TRANSCRIPT
When I was a child, my mom liked me better when I was sick. She treated me better when I was sick, when I had a cold, when I was feeling ill, when I had a headache, when I had a stomachache, when I was physically injured. She was nicer to me. She was kinder to me. She was more gentle with me. She was more empathic. And this was confusing to me because I didn’t like myself better when I was sick. I liked myself better when I was healthy, when my body was working better, when my brain was working better, when I was able to go out and play with my friends and have a good time and be physically active, be independent.
Over time, I started thinking about it. Why was it that way? Why did she like me better when I was sick? I really didn’t have an answer, but at some intuitive level, I could kind of feel it. What I felt, and I later came to in a more conscious way, was that when I was sick, I needed her more. And that was a key. When I was more independent, even as a very little boy, I needed her less. My mom was someone who really needed to be needed. She really had a problem with having a strong sense of her own identity. She had been hurt in all sorts of different ways in her childhood—abandoned, rejected, violated. Lots of bad things had happened to her along the way.
She had me in a way to make up for this. She had me in a way to make up for some of the deficits in her life and in her personality, in her character. I was something that was going to make her complete. I gave her the identity of mother, of carer, of someone who could focus her attention on someone else in a way that was so societally acceptable. Yet what I started realizing as time went on is that I really wanted to be more and more independent, and she wanted me to be less and less independent.
She didn’t want me to have a deep connection with me on the inside. That was the challenge for her. I think very, very early on, she saw that I had the beginnings of an ability to really be connected with myself, with my true self on the inside, to have a relationship with me. And that relationship that I had with me on the inside, that was what was a threat to her because she wanted to be the one in my life who had the most important relationship with me.
Me having a relationship with me was a challenge to her relationship with me. Really, what it was, if she wanted to be the one who called the shots about what reality was, she wanted to be the one who defined reality, defined my reality, defined our relational reality, defined the reality of the external world. If I had a relationship with myself on the inside, I could think for myself. I could make my own judgments. I could be an independent, conscious person. And she didn’t like that.
In a way, there was a good reason for it. The good reason was that my mom was a very, very stuck person. At some deep level, she was committed to not growing. She was committed to staying emotionally shut down, not rocking the boat of her inner world. Her inner world basically was protecting the denial of her own family system, protecting the denial of her parents, not challenging all the different ways in which they had failed her, not really dealing with her own traumas.
By me starting to wake up, starting to look at my life, starting to become more honest with myself, having a more honest relationship with me, I was more and more able to look at her as someone who was really troubled and flawed and screwed up. And she didn’t want me to do that. She wanted me—I’m sorry to use the word—but she wanted me to worship her in a way, to look at her as the God in my universe.
When I was a little, little baby, I did do that. That’s what little babies do. Their mother is their God. Their father, if their father takes that kind of caretaker role, is also a God—literally a God, all-powerful, omnipotent. This person is my conduit to life.
What I realized about was that my mom loved babies. She absolutely loved babies. And the reason that she loved babies was that she could be in control of the relationship entirely. When babies started to get older, when babies started to think for themselves, well, they weren’t so appealing to her. I think, in a way, she wanted me to stay emotionally a baby.
One of the best ways that I would stay a baby is if I was sick, if I was needy, if I couldn’t take care of myself. If she was the one who could come in there and take care of me. I remember how differently she did treat me when I was sick. In a way, she was like the ultimate mother. She was perfect. She was so caring. She was so attentive to my needs. She was so attuned to what I was thinking, where my pain was. It was like she was really awesome at it.
And in a way, at some level, there was part of me that actually, in that way, liked being sick because it was like being sick for me meant that I really had a mom. When I think about that, I feel sad sometimes because part of what I did was that I didn’t take such good care of myself when I was little. I remember getting injured, putting myself in the position of being more likely to get injured, taking stupid risks that I knew were stupid but unconsciously doing them on purpose because I knew that if I got hurt, mommy was going to love me.
And that if I took care of myself—that is, if I practiced good self-care—my mother was going to love me less. What a screwed-up way to grow up! What a screwed-up system to grow up! What a screwed-up way to have a relationship with my mother that I, in a way, had to deny myself, deny myself care and loving myself, honoring myself, and developing myself in order to get loved more from my mother.
Well, basically what it comes down to for me is there was a fork in the road in my life. At some intuitive level, I started figuring out what that fork was. That fork was one: I was going to be more of what she wanted and become more and more sick, or I was going to become more and more and more healthy. If I became more and more and more healthy, I was not gonna fit into my family system anymore. My mother really was not going to love me eventually.
If I became really, really, really sick in a big, deep way, made a life out of being sick, I was gonna, at least on the surface, get my mother’s love. It was not going to challenge my relationship with her. I was going to be what she wanted.
I think the ideal really for my mom is if I could have gone off into the world, been really functional, really successful in society, but again, be really emotionally shut down, be very emotionally sick, have an internally sick relationship, have sick friendships, sick romantic relationships, have a sick marriage, but be successful enough so that she wouldn’t have to financially take care of me.
Though, on the other hand, there were other examples of people in my greater family system who were sick, who couldn’t financially take care of themselves, who were dependent on my greater family system. They were some of the most beloved family members of all, even though they were the least functional, the least emotionally healthy, the most troubled, the most confused—in a way, the least productive members of society. The people who, in a way, on an emotional level, were the lowest levels of role models for me. They were the negative role models. They were the people I didn’t want to become. But my family puts such effort into taking care of them, speaking so well about them, really honoring them.
All we have to take care of them. They can’t take care of themselves, but they served a purpose.
Step back. I remember when I was a teenager, my mother made a comment, an incidental psychological observation. She read it in a book somewhere: the concept of the identified patient. What she said was, in certain family systems, the family system can deem one person the sick person, and that is the person that everyone in the family identifies their own sickness in, plays out their sickness in. This is the person who, in a way, carries overtly the greater manifestation of the whole family system’s sickness.
And what can happen as the result of that is, if that identified patient can actually become mentally ill, and the family wants them to become mentally ill. When she told me that as a teenager, that was a concept I’d never considered. I wasn’t thinking about emotional dynamics in that way. I wasn’t thinking about family systems like that. I wasn’t even thinking of families as a system at all. But I remember home, that caught my attention, and it stayed somewhere in my mind as a theoretical data point.
What’s interesting is I did not see that in relation to myself or my family system. And that’s the irony that shows the blindness of the family system. The blindness, the psychological blindness of me as a child and of my mother as a parent, as one of the two big leaders of my primary family system. That actually, she was doing this to me. And I saw this as I got older, as I became a later teenager, and as I went into my 20s, that at some level, my mom wanted me to be mentally ill. She liked me better when I had emotional problems. She liked me better when I had psychological problems. She liked me better when I was in existential crisis, existential confusion. It made her more comfortable.
It again heightened her role of power. She could be a helper. She could be a healer. She could be the one who had insight, who could take care of me, who could comfort me, who could even pity me. She could look down on me as the one who had all these problems, and it gave her that role again. Oh, she’s a mom! And people would say, she’s such a great mom. She’s so caring. She puts such energy and compassion into you.
And it was like, at some level, once I started waking up, it’s like, you know, that’s not what it is at all. She’s usurping my personality. She wants me to be sick. She set me up to be sick. She likes me being sick. She wants me to do more things better sick. She wanted me to take psychiatric medications. She wanted me to go get free government health insurance when I wasn’t working in my early 20s so I could go get sick therapy. She liked it when I went to therapy. At one point, she referred me to a therapist who was such a sick guy, and she spoke of him in such healthy terms. And it’s like she wanted me to be with a twisted therapist, and she wanted me to stay sick.
She wanted to control my life, and not in a good way. Not like to make decisions that were gonna help me grow and become independent. I think she really wanted me to be broken.
Fast-forward 20 years, more than 20 years, 25 years. I really did become independent. I really did take that fork in the road toward becoming more psychologically independent, toward nurturing as a primary relationship in my life my conscious relationship with the truth of me on the inside. My relationship between my conscious self and my true self, with my inner child, as it were. I had to leave the family system because of it. I no longer fit in. My mom didn’t like it. She definitely didn’t like it that I became a therapist myself, and I didn’t become the kind of therapist that she went to and she wanted to send me to.
She wanted to go to therapists. She went to therapists who were power freaks, who were shut down, who were emotionally sick, who were comfortable with her staying sick. I didn’t like that. I didn’t want to be that way. She really didn’t like it when I became a therapist. But even more than that, she didn’t like it when she saw my connection with me becoming stronger. She didn’t like my psychological insights. She certainly didn’t like it when I started calling out the family system, and she definitely hated it when I started calling her out on her sick behavior. It was threatening to her. It challenged her.
But most of all, the thing that she really didn’t like is that I broke away, that I became independent, that I became more mature, that I started healing my traumas, that I started grieving, that I really became a healthier person. And how sad and confusing and really sick is that? That I had a mother who didn’t want me to grow up. She wanted me to stay a child. She wanted me to stay broken. She would have been much happier if I’d been a child in an adult’s body, a broken, hurt child in an adult’s body. And for me, I didn’t like that. I hated that. That was not the life that I wanted to be.
And what’s sad is that insight that she had about families making one person the identified patient. They will be the sick one. They will be the mentally ill one who makes the family system comfortable, who holds the psychological trauma of everyone in a manifested, overt way. What I’ve seen is that’s very, very common. She was so, so right about that. And I’ve tried to help people break out of that role, but I realize also sometimes you can’t break out of that role unless you also break away from the troubled sides of your parents.
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