"Our ideas and interventions as therapists may forever shape the lives of our clients and those who care about them. Our opinions of how memory works, what constitutes trauma, and how identity is formed will determine what we believe should be investigated and what should be discarded. Which loved ones should be held close and who should be let go? Which careers should be pursued, and which should end?"
"Recent public conversations about family estrangement have sparked concern that therapists are responsible for encouraging many adult children to cut off their parents. In response, many clinicians have emphasized that "ethical therapists" do not tell clients what to do, do not instruct them to estrange, and do not impose their personal values. That defense is somewhat accurate—but largely incomplete. The central concern is not whether therapists explicitly cause estrangement."
Therapists' beliefs about memory, trauma, identity, genetics, environment, and politics shape what gets investigated, validated, or discarded in clinical work. Those beliefs influence decisions about whom clients should keep close, which careers to pursue, and whether parents bear blame. Public concern has arisen about therapists encouraging adult children to sever family ties, prompting clinicians to assert that ethical practice avoids instructing clients. That assertion is incomplete because the interpretive frameworks therapists introduce—trauma, abuse, boundaries, narcissism, enmeshment—profoundly influence meaning-making and the perceived necessity of rupture.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]