The Conscious Parent

effortlessly until the day she was diagnosed with breast cancer. With no
more fight in her, Anita broke down, becoming depressed. At the very
time she needed to be her strongest, she just gave up. This woman who
had given to others her whole life, when she was asked to give to herself,
had no ability to do so. So low was her sense of worth that she couldn’t
“show up” for herself.
Anita counted on her mother to pick her up. Because the situation
evoked so much anxiety in the mother, instead of being compassionate
and caring, she was furious with her daughter. Belittling her repeatedly,
she refused to accept that Anita was in a needy state. Anita’s children,
who were also unable to cope with their mother’s deterioration, began to
deteriorate too. Her husband, unused to being the emotional leader,
started staying away from the house, which he described as “too
morbid.” So it was that, just as she had been in her childhood, Anita
found herself abandoned.
Only after months of therapy did Anita awaken to the fact she was
abandoning herself as a result of being abandoned by her own parents
long ago. She now saw how she had attracted a husband who was just
like her mother, narcissistic and negligent. She realized how, by
constantly giving to her children, she had fostered in them an inability to
cope emotionally with the hardships of life. In her desire to protect them
from suffering the same kind of things she had experienced in her
childhood, she had overindulged them, causing them not just to lack
empathy, but to be callous. So determined had she been not to inflict on
them the responsibilities she was required to shoulder in her youth, she
had unwittingly brought them up with a disregard for duty.