored. Needless suffering is too frequently tolerated in favor of efficiencies and profit. We are too willing to tolerate suffering in others.

The politic here is important: When we are pretending to live a life where we are reducing suffering, we are often instead outsourcing suffering (e.g. in the interest of helping our families be protected from COVID, we ordered groceries to be delivered. The risk of contagion is equal, just distributed to someone else). A desire to lower collective suffering, needless suffering, and unequal suffering is a meaningful goal. A desire to limit our own suffering and the suffering of our children is equally reasonable, providing there is an underlying awareness and consideration of who might suffer by virtue of our efforts.

Parents need to accept kids’ bad feelings without trying to immediately eliminate this suffering 

However, our task as parents is to also teach kids to do without and mourn missed opportunities. Validate their suffering rather than quickly moving to fix or distract them from it with an “Oh, but you have this nice other thing,” or “I’ll do this to make it up to you.” Let them be sad if they weren’t invited to that birthday party or disappointed they couldn’t go sledding because the sled was busted. Parents need to accept the bad feelings of their children. Suffering isn’t a failure.

Take, for instance, a family that moved to a nice school district of well-off families. They’re in the bottom tier of families economically and knew their kids wouldn’t have everything their classmates had, but the schools perform well on state tests and they’re glad to be there. And then, Dad loses his job. Though he picks up part-time work to cover the mortgage, extras like summer camp and the annual eighth-grade field trip have to be cut. The eldest son is devastated. Now, Dad could drive an Uber every night for a month to pay for the trip. Mom and Dad could remind their son they had a great ski trip with the cousins last summer and promise that next year things will be in better shape. These could be fine options—it’s hard to miss out and watch kids suffer. Yet, at least part of the response should be making a place for their son’s sad feelings. Resist the drive to find a solution, to bright side, to urge gratitude—not because those things are bad but because suffering is inevitable and we all must learn to face it.

Parents should also provide leadership around enduring suffering and learning it will pass

Besides not trying to effortlessly eliminate this suffering, parents also need to provide leadership, warmth, comfort, and recognition to help children understand they can endure suffering. Patience is a kind of endurance of suffering, having to tolerate doing without for at least a time. The word patience has its origin in the Greek “to suffer.” It’s quite meaningful to also connect the word “patient” to a similar meaning: “One who suffers.” One can imagine that for physicians that label serves as a reminder: The people coming in for treatment, waiting in the waiting room are suffering. The primary task of a physician is to treat the illness or injury causing suffering. As a parent, a task is to feed our hungry children. By all means, pack snacks for the long car ride ahead. But understand that for our children, learning how to delay having their hunger satiated will (thankfully) emerge at some point or another.

More than just wanting their children to be able to endure the slights of the world, parents have the experience in the world and the perspective on most childhood tribulations to know that these too shall pass. Having to wait, to miss out, and yes, to watch other people be fulfilled in a way we crave only feels like it will swallow us whole. It won’t.

–Matt Lundquist

The post One of Our Most Important Jobs as Parents Is to Teach Our Children How to Suffer appeared first on Tribeca Therapy.

When we think of FOMO or the fear of missing out, we often imagine disappointment about a missed concert or envy at a friend’s big trip to Europe. Even though the acronym can sometimes fetishize the feeling, rendering it a consumable commodity (“I missed out but at least that means I have this cool, relatable thing called FOMO”), FOMO can indicate deeper struggles with isolation and a fear of being not being included. Our Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist recently appeared on WNYC’s

In the segment “How to Combat Summer FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out,” Matt points out that FOMO can refer to both “the experience of feeling like other people are living sexier, more extravagant, more interesting lives” and “a sense of…my friends, people in my friend group, or maybe my family are doing some things without me.” The latter especially, Matt notes, can be “very personal…and disruptive.” Some of the reasons people can miss out may also be related to larger structural issues that impact their lives such as “financial limitations,” “immigration status,” and “different kinds of disability.”

Even though the experience of FOMO can be quite painful at times, part of FOMO derives from consumerism—a false sense of scarcity (“Hurry now so you don’t miss out. There’s a limited-time offer to buy this thing that we’re selling”). The assumption here is if you miss out on this concert, there won’t be another (and twelve others after that). However, fun is not a commodity and neither are inclusion and connection. Though they can be scarce, consumerism can’t fix that scarcity. That being said, we can find ourselves in moments where our lives are lacking fun. Missing out (like on that concert) pokes this bruise—it reminds us of the lack of fun in our lives—but consumerism quickly asserts that THIS is the solution. Maybe it would help. But the larger issue—and the harder work—is learning to create fun that decouples from things that cost money, developing the kind of social relationships where the co-creation of fun (rather than the co-creation of envy) is what’s valued.

There are also occasions when we can miss out on something deeply meaningful and these missings must be grieved. Take, for instance, a soldier not making it to her mom’s funeral because she’s serving abroad and can’t take time off, a man missing a child’s first steps because he’s in rehab, a young adult not being able to attend college away from home due to financial limitations, or, as a WNYC caller mentioned, a person who is not able to attend certain social activities because of a suppressed immune system. Consumer culture offers a false solution here—that even if we do “miss out,” there’s something we can do to “make up for it.” This is a fantasy that we don’t have to grieve. Of course, when we are in pain, we desperately want to be relieved of that pain. But the desire for relief doesn’t mean that it’s possible.

In some cases, FOMO can be understood as a deeper struggle, perhaps one with its origins in childhood trauma, including abuse or abandonment. Feelings we have in response to a given situation often co-mingle with old feelings that vibrate with a similar frequency. For instance, feelings of isolation and missing out can raise, as Matt describes, “experiences of being left out or a fear of being left out that can go back to being a young child but has a kind of primitive psychology to it.” Infants and young children are deeply dependent on adults for survival, as well as social connection and support. Missing out can feel like the end of the world because there may have been a time when you were terribly dependent and believed it was. And so, a struggle with FOMO may be the evocation of feelings about much more painful historical losses beyond missing out in the present whether growing up in a family where scarcity was a tactic of manipulation (all the kids can go to the movies but not you as “punishment”) or very real scarcity (an alcoholic parent who wasn’t available to drive to soccer games or RSVP to birthday parties). This is likely where therapy is warranted.

The post Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist Discusses the Many Struggles of FOMO on WNYC’s All Of It with Alison Stewart appeared first on Tribeca Therapy.

The New York Times recently published an article about “money dysmorphia,” which they define as “someone who is irrationally insecure about finances.” While we do not need yet another popular diagnosis, the struggles the article exposes of feeling financially insecure when you have plenty are very real. When we think of “money problems,” we typically imagine some form of lack—not enough money or overspending, which yields the same effect. Yet, there can be other financial problems even when a person has means.

This can manifest in a few ways, including underspending on essentials relative to need such as a frequent work traveler who drags around a broken suitcase or someone who can afford to buy lunch but suffers without when too rushed to pack to save a few dollars. Some people also underspend on their kids and dependents in scenarios in which money could make a big difference like kids missing out on field trips or medical care. At times, kids become the focus of parents overly worrying about leaving money for their children. Other people struggle with not being able to tolerate risk or debt, leading to forgoing a job with equity for a lower salary or renting when in a position to buy to avoid a mortgage. Ultimately, these struggles lead to not being able to enjoy—not going on a family vacation or even not buying small things like a latte when you can do so.

Emotional experiences of scarcity last well beyond the material reality of poverty itself 

People who grow up with scarcity, which can include scarcity of security or a scarcity of nourishing and reassurance from parents and caregivers, can frequently continue to struggle with finances even when they have enough. Experiences of real poverty and scarcity—hunger pangs, not being able to afford medicine, the humiliation of clothes that don’t fit, an anxiety about not being able to meet basic needs—are formative and last well beyond the material reality of poverty itself.

Psychology tells us that when an emotional experience is internalized (i.e. becomes a part of us), it remains even after the experience changes. Feelings leave an imprint. At the extremes, we call these experiences trauma, effects on our psyche that persist well beyond re-establishing safety. You feel afraid and as though you are in danger long past when you are, which is why the emotional experience of poverty lingers even if the condition of poverty changes.

Money problems are often seen as moral problems: When you make more money, the shame and fear remain

One of the oldest tricks of capitalism is to create a scenario in which people aren’t paid enough to make ends meet and then convince them that’s a moral problem rather than a structural problem. Even apart from crushing material poverty, we still relate to finances morally. Think about all those financial articles blaming millennials for throwing away their money on avocado toast or daily Starbucks. These articles seem to say, “If you’re not doing this ONE thing with your money, you’re ruining your future.”

There is a connection between these late-capitalist shaming barrages and a key piece of “money dysmorphia,” which is, what an object relations person would call, an inability to properly externalize. Our culture has created relationships with money that are unnecessarily complicated (to justify big commissions and profits with banks). If you’re broke, or more accurately, living in a society where the relationship between what you earn and what you need to spend (or are told you need to spend) is designed to leave you in a perpetual deficit, “solving” one of these problems by making more money doesn’t solve the underlying psychological or material issue. The shame and the constant sense of fear remain. 

And with more money, the expectation of what you need to spend goes up and things get more expensive. The biggest flex of the ultra-rich is that they have stuff and they’re not worried about holding onto it. “Quiet” luxury is quiet because it’s secure—not just because they have the disposable income to spend but because their parents did and so they didn’t inherit insecurity.

Moralizing creates a tension between shaming wants and needs and unthinkingly indulging them

Moralizing always operates on the lines of fear—if you do x, it means something quite bad about you for which you might be punished, often with the punishment being ostracized from the group. This is a fear that when you think about it is quite a lot more frightening than it initially seems. Many of us operate around money from a kind of moral register rather than a kind of self-protection or self-satisfaction register. In a sense, we operate between the superego and the id—denying and shaming our wants and needs and then, unthinkingly indulging those needs. In these cases, rejecting thoughts of “going out to dinner would be quite nice” or “the kids having their own bedroom would give them some privacy and space” becomes a kind of denial of desire (and there are parallels here with both sex and food).

What do you do about “money dysmorphia”?: Grieve both the culture and personal emotional experiences of scarcity

When dealing with financial insecurity that doesn’t line up with your means, there are two pieces of work here that need to be done, both involve grieving. The first is to have an understanding of the macro dynamics at work: that these struggles with money are not just incidental to your emotional life but that they’re also no small part of your struggle. We’re all not a bunch of crazy, lazy profligates. We’re up against a powerful consumer culture built to keep us spending and in a state of disorientation, even as we want to badly change this reality. 

The second is to understand the fundamental feature of neurosis, namely that it identifies a human tendency to try to change the past by recreating scenarios of the past and getting them right. It’s to realize that everything now is really okay: “I have enough. I don’t have to keep chasing to catch up. I’m secure.” It’s also to recognize that “mo money, mo problems” can be, by understanding its lessons deeply, a directive on how to live with plenty. You can be free to understand scarcity as a state that’s in the past but very much still felt in the present and then, you can do the work of mourning.

 –Matt Lundquist

The post Even People Who Have Money Feel Messed Up About It: But Look to Culture, Not Psychology for the Answer appeared first on Tribeca Therapy.

Many online therapy-on-demand services explicitly tout the ability to switch therapists as a perk. If you hit a bump in the road, feel uncomfortable for any reason, or get mad at your therapist, including as a sign that you are growing, you are encouraged to abandon ship rather than work through these issues together. This extracts virtually all the value from the process of therapy.

What’s lost in the promises of convenience, comfort, and effectiveness in online therapy platforms, some of which are powered by AI rather than actual human therapists, is the actual point of therapy: your relationship with your therapist. Though flawed as all theorists are, Freud understood something fundamental about people—that our experience of the world is, in large part, a function of early childhood relationships. We develop our sense of self, internalize information about others, and learn how to be a human through our relationships. In a process like therapy that’s meant to help you learn about yourself and your life, talking about your relationship with your therapist is more than just a nice thing to do; it’s an essential part of therapy.

This includes getting angry at your therapist and talking about it

Your therapist will inevitably disappoint and irritate you in all kinds of ways. Rupture and repair are a crucial part of any healthy relationship. Getting angry at your therapist (maybe so angry that you consider leaving treatment) and talking about it creates an opportunity for the two of you to work through conflict together. 

The process of a relationship feeling stressed and injured and subsequently mending it together is a tremendous opportunity for intimacy. Therapy lets you learn how to do this with someone skilled in this exact activity. While a very real relationship, your relationship with your therapist is also a place to practice being in a relationship with another person. That 45- or 50-minute block is a time when the only goal is to better understand your experience and development as a person. This hopefully allows for enough safety for you to take risks by talking about things that normally feel too scary or high-stakes to explicitly name outside of the office like anger.

Working through your anger at your therapist is also an opportunity to better understand your own relationship with anger 

Therapy is a place to bring all of your feelings and reactions with the purpose of fully feeling them, learning about them, and integrating them into your sense of self. We can sometimes go to extreme lengths to avoid conflict. People, especially women, are taught to be polite and palatable. When someone asks, “How are you?”, most of us wouldn’t dream of answering that question honestly. There are different reasons for this including a belief that people are put off by negative feelings, that you would harm or offend someone by expressing anger, frustration, or sorrow, or that expressing those feelings toward another person would result in punishment or rejection. Your relationship with your therapist is exactly the place to look deeply at these fears and assumptions—and a great place to start is anger.

Many struggle with their relationship with anger, thinking it too much, not enough, or expressed in the “wrong” ways and linking it to shame, fear, and loss. People can deny or suppress their anger, often unsuccessfully, which can lead to eruptions, extreme reactions, or passive aggression. We all have a lot of ideas and beliefs about our own and others’ anger. Using your relationship with your therapist to test those assumptions gives you a chance to better understand your relationship with anger and experiment with different ways of engaging with it. 

For instance, if someone grew up with a father who related to himself as a victim when his kid got mad at him, there is a good chance that kid grew up with some amount of fear that their anger is dangerous to others. If that now-grown person can look at this in therapy—by getting mad, expressing that to their therapist, and seeing that their therapist is still okay, they have an opportunity to challenge that internalized message.

Can your therapist hang with your anger?

Telling your therapist that you’re mad at them is also a test to see if your therapist is any good at their job. Your therapist should be able to hang with your anger without being frightened, punitive, or withholding (all reactions folks can get from others in their lives). Save smashing things in the office or screaming in a therapist’s face, a good therapist can take in, be curious about, and help you explore nearly any expression of anger you come in with. 

One of the benefits of therapy is you get to be messy, unfinished, imperfect, and reactive. Whatever you’ve got, you should be able to bring that into therapy however that comes to you. There is value in looking at all expressions of anger, even including the absence of anger if things happen that seem potentially angering like a therapist going on vacation during a particularly difficult moment in the treatment without the patient feeling anger.

If it seems like your therapist isn’t able to handle the intensity or content of your conversations, that’s potentially a red flag that comes with an invitation to address THAT with your therapist. If you’re not able to have a productive conversation because it feels like your therapist is struggling, this is when you may need to move on and find someone else who can be more helpful to you.

–Kelly Scott

The post Tell Your Therapist You’re Mad at Them appeared first on Tribeca Therapy.

Even though they might have the same parents, siblings can have wildly differing narratives of the same family experiences.

While there is often a good amount of shared experiences among siblings, Kelly explains in the segment “All grown up, but still fighting? Why more siblings are turning to therapy, together” on NPR: “Every sibling has different parents. Every sibling has a different upbringing.” For instance, siblings can have differing experiences of a loss such as the death of a parent. Often these perspectives are dependent on their age and role in the family at the time of the loss. The impact on the family may also not be an understanding all the siblings share, which can become a source of contention as siblings age. 

When we’re kids, narratives are often simplistic and black-and-white—one person is right while the other is wrong. However, in families, the story is always much more complex. Even so, childhood years are formative and have a tremendous influence on who a person becomes and how they grow into adulthood. If a brother grows up thinking his older sister was a bully, for example, and she grew up believing her younger siblings were favored, that’s a set-up for ongoing bad feelings. As siblings get older and create their own lives, distance and resentment stemming from these differences in stories can create conflict that goes unaddressed and unresolved.

How can siblings untangle and work through this conflict? Family therapy for adult siblings can be of particular use, helping siblings examine these stories together and complicate the narrative. Granted, as Kelly observes on NPR, family therapy is sometimes an under-considered option for adult siblings. “People just don’t perceive those relationships as needing the type of attention one might bring a spouse or a child,” she says. Much of this has to do with how we relate to the sibling relationship as, Kelly notes, “You’re stuck with me. We’re always going to be family. You can’t actually leave me.”

Working with a family therapist for adult siblings offers a chance to look at and talk about old feelings, share stories, and invite additional perspectives. By bringing both their child and adult selves into the conversation, siblings can deepen their understanding of themselves, each other, and their families. Family therapy can also help siblings find the love and compassion in their relationships that may have suffered for many years.

The post Siblings Can Have Different Stories of Childhood: Family Therapy Can Help Complicate the Narrative appeared first on Tribeca Therapy.

Parents can sometimes regret having children—they love their children, but they hate the job (and at times, they struggle with liking their children

Society likes to only see the positive side of parenthood; the one that is good, wonderful, and amazing. Sure, we acknowledge that parenting is hard but ultimately, everyone in the family should be happy. That’s not always the case. Parenting is challenging and demanding. It takes patience, time, thought, and a ton of physical and emotional labor, sometimes much more than parents anticipate. Parents can also feel locked out of their former lives. With a child entirely dependent on them, they can no longer do whatever they want whenever they want.

This is a real and dramatic role shift, which can leave a parent in a seemingly contradictory bind of loving their child but deeply struggling with the choice they made and the role they’re in. These feelings become even harder to deal with as our culture doesn’t have much room to hold the reality that a parent can be in this type of pain and struggle while also doing all their parental duties and showing up for every parent event. 

Because of this pressure, most parents won’t talk about these feelings of regret. They quickly move past the feelings, hide them from themselves and others around them, or shame themselves for feeling this way. It can seem like the worst and most taboo thing to admit: “I love my kid. I also wish I had made a different choice and I have no clue how I will live with it.” While it can seem impossible and counterintuitive, the best thing parents can do is to not keep these feelings silent or deny them.  

“I love my kid. I hate the job” is ambivalence

The mixed feeling of loving your kid while regretting the choice you made is called ambivalence. Ambivalence means being stuck in the in-between. Often in therapy, I talk about ambivalence in the context of an individual being unsure of what they want. However, it can also look like being in love with something and not liking it all at once such as deeply loving your child but not the role that same child puts you in. If you think, “Man, I love them, but man, I don’t like this right now,” that is ambivalence. 

For parents, ambivalence can come from surprise at how much work, time, and patience parenting takes—that it’s all on you to drive the process, the help, and the time you do or don’t spend with your kid. Sometimes parents avoid thinking about how to get their own needs met or set aside time for themselves in this very big role and commitment so they start to dislike the role. Ambivalence can come from these struggles to set limits or find short amounts of time to yourself so you can best take care of your child with some reserves of a cared-for self. Ambivalence frequently relates as well to historical experiences such as how you were—and still are—treated by your own parents.

Though painful, ambivalence isn’t all bad. In fact, ambivalence can be a step in the process of working through something. Feelings of ambivalence are often how we begin to process being torn between many feelings or different sides of the coin. We frequently come to change with ambivalence, which can actually be a hopeful and helpful process. In a sense, ambivalence can announce: “I can’t choose and I’m struggling. HELP!”

Pushing down ambivalence can lead to stuckness and the feelings coming out in unhelpful ways 

While ambivalence can signal a struggle, the pressure to keep silent about it, especially related to parenthood, is strong. Parents shove down this alarm, deny it, or beat themselves up over these feelings. They can say to themselves, “Good moms/dads/parents don’t have unwanted feelings toward their child. God, I must be so fucked up. I can’t tell anyone or I’d be branded a monster.” There is also a more apathetic and resigned internal dialogue: “Well, I’m the one who made this choice so I just have to live with it. No point in complaining.”

Though it can seem easier, silencing these feelings leaves you stuck, which can lead to depression and anxiety, meanness, isolation, or just feeling alone. When these feelings are pushed aside, either consciously or unconsciously, they have a way of coming out through other means, whether directed at yourself, your partner, or your kid(s). You may lash out in ways that are less than your best self like yelling, being withdrawn, or being reactive. 

For instance, if you’re numbing your ambivalence, you might start to put these feelings on your kid when they’re just acting their age and giving you a hard time because they’re going through something. This situation can merge with your denied feelings of ambivalence so you think: “My kid is so difficult and doesn’t like me.” Kids also have a knack for knowing when something is going on with their parent and “acting out” or being more difficult in response. This is when you get in trouble and start grasping for a solution, believing that you’re simply a bad parent or shouldn’t have made this choice when that isn’t the case—you’re simply struggling with ambivalence.

The first step to working through ambivalence?: Name it

Often when parents come to therapy, especially new moms and dads, they immediately talk about how much they love their child. What is harder to discuss is just how hard the role is and how they feel about their choice now. Naming ambivalence is the first step in a complex process of unpacking these mixed feelings rather than just routinely performing the tasks of parenting without acknowledging what you’re feeling. Though a simple initial move, naming ambivalence helps separate these feelings from the feelings about your kid, making them less entangled within the family system.

Sometimes just being offered the word ambivalence can be a huge help—that there is a word for having feelings that seem to counter and contradict each other. This makes the emotional experiences more normalized and less like a marker of “bad” parenting.

Once you can name it, ambivalence is no longer just isolated and stuck in your mind and thoughts. While naming ambivalence to yourself is key, it is especially useful when you can share these feelings with someone else who makes it okay to voice multiple competing feelings at once like a friend, a partner, or a therapist. For example, you could tell a trusted friend about how much you don’t want to parent right now and are struggling with it. The experience of having someone else who is willing to hear you out, let your feelings be as messy as they need to be, and take this in with you can help you process and make use of these experiences.

Therapy can help parents be curious about ambivalence and make it more manageable

Granted, because of the stigma against parental ambivalence, it can be hard to share these feelings even with your closest loved ones. Therapy can help socialize ambivalence regardless of taboos. A therapist can teach and model curiosity about these feelings rather than rushing to a conclusion that all is lost if you don’t like the parent role you chose. By asking questions, therapy can be a place to bring these feelings to light, unpack the struggle, and feel all the angles of it, including how the stuckness might be protecting you from really deeply looking at all you’re feeling.

Therapy can also help parents tolerate messiness. Ambivalence about parenthood might come and go, but you can learn to approach it in a more manageable way rather than getting stuck or feeling at a loss. These feelings can be noticed and felt, and choices can be made without beating yourself up. When you better understand ambivalence, you can, then, better understand what you need and make choices accordingly that can shift your relationship with yourself. 

This causes a ripple effect on your relationships with your kid, family, and life, allowing you to take new positions out of love, choice, and your values. A powerful result of taking on and talking through ambivalence in therapy is figuring out how to reorganize, disrupt, and relocate yourself in the role you have created. It is a beautiful thing to take parental ambivalence into therapy and the tragedy is not bringing it in at all.

–Rachael Benjamin

The post Parental Ambivalence Is Real and Complicated and We Need to Talk About It More appeared first on Tribeca Therapy.

We all lie—to ourselves and, in turn, to others. Adults lie for many different reasons, whether denying or avoiding a truth, convincing ourselves of something we want to believe, or protecting ourselves from a painful reality. So too with kids. In my therapy with children, the reasons why kids lie are as complex and as nuanced as adults. Depending on where they are developmentally and how expressing emotions is demonstrated by the adults in their lives, kids can struggle with making sense of their feelings. Lying, then, can become a way to communicate fears, feelings, or emotional needs that aren’t being met.

This is why, rather than jumping to immediately reprimand or scold, parents should move toward a kid to understand what the lying is trying to communicate. Direct questions like “Can you tell me about what’s really going on?” or “I think you’re upset about x, y, or z. Can we talk about it?” can open a flow of communication and model honesty. Being curious about a child’s lying (“Is there a reason you lied? Have I let you down in the past when you’ve told me the truth?”) is an opportunity to learn more about what they’re expressing and needing. In this, reassurance that the truth can be handled can be especially important.

Although the why is usually specific to each instance and each kid, there are common threads behind kids’ lying that I come across in therapy with children. To jumpstart these discussions, here are four things kids’ lies can communicate, along with how parents can respond:

1. A wish or a hope that a child’s current reality can’t hold

In my therapy with children, I find that lies for many kids communicate a wish or a fantasy that they have in response to not getting a need met. This need could be emotional, relational, mental, or physical. Lying becomes a way of creating an aspect of reality they wish was real or gaining control over how others see them—owning a toy they want but don’t have, doing well on an exam they struggled with, or feeling “okay” when they’re nervous about friends at school. Lying can be used to ease the discomfort that comes with confronting a painful reality. Take, for example, a kid who tells their friends that their father is dead when he is still alive but absent. There is a wish here that their father could be more present, but it is too painful to admit to others that he’s alive but not around. It is also an expression of their anger and hurt that they are unable to tolerate so they “kill off” their father who represents their anger and hurt.

The truth is reality is hard and kids especially can struggle with fully making sense of the more difficult parts of reality. It can be helpful for parents to take time to explain what is making up the reality that a kid is trying to block or avoid feeling by lying. This can be a chance to put into words what emotions or feelings a child may be expressing or reacting to that they are having trouble tolerating. To return to the example of an absent dad, a parent could say, “Hey, I noticed you mentioned your dad. Has it been difficult adjusting to your dad being away?” Similarly, for a kid who lied about doing better on a test, a parent can offer, “I know it can be embarrassing to fail a test, but that’s something we can talk about.”

2. A need for attention

Other times, kids may lie to receive the attention they are longing for from their parents, family members, or other adults. These lies are usually made knowing full well that adults will eventually find out. What is at play here is a subconscious wish that their parent or other adult will notice the lie, which leads to receiving the attention that they crave. When a kid is lacking in emotional connection or holding in these relationships, lying becomes a means for them to gain the attention that they feel is deprived or missing.

Attention-seeking is normal and, in fact, good for kids to do. It’s common for kids to test out different methods to get attention, even unhelpful ones like lying. For parents, give attention while teaching kids better ways of asking for your attention. Simply comment on the behavior like “I think you’re trying to tell me it’s time for us to spend some time together.” Through verbalizing a kid’s actions, there is an opportunity for the connection they seek.

3. A fear of punishment or other negative repercussions

A fear of being punished, scolded, or shamed by parents or other adults is also a motivating factor when kids lie in therapy with children. The more a kid has historically been met with yelling, anger, or shaming when telling the truth or even, expressing feelings a certain way, the greater the possibility that they will lie in the future or withhold their honest emotions. In these cases, a lie can feel better than telling the truth as it can absolve some of the tension that comes with the fear and uncertainty around how an adult may respond to the truth. Lying protects them from what has happened previously when they expressed themselves honestly.

Punishment is a necessary part of parenting and helps kids learn wrong from right by setting limits. However, it’s important to consider if the punishment makes sense for the direct offense of “wrongdoing” committed. Reasonable punishment can be a moment for a kid to reflect and learn something. Parents should find ways to connect with their kid about how the punishment may be hard to receive. For instance, say, “I know this limit may be difficult to understand and I can tell you’re mad at me. Also, know that I love you and this is coming from a caring place.”

4. A fear their truth or true feelings will be dismissed or judged

Frequently when adult patients recall memories of lying when they were children, they explain they sensed that their parent couldn’t tolerate the truth about a feeling or incident. If a topic has been dismissed by a parent, a child will feel less inclined to share a feeling or experience out of fear of not being taken seriously or being met with judgment. The lie can be more about hiding a truth or not mentioning details rather than a complete untruth. A child may say they are “fine,” even though they are scared and upset about an incident at school, because when they previously let their parent in on an emotional experience, the parent may have responded with a dismissive and invalidating tone such as, “You’re making yourself feel those things. Just suck it up and move on.” Another example is a child overhears their parents criticizing or ridiculing a part of their identity or experience, which leads them to withhold information about parts of themselves. The child lies to avoid feeling unheard, misunderstood, or getting their feelings hurt.

In these instances, parents should take time for self-reflection: Why do you hold this judgment? Where does it come from? How is this stance hindering connection with your kid? Parents can consider the ways they’ve contributed to the relational dynamic where their child didn’t trust them enough to share a truth. Therapy, whether individual, family therapy, or a combination of both, can be especially helpful here. A therapist can encourage looking at judgments through different perspectives and lenses in order to understand how these judgments can be problematic, including in the relationship with your child.

–Noelani Rodriguez

The post Lying Isn’t All Bad: Why and How to Be Curious When Your Kids Don’t Tell the Truth appeared first on Tribeca Therapy.

“I didn’t want to go to my friend’s party, but I had to.” “I have to go to work.” “I just have to go to the family reunion.” “I have to get married if we’re going to move forward.” These are statements I hear both in my conversations with patients and out in the world about obligations. There is a tendency to rely on obligation in how we approach events, jobs, and relationships with friends, family, and partners. Obligation is a way of saying, “I have no choice in the matter. I just have to do this and that’s that.”

However, obligation is also a refusal of your responsibility for the choices you make, how you show up in relationships, and what you do and don’t do. It’s a way of dis-owning (rather than owning) your part in living out your values, wants, and needs. We don’t do things because we’re obligated; we do so because we choose to do them.

Feeling obligated can seem simpler and less vulnerable

The “It’s out of my hands” aspect of obligation can make you feel trapped and like you can’t do anything about it. However stuck you feel, it can also be easier—more known, less risky, and less vulnerable—to simply go along with what you believe you’re obligated to do rather than getting close to yourself and your choices. Even if you ultimately choose to go through with an obligation, it is better to know why you are choosing it and to be fully active in your life. Conversely, when something is felt or framed as out of your hands, there is no questioning, shifting, curiosity, or disruption needed. 

Instead, you can just roll along with life like you did when you went to the store with your parent as a kid. In that case, you just have to go with Mom; you’re not asked or brought into the complexity of the decision-making. Rather than being dragged along with Mom, you are now an adult in tow with a friend, a partner, a boss, or even your own child.

There is also a societal aspect to obligation related to what society tells you that you should or shouldn’t do. In this day and age, it can feel like you have such little control in the world vis-à-vis the economy, work, education, and responsibilities to family and friends. It can feel easier to just say, “That’s how the world works” rather than look at how this might conflict with your values and work out what you want to do, even if it might feel more isolating to go against the grain. For instance, “I have to go to work” means you don’t have to think about why you’re working, your ethics and values in relation to your current position, what may or may not feel fulfilling, and your feelings about your job.

Operating out of obligation can also cause painful, conflicted feelings

Though it may seem simpler, operating out of obligation causes much anxiety, frustration, sadness, loneliness, guilt, shame, and feelings of unsafety and distance. When you feel forced to do something, you feel stuck, and with that comes a lot of complicated emotions that can rear their heads, both externally and internally, at different points of the obligation.  

Take a party you “have to go to” because the host is a friend who has been to your parties. Internally, you might feel nervous but move past this to just feel “off” at the party. You don’t want to be there but have a sense of guilt and indebtedness to your friend to have a good time. Afterward, you may feel sad or extra exhausted without knowing why; it’s because rushing to the solution of “Well, I have to” without listening to yourself and what you want can cause these feelings to come with more intensity. Externally, you may show up late or with a stinky, anxious, or just not-giving energy that others can sense. These feelings can also come out sideways by being snarky or biting toward another friend or your partner. When you feel you don’t have a choice, you don’t get to process your emotions and act your best self with an acknowledgment of the complexities of what that situation or relationship brings up in you.

Another common obligation is related to family like, for instance, a reunion trip that takes place every summer that your family sees as a requirement. While it’s a big event you’ve done every year since you were young, you might feel anxious about making it work with your busy life in NYC, worried about how your relationships with certain family members have changed, or disappointed about missing out on a long weekend in the Hamptons with friends. A lack of choice, coupled with simply powering through because, well, you have to, can make you feel at odds with yourself, lonely, and disconnected from your role in decisions. This can be painful because you’re left alone with a knee-jerk decision. Not only are you left alone, but you might be letting others leave you alone too. This can come out in funky ways either toward other people involved, such as family members or your partner, or toward yourself. These painful responses can be avoided if you approach these decisions through a more thought-out and active process.

How do you own your choices?: Slow down and evaluate your decisions

Owning your part in decision-making is a process of understanding yourself and your role in your choices, being curious about your feelings and yourself in the context of an activity or relationship. What are your values? How do you want to live your life? How does this event or relationship fall within that? This may take a long or short time, yet it’s worth it to be able to not feel powerless with obligations.

For instance, before immediately responding that you will go to a friend’s party because you have to, sit with the relationship: How was it built? How do you feel when you are around this person? Are you at your best or worst with them? What are the conditions that bring those things about? Why do you value this relationship? Is this party a building moment and if not, what else might be? Is this event based on an old version of yourself that no longer fits? Once you answer some of these questions, consider the event itself: Do you want to go? What might you need to go and have fun? Do you want to decline and propose something that feels more aligned with who you are now rather than an old version of yourself? Are you discovering this is something that doesn’t align with your current values like sobriety, being present, or the time? Are you afraid the relationship may not bear declining the invite? 

Returning to the previous family reunion example, slowing down to own your choice around a family event can be of particular significance, moving beyond being towed along as if you were a kid. Ask yourself: How come you’re going on the reunion trip this year? What does it mean to you? Who do you want to see? What are you feeling about it? What do you need at every step if you do go? What do you need if you don’t? Even if you do decide to go, it is a choice made by doing the vulnerable work of knowing yourself, your values, and your relational needs more in that moment.

Therapy can help you be curious about your choices and obligation mindset 

Everything in our day-to-day life moves fast and it can seem impossible to press pause long enough to discover how your values may or may not align with the choices you make. Therapy can be an opportunity to reflect on these questions about yourself, your activities, and your relationships, as well as how you came to fall into an obligation mindset. A therapist can ask: What feels easier about feeling obligated? What does obligation really mean for you? What feels painful about making choices or just going through for obligation’s sake? How did this work in the past in a way that was protective? In therapy, you can refocus and reorganize your thinking about what you previously chalked up to obligations and allow yourself to be more accountable about responsibilities and your values, wants, needs, and feelings. The frame of therapy, in fact, sets up this opportunity as going to therapy itself is a choice you make for yourself.

In disrupting patterns like doing things out of obligation, therapy can also disrupt looming feelings of anxiety, depression, rage, or fear. By no longer disowning your responsibility and making considered choices, you can become a more active participant in life rather than passively going through the motions because you have to.

–Rachael Benjamin

The post Confusing Responsibility and Obligation Is a Mistake: Take More Responsibility for Your Choices appeared first on Tribeca Therapy.

There has been a lot of recent press about parents and their young adult children remaining closely connected for a much longer time than has been the case traditionally. A lot of reasons likely account for this such as financial struggle, life and career disruptions caused by the pandemic, and folks seeking romantic partners later in life. But while having a close relationship with your parents can be both helpful and enjoyable, sometimes it can be driven by a less healthy reason: fear.

Healthy parents are a source of comfort and soothing when we’re young: Sometimes young adults fearfully hold onto these familiar relationships

Parent-child relationships start out very simple under healthy circumstances. When you’re an infant, those relationships are a one-way street. At the most fundamental level, the relationships exist to keep you fed, safe, and alive. When these relationships are working well, parents can offer lots of healthy physical closeness, comfort, and soothing, and you learn that your parents are a reliable source of protection, security, and stability. Knowing you can count on them, you can develop the courage to take more risks (A first step! A new friend! Going to preschool!). This is a healthy and normal part of individuation, the process of forming an identity and a sense of self that’s separate from our parents. Learning you can do things without your parents builds self-confidence, resilience, and creativity. 

Sometimes, though, this process of separating and individuating is delayed, prolonged, or even avoided altogether. Fear can be a reason this happens, whether a young adult is frightened about making decisions for themselves, worried about making consequential mistakes, or scared of being lonely. In these cases, parents are an appealing source of comfort and connection. These are familiar and predictable relationships so there’s an understandable draw to return to what is known.

The line between closeness and dependence can blur in unhelpful ways with young adults and parents

While these relationships may seem protective and soothing for young adults, there is a distinction to be made between closeness and dependence. Sometimes the line between them gets very blurry. While an infant has to rely on a parent in non-negotiable ways, closeness in adult relationships is a choice that requires two autonomous people to decide to give and receive vulnerability and create intimacy together as a mutual activity. Dependence can both look and feel like closeness, and being reliant on another person has a way of feeling like a delicious luxury, a return to childhood.

However, this can quickly turn into emotional enmeshment, meaning one’s well-being is dependent on someone else’s well-being, overinvolvement in a young adult’s life, and ultimately, a dynamic of infantilization. All of this can ironically reinforce the very things the young adult is afraid of. Remaining dependent on a parent sends a message that growing up is dangerous, scary, and out of reach. There is a reason why Peter Pan is a compelling character. The idea of staying young forever, your safety and well-being being someone else’s responsibility (your parents’), and never having to contend with loss and hardship and loneliness can be very appealing.

When you stay a child dependent on parents, you can’t form adult relationships

When you’re stuck in the belief that you need to stay in the protected safety of a parent-child relationship instead of growing up and developing your own life, you can’t really form adult relationships. And that means you are limiting yourself in the amount of intimacy, happiness, and satisfaction you can experience.

Relating to yourself as a child essentially means offering others an underdeveloped version of yourself. This often looks like not knowing how to offer care to others, struggling with accountability, and not being able to own your contributions to problems and conflict. It also robs you of the joy of working through hard things with another person, feeling proud of yourself, and having confidence in your ability to continue to grow into a healthier and more loving iteration of yourself. 

The big question for young adults: What am I trying to avoid?

When considering whether a relationship with parents is one of closeness or dependence made out of fear, a good question for young adults to consider is: What am I trying to avoid? Think about who or what is benefitting from this high level of connection. 

Oftentimes, this isn’t so easy to parse out alone. Therapy can help you get honest with yourself about these relationships and what you may be avoiding by facilitating an exploration of feelings that might seem embarrassing, upsetting, or unpleasant. This can help you know yourself better so you can make more intentional decisions in your relationship as an adult that are better aligned with your values and goals. 

–Kelly Scott

The post Gen Z Is Closer to Parents Than Ever: Make Sure Your Closeness Isn’t a Solution for Fear appeared first on Tribeca Therapy.