Member-only story
I’m in Counseling With My Adult Son
And seeing my behavior plain
When my adult son, 33, asked if I would go to counseling with him, I said I didn’t want to. He was in the midst of a horrible rough patch in his marriage that would possibly lead to divorce (still might). I thought he should be counseling with his wife, not his mother. So did his dad and my friends.
But . . . I’m a mother. What was I going to say? And we were going through a rough patch, too.
I thought he would blame me
My first thought was that he would use the sessions to blame me for his troubles. That didn’t happen. I also thought the counselor we’d located was lame. He took a long time to say anything. He wouldn’t let me and my son talk to each other directly — everything had to go through him. Plus, he kept sending me erroneous appointment reminders, saying I should go to his office, when in fact, we were meeting online. We’d spend 10 minutes at the start of every session trying to work out his inefficiencies. All this annoyed me. Plus, my son was often late. What good is this doing? I kept thinking, lining my ducks up to quit.
