From Every Direction: Guilt, Shame, and Blame Among Parents of Adolescents with Co-occurring Challenges
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From Every Direction: Guilt, Shame, and Blame Among Parents of Adolescents with Co-occurring Challenges Katherine Cohen-Filipic • Kia J. Bentley
Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract This article explores the results of a qualitative inquiry into guilt, blame, and shame as experienced by parents of children with co-occurring mental health and substance use challenges. These interviews represent both the lived experience of parents, as well as the perspective of clinicians who work with these families. The parent– clinician alliance is taken as a central context for considering how these experiences may affect the dynamics of the helping relationship. Analyses of these results suggest that guilt, blame, and shame are often experienced by parents and have important implications for engagement and therapeutic processes. Parents associate feelings of blame with interactions from a number of helping professionals and connect personal characteristics, parenting behaviors, and relationship issues with experiences of shame and guilt surrounding their children’s behavioral health challenges. Finally, the information that is shared across these interviews is used to guide the development of a number of practice guidelines for social workers who work with families of adolescents that experience co-occurring mental health and substance use issues. Keywords Parent–clinician alliance Guilt Blame Shame Attribution Adolescent co-occurring
K. Cohen-Filipic Department of Sociology, 113 Muller Center, Ithaca College, 953 Danby Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. J. Bentley (&) Virginia Commonwealth University, 1000 Floyd Avenue, Richmond, VA 23284-2027, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction Developing a better understanding of how guilt, shame, and blame are experienced and expressed by parents can help social workers and other clinicians establish stronger more effective and collaborative therapeutic relationships. For all people whose lives are impacted by mental health and substance abuse challenges, a long history of stigma, exclusion and prejudice have created fertile conditions to breed experiences that lower self-esteem and induce shame (Corrigan 1998, 2004; Hinshaw 2005). These experiences can have particularly significant and profound effects for family members (Treasure et al. 2001; Corrigan and Miller 2004; Corrigan et al. 2006). In regards to mental health services for children and adolescents, the provider’s relationship with parents is of particular significance. We argue that social workers need to more intentionally consider how guilt, blame and shame may be influencing the dynamics of the parent– clinician relationship and then seek to ally parents as integral members of the youth’s treatment team and foster more empathic, supportive, and responsive relationships with them. Specifically, this paper describes a study that seeks to examine the influence of guilt, blame, and shame for parents of adolescents who experience co-occurring mental health and subs
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