“I needed to swallow a fair share of humble pie” I had to eat to restore a poor relationship with my older daughter, Sarah McLachlan explained. The 58-year-old singer has been vocal on issues of how a parenting process might go wrong despite the intentions being loving and protective. Speaking with Amy Poehler in “Good Hang with Amy Poehler” McLachlan spoke of discovering that the tone and strength she used in her messages was not hitting the ground in the manner she had expected. She has two daughters, India Ann and Taja Summer born in 2002 and 2007 respectively to ex-husband Ashwin Sood.
The point of transition in which McLachlan framed the moment and the moment of recognition is that she felt like she was parenting in contrast to what she had experienced as a child only to hear the same words leave her mouth in anger or frustration. It is funny, as I thought very well in my own head, that I was becoming the very antithesis of my mother, she said, and in hot moments, her words just pour out of your mouth.
The struggle, as McLachlan explained it, came to a point with the reaction of her older daughter to the pressure. Her daughter would close down or even lash out when things seemed hard, and Mclachlan responded in the early days with hardness which she believed would make her resilient. I would have treated her in another way softer. I was a mean girl, I said to Poehler. What safeguards her in her mind is grit: the world is “scary and big” and a child must learn how to do hard things. It was not the intention to help but the knowledge of what was being really happening beneath the reactions. According to McLachlan, she only realized, following family counseling that her daughter was grappling with anxiety and her communication pattern was only increasing shame rather than providing support.
The discovery required another form of strength: control, attention, and healing. McLachlan said that the communication pattern she was doing to her was just making her feel bad about herself rather than uplifting her. As she explained, she took a step back to assess the situation and decided the relationship was more important than being “right” and she had to “learn how to communicate differently.” She further observed that with time, her daughter had learnt to be responsible of her reactions. “It is a beautiful, powerful process, but a long process,” she said, and they have now “such an open, loving relationship.”
The emotional process experienced by McLachlan is not uncommon in therapy rooms: when the fear motivates a parent, the bond may break into control. Psychotherapist Rachel Glik whose practice includes families in the adultchild estrangement maze explains that the anxious, guilt-infused outreach may actually be counterproductive and cause the children to become further alienated, particularly when the parent focuses on personal distress and no longer expresses curiosity. Her advice focuses on the fact that reconciliation is usually initiated by a parent stabilizing and learning to be able to listen without defensiveness an aspect that is influenced by empathetic listening.
In her case, McLachlan used the repair to make sense and take it to her art. She has already mentioned that a painful experience with her firstborn is what inspired the creation of “Gravity” and has since said that therapy provided them with a “safe space to relate.” What I knew is how I was expressing my love to her, she was not listening, she was not feeling it, she said. I was not reaching her. And to me as a parent that is devastating as you would just like to hold your child and embrace them and keep them there.
