Jessica Alba is opening up about the benefits of family therapy.
The former “Dark Angel” star explained to Real Simple in an interview published Tuesday that she decided to start therapy with her daughters — Honor, 15, and Haven, 12 — a few years ago after she found herself engaging in unproductive spats with her eldest child.
“Honor was probably 11, and we were arguing all the time about dumb stuff,” Alba explained. “And I was like, I don’t want to live like this. This is not fun. I didn’t want us to have a wedge between us.”
The Honest Beauty founder said that enlisting a professional helped her kids better empathize with her.
“As her mother, when I say something, she’s going to hear it as an argument or as me trying to control her,” Alba said. “I wanted there to be someone who could explain things in a way I couldn’t. What I said to Honor was, ‘I want to be a better parent to you, and this is your forum to basically talk about everything that gets on your nerves that I do.’”
It seems that Honor did not hold back in therapy — and it helped Alba realize that although she is her kids’ mother, she also needs to take accountability for some of her actions.
“It put me in check. Like, ‘Yeah, I totally do that. And I’m sorry. I’m going to work on that.’”
“The therapist allowed me to see that it’s natural for kids to disagree with their parents, and as a parent it’s not always about being right or rational in that moment,” she added. “I’m not gonna front, it’s a process and I’m not perfect.”
Although Alba is a public promoter of therapy now, this wasn’t always the case. She explained during a keynote speech during a conference in 2019 that when she was growing up, her family sought guidance through religion.
“Some people think, like in my family, you talk to a priest and that’s it,” she said during her speech. “I don’t really feel comfortable talking to him about my feelings.”
She said that going to therapy allowed her and her kids to have a more open dynamic than the one she had with her parents.
“I didn’t grow up in an environment where you talked about this stuff, and it was just like shut it down and keep it moving,” Alba said at the time. “So I find a lot of inspiration just in talking to my kids.”
To read Alba’s interview in full, head over to Real Simple.
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