Observation 1: Strength and Weakness A wife who likes to complain that her husband is soft-boned doesn’t know that she happens to be the cause of his increasingly soft bones. The role of the mother is far greater than that of the father in the early psychological development of the child. Think of the gradual separation of the child from the mother’s body and arms, and you will believe that there is nothing wrong with such a view. The relationship with the mother determines almost every person’s inner sense of adequate security, intimacy, happiness and growth drive. The father is an important partner and leader in his initial growth and self-identity. When dealing with adults and children suffering from neurotic conflicts (fear, depression, anxiety, etc.) and behavioral disorders, a careful analysis of the early mother-son or mother-daughter relationship is needed, and we often find a very strict and correct, responsible mother or a father with a similarly strict and careful mother. When dealing with such a family, it is sometimes harder than ever to convince the mother to give the child the freedom to make mistakes and tell “lies” and do “bad things”. Because such a mother must be a very reasonable person, always on the right track, doing a diligent job as a person, as a mother and wife also very serious. When you talk to them, you often feel a little short of breath and a little defensive. As early as the 1950s, psychiatrists working in family therapy introduced the psychological concept of “marital tilt”, the idea that one parent in a family has a tendency to dominate the family in a destructive way, while the other parent appears dependent and weak, and submits to it. The child grows up viewing this tilted relationship as normal and loses the ability to become an equal, either dependent or powerful. Observation 2: Tilt What are you afraid of? Balance is the first principle of family relationships, and tilt is another kind of balance. It is often observed in clinical therapy that the mother’s sense of role is so strong that the father’s role in the child’s development is weakened or even forced to stray from the intimate and nurturing relationships of the family. As a result of the imbalance, the child’s interaction with the mother has no psychological buffer space created by the father’s insertion, and the right to make adaptive choices in the behavior of both parents is lost, and the child’s behavioral response with the mother is reduced to obedience and disobedience. Over time, the drive for growth is suppressed, and the desire for change and confrontation is depleted, resulting in a delay in the child’s mental development. As shown in the cartoon, the mother’s aggressiveness and the father child’s timidity become a stark contrast. As a result, the treatment will involuntarily try to suppress the mother, forcing her to step back a bit and support the father again, as a way to put the child in a better position in the center. In fact, the family therapist is not in a hurry to deny the picture, as the “tilted relationship” often implies an inner compensation and harmony. In other words, it is difficult to tell who is the cause and who is the effect of the absence of a cowardly father and the emergence of a strong mother. The family therapist sees tilt as a way of being for the family, and analyzes the child’s problems as maintaining or destroying the relationship. If the family wants the child’s problems to go away, they can ask the family if they are willing to change the tilted relationship first and see how the child’s problems would change in a balanced relationship, which is the family’s choice. A counselor with a strong sense of right and wrong will unconsciously act as a judge of the family, criticizing the mother who seems strong but is actually suffering and tired inside, creating a great deal of resistance to therapy and even causing the family to become disgusted with the therapist. The wise ones will align themselves with the mother to seek her strong assistance. There is nothing worse than a counselor trying to help the mother “suppress” the child, thwarting the child’s subconscious “resistance” and assuming that the fault lies with the child. In fact, most children’s behavioral disorders are initially directed at the family, and especially at the person closest to them – the mother. For children to change, parents need to be the first to change. Observation 3: Balance You can’t always ignore your child. Mothers and children are deadly entangled, sometimes not to blackmail their husbands, but to protect themselves! The “mother-child alliance” is another way psychologists describe family relationships, and it’s almost a reversal of the “marital tilt”. In some families, we often see a very authoritative father who reprimands the mother for being overly pampered and indulgent, while the unbearable child clings to the mother with all his heart. The “mother-son alliance” is often long-lasting and unbreakable. Such a mother-son relationship may be an endless worry in the mind of men. You and your wife red face, you can read fear or anger in the eyes of the child, you call him “baby” when he will turn his head to ignore you, and even stop calling you dad. If you have the intention to give your child some pain and find some distress, you will immediately find yourself in a predicament, because any dissatisfaction with the child is naturally attributed to the wife, which is a good intention turned into a donkey’s liver and lungs. Another psychological description of the “mother-child alliance” is the absence of the father in the family emotional relationship or power system, such as long-term absence, loose and free personality, lack of responsibility, etc. The mother-child attachment becomes the center of the family’s emotional ties, and the mother and child form a compensatory “marital relationship”. In such a family relationship, the child is a “tab on the father’s lap”, and the mother will actively present or even exaggerate the child’s problems to her husband, in order to “demand” from him the care he deserves. In the view of onlookers, such mothers have two children, one is never grow immature husband, one is never grow children. The third type of “mother-child alliance” is described psychologically as those mothers who have an incomplete personality, a lack of inner security, a lack of self-identity and a mistrust of intimacy, and who gain internal stability through a deep subconscious attachment to their children. Generally, mother-child passionate attachment is a state of inseparable mother-child interdependence from birth to two years of age, where the dependent mother is so intoxicated by the pleasure of this deep intimacy that she becomes “addicted” to her child. In such a family relationship, the mother sleeps with the child until the child is very old, while the father is often a sleeper in the hallway or small house. At times, the weak father may become an emotional marginal or vagrant in the family, having to please the mother and child to maintain his place in the family.