Tony White

I made a comment in the last post on how as a couples counsellor one not uncommonly sees husbands who have married their mothers and wives who have married their fathers. Why would this be so?

The psychological explanation would be that a child learns how to be in its formative years and that includes how to be in relationships as well. Each child is born with its innate temperament and as it grows though out childhood it has various experiences which impact on its personality as well.

In childhood the child is developing a whole series of templates one could say. It is learning for example about its own OKness and the OKness of others. If a child gets a clear sense of it being not OK then that becomes the template which it takes into adulthood. It will thus structure its life so that its sense of not OKness is repeatedly reinforced and proven over and over. It sets up relationships where it gets walked on, beaten up, used, cheated on and so forth.



This is why I have always said that for the drug addict the drug is not the real problem. The person is simply using the drug as one means to live out its sense of not OKness. If you could actually make a society drug free all the addicts would simply live out their not OKness in another way. However one must say that that maybe in a less dramatically destructive way.

It also develops relationship templates. The young child watches mother and father relate and that forms part of its template. It experiences a relationship first hand with mother and father and that forms its relationship template also. Indeed anyone who is emotionally important for the child will contribute to template formation and that can include siblings, friends and other rellies as well.

So the young girl has a relationship with father where he is distant and a bit critical. Inside her head she develops a strong desire to finally have a father who gives her recognition and approval. The template is established. As she goes through life she meets various eligible men and when her intuition picks up that this one will eventually be distant she will feel an attraction to him. This is the one she will feel the ‘chemistry’ for and the one she will fall in love with. That is why it is sometimes said that you should marry the one you don’t have the chemistry for but have a good workable relationship with.


Establishing her template



I have heard many women say that they promised themselves never to marry a man like their father but sure enough over time the same father daughter relationship is re-established in the marriage. These templates are very powerful and unfortunately there are not easy to change and thus you get people behaving in repetitive ways in their relationships over and over again.

Now hold onto your hats! What is being said here is that we develop psychological templates of our parents that we then use to form romantic relationships with others in later life. So what this means is that your Child ego state is picking a person it perceives to be a facsimile of mother or father. So what this means is that when the woman is having sex with her husband she also has a psychological understanding of him as being her father. She is having psychological incest with father when she has sex with him! TMI!

Then you get the relationship where the Nurturing Parent ego states (NP) of the hubby and missus are not even. The diagram below shows one of the bases of a good relationship. If the two parties are capable of (and do) showing caring and kindness to the other especially when they are in distress, then that is a very good thing. It is an excellent way of keeping good will in a relationship and it very much encourages the Free Child ego states of both parties to stay invested in the relationship.



Rarely are the NPs even. One will tend to be the nurturer ‘manager’ and the other will be less likely to do so. If the difference is not too big then it does not matter. Sometimes it is big and then you get wives saying he is like a child and I have to be his mother. Or the man says that she is child like and he has to be like a parent to her.


The drug or alcohol user in the relationship often will assume the child role and want the spouse to be the parent.



What most clients will expect to happen and what couples counsellors often do is focus on the party who is meant to ‘grow up’. The man who wants the wife to be his mother and keeper will be seen as needing to grow up in the relationship. Most often this is not the main problem. The main shift that needs to take place is that the mother (wife) needs to ‘grow down’. Whilst this is realised by many couples counsellors I would suggest that very commonly it is under emphasised in the counselling.

Sometimes you hear the wife complain endlessly about how he is so much of a child and how she always nurturers him and she never gets any back and so forth. Often that is not the core problem. She is also not mentioning that being the ‘big person’ in the relationship suits her very well. She is in control, she does not have to be emotionally vulnerable or has to emotionally trust hubby. She can be very resistant to doing such things as they can terrify her. So when you hear someone complain that they are like a parent to their spouse remember that it is likely that the person also has a child inside that is terrified of letting the other party take control and be vulnerable and trusting of them.

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