Assessing your reasons for attachment to people in past/present for therapy

Something strikes me about this post, and I'm not sure if I can verbalize it but I'm going to give it a shot.

I am a person who doesn't struggle with transference for my therapists, etc. So, when I read this, what hits me is that there is so much emphasis on other people fulfilling your needs. And, in reading your posts over the years, that desire does seem to be a constant in your posts.

I have a husband who used to expect me to fulfill his needs. It was emotionally draining and I never succeeded. My therapist got me to see that it really isn't my job to fulfill my husband's needs. I couldn't be his fixer. I could pour attention and support and validation into my husbands well of needs all day long, all year long, for decades on end, and much of it would leak out the hole in the bottom of his well. It was an exercise in futility. His need was sucking me dry.

Over time, I learned to have some healthier boundaries in my relationship with my husband, and my husband began to see that he had to be the one to be in control of his own needs. He had to plug that hole in the bottom of his own well.

That doesn't mean he and I don't support each other. Far from it actually. What it means is that in our relationship, we've learned to take ownership of our own needs instead of expecting the other to "fix" us or "make us feel better," nor to do we make the other person our "reason to live" (quotes are mine, just emphasizing the common thinking). I guess our relationship has become more mutual and there is a greater sense of reciprocity. We're much stronger now that we have each taken ownership of our own responsibility to ourselves as individuals, and at the same we are probably more supportive in healthier ways than we ever were before.

There is some wisdom in the adage that you must secure your own oxygen mask before you help the other person secure their own. We had been going about it completely backwards, and we were both oxygen deprived.

An effective therapist will be able to resist the temptation to start fulfilling a client's every need, and instead, will help a client acquire that ability for themselves so that they can succeed in becoming autonomous.

I'm keeping LT's trigger in place, related to self harm/suicidality; also mention of sexual assault:







I think my take on the answer to your question is yes, an "authority figure" can be a peer or a partner or a spouse. I think you may have said this before that your definition of an authority figure may be someone who holds some kind of power over you. Of course there are all kinds of power dynamics in all kinds of relationships, whether because of more societal/social/system reasons (like doctors and lawyers and therapists) or, in the case of interpersonal relationships, even those that are egalitarian (shared decisionmaking or responsibility or however couples define these things) can have power dynamics. Sometimes it's that one person has one foot out of the relationship and the other person is two feet in; one person makes more money; and all sorts of things can give one partner power over the other. I don't even think one person has to consciously "take" power by asserting their superiority because they make more money, or whatever, maybe they don't even want the kind of power that role entails. Or maybe the other person doesn't recognize they feel one-down in the relationship. I think power dynamics in relationships are very complex.

The other way that people in intimate relationships take power (usually strategic, although I do make room for the possibility it is not) is to abuse the other person. Everyone recognizes the punch in the face or the sexual assault as abuse or domestic violence, but emotional abuse or psychological abuse is less often recognized. Most abuse emerges out of a desire to control the other person, and if you can do it with your words, you don't need to use your fists or whatever.

My take on your story about your longer term boyfriend in college is that he was emotionally abusive. Telling someone they need counseling (or that they are "crazy") is emotional abuse. So is blaming someone for problems in the relationship. Most significantly, so is threatening to kill yourself. Also threatening to leave the relationship (as opposed to having a reasonable discussion about whether this relationship is right for you) is also emotional abuse. All of these would be considered "tactics" of control, a taking of power in the relationship, and thus creating a dynamic where he had authority over you. Not because you assigned it to him, but because he took it from you.

But I think what happens to people who have survived abuse, and pings for me in terms of some of my struggles with CSA, is that "authority" gets really confusing because sometimes we do give our power away or as you say it, assign the authority role to someone who does not "own" it based on anything but our assignment. But sometimes people exercise power and control over us, and we can't recognize it or deal with it in not so functional ways, and sometimes I think it's super confusing because both of these things can happen in the same relationship or at the same time.

So I think you're grapping with something very big and substantial and unwieldy, like a bulky piece of furniture that needs to be moved someplace else. Where does this go? Does it make sense over here or over there? How does it look if I turn it sideways, or backwards? But the questions you're raising and how you're looking at them, I think you're really onto something here.

I've read through all the posts and re-reading your question now, although I've never done this in that form, what I'd probably do in your shoes is just write about each person that somehow pops out in your mind in terms of attachment and explain why you think that might be that way, maybe with memories or by analyzing it yourself, whatever seems best. Could even be different from person to person.

Just how you see yourself and attachment with your parents, in relation to those teachers, Ex-MC, your husband, your Ex-T, current T, past and present friends and enemies...

Thanks for everyone’s comments. We discussed this today a bit, and he agreed in including ex-boyfriends and friends in category. So we ended up discussing what made people *not* fall in that category for me. And he said that might actually be a fruitful way of thinking about it. As opposed to the other way. Part of what I came up with is how I ascribe authority to those who seem pulled together. If someone seems more of a mess like me, I see them as more of an equal. T was like, “exactly how much of a mess do you think you are?” And he said how the vast majority of people have doubts in some area of their life at least. More later, need to process more