"One of them is particularly effective when working with a client who has unresolved issues with their parents. Sometimes we don't fully appreciate the effects our early childhood experiences regarding our parents have on the rest of our lives. In talk therapy, we might find ourselves thinking for the first time about how the things our parents did and said might be causes of the issues that have brought us to therapy."
"The content is all the things we're starting to realize about our childhood and how it affects us today. It is the realizations and fears and unacknowledged feelings and events that have been left unsaid over the years. It's the pain and trauma that we have glossed over, made excuses for, or rationalized, even the small things that we minimized but which might have had a stronger emotional impact than we thought."
"We may not fully appreciate the effects of early childhood experiences with our parents on our lives. It can be an emotional experience to relate as an adult to the way our parents acted toward us in childhood. Part of letter writing is to free ourselves from the instinct to protect our parents. There are many tools in the therapist's toolbox to use as they work with clients."
Therapists can use letter writing to help clients process unresolved parental issues and childhood impacts. Clients compose letters that state realizations, fears, unacknowledged feelings, and events left unsaid. Letters surface pain and trauma that were glossed over, excused, or rationalized, including seemingly small incidents with stronger emotional effects than expected. Letters can reveal absenteeism, parental addiction, divorce, and other sources of early trauma. Writing the letter allows clients to acknowledge how parental behavior shaped current problems and to move beyond the instinct to protect parents, enabling clearer emotional processing and therapeutic exploration.
Read at Psychology Today
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