I accept my mother and father as they are, without expecting anything more from them as parents.
For many people, this sentence would simply be an invitation to betray one’s own ideals. And that’s exactly what it is. Without this ‘betrayal’ of one’s ideals, without this inner step from the ideal image to the reality of life, no one can grow up emotionally. There is an interesting phenomenon here: before it looks like betrayal, but afterwards it is pure freedom.
To understand this, I would like to look at how ideals are created, or more precisely, how and why we have created them ourselves. An ideal is an idea of how life should be: our parents, our partner, our children, ourselves, our work, our country or our holidays. An ideal is an inner idea of how we want reality to be. Most of the time I like this inner idea much more than reality itself, the bare ‘what is’.
I bring my first ideal into the world from within our mother. It comes from the experience that all living beings have had as embryos: I am one with an environment that nourishes, sustains and warms me. According to this experience, ‘mother’ means: I am immediately given everything I need, I am safe and protected from everything that could harm me.
At birth, this experience collides with a reality that has nothing to do with it: the womb, my previously spacious environment, contracts so much that I am forced out of it under extreme stress. Outside it is cold and bright; inside something is happening to me, I begin to breathe, I make sounds. If I am lucky, I will be placed on the stomach and breast of the woman from whose womb I have just been expelled. Now I have to work, I have to suck out of her what I need for nourishment. It no longer comes to me automatically through the umbilical cord. Something about this ‘mother from outside’ feels vaguely like the ‘mother from inside’ I have just left. I have known her heartbeat all my nine months of life and yet she is so completely different.
Only now is ‘Mother’ a real person to me. She is happy to see me, or maybe not; she has enough food, or maybe not; she will take me into her heart, or maybe not; she has enough strength, or maybe not; she is relaxed, or maybe not. The new reality is not in the least interested in my memory of the all-encompassing care I received in my mother’s womb. Nor does it take into account my lack of knowledge. All I knew was the cave within this woman. I am used to the all-encompassing care there, and not only that: a newborn baby embodies that all-encompassing reality of care, paradise. That is where its body was created and grew until it was ready to come out.
The new reality out there at the mother’s breast has nothing to do with the ideal inside her from the first sip. Perhaps your ideal is nothing more than a memory of something earlier that you now hold against the present. From now on you will search everywhere for your memory of that immediate, all-encompassing care. You will defend it and unswervingly hold it up to reality as the better, more desirable reality. With birth the ideal comes into the world. The first person you unconsciously confront with it is your mother as a real counterpart: ‘You must continue to feel all my needs precisely and fulfil them immediately, just as you have done up to now! This has nothing to do with her as a person, only with the cave in her womb where you were a moment ago. No real person and no environment, no matter how cosy and harmonious, will ever be able to live up to your ideal. What now?
Ideal and Reality
Ideal and reality are like matter and antimatter, or Voldemort and Harry Potter: Neither can live if the other survives. Ideal and reality immediately come into conflict when they meet; cooperation is impossible. The ideal fights, reality does not. Reality never has to fight; it just is. Reality is always ‘what is the case’ (Wittgenstein). It just works, moment by moment, always fresh and new. The ideal, on the other hand, is always already out of date, because the womb is in the past. It remains so, no matter how longingly we throw the image of it in front of us and expect reality to behave according to that image. Mother and father are never ideal.
In the struggle between ideal and reality, I have seen three possible outcomes in physically mature adults: 1. The ideal perishes. Then the struggle becomes a birth in the full sense of the word, a birth into reality, into a new living space, a new level of consciousness. The person matures inwardly. 2. The ideal survives and causes reality to disappear. Then the ideal becomes a neurosis. One can no longer perceive reality, nor does one react to it, but always to the inner image of how it should be, to the ideal. One builds reality into one’s ideal and understands it accordingly. 3. This struggle remains undecided. Then it can lead to the fragmentation of the ego, also called psychosis. One part lives with the ideal, sometimes with several, another with reality. Sometimes neither.
What I find important here is that every ideal has to do with love, or more precisely with the magical world view of dependent love. The original ideal comes from the dependent love of the embryo. It was actually dependent on the all-encompassing care of the womb in order to survive and grow. An embryo does everything it can to keep the womb safe. It adapts its eating and movement, its whole physical development, to what it finds. Its love has a clear goal: the environment (i.e. the mother) must be good under all circumstances so that it can be safe in it. Dependent love must always seek to stabilise the environment on which it depends, so that it itself may feel safe. Ideal and security are siblings. The infant’s ideal of all-embracing care is a reflection of its survival instinct. It cannot exist without its ideal of the all-providing mother, because its survival depends on it. No one, therefore, can give up an ideal as long as his survival is subjectively linked to it.
This means that the dependent love of embryos, children and adolescents produces ideals because it needs them to survive. Conversely, ideals only exist within the magical worldview of dependent love. They become particularly important when one has to break free from dependence, as in adolescence. Then ideals literally become a mirror image of what we experienced in childhood dependency. A simple example: children of anti-authoritarian parents who then develop strict structures for themselves. Only when the dependence is allowed to end does the ideal become superfluous and dissolve. Then the young person says, ‘I can do things differently from my parents, but I don’t have to’ – and vice versa.
This is exactly what happens when I begin to let my parents be as they are, without wanting them to be different as parents: I let my mother and father be as they are without asking them to be different as parents. This inner step becomes possible when I literally realise that I am indeed free in the sense of ‘no longer dependent on them’, either physically, emotionally or mentally.
I accept myself as I have become in the various stages of dependence on my parents. In the womb my self was physically with my mother; in childhood my self was emotionally with my parents and family; in adolescence it is still there mentally because I have to assert my individuality by separating from them. I help myself in this process by, for example, blaming them for everything they have done wrong to me, for withholding protection and closeness, or for overstepping boundaries and causing me pain. The child in me was right in all these feelings. But I am not a child anymore. I live in a different world than the child I was. When I realise that all this is no longer necessary because I am no longer dependent on my parents, a door to freedom opens.
On the threshold, however, I may immediately encounter difficulties with the next two sentences: ‘2. I allow everything I experienced with them to belong to me, just as it was for me at the time and without wishing for anything else. 3. I accept myself as a child of these people, as I am now, without wishing to be different. When I accept myself as I have become on my journey, I encounter all that I enjoyed and suffered on the way with my parents and away from them. The essence of my life with them reappears as an echo: the total physical dependence in the womb, my physical unconscious worldview; the emotional dependence in childhood, my felt and largely unconscious worldview; and finally the intellectual dependence of adolescence, my conscious worldview. Sometimes this is very powerful and crisis-like, like the first physical birth. The pains of childhood and adolescence make themselves felt. They want attention. They want to be seen.
Everything I find in my parents and in myself comes back to me as an unchangeable fact of nature: my nose, eyes, hands, charisma, character traits, behaviour patterns, etc. You are just like your father. As a young man, there was nothing worse that could be said to me. As a little boy, I was proud to be this man’s son. In my mother’s womb, without question or suspicion, I had taken on his genes. Today I have the pleasure of getting to know this strangely powerful, strangely carefree and life-affirming old man. He is still alive.
This is the second of a four-part series.
