…Because children can’t leave their parents.
One of the most difficult kinds of relationship problem to resolve is where one or both members of a couple are deeply unhappy but cannot bring themselves to leave.
These relationships can go on for years, with cycles of better and worse times, but never resolving in one direction or another: becoming a good stable relationship on the one hand, or ending on the other.
At worst these relationships can become real addictions from which everyone involved suffers terribly. Taking them seriously as addictions means tackling them with serious levels of help, involving for example residential treatment and active support (e.g., 12-step groups, SLAA), beyond even regular therapy and medication in an office setting. Usually, however, people stuck in relationships like this are intensely ambivalent about ending them: one day resolving to leave and making plans to go to rehab, the next day trying yet again to make an unfixable thing work.
I’ve discussed this kind of relationship many, many times with many people, and as part of that have tried to help explain why and how it is that people get into them and get stuck in them. Recently I happened to use a particular phrase, the title of this post, in a couples therapy session as a kind of condensation of a key idea about this topic:
This is so bad for me, why can’t I leave?
Because children can’t leave their parents.
Now of course two adults in a romantic-sexual relationship are not parent and child, so how does this analogy make sense? It has two parts: all relationships are based on earlier ones, and child-to-parent relationships are life-or-death.
First, for one thing, people may often consciously notice similarities between the ways they felt and were treated by one or another parent and the way they feel treated by their adult romantic partner: “This is just what my mother did to me, always criticizing and rejecting me!”
For another, whether we notice this kind of thing or not, our conscious thoughts and feelings really are just the tip of the iceberg. There is a huge amount going on beneath the surface, and some of it is very old.
As early as 1905 Freud observed “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.”
To unpack this a little, to start with the word ‘object’ is used here as in grammar, where a sentence has a subject and an object. The ‘object of one’s affections,’ in a common phrase, is the person that someone, the subject, loves. So, in other words, Finding someone to love is in fact finding someone you already love, or Finding a new love is finding an old one.
(Freud later adds a note about this formulation, which is that there are actually two ways of finding an object — this first attachment type, based on a parental relationship, and a second, narcissistic type, where one goes looking (again unconsciously) for a mirror image of oneself. But that is another story.)
One’s parents (and I mean this inclusively as those people who do the work of raising a child) are our first love objects. The way we love them, and ways they love us, sets up a template or blueprint or script for later loves. When we go looking for love as adults we go looking for the feelings that we had in our first loves: This is what a relationship feels like! Most troubling, if those early relationships are very conflicted or traumatic - stormy, dramatic, painful, ambivalent - then that is what we will (unconsciously) go looking for. This is terrible, but so familiar (familiar — literally, of one’s family)!
Second, the importance of the relationship between parent and child cannot be overemphasized. For children that relationship is literally life-or-death. Babies and children without someone to look after them literally cannot survive. Why do young children sometimes get so intensely upset when their parents leave for a while? There could be lots of specific reasons, but broadly speaking, they should: children that didn’t care about being looked after didn’t make it very long.
Looked at from this perspective, it is not actually such a surprise when people find that their adult romantic-sexual relationships feel like life-or-death and get immovably stuck in them: I cannot live without him/her/them!
The inability for one adult to leave a relationship with another can seem inexplicable and baffling: This is bad, everyone can see it’s bad, so just leave already! But this overlooks the fact that inside the adult who can see that it’s bad is a child for whom that relationship still feels like life-or-death, and who cannot simply walk away from something on which their life depends — literally once depended. Being able to leave such a relationship requires massive support, enough for someone to risk doing something that feels life-threatening! That is why people in this situation sometimes need to go into a residential rehab setting or hospital, where they can feel and actually be kept safe for a while, until the acute life-or-death feeling has faded enough to go on with one’s life.
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