Very interesting.......got me thinking about my situation over the last.....oh so many years now.......

When in California, my psychologist hugged after our session. He allowed me to call whenever I needed.....& there were many times when I needed over the years for many reasons....some very serious reasons when I needed to be in the hospital.

However.....in therapy, he sat there & listened to me talk....& the amount of time I ever remember real feedback is slim to almost none.

Now......I finally found a wonderful psychologist. She provides the greatest amount of feedback (something I always wondered why it was missing before). It was almost very difficult at first to take the feedback without responding to how I thought about what she was suggesting.....sometimes it wasn't in an accepting of what she was saying rather than taking the suggestion & thinking about it. However with her, there is no phone calls between my every 2-3 weeks sessions & there are no hugs at the end of therapy.

The point.......I have the best psychologist in the world now & I am getting something that for me is even more valuable than the hugs & the calls.

Something really hit me in reading your first post Echoes:
Interesting how so many search for that fantasy caretaker (not just therapist). It seems that most people didn't have that fantasy caretaker to nurtured them....& most people didn't have that fantasy good family that we all wanted & think we should have had. If there were so many good families that nurtured their children, there wouldn't be so many people in therapy searching to fill that emptiness.

Interesting how therapy has pointed out how important that the nurturing is.......for me, after I quested after my career rather than being that nurturing mother for my own child. It's also interesting because when we look for that nurturing, we look at it usually as our mother NOT being there for us to give us that love & caring that we see the families of the long past used to give to their families. The farther we move away from that type of family.....the family where the mother was there to make sure that family had their breakfast & got out the door safely in the morning with a hug & a kiss & was there for the kids when they came home from school & provided the dinner on the table by 6pm when Dad got home from work. We look at those families & the parents mostly also provided their family with their religious moral values to feel safe with, knowing that if they followed those values trouble wouldn't be following them around every corner they turned.

But we also don't want that kind of family any more either. I know for me, my drive for having a career was deeper than my drive to be there to nurture a family. We were there to care for our daughter most of the time & when we weren't, my parents were......but so was the pre-school & all the activities we could throw our daughter into as a child....under the guise of making sure that she had all the opportunities that we didn't......& how many of us tell our children, they can grow up & figure out what they want to believe when they get older without giving them any foundation because we don't want to corrupt their minds with out thoughts like our parents did with us?

And yet we crave the nurturing of the past families that we feel we have missed out on because we didn't have that illusive nurturing family that we should have had. Unless the family structure changes in the future......how many nurturing families will there be in the future?

Not saying that it's not possible to have our own lives as parents & still be nurturing, but the more demands that there are on us outside of the home, the more our mind is pulled away from the home & focusing on those things that place the most demands on us. Our employer places immediate demands on us or we get fired in worse case, or don't get the raise or the promotion because we aren't serious about our career. Our children don't place those demands on us until they are in therapy, searching for that illusive nurturing family that we thought we were being while struggling to have our own lives outside of the family.

These are just some thoughts that went through my mind while reading this.....it doesn't mean that every family that doesn't have the stay at home mom isn't a nurturing family& it doesn't mean that every family with a stay at home mother was actually a nurturing family either, but we look at the statistics of the families & the number of divorces because the family of the abuse that exists within the family & they can't possibly stay together & shouldn't stay together just for the kids either But this just points out even more problems with the values we have in how we treat each other & the lack of responsibility we take on at being that good husband (or wife) that wouldn't cause the need for the divorce in the first place. One can be a nurturing single mother/father, it's not impossible, but the more outside pressures we feel on ourselves, the harder it becomes.

We can see by the statistics that the more our society has changed, the more of us are searching for that illusive caretaker that wasn't there for us when we needed them & we continue the search to find the illusive caretaker that will take care of everything in our life, give us the security we never experienced & fix the things that are wrong.

Unfortunately, I don't believe that there ever really was that perfect caretaker because there is no one that perfect in the first place even though there are some that are better at it than others. Even though I had parents who wanted to be those nurturing parents, they failed in their own way to provide what I needed......As humans we are always looking for what we don't have & many times not satisfied with what we do have.....just seems to be something about human nature.

Do we just have to be just satisfied with what we do have???? We don't have to be satisfied with it but we are stuck with what we do have & have to learn how to get beyond it & on with our life in spite of the hand we were dealt. We have to focus on what we can change & that isn't the past, but the future & what we need to change in our lives so that the future children don't find less & less nurturing in their lives as our society's statistics get worse & worse in terms of the family & the amount of abuse that is out there & the temptations that are out there in society, pulling our children into lower & lower moral values & more into self absorption, doing whatever feels good.

Where exactly did it start? Where exactly will it ever end????