"Curve" Love

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Sometimes love is so crooked

that it can be very difficult to recognize it as such …

I often encounter situations in therapy with the inability of an adult client to accept his parent (s). How does it manifest?

The client is persistent:

• Blames the parent for the past;
• Associates his life failures with the mistakes of his parents or, in general, with the idea of bad parents;
• Complains that he did not receive something from his parent in childhood;
• He cannot agree with how the parent is behaving towards him now (he does something wrong, or, in general, loves him wrong).

Such clients have a lot of grievances, complaints, discontent with their parents, with a persistent desire to change the situation, namely, to remake their parents.

Here are just examples of some of them:

- She was never interested in what I feel, and did not talk to me about it … It was more important for her to feed me than to talk.

- I received attention from my mother only when I was sick, when I felt bad …

- My parents forced me to go not where I wanted, and from this my whole life went to hell …

- My mother always knew better than me what I want.

And I understand my clients. You want parental love at any age! It doesn't matter that you are 30, 40, 50 … The inner child remains hungry. If there is a hole in your soul from a lack of love, then it hurts and requires filling. Rational advice like: You're an adult! Don `t cry! Take responsibility for your life, etc. little help here.

I see these situations in therapy as difficult but not hopeless. They have pros and cons. The downside is that close relationships between loved ones are now impossible. The plus is that close people still have a need for this kind of relationship and have not lost the hope that this will someday become possible. That is why such clients go to psychotherapy in the hope of changing something.

I am not going to generalize the described situations now (they are actually very different) and give out some unified algorithm for working with them. I will only note that I am of the opinion that for a person to function well in life it is important to maintain close relations with his parents - “to have parents in his heart”. However, this is not possible in all cases, and not all parents can and should be forgiven and accepted. I wrote about this in more detail here … On the way to adoption

In this article, I will focus only on the option when the parent, in principle, loved and loves his child, but does not do it the way he would like. When this very care-love manifests itself not explicitly, not directly, and sometimes so “crookedly” that sometimes it is very difficult to recognize it as such.

Traces of such a "love curve" can be found in the relationship of the parents' indifference to their child. This kind of parenting relationship is often described by the client as dry, unemotional, functional, sometimes as inadequate with constant invasions of personal space … The options here are individual and there are a lot of them.

The only thing that is definitely not in the relationship described by the client is parental indifference.

And you can and should work with this. In the described situation in therapy with a client, it is necessary, in my opinion, to solve three main tasks:

Challenge number one - to help the client recognize that parental love is behind all this parenting relationship. Such is love …

Problem number two - agree that parents are not chosen, that parents will not change and cannot love in another way. And in the end, be disappointed and agree that this is so.

Problem number three - learn to live with this knowledge, build it into his identity.

Problem number four - learn to build close relationships with parents (unfortunately, it is not always possible) - as they are, and not try to change them.

I will tell you how this can be done in my next article - "People-icebergs".