A boy like this will often show up in my office twenty to forty years later, still a boy in many ways, with one form of inner turmoil or another. I see them all the time.
I will tell him I can help him, but that it will take a year and a half to three years of rather painful therapy, and that he’ll want to drop out many times along the way, BUT - that if he sticks it out I can guarantee he’ll walk out the man he always envied others for being.
And when they stick it out, they do. Just like clockwork. It almost doesn’t matter what we talk about, but we certainly don’t to talk much about the mother who quashed his spirit for her own needs years ago.
The therapy is nothing fancy, but needs to be informed by an understanding of the territory, and the basics of technique. Essentially, we talk about him, who he is, not who his mother wanted him to be. He gradually allows himself to enter the painful void at his core where his sense of worth ought to be - and would be if his mother hadn’t snuffed it out; an empty, lonely, fearful, angry pain so horrible that he has pathologically arranged his whole inner and outer life in an effort to avoid it.
And one day, like clockwork, in a year and a half to three years, for no apparent reason, the result of no clever interpretation or insight from me, he walks in completely changed - a man. He got it. He filled the void his mom left him with, and filled it with things important to him, not her. He walks in like a man. He holds himself like a man. He talks like a man. And it’s solid, unshakable and permanent, and we say our goodbyes like two men, with a solid handshake and a solid look in the eye.
They “pay” you for this BS?
The damage parents do. It’s a blessing of being the children of God that lets us undo it. I’m thankful for the Atonement of Jesus Christ and good people like you.