Making Friends With Our Mental Illness
It's common for people to ask therapists, “Are they mentally ill? Is it a mental illness?”
It's common for people to ask therapists, “Are they mentally ill? Is it a mental illness?”
I often hear parents or parent educators utter the adage, “You should be a parent, not a friend, to your child”. I think this goes largely unchallenged in our culture. And the current ubiquitous criticism of parents as helicopter-parents or snowplow parents describes a parent who spends every ounce of their energy to remove discomfort and struggle from the child’s life and wants the child to approve of them. I believe there is a problem with this blanket criticism and the problem may start with our understanding of what it means to be a friend and only partly to do with our understanding of the role of a parent.
Families who make the difficult and courageous decision to send their child to Wilderness Therapy often hear from concerned friends and local professionals. These caring individuals have questions about “Wilderness Therapy.” Maybe they have heard stories of such programs or maybe the idea of sending a child away for treatment seems contrary to the notion that healing must happen in the family where the young person is surrounded by those that love him or her most.