when you feel the most misunderstood by those who are supposed to know you best…

You see their name flash on your phone…and immediately let it go to voicemail, You are gripped with anxiety as you drive up to see them. Not going home “for the holidays”, is an option you fantasize about- you may even risk skipping the trip- but you know you won’t hear the end of it. Family dinners swing between tense silences as someone drinks, someone nervously makes jokes, someone else hyper focuses on conversation about work while another stews in silence. You send the customary Mother’s Day flowers but every memory of her is brimming with hurt, neglect, pain. You wish he bothered telling you he was proud of you even once, and you feel anger that you still hold hope for his approval.
You are slowly beginning to notice that your current romantic relationships are beginning to resemble the one of your parents- the one you swore would never be the case.
You wish you felt joy or eagerness when you think of seeing them…but you are now so used to the distance and detachment, that you struggle to feel anything at all.

When families inflict pain, it wounds us in ways not much else can. It immediately cracks our very foundation. We can build our entire life despite this, but those cracks…they never seal and they always show. Family relationships are messy. The holiday pictures tend to hide the secrets, the quiet anger, the judgment and neglect that your insides never forget.
While as children, we are often sent to the school counselor for our “behavior problems”, it is the when we become adults that we realize that they weren’t “behavior problems” and it wasn’t us who needed help. It was family stress that was weighing heavy on our shoulders and it was the family that needed help.
There is a little kid inside your grown up body, who remembers it all. The grown up you had a full life of all the check lists that embody adulthood. But the kid in you? He rarely sleeps, he drinks to forget, he stays away from “commitment” or finds himself dealing with a series of break ups.
That kid, the one you may not even be fully aware of, is always with you.

I often tell my clients that they have an invisible car seat in the back of their car, 24/7. And that car seat belongs to the kid you never got to be, or the kid you had to be.

Therapy to untangle family issues can often be seen as unnecessary- its in the past, you dont see them that often, so what is the point?
The point is that our family experiences leak into our present without permission. They show up in our romantic relationships, in the way we cope with stress, the life we build, the things we prioritize, the depression we hide and the anxiety we can’t.
That kid-in-the-car seat deserves a new shot at life. That kid may never get the parents he wanted, but he can live a life free of old pain. We cannot change our past, but we can heal from it enough so that our present feels great and our future, promising.

Family Therapy can be for your entire family- or it can be just for you.
Regardless, it is an efficient way to guarantee that your future is fully yours and not a reaction to what they did.
You deserve to be free. I can help you get there.