Blog Post Title Three
During my traineeship, I encountered two clients who were adult children living at home. Both worked and contributed to their households to varying degrees and both really wrestled with self-esteem and feelings of hopelessness. One thing I learned of the time, was that disclosing about my own experience as an adult child living in my childhood home may have been a helpful, de-stigmatizing act. During training, it’s a challenge for therapists to discern when and how to disclose certain details about ones personal life. It’s often debated if personal disclosure should happen at all and if you do choose to do it, it takes time to develop the discernment and wisdom for when it’s appropriate. Since then, I’ve often thought about how my own sharing could have been helpful because my own therapeutic journey as a client has shown me how freeing it can be to hear from someone, “I’m like you…” and “there’s nothing wrong with…”
So here it goes. If you’re an adult child living at home trying to find a sense of self or battling voices telling you you’re a loser because you don’t have a partner, job, house, child, etc, I want to tell you that you are not defined by your unmet goals. I want to invite you to get curious about what this critical voice has been trying to accomplish and question whether or not it’s been successful or helpful. Can you be curious rather than judgmental about yourself?
I am 34 years old and I’ve been living with my parents in the house they own for my entire life. The only interruption was in college when I attended the University of California, Santa Cruz to live on campus. My dream was (and is) to make enough money to buy a home of my own and to have a two separate ADU’s- one for my parents and another for my husband’s mom. Where I live in the Bay Area, you are lucky and unlikely to find a condo for $1MM and a starter single-family home for under $3MM. Neither my husband nor I are tech professionals and suffice it to say, we’ve accepted that our current choices mean that if that dream happens, it will be significantly later than some others in our community. When I’m discouraged, I still think about comedy segments like these, that have shaped how we think of adults living with their parents. The stereotype is that if you live at home, you’re likely incompetent and lazy. Even if there is evidence to the contrary, if you’re not contributing X amount of dollars or X number of hours to chores, you still carry the shame.
