The shortest psychotherapy

When you see people as good, they tend to become that way. A few years ago, a woman called me, her voice filled with despair as she described how her life had lost meaning because she felt she was a bad mother. Her daughter had married and accepted her husband’s insistence to live with his parents since they didn’t have their own place or enough money to rent one. She had offered for them to live with her in a bigger, more comfortable apartment, but her daughter explained that her husband couldn’t be without his parents. ‘And she can be without me,’ she lamented. “Is his mother a better mother than I am, after all I’ve invested in her life?’ She continued, saying her daughter was avoiding her and visiting less. ‘Ma’am,’ I interrupted, ‘the fact that your daughter can be without you means you are a good mother, better than one whose adult child cannot be independent. Your daughter can even oppose you, which shows she has enough trust in your love. Good parenting means your children leave, become independent, and don’t fight for crumbs of your love by staying with you.’ There was a moment of silence. ‘Do you really think that?’ she asked. ‘Absolutely,’ I replied. ‘You can’t imagine how much you’ve helped me and how differently I feel now.’ She thanked me, and we ended our ten-minute conversation. A month later, she called again to express her gratitude and share how her relationship with her daughter had improved—how her daughter was visiting more often and how they were talking for hours about various topics… how I had “saved her life.” ‘Don’t exaggerate,’ I replied, ‘I just reminded you of what you already knew but lost sight of due to the stress of separation.’A few days later, her daughter called me, saying, ‘I don’t know what you did to my mother or how, but thank you from the bottom of my heart.’ ‘Nothing special,’ I replied, ‘I just reminded her how good she is.’ A year passed since that conversation, and the woman called me again to say she had ‘become a grandmother and is the happiest grandma in the world’ and how she could never forget how that brief conversation “brought her back to herself.” ‘You were right,’ I said, ‘it brought you back to something you already were but temporarily lost—a sense of being good.’