But why go back?
When people in abusive relationships continue to return to the source of the abuse, most people are utterly perplexed. Similarly, when children defend their abusive or neglectful parents to the hilt, it can feel like incomprehensible, wilful ignorance.
Therapists will be confronted with both of these scenarios, the latter being extremely common. Any time a new client says ‘I had a wonderful childhood,’ a therapist’s ears prick up. And no, that’s not because we’re looking to foist false narratives on happy childhoods (they do exist), but because when we allow space and safety and security for defences to drop, the truth is often very different. The defence is what kept the child alive – psychologically, if not literally – but the defence is now woefully out of date, and the consequences of it are often why people find themselves picking up the phone to a therapist.
This is not an article about the nature of abusive relationships and nor is it an article about getting out of them. I also want to acknowledge that there are a number of very real, tangible, here-and-now reasons that people stay put, such as: fully-justified fear at the consequences of leaving; intimidation; cultural norms; lack of resources; children. Leaving an abusive relationship is incredibly hard and dangerous. Similarly, a child usually needs its parents in order to survive. So they find a way to tolerate what happens to them.
However, the psychological machinations run deeper.
At this point, I’d like to introduce Ronald Fairbairn, who was a Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and a key figure in the founding of the object relations school. He was a pivotal – if sometimes a little overlooked - figure in the fundamental shift in psychoanalysis from Freud’s drive theory, where humans are seen as fundamentally pleasure-seeking, to object relations theory, where humans are seen as fundamentally object-seeking. So our deepest motivations are in seeking to form relationships (with objects, which, confusingly, means people) rather than simply to discharge instinctual drives. Object relations was the forerunner and foundation for the more well-known attachment theory of Bowlby and Ainsworth.
Fairbairn posited that when a parent is rejecting, the child’s need for love and security remains unsatisfied. Rather than turning away, the child becomes even more fixated and dependent on the rejecting parent. This is because the child’s survival - both physical and psychological - depends on maintaining some form of attachment, even if it is to a harmful or neglectful caregiver. The more the parent rejects, the more desperate the child’s need becomes, leading to a powerful, sometimes lifelong, attachment to the bad object.
To cope with the pain of rejection and the impossibility of acknowledging that the needed parent is also the source of pain, the child employs a psychological defence called splitting. This involves dividing the parent (and the child’s own experience) into good and bad parts. The intolerable aspects - neglect, abuse, rejection - are dissociated and forced into the unconscious. This protects the child’s conscious ego from overwhelming distress and allows the child to maintain an idealised image of the parent, preserving hope for love and attachment.
Despite experiencing abuse or neglect from a parent, a child’s attachment to that parent endures. The child internalises both the bad object - the parent who rejects them - and the exciting object - the parent who occasionally provides hope or affection. Deep within the child’s unconscious, there remains an ongoing drive to mend and resolve these internalised relationships, which frequently leads to repeating similar patterns in relationships later in life. While the rejecting part of the parental object is split off, the exciting object part, however negligible, creates excitement in the child, because it promises the libidinal ego that love is just around the corner.
Fairbairn’s model helps explain why individuals may remain attached to abusive partners or repeat self-destructive relational patterns – or remain convinced that a childhood dominated by unhealthy parenting is actually idyllic. The splitting defence and dissociation allow the person to avoid conscious awareness of the pain, but the internalised dynamics continue to shape behaviour and emotional life. This is why so many clients will say, ‘I don’t know why I keep doing this, but…’
Greenberg & Mitchell wrote: “The child needs the parent so he integrates his relations with him on a suffering masochistic basis…The emptier the real exchange, the greater his devotion to the promising yet depriving features of his parents which he has internalised and seeks within... The individual’s perception of reality is filtered through these sub-selves or part-object identifications, and all the world becomes a stage on which to act out or re-enact these powerful internal object relationships.”
Now we can see human behaviour, no matter how futile or self-destructive it can be, as ‘a desperate attempt to salvage attachment to frustrating but needed objects, real or internalised.’ (Celani). And desperate is the word: it creates a longing for an object to love and be loved by, to see and be seen by. Fairbairn originally termed splitting as The Moral Defence, where the individual blamed the self for the failure of the object.
It is perhaps now easier to see why abuse in relationships is so insidious. It acts on patterns already present but unconscious. So where a partner is caring and romantic one day and cold or abusive the next, the promise of love feels always just within reach. The small acts of kindness or love can seem bigger than they really are because although they occur infrequently, they tap into the hope of something different.
The abused or neglected child works so hard to maintain the parents’ positive image that you can see how this might translate in adulthood not only to toleration of abuse but actually sometimes an effort to be the abuser’s healer or saviour.
It’s also not a big leap to see how the child who concludes that they are bad instead of facing into their parents’ cruelty could become the adults who feels like they deserve the abuse – and the abusive partner will, of course, exploit that.
As relational therapists, our role is to provide the relationship and environment that makes it psychologically safe for the client to see clearly, to drop their defences, to experience and move through the pain of the reality, and to find compassion for themselves as both child and adult, and to try and help them break those patterns of relating that have dominated for so long.
A final note for therapists and trainees: Fairbairn has a lot to offer, I think. However, his writing is not always easy to follow, and nor are his theoretical proclamations always consistent and uncontradictory. Fortunately, someone with considerably more brains and patience than I possess has deciphered his work: I heartily recommend David Celani’s ‘Fairbairn’s Object Relations Theory in the Clinical Setting’, which is a brilliant explanation of his work and its relevance. I note he has written a subsequent book – ‘Ronald Fairbairn: a Contemporary Introduction’, which I haven’t read but I imagine is similarly valuable.