TRANSCRIPT
From what I’ve observed, people not infrequently unconsciously choose to have children with people who are less emotionally healthy than they are. And why in the world would they do this? Because you would think people would choose to have children with the most emotionally healthy partner that they could find. After all, wouldn’t that be the best for their children?
Well, one of the big reasons that I see people pick less healthy partners than they are is that it puts them in a position of power. They can actually be the dominant force on an emotional level in this new family system. They can have more control. They can make more decisions. Also, when it comes to their relationship with the child, they can be considered to be the healthy one.
I see that not infrequently, especially when problems start to happen in the relationship. The parent who is emotionally healthier can often manipulate the child better. They can even turn the child against the parent who is less healthy. And often, I think at an unconscious level, they did this long before the relationship became unhealthy. In fact, they picked this more troubled partner to fulfill that very role, and that’s very disturbing to me.
I actually saw it in my own childhood with my parents. Both my parents actually tried to do it with each other, but my mom was a little bit emotionally healthier than my father. So what she did is she dug under my father in her relationship with me. She let me know how horrible he was in all these different ways, and how immature and how bad he was, in hopes that I would be on her side, that I would come to her team.
And because she was emotionally healthier than he was, in a way I had a closer relationship with her. She gave me more healthy love. She gave me more love at all. I needed her more; therefore, I was more willing to turn against my father. And really what was going on unconsciously—and I think this is very common with parents—my mother, having picked a less emotionally mature man to have children with, is that they’re playing out their own childhood dynamics which they never really dealt with.
Basically, what it was, was my mother was trying to get me to be the parent that she’d never really had—to side with her against the bad parent. So basically, I became the good parent in relationship to my mom. My father became the bad parent, and she wanted me to take her side in her relationship with my dad. And that, in a big part, was my purpose—to be the perfect parent for her. And my dad could be someone who she could push away, humiliate, and belittle.
Now, was my dad just an unwitting victim in his relationship with my mom? In a way he was, and in a way he wasn’t. Because he was manipulating her too. He picked her not just because of her good qualities and her healthier qualities, but he picked her because of her disturbed qualities. She had a lot of them. He felt less threatened by her disturbed qualities. If she had been really emotionally healthier, he would have been scared of her. He would have run away from her because it would have called him out for his bad qualities.
And I see that again and again with people. And it’s the same thing with my dad. If he had been healthier, my mom, she would have been frightened by him. It would have called out how much internal work she needed to do before she was ready to participate in a healthy partnership, especially a healthy partnership that produced children.
And so I think about comments that I get on a video that I made. It’s a video I made on advice to parents who are estranged from their children, where I say if you’re estranged from your children, pretty much from what I’ve seen, it means that you’ve failed them in a lot of different ways. And you have to own up to your failures and start to become healthier.
Well, a lot of people have commented, “I didn’t fail my children. I was the good parent. It was the other parent, the bad parent, who failed them.” And yet they had more control over my children, and the bad parent turned my children against me. So my children are the bad ones, and my partner, my ex-partner, he or she is the bad one. I’m not at fault. I don’t need to change. I am perfect.
And I would argue that’s actually ridiculous. I have never in my life seen a partnership where there’s one who’s healthy and one who’s unhealthy. I think of all my time as a couples therapist. When I was a therapist, not infrequently I saw couples. Many, many times I saw them come in and say, “I’m the healthy one. This is the unhealthy one.” Or the other one would say, “I’m the healthy one, and she or he is the unhealthy one.” But I never saw it, really.
I go by that philosophy: it takes two to tango. Yes, one might be a little bit emotionally healthy, or one might be a little bit less emotionally healthy, but I’ve never seen a couple where there’s really one healthy one and one unhealthy one. They would never be drawn to each other. I’ve seen couples who are generally both healthier. I’ve seen couples who are generally both less healthy. But I’ve never seen couples who are both really, really different from each other.
But I think really picking an unhealthy partner is a setup, unconsciously an advantageous setup from the perspective of the picker, to preemptively justify being able to blame someone. They’re looking forward unconsciously and thinking, “You know, when the hits the fan in this relationship, when we break up, or when something bad happens, or we have problems with the children, I will always be able to blame it on him or her.” And I think a lot of parents do that.
They have a little notebook where they write down all the bad qualities and all the bad things that their other partner has done, and they hold it. They hold it as future ammunition should bad things ever happen in this relationship. And I think a big part of it is it’s a big defense against looking at oneself in the mirror. It’s a big defense not just against looking at oneself in the mirror, but looking at one’s history in the mirror.
I think a lot of times for people it is easier to blame one’s partner than it is to blame one’s historical parents. And I’ve seen this a lot of times. When a relationship problem happens, one person’s parents totally side with their child, and the other partner, “Oh, your ex-husband, your ex-wife was evil and bad,” and becomes the old family unit becomes extra strong as a result of this bad evil partner. And the bad evil partner sides with his or her parents against the other partner. “Oh, they’re the bad ones that you married into a terrible family. How unlucky of you!”
And really it was all a setup from the beginning for people to let their own parents off the hook. But why would they let their own parents off the hook? Because if you let your own parents off the hook, you can’t grow. You can’t change. You can’t see all the bad ways in which you’re actually kind of like your own screwed-up parents.
And from what I’ve seen, well, a lot of times on an emotional level, it’s just easier. It’s more comfortable to blame a partner than to blame your parents. If you blame your parents—I’ll speak from personal experience—it’s hell. It’s painful. It’s terrible. Becoming alienated from one’s own historical childhood family of origin is terrifying. It can be overwhelming if you’re actually a child still living with your parents, literally dependent on them emotionally and financially. It can be deadly.
I think of myself as a child. I knew all sorts of horrible things about my parents when I was a kid, and yet I couldn’t consciously know it. I couldn’t really look at it in the mirror because I knew that if I knew it, it would wreak devastation and havoc in my personal life. So I had to shut it down, even pretend it wasn’t going on, split it off, dissociate from it until I was older, until I was in my 20s, even in my 30s to some degree. And then I could start to break away in an independent, healthy way that wouldn’t cause me too much self-harm.
Well, I think a lot of people never get to that stage.
In a way, they stay beholden to their parents, and it’s easier to just blame the other. Pick a partner who’s screwed up, so later you can blame them and blame all the things that you should be blaming your parents for onto this person who you actually unconsciously, purposefully picked.
Also, I’ve even seen parents who blame their own children, reject their own children, even for the things that actually they should be blaming their parents for. All the ways in which their parent blamed them, it’s more comfortable for them to blame their child or to say, “I blame my child because my ex-partner, my ex-husband, my ex-wife had such a negative influence on my child that I blame both of them. I reject all of them. The only ones who are good in my life are me and my parents who stayed on my side.” And sadly, what I see is this is just a very strong, good way to never grow.