Transitions Individual & Couple’s Counseling and Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: Harrisonburg, Virginia — Make Changes that Last

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0375760288Peer orientation is not the only way the attachment order can become inverted. It may happen, for example, because the parents have unresolved needs they project onto the child. In our respective practices as psychologist and physician, we have both seen parents who would rely on their children as confidants, complaining to their children about problems with their spouse. The child becomes a listening post for the parent’s emotional distress. Instead of being able to confide to her parents her own difficulties, she learns to suppress her needs and to serve the emotional needs of others. Such an inversion of the attachment hierarchy is also harmful to healthy development. In Attachment, the first volume of his classic trilogy exploring the influence of parent-child relationships on personality development, the psychiatrist John Bowlby writes that ‘The reversal of roles between child, or adolescent, and parent, unless very temporary, is almost always not only a sign of pathology in the parent but a cause of it in the child.’ Role reversal with a parent skews the child’s relationship with the whole world. It is a potent source of later psychological and physical stress.

Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté

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