What difference would it have made in your life if you had been your own parent?

The contents of this blog are my opinions and are not the opinions of any current or former colleagues. This is not to be construed as mental health or medical advice and does not constitute a relationship with a professional therapist.

“How do you imagine your life might have been if you’d had yourself as a father or mother?”

That’s from David Denborough’s Retelling the Stories of Our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw Inspiration and Transform Experience (p. 197.) I was reading an article by a Noam Shpancer, Ph.D. on Psychology Today a while back (“The Most Important Question in Therapy.”) I am prone to hyperbole, but I feel Denborough’s question is one of the most important questions we can ask of our clients, and one of the most important questions we can ask of ourselves. Denborough asks another important question in the same section: “If you’d had yourself for a mother or father, what would you have appreciated about yourself as a child that wasn’t appreciated in you as a child or adolescent?” (p. 197.)

What difference would it have made in your life if you had been your own parent? I’ve had clients tell me they would not have allowed themselves to be sexually abused as children for years; I’ve had other clients tell me they would have been able to talk about their disordered eating and find support in doing so; I had one client say to me “I’m not going to answer that bullshit science fiction question.”

I’m nearly finished reading Paul Williams’ Invasive Objects: Minds Under Siege. Paul Williams is a psychoanalyst; in his book he discusses a client with a highly traumatized childhood who engages in analysis for years with Williams. “After some years of analytic work, James said to me: ‘I feel I have to pay attention every day to that child I was. It’s like visiting someone in hospital or a grave. If I don’t think of him or hold his hand, I feel lost. I will never let him go again.’” (p. 161). Williams’ client is engaged in long-term psychoanalytic therapy; it appears this has given him the ability to do what Internal Family Systems therapy refers to as “parts work” (or, sometimes, “ego state therapy.”)

Notably, the Adult Children of Alcohlics and Other Dysfunctional Families 12 Step support group (ACA, sometimes stylized as ACoA, which I prefer less) also eventually focuses on what they describe as “reparenting” and learning to treat yourself with “gentleness, humor, love and respect” as opposed to harshness, rigidity, self-deprecation, etc.

I have a significant interest in and continue to pursue training in Internal Family Systems therapy. Internal Family Systems proposes that we have protective parts that protect us from our wounded inner children (“exiles”, in IFS parlance), and that we have a core Self which can help heal those wounded children. I regularly consult with a therapist who explains that Self’s superpower is the ability to remove moral meaning from our experiences. Denborough and Williams, despite being involved in different schools of therapy, both appear to suggest something very similar. What if we could learn to treat ourselves with curiosity, compassion, and respect? What if we could learn to tend to the hurt parts of our pasts?

When we enter therapy, we hope to begin to develop a new relationship with ourselves, a new relationship to our histories and heartbreaks, and with a little bit of determination and luck, a new relationship with our futures.

My perfectionistic parts want me to let you know I wrote this on Monday, June 16th, 2025, not May 28th. Ha!