TRANSCRIPT
About ten or fifteen years ago, I came up with the phrase “parental rescue fantasy,” and for me, it’s been an incredibly helpful concept in understanding human psychology, particularly people’s motivations. What I have seen in the world is some people, most people, perhaps all people to a degree, had childhoods in which their parents did not fully meet a lot of their very legitimate needs. At some level, people were neglected, rejected, abandoned, even not entirely necessarily, but in big ways, in so many different areas of their childhood need.
The result is these children grew up to become adults who still had a lot of unmet need inside of them, a lot of unresolved need, all sorts of longings, and grew up with the deep, deep hope that finally, somebody out there would love them and nurture them and witness them in the way that their parents from childhood never did. Someone out there, they hope in their fantasy, would make up for all the bad things that happened to them and be their perfect parent.
From what I’ve seen in people again and again and again, people have that fantasy, and they live with it, and they’re not aware of it. They’re even less aware of it if they’re less connected to their history of childhood abandonment, childhood neglect, various forms of childhood trauma.
Parental Rescue Fantasy in Adulthood
So what does this parental rescue fantasy look like? How does it play out in adulthood? Well, perhaps the most obvious way that parental rescue fantasy plays out is through people’s romantic relationships. It starts when people fall in love. I think falling in love, at basic, is parental rescue fantasy in so many cases. It’s this feeling that that other person is going to save me. That other person is my ideal of perfection. That person is going to love me and be there for me and care for me and respect me and nurture me and take me in and be all the things that I really wish my parents had always done but didn’t do or didn’t do effectively.
Now what I see is that parental rescue fantasy is an unconscious process. So when people fall in love, they don’t think, “Oh, that woman or that guy, or whoever it is that I’ve fallen in love with, is going to be that parental figure for me.” They don’t even necessarily connect it at all to their parents. All they think is that person is it for me. But really, what’s motivating it under the surface is all that unmet childhood need, that horrible, painful, fulminating loneliness and sense of dissatisfaction and harm that still lives within people. That doesn’t go away just because people have grown up; it’s just split off, it’s buried, it’s dissociated.
So what they do in their relationships so often when they fall in love is all of those feelings, all those ancient historical feelings of neediness, of unmet need, of longing, of pain, sometimes even of rage and anger and senses of dissatisfaction, senses of rejection and abandonment that so often come up in romantic relationships, it’s all motivated by what happened back then. There’s an expectation that so many people can so easily get that their romantic partner is going to save them. And sometimes they even take it a step further; lots of people do. They can feel it’s actually the job of their romantic partner to save them. It’s the job, the expectation of their romantic partner to be that perfect ideal object for them.
Now why do I say parental rescue fantasy? For me, it seems pretty clear because when people have an expectation that it’s another person’s job to save them, they’re wrong. It’s no one else’s job to save us. It’s nobody else’s job to heal us. But it actually was our parents’ to meet our emotional needs in childhood. And where our parents failed us, they failed as parents. So when people get failed as children, it doesn’t mean those needs go away; they live on and on and on into their adulthood.
And many people, most people perhaps, never actually take the leap into realizing it’s not somebody else’s job to save me because the only person that can save an adult from all that history of trauma and longing and pain and neglect and abandonment is ourselves once we become adults. And it’s really not fair; it’s a terrible thing. But the only person who can really save us is us. Other people can help us on that process, but really, we’re the one in charge. We have to take over the responsibility of becoming our own parents.
Now the sad thing is a lot of times a partner will try to meet that fantasy, will try to be a perfect parent for their partner, will do everything, will meet all their needs, will listen, will witness, will care, will be there for them over and over again, even take a lot of abuse, take a lot of really disrespectful, horrible behavior to try to meet that parental rescue fantasy. But it doesn’t work most of the time. It doesn’t even help. Sometimes it even makes the people worse, the people who have this fantasy, because it then sends them a distorted message that it’s okay for them to have this parental rescue fantasy. And at basic, it’s really not okay to have that parental rescue fantasy because it’s a setup for failure. It is a fantasy; ultimately, the fantasy has to be broken, and the person has to take the responsibility back for themselves.
The problem is taking back that responsibility in itself is an extremely painful thing because what it means is looking at the horrible things that one’s parents did to us and not only that, looking at the horrible things that one’s parents didn’t do for us. It means going back and becoming again, embodying, acknowledging what’s within us, that very pained, wounded, neglected, abandoned, vulnerable little child that we once were and to some degree still are.
Now, a lot of people have children to play out their parental rescue fantasy. They look at their own children as parental figures. They want their children to save them. They have an expectation in their very relationship with the children that they create that it’s the job of those children to make up for what they themselves didn’t get when they were children. They want their children to love them unconditionally, to be there for them, to listen to them. And to me, that’s a horror because the problem is when people look at their children that way, and I think most people, if not to some degree all people who have children do this, when they do this with their children, when they project parental rescue fantasy onto their children, the problem with children is they are so needy themselves, so profoundly full of need, that they have no choice but to try to meet their parents’ needs.
And that’s the basic thing that happens to children when they become parents. Children want to make their parents happy. They want to make their parents feel satisfied. They want to make their parents feel useful. They want to make their parents feel stable. They want to make their parents feel loved. And the reason that children do all those things and do it to the best of their ability and profoundly distort their own personalities in the process is because children have no choice. They are so full of need themselves that they’ll do anything, literally transform themselves into anything they can, including into the parents of their own parents, to get their parents to love them.
It’s a profound distortion, and the irony in this is by children trying to meet the parental rescue fantasy of their parents, the children end up getting neglected and don’t get their own needs met. And they grow up into adults who themselves are full of parental rescue fantasy, and they’re looking for someone else outside of them, something outside of them to save them in the way that their own parents never did. This is the intergenerational replication of trauma, the transgenerational transmission of trauma; it just gets passed right down the generations.
Now I can give another example, and it’s actually a very different type of example. From what I’ve seen, a lot of people who come to therapy want to play out parental rescue fantasy with therapists. So what does that look like? People come to therapy, and they look at the therapist as a parental figure, even a God sort of. They have that transference; they project all of their unmet historical childhood need onto this therapist. This person is someone who is going to save me. This person is going to be there for me. This person understands me.
Can witness me and finally can know me for who I really am. Now, can that work to a client’s advantage in therapy? To a degree, as long as the therapist is aware of what’s going on and doesn’t play into it.
Now, a therapist can witness someone, can really see someone, can really help someone look inside themselves and get to know their history, get to know their traumas, get to know what they went through. But if a therapist is good, they are not going to continue to give the client the idea that the therapist can save them. The therapist is not really a parental figure. The therapist is something different.
To me, what a good therapist does is they don’t nurture the parental rescue fantasy in a client. Instead, they help the client to become aware that that is what the client is playing out. These are the dynamics in the client’s relationship with a therapist. And to me, a good therapist also points out, “If you’re doing this with me, you’re probably doing this in your whole life, in all areas of your life.”
The goal of therapy, to me, is to help the client begin to look back on themselves, to look inside themselves, to look at their feelings, to look at their motivations, and most importantly, to look at their history. The history of what actually happened to them when they were children in their relationships with their parents. To look at the dynamics between themselves and their parents when they were children and to see what of their needs did not get met.
Now, a lot of therapists don’t do that. A lot of therapists, from what I’ve seen, love parental rescue fantasy. Because what happens so easily is when a client comes into therapy and they have that parental rescue fantasy toward the therapist, in a sort of sense, they’re kind of falling in love, maybe in a non-romantic sense, or sometimes even in a romantic sense with the therapist. “Oh my god, here’s this parental figure who’s going to save me!”
And so often what happens, from the perspective of a therapist, is their radar comes up and they realize, “Oh my god, I got somebody who’s gonna come forever. Here’s a dependent person.” And as long as I play the parental role and I’d be loving in a parental way, and I always take the client’s side and always tell them how great they are, and basically to use that sort of therapeutic term, narcissistically gratify the client, that client is never going to resolve their fundamental dynamics that are causing them to have the parental rescue fantasy.
Instead, what’s going to happen is that parental rescue fantasy dynamic is going to be played out with the therapist in the long term. And that client is going to keep coming back to keep getting that dose of fulfillment of parental rescue fantasy.
And there’s one little ironic twist in it. I think a lot of therapists become therapists to work out their own dynamics of parental rescue fantasy. So when they get someone who comes every week and comes on time and pays them money and respects them and treats them like a little God in the office, actually the therapist’s unresolved parental rescue fantasy can be met, met in a sense, but not resolved in that therapy dynamic too. Because it’s making the therapist feel like, “Oh, here’s someone who’s listening to me, who cares about me, who’s always there for me, who takes care of, who gives me money.”
And in a certain sense, the therapist isn’t growing. The therapist isn’t changing. The therapist just has someone who’s a permanent audience member for them, someone who bolsters the therapist’s ego and makes the therapist feel important and valid. Whereas on the inside, so many therapists, from what I’ve seen, are still just hurt, abandoned little children who are looking for people who are gonna take care of them, listen to them, and do it forever without ever rejecting them.