These Are The Most Common Issues Gen X'ers Bring Up In Therapy, According To Therapists

Millennials and Generation Z are often dubbed the “therapy generations,” known for prioritizing mental health and seeking counseling when they need it. Where does that leave Gen X? Is the demographic known for its independent streak and “whatever” attitude similarly blasé about getting a therapist?

Many Gen Xers — those born between about 1965 and 1980 — came of age in a time when seeking help wasn’t as normalized. For some, a “shadow of a stigma” still lingers, said Tracy Douglas, a therapist in Wisconsin who specializes in Gen X clients .

Mental health wasn’t exactly a dinner table topic in the ’70s and ’80s, she said. Apart from a Woody Allen film ― or the kind of urbane circles those movies depicted ― it wasn’t really talked about at all.

“Therapy wasn’t seen as a proactive tool for healing and growth so much as it was an absolute last resort to turn to,” Douglas, who was born in 1970 herself, told HuffPost. “Because of that, many Gen Xers can still have a sense that they should be able to muscle through troubles on their own.” For some Gen Xers, off-putting experiences with quirky ’70s- and ’80s-era therapists ― or ones who felt overly performative ― have made them hesitant to go back.

“I had one client tell me about a family session from his teens where a therapist forced the entire family to hold hands, look each other in the eye, and recite ‘I love you’ to each family member,” Douglas said. “It was so forced, awkward and profoundly disconnected from their actual family dynamic that they never went back.”

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Still, more members of the latchkey generation are starting to try therapy. In 2018, about 26% of Gen Xers said they’d sought therapy at some point, according to the American Psychological Association — and that number has only climbed since the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off a full-blown therapy boom, fueled in part by the rise of telehealth .

“Once they’re actually in the room, Gen Xers are often some of the most committed clients I work with,” said Jennifer Chappell Marsh , a marriage and family therapist in San Diego, California. Her Gen X clients are adaptable and genuinely want to understand what’s happening in their lives and what makes them tick.

“They respond really well when the work makes sense to them,” she told HuffPost. “When I can help a Gen X client see that the way they’ve been coping was a completely logical response to what they lived through, something shifts.” What exactly are they discussing on therapists’ couches? Below, Marsh, Douglas and other therapists share the top issues they hear from Gen Xers.

1. They have chronic stress with no blueprint for asking for help.

Raised to be self-reliant, many Gen Xers take a DIY approach to their personal problems. Marsh said a lot of her Gen X clients grew up in homes with divorced or two working parents, where emotional attunement was often lacking. The lesson they absorbed, she said, was simple: You get through things by handling them yourself.

“In attachment terms, we’d call this a dismissing style ― self-reliant, uncomfortable with dependence, skilled at managing their own distress without letting anyone in,” she said. “When midlife hits and everything gets heavy, they don’t reach out, they just keep going.” When they do seek help with a mental health professional, it’s often a massive relief, though it can feel foreign or scary at first. “Therapy is often the first time a Gen X client has genuinely been invited to slow down and feel what’s been building for decades,” she said.

2. They’re questioning long-term marriages and relationships.

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Douglas said there’s a “massive un-mooring” happening in Gen X partnerships today, especially among long-term straight couples. After decades of carrying the lion’s share of the mental and emotional load for their families, many Gen X women are looking at their marriages and realizing they might actually prefer being alone, she said.

“They are choosing peace and ease by casting off the responsibilities of mental and emotional labor that has long been taken for granted,” she said. “Meanwhile, I see men are hitting a wall where being stoic and staying at a remove doesn’t work anymore.”

“Husbands are realizing that to survive and thrive in this stage of life with their partners, they need to understand their and their partners’ emotional lives so they can connect on deep, meaningful levels,” Douglas said. After decades of just getting by, many of these partners are either finding the courage to leave or finally speaking up about their emotions and needs in hopes of carving out the lives they actually want.

3. They’re burnt out.

Gen X has collective strength and grit, but without self-care and community care, burnout sets in, said Jessika Fruchter , a marriage and family therapist in Oakland, California. When clients show up in her office, “they’re often exhausted from white-knuckling through it all.”

“At this point in midlife, many of them are both caregivers to kids and to aging parents,” she said. “They also have careers, relationships and a long list of other responsibilities.”

Many in Gen X were latchkey kids, and Fruchter said it’s not uncommon to hear boasts like, “I basically raised myself.” “Over time, though, that hyper-independence becomes a liability,” she said. “Much of the work here is about learning to ask for help and prioritize caring for ourselves, as we do others.”

4. They’re waiting for their adult children to grow up.

Many Gen Xers struggle with moving out of the parenting stage of their lives, said Kurt Smith , a therapist in Roseville, California, who specializes in counseling men. It’s not uncommon for adult children in their 30s and 40s to be living back at home.

“This can occur for understandable reasons, but some adult children never leave when they come back or even have a plan or desire to do so,” Smith said. “Their Gen X parents end up struggling to distinguish between whether they’re loving or enabling them. This is a problem that much fewer of their parents had.”

5. Gen X women are going through menopause.

When it comes to being transparent about perimenopause or menopause, Gen X women are pattern breakers, Fruchter said.

“Earlier generations rarely spoke out about how challenging this developmental stage actually is, and what a toll it can take on mental health,” she said. “Between hormonal shifts, identity shifts and difficult physical symptoms, Gen X women seek out a space for support.”

6. They’re anxious over money.

Gen X is currently being flattened by an unprecedented “sandwich squeeze,” having to deal with the financial and emotional burden of supporting their aging parents and children who haven’t yet taken flight, financially speaking.

“A lot of Gen Xers find themselves worried about how to fund the launch of young adult children, who are facing a world way more expensive than the one they entered, while also realizing that many of their aging parents didn’t have a Plan B for their long-term care,” Douglas said. She said it’s a “financial and emotional pincer move” that’s left many Gen Xers feeling anxious about how they’re going to make ends meet, plus depressed from feeling like they just aren’t measuring up or doing enough.

7. They have unprocessed early childhood wounds showing up in midlife.

As a collective, many Gen Xers grew up amid high divorce rates, latchkey childhoods, and a culture that prized toughness over tenderness, Marsh said. Decades later, her clients in this age group are often grappling with the long-term effects of early attachment wounds, especially emotional unavailability or loss that was never named or fully processed.

“Those things don’t just disappear; they’re stuffed down and resurface later in relationships, in parenting, in how someone responds when their partner gets upset or criticizes them,” she said. “A lot of my Gen X clients are genuinely surprised to realize that what they’re dealing with in their 40s or 50s has roots in something that happened in childhood,” she added.

That’s where trauma-informed work like EMDR therapy can be game-changing, Marsh said. EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, therapy is a mental health treatment technique that involves moving your eyes a specific way while you process traumatic memories. “When we do that, many clients find that they’re healing things they didn’t even know they were still carrying,” she said.

What Marsh most wants people to understand about Gen X in therapy is that beneath all that self-sufficiency is a generation that was never really given permission to need. “For people who’ve spent their whole lives keeping it together with very little support, it’s pretty profound to feel safe enough to be known by another person,” she said.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost .

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