Jessica Alba Had to Go to Therapy After Constant Fights With Her Daughter
Actor Jessica Alba discovered how truly difficult motherhood could be when she was at constant odds with one of her children. But the relationship between herself and her daughter might’ve only gotten stronger as a result.
Jessica Alba revealed how therapy helped her relationship with her daughter
Alba recently revealed some of the challenges that faced her family over the years. In an interview with Real Simple, she confided there were many times when she and her daughter, Honor, weren’t seeing eye to eye. And there was nothing that Alba could say to diffuse their combative relationship.
“Honor was probably 11, and we were arguing all the time about dumb stuff. 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. As her mother, when I say something, she’s going to hear it as an argument or as me trying to control her. I wanted there to be someone who could explain things in a way I couldn’t,” Alba said.
To help mend her relationship with Honor, Alba felt she and her daughter needed to listen to an unbiased voice. The Fantastic Four star felt a therapist might have the answers that she didn’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,’” she recalled telling her daughter.
Therapy turned out to be exactly what both Alba and Honor needed to get on the same page.
“It put me in check. Like, ‘Yeah, I totally do that. And I’m sorry. I’m going to work on that.’ It gave her a little bit of perspective too—that I’m not the bad guy; I’m just being a parent. She’ll come out the other side of it, and I’ll still be here. I just wanted to get to that point, and it worked,” Alba said.
Therapy also managed to open Alba’s eyes to the fact that arguments between parents and their children were normal.
“And 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. I’m not gonna front, it’s a process and I’m not perfect,” she said.
Jessica Alba wrestled with her children’s upbringing when comparing it to her own
Alba’s childhood was vastly different than her children’s. The Sin City actor has been very candid about her past, sharing that her parents had little financial security. This instilled a work ethic in Alba that helped her develop a multi-million dollar company.
“I grew up in survival mode,” Alba once told Glamour. “It was almost sort of what I was born into. My parents didn’t have a safety net, they were living paycheck to paycheck. And so the mentality of ‘tomorrow’s not guaranteed’… For me, I was like, ‘I got to do everything I can to keep my head above water.’”
Thanks to Alba’s successes, her children have enjoyed a much more stable upbringing than she did. But the actor grappled with that revelation and wondered if her children’s lack of trials might’ve stifled their character.
“I wrestle with this! And I try, I try to get them to understand a reality that’s just frankly, not a reality that they’ll ever understand,” Alba once said on Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?”
Alba felt that this meant there was a part of her life that her kids might never be able to identify with.
“I really wrestle with this one,” she said. “It’s not possible for them to understand what it was like for me or what it’s genuinely like for other people.”
But at the same time, Alba wasn’t really sure that challenges like the one she faced would mold Honor and her siblings into good people.
“And I don’t know now if they ever really need to see the sadness or the hardship that brings out in people. I don’t know if it’ll make them better people,” Alba added. “More importantly, I really, really want them to have empathy and compassion and humility and really operate in the world with kindness and gratitude.”
