The Reynolds Family: A Story of Healing

Sunday, January 26, 2025. This is for Viv in Canada.

When Emma Reynolds walked into my office for her first session, she carried more than a notebook and an anxious smile—she carried her entire family.

Not literally, of course, but in the way that cycle-breakers do: as though she had been assigned the role of family historian, emotional janitor, and reluctant warrior, all at once.

“I’m just so tired,” she said, her voice breaking as she sank into the chair. “I’m trying to fix everything—my mom, my dad, even my brother—and it feels like I’m failing. But I can’t stop. If I don’t do it, who will?”

That’s the thing about some folks like Emma: the feel an urgency to appoint themselves the saviors of their families, often before anyone else even realizes there’s a problem to be saved from.

A Family History Written in Silence

Emma grew up in a home that wasn’t unloving, but it was emotionally a bit stilted.

Her mother, Susan, came from a long line of women who believed strength meant swallowing your feelings whole. “Crying never solved anything,” Susan would say.

Her father, Greg, was quieter, the kind of man who loved his family deeply but only knew how to show it through acts of service—fixing a leaky faucet, shoveling the driveway, keeping the lights on.

“Sometimes I think my dad wanted to connect,” Emma told me once. “But I don’t think he knew how. He’d just...disappear into the garden.”

And then there was Jack, her older brother, who coped by detaching entirely. “Jack thinks therapy is for people who can’t take a joke,” Emma said with a wry laugh. “He calls me the ‘emotional support sibling.’”

Emma, meanwhile, had always been the feeler. The absorber. In clinical terms, Emma is a neurodivergent highly sensitive human.

The one who couldn’t help but notice the silences at the dinner table or the sharp edge in her mother’s voice when life felt overwhelming. And now, at 32, she was determined to rewrite her family’s story—starting with herself and her 5-year-old daughter, Sophia.

The Weight of Being the "Cycle-Breaker"

Emma’s journey wasn’t born of resentment; it was born of love.

She wanted better for Sophia. She wanted a home where feelings weren’t met with dismissal, where vulnerability wasn’t seen as weakness. But the cost of trying to “heal” her entire family was high.

In therapy, Emma described the moments that made her feel invisible.

Like the time she tried to talk to Susan about boundaries, only to hear, “Oh, Emma, stop overthinking everything. You’re exhausting yourself for nothing.” Or the time she suggested family counseling, and Jack laughed, saying, “Yeah, good luck getting Mom to admit she’s wrong about anything.”

The exhaustion Emma felt wasn’t just physical; it was existential. “I want to believe I can change things,” she confessed. “But sometimes it feels like I’m screaming into the void.”

A Shift in Perspective

The first thing we worked on was reframing Emma’s role. “You’re not here to carry the entire family,” I told her gently. “You’re here to model a new way of being. That doesn’t mean fixing everything—it means modeling your personal preferences and showing what’s possible.”

At first, this idea was hard for Emma to accept.

She had spent so much time picking up the emotional slack for everyone else that stepping back felt like abandonment. But as we worked together, she began to see that setting boundaries wasn’t selfish—it was necessary.

When her mother called to vent about Jack’s lack of involvement in family matters, Emma practiced saying, “I hear that you’re frustrated, Mom. But that’s between you and Jack. I can’t be in the middle.”

When Jack made snide comments about her “therapy talk,” Emma stopped laughing it off. Instead, she responded with honesty: “Jack, I know you don’t take this seriously, but it’s important to me. If you can’t respect that, we don’t have to talk about it.”

Small Steps, Big Changes

• The most beautiful changes often start small. For Emma, it was carving out time for herself—journaling in the mornings, taking walks without Sophia, even allowing herself a guilt-free Netflix binge now and then. “I didn’t realize how much I needed that,” she said after a few weeks. “It’s like I can breathe again.”

• It was also about creating new traditions with Sophia, ones that emphasized connection and emotional safety. Every Friday night, they’d sit on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and have what Sophia dubbed “Feelings Friday,” where they’d talk about their highs and lows of the week. “She loves it,” Emma said, her eyes lighting up. “And I think I love it even more.”

• But perhaps the most significant shift came when Emma stopped trying to drag her family onto the healing path and started focusing on her own. To her surprise, her parents began to notice. Greg, in his quiet way, started asking questions about therapy. “Your mom and I have been talking,” he said one day. “Maybe we could...try it.”

A Family, Evolving

The Reynolds family isn’t perfect—no family is.

Susan still resists therapy more often than not, and Jack still jokes about Emma’s “self-help obsession.” But there’s progress, and that matters. Greg has started naming his feelings more, and Susan has softened in ways Emma once thought impossible.

“I think the biggest change,” Emma told me recently, “is that I’m not trying to fix them anymore. I’m just...being me. And somehow, that’s enough.”

A Message for Every Cycle-Breaker

The Reynolds family is a reminder that healing doesn’t happen all at once. It’s messy and slow and full of setbacks.

But every small step—every boundary set, every moment of self-care, every conversation that feels just a little bit different—creates ripples that can change an entire family over time.

To every cycle-breaker out there: You are enough, just as you are. You don’t have to carry the whole family on your back. Sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do is simply show them the way forward.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.