Mother forces 16-year-old daughter to go to therapy for not celebrating her stepfather on Father’s Day: ‘I didn’t want another dad’

It’s a tricky thing to make someone feel something that they don’t feel. And when you’re a teen there’s so much changing emotionally that it’s sometimes hard to make sense of the things you’re actually feeling without trying to force it—or having someone gaslighting you and saying that you said something that you never said. When that person is your parent, it makes things a whole lot more complicated; this is the person who is supposed to be showing you the way, and while they probably think they are, they’re actually obfuscating the path forward.

You can’t force love towards a new family member; sure, one day, you might get there, but it is something that needs to develop naturally, pretty much by definition. This teen made it pretty clear that she wouldn’t regard her stepfather as her “dad,” but that didn’t stop her mom from claiming that she’d said otherwise, forcing her into family therapy sessions to try and change the way she felt about her stepfather.