My daughter is often in tears and says she always feels sad | Ask Philippa

The dilemma My daughter, 20, tells me she feels sad “all the time”.

It’s been going on since she started secondary school, although she was a troublesome toddler and we had really terrible twos that went on for a few years. She always comes to me and not her lovely, sensitive, understanding dad for these talks. She’s doing well in her first year of uni and is popular. We have a comfortable, affluent lifestyle, as well as an emotionally warm home. Indeed, so comfortable is our lifestyle, she often feels she is very “privileged” and has no reason to feel sad and this only contributes to her low mood by adding guilt. She’s been asking for antidepressants for years and during this time I’ve known many of my friends with girls the same age agreeing to prescription drugs. However, my father, who works with people coming off antidepressants, convinced us this isn’t a good idea.

It is hard to “just listen”. I’ve done so much listening and hugging and it’s not working. The latest crisis is again coming after a long period of her seeming happy and fulfilled. I feel frustrated that I can’t help. Maybe antidepressants are the solution. However, I’m also beginning to wonder if she isn’t just a sensitive, melancholic person who needs to come to terms with feeling periods of sadness, find things that make her happy and muddle through.

Philippa’s answer You are doing well to tell her not to admonish herself for being sad just because she is financially secure. She already has one thing to cry about, and if she doesn’t feel entitled to cry about it, that would give her two. If she wanted to, she could ask her GP about SSRIs and, at her age, wouldn’t need your permission, so I believe that she does want something from you, but what?

As she comes to you and not her sensitive dad, it makes me suspicious that the problem may be rooted in your relationship together. I wonder if it’s to do with that period you call the “terrible twos”. How I hate that expression! This is a time when children are discovering their agency, their potency; they do need boundaries to keep them safe and their parents sane, but within those boundaries they need freedom to be themselves and experiment. It is the terrific twos. They need their feelings, which would seem unreasonable to any adult, to be validated. This usually means empathising with a tantrum because it is impossible to fly to the moon or some such. When we are doing a hundred things at once and have more than one child, it’s hard to honour all their needs for validation and autonomy and we may, while we admonish them for their experiments or frustration, somehow, without meaning to, give them the impression they are “terrible”. And this might stick. You can talk about this with her. She won’t consciously remember it all, but her body might.

You could suggest how you may at the time have inadvertently given her the impression then that she was terrible. Why I think there may be something in this is because she is coming to you with her tears and not her sympathetic dad. Talk to her about this and tell her she wasn’t and isn’t bad and she is never too much. (I get the feeling with her drowning you now with her tears she could be again unconsciously testing you to see if she is “too much”.)

Don’t think of doing that as something that should “work”. Don’t think of your relating together as interventions with outcomes. I think that might be the hurdle she is unconsciously trying to make you overcome. Therapy might help your daughter, but I think it would really help you. A relationship with a therapist would hold and contain a psychological space for you, making it easier for you to do that for your daughter.

Her sadness peaks may have something to do with her hormones, so she should visit her GP anyway.

I like your idea of becoming comfortable with being sad. “Hello darkness my old friend,” sang Simon & Garfunkel. Sadness is a part of life. It is good, though, if you can pin it on some sort of story as to how she is sad. The story that might fit could be what happened in your relationship when she was aged between two and five, or it might be that she was overwhelmed by secondary school. She was there for a third of her life.

Suggested reading: The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, which I think if both of you read and discussed together would help your relationship, and another one of my books, How to Stay Sane, which is good for learning how to observe your feelings rather than being your feelings; this helps you get some distance from them if they begin to feel too much.

Love her with her tears. We all want to be acceptable and accepted, whatever we are feeling. You sound like a lovely mother. You can do this.

If you have a question, send an email to askphilippa@observer.co.uk
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