The company’s policies are constantly changing
The company’s policies are in a state of flux. One of the stranger yet more useful suggestions of psychotherapy, and in particular a branch of it known as Transactional Analysis, is that all of us contain within ourselves three essential personalities: a child, a parent, and an adult. To flesh these out a little, the child is typically vulnerable, touching, trusting, weak, in need, and incapable of properly looking after themselves, crying out for assistance, tenderness, support, structure, and some rules. The parent is strong, dominant, in control, and responsible, but also often chiding, critical, and hectoring. Meanwhile, the adult is sane, thoughtful, in command, neither too weak nor too strong, creative, and kind.
In an ideal world, we would all be able to toggle between these three personality types with relative ease. In a good relationship, we would constantly be moving between all three roles in ourselves, mostly hovering in the adult zone, but able when occasions demand it to go into parent or child mode. For example, when we’re feeling sad and under pressure, it should be part of health to know how to become a child again, that is to show our need, ask for help, curl into a ball, become small, and trust that we can be met with kindness and sympathy without fearing attack or belittlement. Then again, there should also be moments in a relationship, particularly when our usually adult partner has hit a crisis and descended into a childlike mode, when we are powerfully able to step up into a parental role and become ministering, indulgent to weakness and tantrums, calm in the face of irrationality, and secure enough in ourselves to know that the child partner will in a little while revert back to the maturity and self-command that we typically expect from them.
If a couple have small children, then for long stretches both people may need to act as parent, but then once the kids are in bed they might both have a go at being sweet, slightly naughty children, or one might play adult to the other one’s needy younger self.
The difficulty for couples and individuals is when people get stuck in particular positions, when they can only ever be children or only ever parents or only ever adults. There are relationships where, for example, one partner is always child and the other is always parent. One person is forever being a bit irresponsible, a bit naughty, they leave their clothes everywhere, they don’t book in for driving lessons, they don’t go to the dry cleaners, they forget to do the shopping, and they lose the keys. This can be highly endearing when one’s in the mood, but you’d hesitate a lot before leaving them in charge.
On the other side of the ledger, there is in such relationships often a parental type partner who is always chiding, always reminding the child what to do, super competent, forever rather stressed, alternately indulgent to the child but also on the edge of being cross and punitive.
Associated with this can be a deep reluctance on the part of the parental figure ever to access their own child self. They always have to be strong, they always have to be mummy and daddy, they cannot go anywhere near being a baby.
Why, we might ask, do people and therefore couples get stuck in these roles? Why can it be so hard to move out of them? Why are some people rigidly incapable of feeling their way into the role of, be it parent or child or adult? In all cases, we are typically looking at something in the past which has made an easy transition to a particular position untenable or frightening. There are people stuck in the child role for whom adulthood and parenthood present insuperable difficulties. Perhaps they are the offspring of a loving parent who couldn’t tolerate their maturity; to be deemed worthy of love they had to stay a baby, or else. Alternatively, one may feel one has to stay stuck in the child mode because a parent would be angry, castrating, and humiliating if one dared to show independence and pride in one’s adult ideals.
At the other end of the spectrum, very poignantly, there are people who are rigidly incapable of feeling their way into the role of parent or adult.