Does Therapy Come Too Late?

Why do we leave school without ever learning how to help ourselves? At home, the models for healthy adjustment are often missing too. Many parents are just as lost as their kids, and admitting it is hard, especially when they never received that kind of guidance themselves, not at the kitchen table and not in a classroom.

Bookstores are full of self-help titles written for grown-ups. Children get almost none of that. It makes you wonder whether some parents quietly prefer kids who know no more about handling life than they themselves did at that age.

So where does a child actually pick up coping skills? From video games, maybe. From violent shows. From the arguments and chaos playing out at home. Values and ideals and anything touching on spirituality have been pushed nearly out of schools and out of most public view. The gentle, wholesome programs of years past gave way to drama for its own sake, full of lousy examples of how to treat people or work through a problem.

Doing therapy can wear a person down, and it gets especially hard once someone's beliefs and ways of solving problems have hardened into who they are. By then a challenge to change feels like an attack on the self. A lot of this traces back to how self-esteem got built in the first place, and the habits a person was handed for protecting it. When someone dreads criticism and the rejection they assume follows it, lying and dodging and shrugging off responsibility become the go-to moves.

The payoff is a fear of change and a kind of learned helplessness, which crowds out the problem-solving skills and the honest wish to do better that might otherwise grow. People are works in progress. Making mistakes, then rethinking and adjusting, is simply how it goes. Years ago I wrote something, a story or maybe a poem, about a character I called Old King Never Ever Wrong.

Stories are meant to teach, not only to entertain or let off steam. Long before most people could read or write, stories carried lessons from one generation to the next, handed down by voice. Think of the parables Jesus told. Think of the Bible stories children still hear in Sunday school and church.