Family love as Stockholm Syndrome – an unconventional opinion

“Familial love is Stockholm Syndrome… We need people to survive so we love people to survive.”

A friend sent me this post by @makingfriendsonline over the weekend.

My friend has recently lost her mother. After years of torment, she says her mother’s death felt like a relief. She felt that this post reflected the many confused feelings she has experienced.

This friend and I shared a lot of very honest and vulnerable conversations over the years about our mothers, our fathers, the dysfunction in our families of origin, and how we unconsciously perpetuated it in our own families.

I always felt that we have these romanticized expectations from love, from relationships, from family gatherings during holidays, but that reality never quite lives up to that crescendo moment we dream of.

So when I received this post that began with a sentence: “Familial love is Stockholm Syndrome and that’s okay” – I was not shocked, but intrigued and curious. In fact, I found this very much in resonance with my own observations and conclusions about the evolution of our nuclear families. This was just another sobering testimony from the trenches.

The idea is that our survival needs “brainwashed” us into loving people who treated us as possessions, and left us full of sentimentality for our parents, which the author refers to as our “childhood captors.”

Stockholm syndrome can be described as a “psychological response wherein a captive begins to identify closely with his or her captors, as well as with their agenda and demands.” Sounds a lot like child development to me, says @makingfriendsonline.

I agree.

Synchronistically, just the night before I watched a documentary on Netflix about the Menendez brothers. In the infamous 80s case, Eric and Lyle Menendez (aged 18 and 21 at the time) shot and killed both of their parents and went to prison for life. The evidence that their father sexually abused the boys for most of their lives with their mother’s knowledge was not permitted during the trial.

The documentary was hard for me to watch, and yet I know that this is not a freak isolated case. According to rainn.org 34% of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are family members.

My own father was physically (not sexually) and emotionally abusive to me and my younger sister for as long as I remember. And yet, when he cut all contact with me and my sister – and our respective families – when our parents finally separated 15 years ago, I looked for him for years, trying to establish “normal” contact. Talk about sentimentality toward my childhood captor.

So sold I was on the patriarchal family values, I used to believe that thanks to my parents staying together, they provided the stability that I needed as a child.

My parents raised me to believe that they stayed together “for us,” their children. This was narrated as the ultimate and worthy sacrifice.

As a result, I have learned that lying, cheating, belittling and name calling, denying what I’ve witnessed, avoiding difficult conversations, and keeping secrets was a “normal” part of family life.

In the last few years, as I was questioning all the narratives with which I was raised, I dared to reflect to my mother that by staying with our father she actually enabled abuse.

From my mother’s reaction, it was clear that she has never thought of it that way.

Today I know that my mother’s inability to leave her unsatisfactory marriage – for which I’d judged her over the years – had very little to do with clear thinking of a woman focused on her family’s wellbeing. It had everything to do with survival.

Which makes my family another example of relating from Stockholm Syndrome.

But this is so much older than my mother, who inherited from her own mother a belief that a woman cannot survive alone.

My grandmother, having lost two small children during WWII, has managed to run away from the Minsk ghetto and spent the rest of the war living in a forest in Belarus, where she joined Resistance fighters. She raised my mother on stories that (in those circumstances) a woman alone was in constant risk of starvation and rape. A woman attached to a man could count on some protection, some food, and have unwanted sex only with him.

My mother was born after the war. She was always employed and self-sufficient, and could definitely survive by herself. But she was driven by inherited fears that did not reflect her own reality.

Moreover, as a child my mother was chronically beaten and emotionally neglected by her traumatized-by-war father. She grew up – as all abused children do – with very low sense of self-worth, which she dutifully passed on to us, modeling docile and non-confrontational behavior that today I know to be fawning and freeze.

My mother’s childhood has normalized an abusive father. That is why when she saw her husband repeating the cycle of abuse toward her children, it did not mobilize her into action. She was in the familiar mode: surviving.

In one part of the Menendez documentary, the incarcerated Lyle Menendez who is now in his 50s was asked whether he knew that what was happening at home was not normal. He said (I paraphrase) : “How was I supposed to know that his was not normal? That is all I knew.”

The way parents treat themselves, each other, and their children models and perpetuates dysfunction, and has dramatic implications on their children’s mental health and levels of wellbeing throughout their lives.

Me, my mother and my sister with our 5 girls

There is a specific mechanism with which every child copes with their environment. We internalize our caregivers’ angry or critical voices and behavior as a way to self-police, in order to remain within the lines of what is permitted.

We do this in order to ensure bonding with people on whom we depend for survival – to prevent conflict, and to minimize further humiliation.

The survival prerogative is so powerful that during developmental years the child cannot turn against its parents and instead turns the anger within, against itself, where it festers and becomes guilt, self-hate, and creates various inner and outer relating conflicts.

By the time we leave our parents’ house, we have internalized all the dysfunctional patterns that we unconsciously bring into all of our other relationships. And now we have a vigilant inner voice that does all the punishing and criticizing, which we like to project on people with whom we are in relationships.

I used to study the impact my parents’ choices made on my life.

Now I observe how my own young adult children continue being impacted by the family dysfunction from both sides.

Observing my children struggling in the prison of perfectionism and self-doubt used to cause much pain and sorrow, also guilt.

Today I view the intergenerational karmic patterns we inherit as part of our purpose here.

As we become more self-aware humans, we have the opportunity to interrupt, heal, and repair the distortions in relating passed down to us.

Family love as a Stockholm syndrome – this is where we come from.

Where we are going is learning to repair and reset our nervous systems so we can actually find safety in our bodies, in our relationships, in our lives.

This is our work now: we need to re-wild out of tribal consciousness that had us trying to belong through conforming and fear, and actually find comfort in who we are as individuals.

Individuation can get extremely uncomfortable, as it may require us to rupture some bonds that we spent our whole life maintaining out of survival.

To be willing to stand in the naked truth of who we are is what thriving is.

And it gives us the truest kind of belonging: we become the unique instrument in the harmony of the cosmic orchestra.

We need more of thriving humans to usher along the collective awakening from the Dark Ages and toward healing so needed now.

Work with me!

Feel free to respond to this email with any questions.

Or book a FREE 30-min conversation here to discuss how I can guide you to see, interrupt and heal your intergenerational family patterns, so that you and your children may shine!

PS: This holiday season, instead of buying an object you may not even need, give yourself or your loved ones a gift that is always with you – investment in your personal growth. These masterclasses and a 3-module course are edited and time-stamped for easy viewing, and sum up some of my foundational teachings on child development, coping mechanisms, and relating dynamics.

To purchase, please go HERE. Special offers with discounts available.

PPS: After my recent newsletter on sex as a strategy to meet our needs (link), I was invited by my friend and colleague Monika Carless to a conversation that we have recorded.
If curious, watch it here.