Contents
We want to surround a loved one with love, to save us from any difficulties. Isn’t this a natural desire? But sometimes care imperceptibly becomes hyperprotection, and from an independent person the partner turns into a helpless child. Why is this happening?
What is the difference between care and overprotection? Showing care, we offer a person help, leaving him the right to refuse. We see him as a self-sufficient adult, we trust his choice and ability to take care of himself. Hyper-custody means the desire to protect a person from any obstacles and difficulties, attempts to impose over-care on him.
Surely you know couples in which women complain that their husbands behave like children. Some accept the situation and laugh it off: «It’s just that in addition to two children, I have a third — my husband.» And indeed, they say, how can one not follow if, without me, he will certainly forget to put on his hat or be late for an important meeting. Others are embarrassed by this state of affairs: after all, once they began to meet with a self-confident man who solved their problems.
Even if what is happening does not suit you, it is not always easy to change the established relationship scenario. We do not notice how, as if on autopilot, we continue to act as before. Or we notice and then we get angry, scold our partner, and at the same time ourselves. How to explain this paradox? What can the desire to patronize mean?
1. I see a weak and helpless partner
A newborn child will not survive without a mother or other adult to replace her. Therefore, parents create conditions around him in which he will not need anything. As a person grows up, he learns to serve himself. Does this mean that he no longer needs the care of loving people? No, but he doesn’t need the care he received as a baby.
However, sometimes we begin to see helpless children in fully capable people. It seems to us that without us a person will get into trouble or be ashamed to ask for help. At this moment, we decide for him what is better for him, for some reason believing that he himself will not be able to cope with this task.
Why are we doing this? The reasons may be different. For example, deep down we ourselves want to be helpless, we want someone to “impose” help that we don’t know how to ask for.
2. Overprotectiveness is a common way to express love.
You can talk about your feelings in different ways — for example, by offering help. If we want to patronize, perhaps this is the form in which we received love in childhood. After all, it is in contact with the mother that the child learns the basic skills of building relationships and, growing up, applies them in communication with a partner. Remember how your parents treated you. How did you know that they love you?
3. For some reason, overprotection is beneficial to both
In a couple, different models of relationships are possible, and the interaction of “protective adult and helpless child” is just one of them. However, partners make the choice of model together. Most often this happens spontaneously based on the personal characteristics of each.
For example, if one takes the role of a parent, the second also makes a contribution to what is happening — either begins to “play child”, or resists and offers his own rules. Or vice versa: one is pleased to be helpless, while the other, satisfying his needs, takes the role of a guardian or refuses it.
No matter how the roles in your family system develop, it is important not to turn the relationship into a search for the one to blame, who allegedly started the first one, but to figure out how both of you are in this situation. For some reason, the parent-child model has proven to be sustainable, which means everyone benefits from it.
For example, it can be a way to avoid talking about sex, especially if the couple is struggling in this area. Child-parent relationships exclude sexual overtones, which means they are safe — in them you can remain close to each other, but bypass an uncomfortable topic.
4. Striving for control
The situation in which one takes care of the other creates a co-dependent relationship. It seems that only the “weak” is dependent on the “strong”, but in fact the “strong” is also dependent on caring for the “weak”. Sometimes partners can switch roles, which only strengthens their dependence on each other.
Behind the desire for overprotection may be a desire to become indispensable for a person, to “tie” him to himself and thereby cope with his own anxiety of being abandoned. So excessive care becomes a way of control.
In addition, the strong begin to feel needed, significant in the life of another, and this allows him, among other things, to fill his own life with meaning. Before sorting out the relationship, making claims, it is useful to figure out how you are in the current model of relations. What annoys you about it, and what gives you pleasure.
You may recognize yourself in one of the explanations above, or you may discover your own reasons why relationships in a couple develop in a special scenario. Then we can discuss the situation together. It may turn out that the partner is also not quite satisfied with the current state of affairs. Or you will learn about how he sees what is happening. Such a conversation will not necessarily lead to change immediately, but it can be the first step on the way to them.