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 and 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, submissive to him or her. The child grows up viewing this tilt as normal and loses the ability to become an equal, either dependent or powerful. Observation 2: What are you afraid of with tilting? 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 from the father’s insertion and loses the right to make adaptive choices in the behavior of both parents, and the child’s behavioral responses with the mother are reduced to obedience and disobedience. Over time, the dynamics of growth are 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 contrasts with the father’s child’s timidity. 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. Nothing is worse than a counselor trying to help the mother “suppress” the child and thwart the child’s subconscious “resistance”, thinking that the child is to blame. 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: Balancing you can never ignore the 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 spoiled 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 “leash” on the father’s lap, and the mother actively presents or even exaggerates the child’s problems to her husband in order to “demand” from him the care he deserves. In the eyes of onlookers, such mothers have two children, a husband who never grows up, and a child who never grows up. 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 inner stability through a deep subconscious attachment to their children. Generally, mother-child passionate attachment is a state of inseparable mother-child interdependence between the child’s birth and two years of age, where the personality-dependent mother becomes so intoxicated by the pleasure of this deep intimacy that she becomes “addicted” to her child. In such a family relationship, the mother is expected to sleep with the child until the child is very large, while the father is often a sleeper in the overflow room or small house. Sometimes, the father with a weak personality may become an emotional fringe or vagabond of the family, and he has to maintain his place in the family by pleasing the mother and child. Observation 4: Oedipal children do not mind their mothers …… When the husband is not yet grown up, the mother-son alliance is sometimes compensated for the family function. According to family pathology, the “mother-child alliance” makes the child a projection ‘container’ for the couple’s personality conflicts, and the couple unconsciously transfers the problems of the marriage to the child, and the child lives like a ‘prop’ who suffers for the marriage ‘. Because of the mother’s personality, emotions have a strong identification and internalization effect on the child in the alliance, the child’s self-development is suppressed, and this suppression will continue into adolescence and be violently released. Similarly, the excessive closeness of the mother delays the development of the boy’s gender identity and sexuality, and many boys have a “Oedipal complex” (Oedipus complex) that they cannot shake. The understanding of the mother-son alliance and clinical psychotherapy may be two different things, and counselors do not look at the “mother-son alliance” in terms of the above simple logical relationship. Generally, we first accept the alliance as a compensatory state of the family relationship, and until a new balance is established, the “mother-child alliance” may be an effective mechanism of balance within the family. By entering the family with this concept, the counselor is better able to maintain a neutral position and a broader perspective. We cunningly bypass the cause and effect of right and wrong given to us by family members, and do not act as educators or relationship mediators for the family. We maintain a high level of respect and identification with what the family presents to us, and collaborate with the family to find multiple possibilities for future changes as a way to reduce anxiety within the family. We do not discuss why the family is the way it is or why the child is having this or that problem, rather we are happy to admit that we are ignorant of the causes of the problem (playing dumb). We are only willing to discuss with families how this “mother-child alliance” has been maintained and what each member needs to do to make the “alliance” not look so bad if the family chooses not to change the status quo. If the family chooses to change, how to build the new relationship and how to maintain the sustainability of the change. In therapy, the family therapist is very willing to sit on the same bench as the family, and it would be unpalatable to get used to sitting on the opposite side of the table from the family and letting them throw their troubles and anger around. Observation #5: Bondage seems to be a crossover. People who don’t do things will never do anything wrong! People who do things, always start by making mistakes. “Double bind” is a classic description of a paradoxical scenario in family dynamics by family therapist Bateson, who argues that “double bind is a scenario in which there is an apparent contradiction between the relational and content levels of communication between parents or between parents and children, so that family communication develops out a paradoxical uncertainty in which family members do not know whether the other person cares about them or complains about them.” As the father says, “I did this to love you!” while the child knows that big trouble may follow. Bateson believes this paradoxical scenario is a determinant of schizophrenia or emotional disturbance in children. In Chinese culture, parents like to hide their anger toward their children in a seeming concern for them, and the worse the relationship with their children, the easier it is for them to vent their frustration through “education. As a result, the child is left in a paradoxical situation of being cared for at the content level and being hurt at the relationship level, and is unable to comment on or resist these contradictory messages. Slowly the child uses the paradoxical messages to avoid punishment, copes with all relationships in a distorted manner, loses the ability to develop a correct understanding of himself and others, and develops delayed personality differentiation. In the cartoon, the mother angrily says to her daughter, “Look at you, you’re 15 years old and you still don’t want to share a little bit of the housework with your mother, you’re so lazy!” That is, it expresses a kind of expectation for the growth of her children, but also expresses a kind of disappointment and complaint for her daughter. The daughter has to balance her mother’s emotions and feels that she should do something about it. The daughter says to her mother, “Okay, I’ll mop the floor.” The expression is one of obedience, even a deliberate ingratiation, but inside hides a defense, a fear of continuing to communicate with the mother. When a daughter mops the floor, if she receives a compliment from her mother, the response is successful, her heart is satisfied, and the act of mopping is transformed into a motivation for growth. But the mother shouted, “Look at the floor you mopped! You might as well not do it at all. You’ve grown up and you don’t even know how to mop the floor!” The daughter is forced to be in a position where she is at a loss as to what to do, and there is no way out either way. If she doesn’t mop the floor, she has to continue to endure her mother’s accusations and complaints; if she does mop the floor, she has to endure her mother’s new accusations and complaints, and she is unhappy either way. The children’s motivation to grow is diminished because of the conflicting messages from their mothers. The feeling in the child’s mind is: “No matter what, I can’t get rid of my mother’s dissatisfaction with me.” Observation 6: Conflicts you stab me not! Many children grow up in a “war”! Coping with such “intimate exchanges” makes children mellow and mature, and ultimately the children win. If the parents are socially elite, the child may not be so lucky to get away with it, the parents do not talk to the child then, once the conversation will touch the child’s “soul”, until the child’s mind bruises a thousand holes. Psychologist Theodore Leeds has studied how children in elite families are treated by their parents. Leeds studied the maladjustment of children growing up in elite families and found that the higher the family status, the more psychological problems the child has, and the more troublesome to solve. From a genetic perspective, because of their high IQ, children benefit from the “sparring” with their parents by easily finding or creating an emotional or behavioral barrier to respond effectively to difficult situations. Counselors see that many children’s problems are nurtured by inappropriate parenting and attempt to educate parents in a way that achieves a balance of communication within the family, which may be a good idea, but the results are unpredictable. Some parents take counselors’ advice to become tied up in educating their children without rules and regulations, putting their children’s psychological development at greater risk. A wise therapist does not make things difficult for parents. Instead, they show enough respect and affirmation for the parents in front of the child. We work with the family to re-describe the family’s “scenario” and change the “story script” that the family presents to us so that the family gets a new vision and a new feeling. We give an unexpected meaning to the child’s “symptoms” or the family’s conflict, so that the conflicting messages have a positive interactive effect. We also need to translate the child’s inner feelings about parenting and show him the selfless and loving heart that is embedded in education. We will use the child’s questions to give the parent a wide berth to express himself, so that the parent becomes more like a good parent and the child more like a good child. This is done to give our hint: “The family must find the hidden harmony in the conflict between love and education, and bring peace to the troubled heart.” Observation 7: Divide the child, or I’m good for you! If the child becomes a three-headed, six-armed Nezha, he may be able to satisfy the multiple needs of both parents! The scenario in the cartoon is another type of psychological description of family relationships – “marital splitting” – by the 1950s psychologist Theodore? Leeds proposed it. When studying child psychosis (bipolar disorder), Leeds argued that: there is no good structure and role differentiation within the family, the couple is excessively independent and lacks the necessary emotional communication and intimate dependence. Even couples are in bed together, distant from each other, full of hostile competition, desperately trying to get loyalty and closeness from the child, resulting in the child’s inability to adapt. The child feels strongly the importance of instability and unity within the family, and quickly develops a self-control to cope or oscillate between the opposing conceptions of the family or the either/or relationship patterns, compensating for the parent’s need for family relationships with self “division” to maintain unity in the midst of separation and harmony in the midst of conflict. In such a family relationship, the balance is not only between the two, but also between the two. In such a family relationship, balance is achieved by the child’s willingness to “self-sacrifice,” and the child’s problems are actually an essential element of family maintenance. But there is a limit to compensation, and when the cushion fails, the child may get into serious trouble and either over-control himself or herself – depression – or ventilate out of control – mania – and continue to oscillate between these two emotional states. The over-controlled child may submerge this family conflict deep inside and become the psychological source of adult neurosis or psychosomatic disorders. The out-of-control child, however, seems to rebel against “family reality,” forcing the parents to change their attitudes and regulate the family, a loss of control known medically as child neurosis or child psychosis. Observation 8: You are stupid if you don’t do it, and you are even stupider if you don’t do it well. What seems to be an angel to adults is the devil in the mind of a child! The child in double bondage, internal conflict persists and a great deal of anxiety accumulates. The counselor enters such a family and is prone to sympathize with the child. If one tries to remove the conflicting messages within the family by teaching the parents wishfully, it is easy to cause resentment among the parents who have a strong need for self-esteem. As a result, the child is frightened in the office and sometimes has to “align” with the parents by expressing dislike for the counselor, leaving the therapy in a difficult situation. For children who are rebellious or have aggressive desires, such teaching encourages confrontation and rebuke of the parent, leaving the parent in an awkward position in front of the doctor and losing dignity. Many counselors who desire a sense of authority are eager to indoctrinate families with psychological ideas and train their clients, thinking that this will bring peace to the world. For parents with knowledge and understanding, this can still be done, but for families with little understanding or deep conflicts and entanglements, psychological knowledge is a double-edged sword that helps and hurts more, causing families to lose their self-judgment and self-renewal, pushing them into greater crisis and distress. Of course, many families are also happy to put all the trouble on the therapist and let their children come to the counselor for ideas on big and small matters, making the therapist suffer inside under the surface glory. Smart family therapists bypass value judgments about family communication patterns and allow parents and children to experience each other’s closeness and proximity on a relational level through family shaping (a kind of in-office family psychodrama), triggering their internal associations. It also creates new patterns of communication and triggers new emotional experiences to promote the family’s expectations for the future. In conversations with families, flexibility is needed to avoid expressing a view of what is right or wrong about family matters and to introduce a valid or invalid judgment instead. Counselors pigeonhole many seemingly good approaches to family education and parenting theory, finding something very individualized to untangle the family’s knots. The therapist is happy to play an ambiguous role when conveying a certain message will bring value judgments or provoke new conflicts in the family, and quietly make modifications to the family by presenting multiple exchanges to deal with conflicting messages in the family. When the family is completely renewed, the family will find that all beneficial decisions come from themselves. Observation 9: Showing Weakness Oh my God! Where did his bones go? Is it genetic inheritance from the parents that the child can’t straighten up? Another, more difficult type of double-bind occurs in families with poorly differentiated or emotionally divided personalities, where the child is chastised by the other parent whether he or she follows the mother or the father, and is unable to get an affirmative or negative view of whatever he or she does. Sometimes both parents have ambiguous views in order to avoid their own conflicts, or they go their own way and do not interfere with each other. Children can neither find rules in the family nor form effective communication, and they have to look at their parents’ faces and guess what they are thinking before they can do anything. A male client was 28 years old, unable to do anything or touch anyone, and was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as having a schizophrenic disorder. Observing his family relationship, he found that there was no decent communication between his parents, and his father shut up when his mother spoke, and his mother pretended not to hear when his father spoke. The subject and his father were strangers, and the father rarely returned to the home. I also found that the person in question had very little communication with his mother, and did not speak until he had to, and when he did, it was in a slightly muffled voice, but his behavior was very tacit. The mother is very close to him, what he wants the mother can guess, whether to make it clear does not seem to be so important. The father in this family has a low personality differentiation, is introverted and uncommunicative, the couple is emotionally indifferent, and there is no formative communication in the family or something that could cause circular interaction among the members. My effort is to rebuild the family’s communication patterns and to reduce the mother’s substitution and the emotional entanglement between mother and child in order to facilitate the client’s psychological development. In therapy, it is important to recognize this reality that the mother-child entanglement is the emotional core of the family’s continued existence, and you can only maintain respect for it until a new balance is born. I say to the mother, “You have been caring for this sick child for ten years without complaint, you are a great mother. I say to the child, “You have given up your freedom for ten years to be with your mother willingly; you are also a very good child.” When the family feels safe in the presence of the therapist, I suggest that the mother “degenerate” to the son’s time, the son “evolve” to the mother’s time, and the father play the role of arbiter, calling “time out” on the game. “. When playing the new role, the son’s face becomes clear and the language becomes clear. When the father’s function is weak in a family, for the stability of the family, mother-child entanglement is easy to form, counselors suggest that mothers can rely more on social buffering mechanisms, gradually allowing the child’s emotional needs from the mother to society. Such as encouraging the child to interact with children of the same age, classmates, neighbors, teachers, respect for friendship, love of life and nature, etc. Many children with poor personality development will slowly find their psychological leader and their psychosomatic development compensated with such encouragement. Observation 10: What about caring cartoons? It’s all for your own good! Many powerless demands on children are packaged in beautiful language. The family’s therapist walks into a family and likes to focus on some of the internal taboos that may exist in the family. We ask our children what there is in the family that can only be understood and not spoken. We often find that almost all families have more or less restrictions on what they can communicate. These restrictions represent the family’s cultural consciousness, hierarchy of power and the family’s “rules of the game,” and they can be used to consider the closeness of the family members. Consider a scenario in which a child comes home happy and excited, saying, “Dad! Mom! I got 95 points on my physics test today.” Mom says seriously, “Don’t be happy yet, tell me what is the best score in your class?” Dad then said, “Think about what that 5 points is to lose.” When the child collection smiling face, happy all lost, hiding into their own cabin, the parents face only a smile, said: “Our children are not bad.” The fear of sharing the child’s happiness openly for fear of pride makes communication within the family uninteresting and frustrates the child’s enthusiasm to get the parents’ approval. Perhaps for cultural reasons, Chinese parents are accustomed to making decisions for their children, from dressing and eating to studying and employment, as if it were a parental failing not to take care of them. Most children who like Korean music will not talk about their feelings about Korean culture with their parents who like to watch Korean dramas, and if they do so, they will be making a fool of themselves. Children who like to be competitive are afraid to discuss relationships with their equally competitive fathers, and if they do, it will be with falsehoods. Many children are explicitly forbidden to discuss the rights and wrongs of their parents or to engage in emotional activities between them. Parents who intend to do what is best for their children and create the ideal living space for them end up ignoring the natural, vivid, and diverse characteristics of their children’s development, which happens to deprive them of the opportunity to shine in the family arena and diminish their motivation to grow. Parents who complain about their children’s lack of autonomy and independence are often the ones who suppress any independent thinking and behavior of their children, creating a “vicious circle” in which families are trapped and cannot extricate themselves. This contradictory situation in family education is described by psychology as “pseudo-reciprocity” in the family. Families with pseudo-reciprocity appear to be harmonious, with parents looking out for their children and children sharing their parents’ concerns, but in reality, everyone is repressed and restricted, and everyone is uncomfortable.