Earlier this year, an essay appeared in the Atlantic with a provocative title: “Dear Therapist: I Don’t Want to Take Care of My Aging Homophobic Parents.” The piece was fueled by a thorny question: When it comes to caregiving, especially at the end of life, what do we owe parents who caused us extreme pain and trauma?
Joshua Johnson, a therapist and social worker at Bridge Consulting Services in Phoenix, says that when it comes to parental relationships, his patients often feel intense social pressure to put their pain aside. But, Johnson says that can be an unhealthy thing to do.
Full conversation
JOSHUA JOHNSON: Sometimes you do have to create some distance to heal. And in order for you to heal, sometimes you have to kind of turn off the noise in other arenas. So you can kind of navigate into your self-care space and really start healing the inner child in you.
And then hopefully, then you get to a point where now you're able to bring them back into the fold right. But by that time, you've not only acknowledged the trauma, but then now you've learned how to set boundaries with it.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. I mean, it does feel like we're talking about a bit of a taboo here. This idea that you would separate quote unquote from your parents willingly. Can you maybe give any examples that might illustrate why that that can be valuable for somebody who is reckoning with abuse or something like that?
JOHNSON: Absolutely. They learn forgiveness. They learn not only forgiveness towards the person who would hurt them, right? But they also learn forgiveness within themselves because oftentimes when we have been abused, you know, we end up blaming ourselves.
And one of the biggest things I have to remember and teach people is that when this abuse happened, you were 6,7, 8, 10, 16 years old, right? So clearly, right? You don't have the cognitive thought process of understanding that this was abuse until now we're in this space as an adult.
DINGMAN: So when it comes to this sense of forgiveness, how much do you find, I guess that that your clients are struggling to forgive themselves for a situation that maybe rationally we could say is not of their own making, but is so enmeshed that it is hard to see the complications of when you're a young person?
JOHNSON: Well, you got to remember too that we are untangling, right, almost depending on the person 20 years worth of ways of thinking. Can you imagine if we had an iPad before we exit out our parents' womb of like, oh, I can even pick my parents rather if it's depending on the race, the financial piece of it. I want us to be billionaires. I want to have a million dogs. If we had the ability to choose our lifestyle, none of us would have problems.
But unfortunately, sometimes we're born into drug abuse. Sometimes we're born into alcoholism. And so when we're born into traditions that do not belong to us, right, we are automatically forced to accept all those things at birth, right?
Until then you become of this current age when you're like, drug abuse doesn't work for me. Alcoholism, you know, verbal abuse, physical abuse does not work for me.
DINGMAN: Well, and it strikes me that in that answer, you, you've hit upon one of the really important tensions here, which is that when you're born into a situation like that or multiple situations like that, they become your norm because you don't know any other way, which is what creates the tension of this care conundrum because it is a societal norm to take care of your parents, even though you have recognized that your relationship with your parents falls outside of that norm.
JOHNSON: Right. Right. And even then for that piece is really important, you know, I like to do these several steps. One of them is acknowledging the truth, right? Because you can't stray away from truth, right? You know, understanding that, hey, this was my life. This is what happened to me.
Does it suck? Absolutely. But I have now the power and control currently to make a difference in my life, even with the person that yes, at the end of the day, do I love and care about this person? I do. But then also as well, maybe I'm not emotionally attached to that because of the trauma.
DINGMAN: What about a situation where somebody has done a lot of work with a therapist like yourself and reached a point where they feel like they can be in the hospital at the end of a parent's life, a parent who they had an abusive relationship with and it feels important to them to say some things to that parent that they have not been able to say previously.
Do you think it's important for them to express that even though this parent is at the end of their life, maybe not in a place where they have the capacity to respond or give your client the kind of apology that they may be hoping for or the kind of open dialogue that they may have been hoping for?
JOHNSON: Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's a space, a few different ways that I personally would do it. One of them is writing a letter to that person. Oftentimes the reason why I say writing a letter is because we try to pull everything off the top of our head and oftentimes things get missed, right? And the best way of just writing it out is just saying how you feel talking about it.
Of course, do it with your therapist if you are in therapy because then they can help you do a deeper dive or why you feel this way. Because at the end of the day, this forgiveness piece is for you. It's not for them, right? Because even when they officially pass on, guess who's still leaving and breathing, dealing with it.
DINGMAN: Right. You know, it feels like we're talking about something that is scary to think about when it comes to our parents, which is like, are we allowed to center ourselves when we're so conditioned to feel like our parents have been so unselfish?
JOHNSON: I think it's important to understand when you get to a certain point in therapy, you learn and it may be a little plot twist here, is that everyone's operating at their highest capacity. How our mom and dad were treating us when they were younger, and again, not condoning it, not saying it's OK, but they're a product from the generation before.
DINGMAN: You know, I asked that question in the spirit of, is it selfish to center your own well being and emotional recovery in your dynamic with a parent? But it feels like what you just said is that what can be really impactful is actually to approach that conversation from a place of generosity, from a place of saying, I am aware that the version of you that was you doing your best was informed potentially by generations of bad behavior and that it's not that you were willfully behaving the way you did. But nevertheless, it is the way you behaved and this is the impact it had on me. That's actually a very generous spirit.
JOHNSON: It’s being as let's switch it up. It's not selfish, it’s being self-aware.
DINGMAN: I feel like I'm getting free therapy on this conversation.
[LAUGHTER]
JOHNSON: I am self-aware of my capacity. I'm self-aware on who you are as an individual. I am practicing self-aware that you may not show up for me the way, in the capacity that I think I need you in. That's fair to say. And oftentimes we get in a place of blame, right? Again, I'm not saying that what people have done is. is OK. I'm not condoning it, but also as well as I have to learn that it happened and I have to accept it.
Now what I choose to do moving forward, right? That's my choice. Rather if it's again putting myself in this space of helping you throughout your end of days, or I choose to step back because this is still a little too much for me. That's my capacity, that's me being self-aware. And again, it doesn't make us selfish at all.
DINGMAN: Let's say somebody's listening to this right now and this is a situation they find themselves in. What would your message to them be?
JOHNSON: Forgiveness does not change the past, but it enlarges the future. So I tell, I tell everyone that it's important to know that your story is real. It's important to validate who you are and to always be open to changing your life.
