Adult clients say that their parent was cruel or neglectful to them but warm and benevolent to friends or needy strangers. My first wife would be abusive to her teenage daughters but empathic and delightful to her daughters’ teenage friends. Clients tell me that their mothers, hospital nurses, were doting on their patients but monsters and starvers to them.
Don’t be shallow, my peers, and think this is duplicity or hypocrisy.
What you are looking at (or hearing about from your clients) are parents who are still children. This isn’t the “inner child” meme, which is an old and fallacious concept. The true concept (which I’ve explicated in hundreds of earlier posts) is that people don’t have an “inner child,” they are their inner child while the adult character they cherish or deplore is the façade, the mirage.
These parents did not become adults. They did not succeed the psycho-developmental stages owing to the thousands of possible influences that shut down their feeling core in childhood. This includes abused children and those who “grew up too fast.” Now, thrust into the permanent masquerade of utilitarian adulthood, they are nothing but starved, empty vessels of need.
From this perspective, what may seem like inexplicable or sociopathic hypocrisy makes perfect sense: The child-mother can’t mother her own children: She is too young and needy: They are there for her. She is enraged. But the child-mother must supplicate and impress and seek approval from others, who unconsciously are her betters and superiors whatever their age.
My clients see this quite quickly when I describe it to them. I can’t say that it makes them feel better, as the knowledge leaves them even more unparented than they had been. And yet it helps them grow.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.