Gratifying Childhood Losses in Adulthood vs Grieving and Acceptance
Early psychoanalytic theorists like Balint and Winnocott, viewed problems with early parental bonding as the origin of emotional difficulties in adulthood. If the love you were supposed to get without complications does not arrive for reasons in the parent, all kinds of problems can ensue. This part of their theorizing makes intuitive sense. It was a needed corrective on Freud’s earlier theorizing about how psychopathology gets started.
The problem is not with the problem these psychoanalytic thinkers identified and clarified. In my opinion, the problem is with the solution. It made sense to them that the solution for difficulties with early primary bonding, simply put, the bond you formed or didn’t with your mother, is to get what you needed in childhood now as an adult in psychotherapy. I believe this idea of reparenting the deprived and disappointed adult who has not resolved the effects of inadequate primary bonding in childhood, is responsible for many unidentified treatment failures and exacerbated emotional suffering. Let’s analyze the problems with this belief that childhood losses can be finally gratified in adulthood.
First and foremost, childhood is gone. A therapy based on the assumption that we can return to childhood as an adult, apart from memories, is grossly in error. We can imagine and remember traumatic experience. We can go back to the feelings of traumatic loss and experience. But we cannot become that earlier version of ourselves that was hurt or deprived. We only get one shot at childhood. The good news is, we can grieve the loss we sufferred and focus on having experiences in adulthood that would help heal us. Back to to this healthier alternative in a minute.
As therapists, it’s important to realize that suggesting the possibility that the “inner child” of a patient can be gratified if the therapist or any other adult finally gives the deprived person what they did not get, keeps alive an irrational pathological hope that can limit adult psychological maturation for a lifetime. The hope is that another adult can reparent the deprived person the way they should have been parented and a magical healing will take place. What often happens instead is an obsessive search, mixed with painful feelings of loss and old needs, drive the deprived individual to look for relief in the parentified love of another adult or psychotherapist. The disappointments with this effort are frequent and not often publicized. Regardless, the belief in this regressive form of “treatment” persists among certain psychological providers, whether they use this language or not.
Along with this irrational hope that a parentified adult can “reparent,” the underlying implication is that our patients are undeveloped children waiting to be nurtured into adulthood now in young adulthood, middle-age, or beyond. The most egregious outcome of this iatrogenic (meaning problem created by the doctor) pathological hope is that such an indoctrinated patient will not be encouraged to focus on their own internal resources, looking inside of themselves for what is needed to solve this problem instead of life-long dependencies on other adults, psychotherapists or otherwise.
The alternative, and in my mind, much more realistic approach is to couple grieving the losses and disappointments of childhood with an experience of what Eric Fromm called secondary bonding, or the possible healthier experiences of love in adulthood. Yes, grieving the loss of love in childhood now as an adult is emotionally and sometimes physically painful. No doubt. This is why it often requires the support of another caring and understanding adult to witness and guide the process to completion. Grieving childhood losses will require re-membering earlier painful experiences, working through the defensive blockages and fears involved, and is best done in the context of an emotionally intimate therapeutic relationship.
An emotionally intimate therapeutic relationship will not only provide the best context for this resolving grief but will introduce a childhood deprived adult patient to direct experiences of emotional intimacy in an equal, honest, and open adult relationship which invites the recovering patient to explore secondary bonding options instead of irrational regressive illusions of childhood gratification in adulthood. Once grieving and letting-go reach the stage of resolution, an emotionally intimate therapeutic relationship often speeds up the psychological health of the patient. Letting-go of adulthood dependencies, and an evolving interest in healthy adulthood love relationships are a common outcome of this work.
As a psychoanalyst, I often think about what complications the provider brings to the psychotherapeutic table, so to speak. Maybe the therapist’s own unconscious interest in finding childhood gratifications, hidden behind the emphasis on caregiving, is silently at work. I’ve learned in my own personal psychological explorations, that my parentified childhood hid much of my early childhood disappointments behind my focus on helping others. These hidden emotional deprivations emerged in my therapy, were remembered and verbalized, the impossibility of gratifying them in my adult life accepted, leading to an understanding of how a healthy love relationship has a lot to offer.
Comments welcome…
Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychological disability consultant, speaker, and author of the award-winning book, Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. Presentations and telehealth Love Life Consultations available upon request. Contact: 212-875-0154 or drtomjordan@lovelifelearningcenter.com for inquiries. Visit my speaker page at lovelifelearningcenter.com/speaker
