My Mother Was A Psychotherapist

She didn't have a college degree or any other credentials. Like all psychotherapists and counselors, she was much better helping others see their key issues, strengths, and options, than she was with her own. In fact like most, she had parts of her life where she was "crazy." Still, she did have some major key insights that she tried to offer her children and others.

To tell you more, I need to share some inside information. Almost all families have their own onomatopoetic or euphonic words for the major bodily functions. Ours were "pish" and "uhohdoo"--go ahead, you can guess.

One of my mother's favorite teachings was, "Wish in one hand, pish in the other and see which weighs more."

Now that is a very good restatement of a good rule of sanity. Today I frequently find myself helping clients realize that you cannot change the past. It is what it is. You may wish it had been different, but it is what it is. You can build on it. You can plan for the future. You can learn how certain antecedents lead to certain consequences. But you cannot change it. That's why continuing feelings of guilt are wasted emotional energy. The same is true of continued anger.

If you feel troubled by something you did that harmed another person, the first thing is to ameliorate the damage. Attempt to fix the present results of your behavior--and if possible acknowledge and apologize for having acted that way. But continuing to feel guilty serves neither you nor your victim. It interferes with effective correction. Sometimes it even reinforces the others feelings of being unable to move on.

A good example of this is the remorse and guilt some parents have for the way they raised their children. There are very few perfect parents. There are also very few perfect children. The little bundles of joy just don't come with an instruction manual. They are also not like pancakes. If you burn the first pancakes you can throw it away and start over. Not so with children. Also, any lessons you learn on the first one, don't seem to apply to subsequent children. That doesn't mean that there are no general rules, but the specifics are different with each child. (However, you may wish to read my blog entry "Operating Instructions for Your Life")

At some point every parent has to come to terms with his or her failures. All you can do is accept the reality, change or ameliorate, in the present, whatever can be changed, and move forward without being paralyzed by guilt.

Blame is as useless as guilt. I will often hear laments about how badly a client was treated by her parent. She had a clinging mother or a father who was abusive. Sometimes a woman client will share that she was the subject of sexual abuse. While, if true, there may be reasons for her to confront the father--sometimes even involve the authorities--in reality she cannot change the fact of the abuse. This is especially true when the parent has died. No matter how badly treated, the client's wishes that the parent behaved differently are fruitless. What the client can do is change his or her emotions about that past parental behavior.

I think my mother understood all this. Wishing always weighs less and has less value than "pishing." Or, as a local counseling/coaching group likes to say, "Love what IS." Accept and embrace reality. Pretty good advice for a woman with a high school education and a lot of her own craziness.

A second therapeutically sound aphorism of my mother was "We all know that we all stink when we make uhohdoo." Uhohdoo is a human part of everyone's life. My mother would say this when we would put down another person because they screwed up.

Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone does the best they know how. It's easy to assume malevolence when we have been harmed by another. But the truth is, the other person may have been careless, may have lacked awareness, or knowledge or ability, may have even been vindictive. Yet whatever the behavior, the person was doing what they thought was right under the circumstances as he understood them.

I'm not justifying bad behavior. People who harm others and don't recognize that, need to be made aware of the consequences of their behavior. Those who repeatedly do so may need to be restrained and retrained--that's what jails and prisons are for. However, a year of internship in San Quentin prison taught me that most inmates, as they began to understand the consequences to the victim and the other options that they had not seen at the time, were remorseful. That at the time of the offense, they did think that this was the best they could do. (I leave it for another posting to discuss prisons and our overuse of them. We hold more prisoners per population than any other nation on earth both in absolute numbers and proportionately.)

Most of us do not commit terrible acts on others or ourselves. When we do harm to another, we properly feel remorse and try to correct the problem to the best of our ability. However, what we were thinking and feeling at the moment was almost always based on our own misperceptions, lack of understanding, poor cognition, habits, etc., not on malevolence. We all "make uhohdoo." There are times when we all stink. It is in the nature of humans that we are fallible.

That's not an excuse, just a fact. That's why restitution works wonders in the criminal system. It gives both the victim and the perpetrator a new vista. It brings both to a realization of the humanity of the other. It links them as people. That's also why forgiveness works. Forgiveness is not an excusing of bad behavior. It is an acknowledgment that every person makes errors of judgement, knowledge, emotions and behavior. It is also an acknowledgment of the humanity of the other.

So my mother was, at times, a pretty good psychotherapist. She didn't always apply those things to herself. But all of us who do counseling/psychotherapy know that we too fail in that way. That's why a good counselor always finds someone who can be our own counselor.

(For clarity, let me say that I much prefer the word counseling to psychotherapy. Counseling, coaching and education are what promote mental health. Therapy and psychotherapy have simply become the common terms that we are forced to apply in our overly pseudo-scientific and medicalized profession. For more on this subject, you can read William Glasser, E. Fuller Tory, and Thomas Szasz among others.)