Part 1/2: Is Therapy The Answer?
Therapy Is Everything
(Reminder- Seth and Abel are a semi-fictional composite of my children for anonymity and plausible deniability purposes.)
You can safely assume that if my perfect children—and they are perfect, just ask their self-esteem coach—required therapy, they would have it. There's an African saying, "It takes a village to raise a child." Our village is currently located in Massachusetts, where there are lots of people with higher education, and high hourly rates to match.
It began innocently enough. We were worried when Seth didn't talk on time, and he was referred to speech therapy. It only took until he was three and a half to solve this problem. Once speech therapy did work, it was a little too effective. I'm not saying he talks too much, because he should always feel free to express himself, but I occasionally find myself fantasizing about Seth not sharing his every thought with me.1
You might think that our speech therapy success would have marked the end of our family's journey. No. It was only the beginning.
One day, I caught Seth poking Abel repeatedly. I told him to stop it. He asked me, "Is this a trauma-informed household?" Even I don't know what trauma-informed means, so it probably isn't.
Abel is equally educated in psychological jargon, and at age 7, he tells me that he is "feeling emotionally overwhelmed" about cleaning his room. That's a lot of feelings to process about a Lego set and yesterday’s shoes!
Don't imagine I find this even the slightest bit annoying. It's really wonderful. In fact, I'm very proud of his ability to describe his emotions this way. Imagine if we were the kind of terrible parents who use attachment-threatening ultimatums like “Just do it”!
I, Isha Yiras Hashem, am the very model of a modern parent, qualified to teach the parenting classes I offered in a previous post.2 (Link)
My friend's nine-year-old cited a peer-reviewed study about why sharing her bicycle triggers her generalized anxiety disorder. The pediatrician referred her to a child psychiatrist, who recommended play therapy. I'm told that she now spends more time in therapy than she spends in school. Fortunately the therapy comes to her. It is now done in school, because it is a full time curriculum.
Am I, Isha Yiras Hashem, really a good mother?
Maybe a really good mother would make sure Seth had therapy every hour of every day. I imagine a grown-up Seth telling his therapist sadly, “If only I had had more therapy, I would have been more successful.”
There's a therapist for everything. At pickup last week, when Abel wouldn't give back his friend's teddy bear, another parent asked, "Do you want the number of my amazing toy-sharing trauma specialist? He specializes in transitional object attachment issues!" That is how I found out that "Put it back right now!" might result in Teddy Attachment Syndrome.
It's not just toys. Struggling with your multiplication tables is now occasionally diagnosed as STEM-Related Academic Trauma. This requires specialized flash cards that come with trigger warnings. See below.
Don't get me wrong—I'm not anti-therapy! You can even read about my own professional emotional support human here. As long time readers of this blog already know, we are still working through my therapist's misguided beliefs about Esau in the book of Genesis. 3 4
I asked her how she became such a good therapist while being completely wrong about Esau. It turns out that she has her own therapist to process her feelings about my biblical interpretations, and that therapist has a therapist to handle the secondhand trauma of hearing about my therapist's problems with my problems. It's a never-ending circle of therapy.5
Speaking of family conflicts that could have used some therapeutic intervention, let's talk about something I've heard is an issue in, um, my neighbor's cousin's friend's pen pal's family. I refer to “fighting”.
As a good mother, if my kids fight over the swing set, I would never tell anyone that I want them to work it out themselves.6 That's grounds for a CPS call these days. It’s like treating your children as tiny gladiators in a playground Colosseum. Bad! Evil! Thumbs down! Don’t do it!!
Be an excellent mother like me! Spend the next hour facilitating a "conflict resolution circle" complete with talking stick and feelings journal.
Sometimes I worry about their future, though. What happens when they enter the real world and meet someone who DOESN'T care about their feelings? My therapist says I'm catastrophizing, but my life coach disagrees.
Recently, a friend confided that she's receiving "Parent-Child Interaction Therapy." Surely, I thought, she must be joking. “That is very funny”, I said. “You've given me a great idea for a post.” She wasn't joking, and I had to apologize.7
I just don't get it. Here are two capable adults who own a home, pay taxes, and manage their lives successfully in every other way, yet they're paying a 23-year-old to teach them how to parent. A teenager with babysitting experience could probably do the same job, for cheaper.
The final straw came during my son's play therapy session last week, when he lost a board game. His therapist suggested we add "competitive outcome resilience therapy" to his treatment plan. I told her to tell him to read the rules more carefully.
The therapist shook her head disapprovingly. I was definitely in trouble. Later that day, she texted me that her therapeutic advisor had recommended that future sessions would focus on my "maladaptive instructional control patterns."
I had to protect myself. So I informed her that, unfortunately, Seth had experienced a sudden and acute onset of Therapeutic Environment Anxiety Syndrome (TEAS), and, as a result, she was not welcome back until he recovered. She said she would have told us to start medication.
Medication for what?
They'll come up with a label somehow. Our child psychiatrist (we have one of those too, of course) tells me the next DSM update will include 'Homework Refusal Syndrome,’ 'Prolonged Bathtub Resistance Disorder,' and 'Chronic Vegetable Avoidance Anxiety.' When simple solutions like timeout8 fail, we're quickly shuffled toward the professional intervention conveyor belt—medication, therapy, or both. Usually both.
In Part Two, we’ll discuss some observations about therapy culture, access, and what normal looks like.
Also, anything you don't like about this article is my therapist's fault. I mean she has to earn a living somehow.
https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/parenting-classes-introduction
This is only partially true. But my beloved therapist is, in fact, totally wrong about Esau, and has been for years. And she is reading this. Hi!
Rebbetzin Fastag responds: “However, there is something I personally disagree with. When children have an argument and you tell them to work it out themselves, what happens is that the stronger one takes what he wants and the weaker one suffers. It's basically the jungle. So I do think parents must get involved.”
I agree, but I couldn't figure out how to work it into the text easily. So here it is as a footnote.
Thanks for forgiving me, ERF. And thanks for the idea!
Timeout is now considered traumatizing, by the way, and losing privileges damages self-esteem.
As a fully therapized reader, I loved your essay. I want to share it with my grown children for my grandchildren’s sake, but I know they would tell their therapists it’s all their mother’s fault.
Definitely food for thought. Do you think your son would have started speaking without the SLP intervention? I do think there's a place for therapy in a child's life. At the same time, I find that the therapist can attempt to morph all relationships for the child into a therapy relationship (which is often client-centric) and, as you noted, that's not how the world works...
(and I was so sure you were going to go with turtles, I mean therapists all the way down... But the Matryoshka analogy works as well)