A GoodTherapy.org Featured Column written by Judith Barr, MA, LMHC
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Today I saw the movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It was a deeply moving film. I recommend it highly. And I also wish for you that you allow it to open your heart to yourself and others in a new way.
Benjamin (as you can read anywhere on the internet - so I’m not giving anything away) is born old and gets younger and younger through his life and the movie. You journey with him as he goes through the pains and joys, sorrows and comforts of life.
Again, without giving the movie away, I want to offer what moved me most . . .
That we witness, in reverse, Benjamin’s experience in life as an old man, its effect on him as he goes through his life, and his experience in life as a baby.
One of my early teachers about therapy taught this in my very first class with him - If you haven’t worked through your dependency issues in your childhood, early adulthood, or midlife . . . when you reach your elder years, you will be faced with them all over again, without the benefit of having resolved them.
Think about this. Feel it. We face and meet many of the same experiences in our elder years as we do when we are infants, babies, and children. We are often, no matter how fiercely independent we have come to be, dependent in some way on others who take care of us to some degree. Even before our elder years.
If we had parents who didn’t need for someone to be dependent on them to satisfy their wounded selves - their need to be loved, their need to have power, their need to be needed . . .
If we had parents who were fine to have someone be dependent on them and felt honored to have the task to cherish and to nourish that dependent child into his or her own unique self, becoming all he or she could possibly be . . .Then we have probably lived the passage through the dependency issues already - perhaps with a loose thread here or there that needs to be tended to.
But truthfully, how many people grew up with parents that evolved? That conscious? That un-wounded? That healed? Read the rest of this entry