It is hard for people to mourn the loss of a parental relationship when they are overwhelmed by negative memories and feelings. Psychotherapy can be helpful in these situations. Parent-child relationships, like all relationships, are never perfect. Although experiences such as shock, denial and acceptance are common to the mourning process, mourning unfolds in a particular way for each person. The job of a therapist doing grief counseling is to help people navigate this personal and arduous journey.
Mourning grief is a difficult process, but unlike depression, mourning promotes growth and self-integration. It is a common misconception that it is more difficult to mourn the loss of a parent with whom one was close than the loss of a parent with whom one was estranged. Often the opposite is true. The more pertinent question is whether the relationship was emotionally satisfying. The loss of a satisfying relationship is easier to mourn than the loss of an unsatisfying relationship.
Mourning does not occur in discrete, successive stages that are neatly laid out. Mourning an unsatisfying parental relationship is like untying a difficult knot. It can be a seemingly intractable problem because people mourning unsatisfying relationships have conflicting feelings that must be worked through, and some of these feelings are outside of a person’s awareness. Examples of such feelings are love and hate, anger and guilt, sadness and happiness. A therapist doing grief work must help the patient tolerate the confusion of experiencing opposite feelings toward their parent at the same time.
Many people find it difficult accepting that they loved and hated the same parent. It doesn’t seem to make sense. Feeling angry at a parent can seem wrong and make a person feel guilty. Guilt is often expiated through suffering. Self-imposed suffering designed to relieve guilt is different than the grief of loss, and the two feelings can be confused. If a child feels that they deserve to suffer because they are angry at their deceased parent, therapy can help them differentiate their grief from their guilt, which are processed in different ways.
Often people are not aware they are angry at the parent they loved. Therapy can help the patient to become aware of their anger so it can be worked through in order to reach the positive aspects of the relationship. But these positive feelings cannot be reached if blocked from awareness by anger. Even tainted parent-child relationships have good aspects, which can serve as sources of strength for the surviving child. Although it is hard to let go of pleasant memories, it can be harder to let go of unpleasant ones. Sometimes unpleasant memories are the dominant memories of the relationship, and letting go of them means letting go of the deceased. In an unsatisfying parent-child relationship, the child must simultaneously work through and experience hating the parent they loved, loving the parent they hated, feeling angry for being left behind, feeling guilty for feeling angry, feeling foolish for feeling sad, feeling happy and upset that the relationship is over.
In an unsatisfying relationship, in addition to the usual anger of being left behind, a child might also be angry over the way they were treated. Often children of unsatisfying parental relationships are angry over the wished-for relationship that they were denied. In an unsatisfying relationship, there are many unmet wishes regarding what could have been. These numerous unfulfilled wishes can be hard to let go of and hard to mourn. This is precisely what makes mourning unsatisfying relationships so difficult—it is very hard to mourn lost dreams.
Grief work requires that the therapist listen to the patient’s story while helping them slice and dice the various components of their experience in order to put each component in its proper place. It requires the therapist to have patience and not be overwhelmed by listening. A therapist must be able to listen to this material empathically. Listening empathically does not imply feeling sorry for the patient. It means being able to put yourself in the patient’s shoes in order for the patient to feel understood. Mourning an unsatisfying parental relationship is difficult but not impossible, and is helped by the therapeutic process.
Jonathan Bellin is accepting new patients and has been a therapist for over 25 years. He has a tele-therapy practice where he treats patients age 18+ with ADHD, depression, anxiety, PTSD, trauma and relationship issues. Jonathan received his MSW from YU in 1991. He can be reached at [email protected].
