The parent-child relationship and the impact on partner relationships

By Susanne Hazen and Josianne Zwart (Hey Joos! Virtual assistant & projectmanager)
Photo: Laura Fuhrman, published on Unsplash

Not a single parent is perfect. Even if your father and mother would have been some kind of Buddhas, they wouldn’t have been ideal for you. Even Buddhas aren’t capable of giving a child what it needs, since the needs of a child are endless. Besides that, parents have their obligations and responsibilities towards their children. This means that they can’t just fulfil all their child’s needs. The result is that everyone of us has a jar of unfulfilled needs that has to be filled by something or someone else.

Falling in blind love
As we get older, we fall in love. Hormones are flying around, and this magical feeling arises: there is the one who can heal you and who can fill that jar of unfulfilled needs.

But the thing is: you don’t see that other person at all, and that person doesn’t see you either. You see someone who loves you until the end of time, but that comes from your own needs and desires. Each desire muddles the perception.

We already know that the state of being in love doesn’t last forever, but that it is a feeling driven by hormones. After a while, disappointment comes around the corner, and from that state comes rage. As you can read in the previous blog post, this is mainly old rage from someone’s childhood or rage coming from transgenerational connections. The rage that comes from old pain and is being projected onto someone else in the current time, is called ‘transference’ in psychoanalysis.

Dynamics in relations based on childhood patterns
The rage from someone’s childhood or transgenerational connections, where does that come from?

Women have expectations towards their partner, unknowingly. He has to have something from her father, but also from her mother. She sees both of them in her partner.

When a woman is frustrated with her husband, she’ll have a deep desire for her own father and mother. In her mind, the connection with her father was not complete, and she’ll want to fill this void via her husband. But that turned out to be a fairytale. So when this woman has a son, she’ll focus her desire for male energy on the son, since she couldn’t find that with her father and husband.

The same happens with a man who turns into the father of a girl. The thing he hoped to find with his mother (and later with his wife) but could not get from the both of them, he’ll start looking for with his daughter.

This way, children are being used for something that they’re not. Those children can easily feel the needs of their parents and are so loyal and full of love towards them that they want to fulfil their parents’ needs. However, they know that something is wrong and that they are being used. Eventually, this abuse will drive them to rage, usually hidden. This rage has to come out at some point, and it will be projected onto someone else.

The woman, her father’s princess, will have difficulties with men. The rage that was destined for her father, will be targeted toward other men. The men, their mothers’ princes, will feel the same. They will have trouble in relationships because the man is unknowingly mad at his mother. He projects his rage toward other women.

But then what? What if you target your rage against someone else?

• You’ll break up your relationship and try it with someone else;
• You’ll get frustrated and lose all hope after trying multiple times. You give up;
• Or: you research your own patterns and come to new perspectives. You have to heal something within yourself, be aware of that and change yourself.

Healing movement and sentences
To heal the rage within you, you can do a constellation. In a constellation, we can make the dynamics between mother/son or father/daughter visible. As a healing sentence, the ‘parent’ can say: “I gave you what I could give you.”

The parent (representative of) who says that, has to be confident and in strength. A strong parent is what a child needs.

Connecting with someone else is not only taught by our parents or caregivers, but is also influenced by intergenerational trauma, that we can research with family constellations or Systemic Ritual.

Want to know more?
As described above, this is simply put what we can do during a constellation or Systemic Ritual, where we make the dynamics between a parent and child visible. During the online workshops, you can get to know Systemic Ritual at an entry-level. I’ll tell you more about systemic constellations and rituals, but we will mainly do some constellations or rituals so you can experience how it works and what it can do for you. Do you want more, and live? Click here for the workshop series ‘Hidden Dynamics’. This starts on Saturday morning, 24 September, in Amsterdam.

Click here for the full agenda.

Inspired by a workshop by Bertold Ulsamer.