Alpha and Omega, the child

It’s unfortunate that “love” means different things to different people. More accurately, that there are different feelings – some wonderful, many not – that people give the name “love.” If this were not so, then clients could quit injurious parents, parents who are killing their soul, bleeding out their future.

There was a time, in my earlier ignorant therapy days, when I lived predominately in my own cold alienation, which I conflated with a principle of client health and independence, and thought clients should “cut the toxic umbilical cord” to family – painfully, yes – and walk away. One image I presented was: You are in the hospital with a gangrenous leg. The doctor says your choice is to keep the leg and probably die, or have it amputated and leave the hospital less but stronger, deprived but healthier. I assumed clients would always agree, not necessarily in their heart but in their “wise mind,” that the latter was best.

I was wrong. People define love in different ways. Often, it’s a child’s definition.

A beaten child loves his father. Woe befall him if he becomes one of those children so detached or so hating that he no longer knows the feeling. What he does feel at the time of his abuse may be dependency, not love. But he will later name it that.

That is where many, many adults are. Their love for absolutely unloving parents is still that child’s need. There is a feeling there, maybe not a full emotion, but a body sensation that is as big as the universe. It gives the child the world. Connection. A semblance of care in the parent’s big, powerful hand. Adults who love failed parents are still in that hand.

What can depth therapy do for these lovers? In a way, I still live in a theory, or with a specific fantasy, where the person can walk away, after tears, anguish, a new grim kind of strength. Then heal more elsewhere, maybe a thousand miles away, and these clearer eyes now see a different more exciting horizon. The fantasy appeals to me because my life equates strength with rejection of injustice, growth with independence. While deep, deep under the surface there must always be the symbiotic need.

I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone to comply with my fantasy, in twenty-one years. I’ve had to accept that depth therapy should not just help the inner child, but sometimes accept her enclosure in her parents’ arid embrace.