S26·E11 Your Mum and Dad: A Devastating Truth

In this documentary, Dutch film director Klaartje Quirijns originally set out to document therapy. She was interested in the sessions of a friend, Michael Moskowitz, who was unravelling a lifetime of family trauma inherited from the legacies of World War II. In these rarely filmed sessions, led by esteemed American psychotherapist Kirkland Vaughans, Klaartje begins to understand that all lived experience is shaped through the lives of our parents.

In the ultimate display of vulnerability, Klaartje then decides to turn the camera on herself, beginning a journey to unravel her own family secrets. She traces the lineage of her story across three generations – her mother, herself and now her two daughters. Meanwhile, Vaughans continues to guide viewers through the complexities of the mind, showing how easy it is to become colonised by the behaviour of our parents.