In almost every session there comes a point when the air shifts. The room settles. A patient is talking about their mother, or their father, and you can almost touch the old injury, close to the skin, tender, asking, without saying so, for some kind of easing. You’re across from them, with your training, your experience, your own story sitting quietly behind your eyes, and you’re faced with a choice that can outweigh a dozen techniques.

That’s the choice I want to name. Because I worry we sometimes miss it, and the cost doesn’t stop with the person in our office. It lands on grandparents who lie awake wondering if they’ll ever hold that grandchild again. It lands on kids who grow up with an empty space where a grandmother used to be, and only a vague, inherited explanation for why.

This is written to therapists. It’s also written to me, for the days when I need to hear it again.

We Weren’t There

Here’s what we don’t say often enough, even to one another: we only ever hear one side. Not because patients are deceiving us. Because when people hurt, they tell the version that helps them make sense of the hurt, and that version can’t help being partial.

A mother who finally drew a line, late and clumsily, gets filed as “controlling.” A father who never learned how to grieve out loud becomes “cold.” And we receive these accounts in fifty-minute slices, missing the context, missing the ordinary days, missing the quiet acts of love that never show up in session because they don’t sting.

We weren’t in the kitchen when it happened. We didn’t live inside that household. We didn’t watch the parent’s own history press down on them, or see the thousand small repairs that might have followed. We’re hearing one telling, filtered through the loudest wound of the week, shared by someone who is not, understandably, in their most generous frame of mind.

That isn’t a problem with the patient. It’s how memory works when it’s fused to pain. Still, it should make us cautious about what we conclude, and even more cautious about what we return to them wrapped in the authority of “clinical insight.”

What We Carry In With Us

There’s another piece we have to be honest about. A lot of us came to this work because we know what pain feels like from the inside. We’ve sat in that chair. Some of us still have an estrangement in our own family, still have a wound that hasn’t sealed over, still find ourselves sorting out our personal story in real time while we’re being paid to hold someone else’s.

That doesn’t automatically make us less fit for the work. Often it’s part of what makes us sensitive, tuned in, able to stay present. The risk starts when we stop noticing it. When a patient describes a difficult parent and something in us tightens, recognizes the pattern, agrees too fast, that’s the signal to slow down, not to accelerate. That’s our material stepping into the room without being invited.

If we don’t admit that to ourselves, we’ll pass it along to the patient as though it belonged to them.

Maybe this is the quiet obligation under every license we hold: know your own history well enough to tell what’s yours apart from what’s theirs.

The Drift Toward “No Contact”

I’m going to say this plainly, because this is one of those places where careful, polished language can hide what’s actually happening. Right now there’s a drift in our field, and it’s amplified by social media, by certain trainings, by ready-made phrases that slide out too easily, that treats going “no contact” as though it were healing by definition. As if cutting the cord is the finish line. As if distance, on its own, equals recovery.

Sometimes distance is necessary. I want to be clear about that. There are parents whose behavior is genuinely dangerous. There are patterns of abuse where no boundary holds, and safety requires space, for the patient and for their children. When that’s the reality, protection isn’t optional, it’s part of our job.

But that’s not what I mean.

I mean something quieter, and more common. A therapist who never meets the parent, never hears another account, never sits with anything but the patient’s version, and still begins nudging a person toward estrangement as if it’s the natural next step. A sympathetic nod. A tidy reframe. “That relationship isn’t serving you.” “You don’t owe anyone access to you.” Those lines aren’t inherently false. Spoken without deep care, though, they can become a gentle kind of coercion, steering a vulnerable person toward a permanent rupture on the basis of an incomplete, emotionally charged story.

When we do that, we’re not doing therapy. We’re passing a judgment we do not have the standing to make. We didn’t swear an oath to arbitrate someone’s family. We committed to helping a person understand themselves well enough to choose wisely, and choosing wisely sometimes means staying, working, setting a boundary that isn’t a wall.

Guiding someone toward the most final, most painful option, while holding the thinnest evidence we will ever have, isn’t treatment. It’s a misuse of the trust in the room.

The People Who Don’t Get a Say

This is the part that sits heaviest for me, and it’s the part we don’t talk about enough. When a parent is cut off, it’s rarely only one relationship that’s severed. Often a child is separated from a grandparent too, and that child never gets a vote.

There are things a grandparent can give that no one else quite gives. A different tempo. A longer view. Family stories that make a young life feel located, held. The particular kind of love that isn’t trying to raise you, just trying to know you. When grandparents are present and engaged, kids often carry a steadier sense of who they are and where they come from, not because grandparents are flawless, but because an extra root system can steady a growing person.

When we help close that door, we’re effectively deciding something for a child who never sat in our office, never told their story, and will eventually be old enough to ask why.

We should sit with that, really sit with it, the way we’d want a colleague to sit with it before giving guidance that reaches three generations deep.

No One Gets a Manual

We also need to be honest about what, exactly, we’re judging when we judge a parent.

Nobody does this perfectly. Not one person. Children don’t arrive with instructions, no guide for this temperament, this sensitivity, this particular way of needing love. Every parent alive has been improvising, in real time, with whatever they had available: their own upbringing, their own fatigue, their own unfinished grief, usually without training, without rehearsal.

We would never demand flawless execution from ourselves in our work. Yet it’s easy to hold parents to a standard no human being could meet, and then label the failure as pathology.

I think about this often with mothers. So many of the mothers our patients describe weren’t cruel. They were exhausted in a way that’s hard to put into words, carrying children, household, often a job, often the emotional climate of everyone around them, with less support than they needed and more expected of them than anyone wants to admit. For decades women were asked to do almost everything and complain about almost nothing.

A mother who snapped, withdrew, failed to be all things at all times in a system demanding exactly that, isn’t automatically a villain. She’s a person running on fumes, doing what she could with what she had, in circumstances that would have flattened plenty of us.

None of this means a patient’s wounds aren’t real, or that harm should be excused because it can be explained. It means we hold the full picture. A mother not being perfect isn’t the same as a mother not loving. We don’t help patients by collapsing “she was human” into “she was harmful,” because buried in that collapse is a standard none of us would survive either.

What I Think We Owe Instead

So no, this isn’t a call to silence when someone is describing real harm. It’s a call to hold our role with more humility than the moment we’re in tends to reward.

Ask more before interpreting. Stay curious about the parent as a whole person, not only as a figure in the patient’s pain. Keep remembering that boundaries and rupture aren’t the same thing, and that many family injuries have more room for repair than our culture currently likes to admit.

And keep checking ourselves. Is this truly my patient’s conclusion, or did I guide them here? Would I be able to explain this recommendation to the parent, face to face, without hiding behind jargon? Who else loses something if this relationship ends?

Because our influence in that room is real. When someone is hurting, a small suggestion can land like permission, sometimes like an order. We have to carry that weight the way we’d want it carried if we were the ones standing on the other side of a door that just closed.

A Closing Thought

This isn’t written to shame anyone. It’s written because I believe most of us came into this work to help heal families, not to quietly take them apart. On the days when the patient’s pain is loud and the parent’s failures look obvious, it’s worth remembering we’re holding something bigger than one person’s account.

Sometimes, without realizing it, we’re holding a grandchild’s future memory of someone who loved them. We should be worthy of that.

With respect for the work we all carry,

Inge