A therapist tells trauma victim to have a baby

https://old.reddit.com/r/childfree/comments/198fj44/my_friends_therapist_told_her_that_having_a_baby/

Gee, that is $$$ well spent. A woman ran into a friend who is trying for a rugrat and has trauma from family abuse was told by her therapist that a baby would help. I think that person needs to lose their licence.

Imagine if the trauma victim abuses the kid and creates more trauma...Well I guess that would mean a future client.

From the post:

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My friend then told me that that through therapy she and her therapist came to a realization that having children could help heal her childhood trauma and abuse. This really concerned me. I think it could be harmful to both mother and child because it sets up very large and probably unattainable expectations of the kid and parenthood in general. Bringing a child into this world to serve as therapy for you does not sound right to me. However, I am no therapist...

JFC that is the worst fucking advice ever. First of all, it is an EXTREMELY BAD IDEA to have children to heal yourself. What's that thing about not giving a child a job before it's born? The kid's job shouldn't be to make you happy.

Sure, have a kid and fuck them up just like you were fucked up. That therapist should be FIRED.

I was raised by a mother like this, and OMG the stories I could tell you about the grief I got when I just wanted to be left alone or I wanted to do something that was different from what my mother thought I should do.

I remember getting screamed at when I wasn't jazzed about some Great Thing my mom thought I MUST do. I got to hear about how great it was going to be. When I continued to be unimpressed, she would up the ante. She would tell me how she did X,Y, Z and usually how much money/time she expended on something I didn't even want.

100% of the time this was because my mom wanted me to do something she didn't get to do, when I couldn't have cared less.

That is what it's like to be raised by someone who is having children for the wrong reasons, and to encourage someone to do this is unconscionable.

I was also raised by someone who was mentally unfit and I can assure you it did not make my mother more competent. All she did was take everything out on me, tell me I was stupid all the time, and scream at me constantly about the tiniest things (giving me anxiety in the process). She is a narcissist who was also raised by a narcissist, and due to money being tight when I was a kid, we were forced to live with her narcissist mother who continued to treat her like crap. I would have had far more sympathy for her being a victim of narcissistic parenting had she not turned around and taken her shitty life out on me just because I existed.

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bell_flower
I remember getting screamed at when I wasn't jazzed about some Great Thing my mom thought I MUST do. I got to hear about how great it was going to be. When I continued to be unimpressed, she would up the ante. She would tell me how she did X,Y, Z and usually how much money/time she expended on something I didn't even want.

Sounds like my mother too. Here's a good example: she coerced me into college I didn't want to attend. I had a panic attack over it so badly that I was hyperventilating and my hands stiffened up to the point where I couldn't move them for an hour from muscle tension. She started bawling that she was only making me go for my own good and I needed to "stop doing that with your hands."

I was also guilt tripped for daring to be upset because in my mother's head, I had nothing to be sad about. If I got upset about anything, especially about how she treated me, she would rattle on about how haaaaaaard she worked to give me things she didn't have growing up. She always found a way to turn it back around and make herself the victim, so I couldn't even express emotions without getting bitched at.

Big shock, as an adult, I hide my emotions at all costs. I will sit there with tears rolling down my face and say I'm fine and nothing is wrong because it's still ingrained in my head that I am not allowed to be outwardly upset, even if it's for a good reason.

What she should have done was get away from her abusive parent sooner, which she did when I was 14 and she decided being poor and living in her own house was better than living with her mother. She should have also gotten fucking therapy before making a whole new person to raise.

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bell_flower
100% of the time this was because my mom wanted me to do something she didn't get to do, when I couldn't have cared less.

Same here. My mother always wanted to go to college to be a teacher (LOLWUT she couldn't even handle not fucking up one child, let alone 30 of them), but she couldn't afford to. So she made me go, twice. I never wanted to go to college, or if I did, I would have preferred community college or a trade school. Instead I was forced into art school because some asshat told her art was incredibly lucrative and I'd make money hand over fist. Because of her not letting me live my own life, I'm now six figures in debt I'll never pay off. I "had to" go to college because she couldn't. Didn't matter what I wanted, all that mattered was what she wanted.

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Babies do not heal mental illness, especially not if you haven't gotten your head screwed on properly with therapy, medication, etc. All that will happen is you will fuck up your kid by exposing them to your mental fuckery and then they will need therapy too.

The friend described in the original Reddit post doesn't even sound like she wants kids, but is going to have one anyway because her idiot therapist told her to and because her husband really wants them. Great, so not only is she trying to have a kid to fix her emotional damage, she's having a kid she doesn't even want. That kid is guaranteed to be screwed up. The husband is also severely agoraphobic, so both of them are fucked in the head. Encouraging people like this to breed is so irresponsible. You can have a stable relationship and perfect mental health and a child will ruin both those things. If you go in already damaged, you're just going to create another generation of mental illness.

God I hope this woman grows some sense and realizes a brat won't fix her life.

I never felt loved or wanted by my parents. I know from things they have said they felt the same way about their parents. They thought they were doing a better job than their parents. Maybe that's true, but it still was a lousy job and it still fucked me up.

So many parents make the mistake of trying to give their kids either what they liked about their own childhoods or what they wanted but didn't have. It never occurs to them their kid might want something completely different. My mom did this a lot. I resent her for not letting me have what I wanted, which would not have taken any more money or effort than the crap she pushed on me.

A lot of therapists are even crazier than their clients.

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"I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all."
~Sigmund Freud

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ondinette
I never felt loved or wanted by my parents. I know from things they have said they felt the same way about their parents. They thought they were doing a better job than their parents. Maybe that's true, but it still was a lousy job and it still fucked me up.

So many parents make the mistake of trying to give their kids either what they liked about their own childhoods or what they wanted but didn't have. It never occurs to them their kid might want something completely different. My mom did this a lot. I resent her for not letting me have what I wanted, which would not have taken any more money or effort than the crap she pushed on me.

Same here. My mother seemed to think that because she didn't beat me, make me clean my plate and made sure I didn't go without necessities that she was parent of the century. That's because her parents were born during the Depression and were super broke, and her father was an abusive alcoholic. So going without, eating what was put in front of you and beatings were the norm for her and her siblings.

She may not have done those things, but she fucked me up in whole new ways. Didn't socialize me, screamed at me constantly over the tiniest issues, didn't let me go anywhere or do anything because she assumed I'd get in trouble/do drugs/have sex, wouldn't take me to the doctor unless my ailment inconvenienced her (like chronic coughing keeping her up all night), didn't teach me how to do anything useful and never let me make mistakes, and gave no fucks what I wanted to do with my own life because she was too busy forcing me into what she wanted me to do.

All these things have made me into a mental wreck as an adult. As a result of the screaming over the most trivial things, I will break down if I make a tiny mistake and will not forgive myself. I'm an introvert who still doesn't really know how to talk to people. I feel guilty about going to the doctor even though I have my own insurance because I was made to feel guilty for being sick as a kid. I'm an anxious overthinker after a lifetime of having to stay a step ahead of my mother mentally to minimize the chances of her having a meltdown. I have no motivation to do anything because it's ingrained in my head that I'm too stupid to do anything right, so I shouldn't bother trying. I also have absolutely no self-esteem or self-confidence from being told how dumb I am.

I almost wish she would have just beaten me instead. Physical wounds heal, but mental wounds require therapy I can't afford.

My mother and her family were refugees in Germany during WW2 after their village got bombed. Let's just say my childhood was far from ideal. She had severe PTSD from living through the war and she beat me regularly. She also had me much later in life and TBH I have no idea why.

This therapist needs to have their license revoked ASAP. What a shitty, shitty thing to do to a patient. I hope this lady wises up and realizes that having a kid will only make things much worse, especially if her husband also has something wrong with him.

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mumofsixbirds
My mother and her family were refugees in Germany during WW2 after their village got bombed. Let's just say my childhood was far from ideal. She had severe PTSD from living through the war and she beat me regularly. She also had me much later in life and TBH I have no idea why.

This therapist needs to have their license revoked ASAP. What a shitty, shitty thing to do to a patient. I hope this lady wises up and realizes that having a kid will only make things much worse, especially if her husband also has something wrong with him.

That therapist needs her ass beaten.

A lot of therapists are fucking jokes. All they do is spew their opinions (which are the opinions of society because they cannot think for themselves). I have an inherited condition and a therapist asked me if I was going to have kids and said that having kids makes things so much better. Children should not be born with a job to do, but breeders and breeder brains don't understand that.

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"I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all."
~Sigmund Freud

I had a friend (who was studying to be a counselor of sorts) once tell me I should have children. This was when I was in my 40's (with no significant other) and he knew when he said it that I'm childfree as I had told him more than once. I also never talked about kids in front of him because I had no interest in them.

This came up when I was looking for ways to heal my trauma. I'm guessing his thought was that if I had a brat I could forget about my trauma instead? He is also childless and a childless person will never understand a childfree person. So, it could have been about me having a brat because I had opportunities to do so. Both breeders and the childless are hardwired to have kids and I don't think they care much about the circumstances other than a person being at least 18, if that.

Some parents probably don't understand how anyone doesn't want kids and are likely to suppress saying this to the childfree because we have made our stance clear. The parents are like the childfree in this aspect, as we don't understand why anyone would want kids but we may suppress our opinion towards others once they have made it clear they want kids.

Forgetting about trauma and stuffing it down somewhere in order to raise a kid I don't want is a recipe for trauma exponentially increasing. No thanks, I'll take working through my own trauma without the distraction of a 100% dependent being TYVM.

I've watched adults around kids who have trauma. They are easily triggered by kids who aren't really doing anything but being kids. Not good for the kids (who will start to carry their own trauma from these experiences) and not good for the adults either.

When my marriage was failing, I remember going to see a marriage counselor. My husband and I were having serious problems at the time and I knew at that point that our marriage wasn't going to last, but it was a last-ditch attempt at trying.

The therapist was some older dude who asked me why we didn't have kids and he then scolded me because it was my responsibility to propagate the next generation. That shit cost me money too. We left the session and never returned. I was absolutely furious. Even my husband thought that was way out of line, so at least we could agree on that one thing.

Not to mention that I was over 50 and my ex is even older than me.

I have to honestly say that it put me off therapists. I know there are some better ones, but why do I want to spend all that money only to find out that the person is an idiot who dispenses crap advice? Thanks, I'd rather keep the money in my wallet and try to work it out on my own.

ETA: I occasionally do attend mental health but it's fully covered and if I don't jive with the person I'm assigned there, I can opt for another person. I'm going to be attending a group there for trauma victims because I still need some help dealing with that.