By Nivida Chandra, Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto, The Guardian, September 20, 2022
I came to research the emotional neglect of children by accident. More than a decade ago, I wrote my master’s thesis on the relationship between the personal and professional lives of psychotherapists. How did they manage to keep the distress they heard in their clinics from affecting their own emotional balance? And how did they stop their personal challenges from affecting their clinical work?
In our conversations, I asked what brought them to be clinicians. The consistency of their answers surprised me. Virtually all said that being there for others, emotionally, came naturally; they were good at it because they were practised in tending others’ needs since childhood, starting with their own parents. With deeper conversations, I learned of the difficult family circumstances they each came from.
Their childhood stories were dominated by watching one parent beat the other, or a parent with undiagnosed depression, or other shades of pervasive discord between their parents. Their “job” was to protect and support their parents however possible. It made sense then that, as adults, they channelled this exceptional skill towards helping even more people.
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