When a client says, “I was always worrying about my parents,” the link to a certain type of present-day anxiety is often straightforward. Compulsive people-pleasing, vigilance of other people’s moods, an instinct to rescue or soothe – these aren’t inherent traits. They’re the after-effects of a childhood in which the child’s own development was interrupted.
In the language of Donald Winnicott, this is a developmental impingement. Ideally, early life provides a space in which the child can become themselves: through play, through exploration, through the freedom to feel temporarily omnipotent. Through believing that the world appears and disappears in response to their needs. In this ideal environment the parent “magically” provides what is required and then recedes, allowing the child to discover and form their personality and subjective sense of self, unburdened by any concern outside of themselves.
However, when a child is prematurely recruited into awareness of a parent’s depression, conflict, financial strain, or instability, the developmental field narrows. The child’s attention is yanked outward. Instead of exploring who they are, they monitor who the parent is. Instead of inhabiting a world shaped around their needs, they adapt to the parent’s needs. This is the essence of impingement: the environment interrupts the spontaneous unfolding of the self.
What begins as vigilance becomes the structure of their character. The child who had to make a parent “okay” grows into an adult who can themselves only feel okay when others are okay. Their self-worth is contingent and externally located. They struggle to assert themselves because they never quite had the developmental space in which their sense of self could be steadily discovered. In a tragic sense, they don’t just fail to put themselves first, they don’t even really know the self that would like to be put first. Their subjective self never quite got the chance to come into being as an existential experience.
Therapy can here support a kind of late freedom, providing the client with a space in which the self, long deferred, can begin to appear. The client is allowed and encouraged to start to centre on themselves a little more, to find a healthier balance between that and worrying about others people’s okayness.
