They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
– from ‘This Be the Verse’ (1971) by Philip Larkin
No one comes through childhood untouched or unscathed. One reason, says the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, is the asymmetry of the relationships in a child’s world. One person is big, the other small. One knows, whereas the other learns, and one gives, whereas the other needs. We usually envision this as well-intentioned or at least necessary and innocent. But Phillips says that the imbalance of power resulting when love and dependence are interwoven with frustration and envy could be seen as a form of sadomasochism.
I came to these thoughts gradually myself. As a postdoctoral fellow in early childhood, working with parents and children aged three and younger, I confronted the asymmetry in a raw form: a baby completely dependent on an adult struggling with their own needs and anxieties. After this, I provided long-term psychotherapy to adults, and patient after patient filtered their childhood experience – the way they were nurtured, held, frightened or overlooked – through the way they organised their world now. Becoming a parent myself provided yet another perspective: I could see the intergenerational transmission up close. Childhood never ends because it persists as an internal grammar influencing how we understand power, love and our own experience as adults. The question is not whether the asymmetry of childhood leaves behind a trace, because it does, but what we do with that trace.
As I see it, to say that no one ‘recovers’ from childhood is not to say that all are harmed. It is, rather, to suggest that being small with a powerful other leaves behind a trace. Early on, the child confronts the reality that closeness can be laced with coercion and that one’s own vitality can feel overwhelming to oneself or the other. In parenting, the line between protection and control, guidance and domination, is ever shifting. Even in loving families, children learn that someone else’s mood can tower over their world like a storm.
Phillips’s provocative argument asks us to reflect upon the residues of this asymmetry, with its intermingling of tenderness and intimidation, and how they become an aspect of our psychological structure. We all carry the emotional logic of being small, including the desire to be looked after without being overpowered, the wish to be understood without being shamed, and the worry that dependence makes us prey to someone else’s will. Childhood doesn’t end when we grow up because it persists as an internal structure shaping how we understand power, love and needs throughout the remainder of our lives.
A child does not encounter the world as a set of ideas but as a set of differences, whether size and strength, knowledge and mobility, even mood. From the beginning, the adult’s body looms large, a voice filling the room. In difficult moments, their absence is immeasurable. Before any explicit teaching, the child grasps that others can lift you, soothe you or restrain you, or disappear without notice. These contrasts are structured around who has power and who doesn’t.
This asymmetry is not inherently bad. On the contrary, it is the needed foundation of protection, learning and attachment. A child needs someone bigger, for their dependency is real, not symbolic. But because the child has no alternative way of understanding experience, they interpret everything, whether hunger or comfort or absence, as a commentary upon themselves. The adult’s attuned responsiveness is the measure of the child’s worth. The adult’s emotional withdrawal becomes evidence of failure, their irritation a mirror for the child’s badness. Asymmetry means that the child cannot resist reading the adult’s internal states as reflections of their own.
Adults regularly project onto children the traits they cannot stand to experience in themselves
In this context, children fantasise about being the big one. The toddler who kicks, bites, commands or protests is learning about power. The experience is fraught: dependence inevitably generates frustration, frustration leads to aggression, and aggression fuels guilt. In this swirl, children start to intuit that love and dominance are not cleanly separable. At times, being cared for feels controlling, while exerting control is a plea for care.
If Phillips focuses our attention on the echoes of this early asymmetry, the analyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl widens the frame. From her perspective, our culture is built around a mostly invisible prejudice against children, which she calls ‘childism’. For her, children do not just confront the inherent imbalance of size and authority. They must also face adults who hold unconscious and culturally sanctioned fantasies about what children are. Those fantasies, which include notions of children as bad, seductive, rebellious, fragile or contaminating, shape the way adults hold them in mind and interact with them long before any conflict takes place.
Young-Bruehl’s suggestion is disturbing because it reframes what we typically think of as ‘normal parenting’. What adults usually cast as discipline and guidance tends to hide deeper anxieties, such as their own unresolved dependency, their fear of being overwhelmed or their wish to feel capable. She describes how adults regularly project onto children the traits they cannot stand to experience in themselves, whether aggression, vulnerability, sexuality, disobedience or longing. In short, the child is the repository of what the adult has disowned.
The central thrust of her argument is this: children don’t grow into adulthood in a vacuum of benevolent caregiving. Instead, they develop in an environment of unconscious adult assumptions, all of which are enacted through projections, stereotypes and defences. The seemingly apparent ‘natural dependency of childhood’ is always shaped, in advance, by the adult’s fantasies of childhood. The child is not just small in comparison to the adult. The child is also interpreted, defined and restricted by inherited beliefs about what a child is.
Adults use children to manage their own childhood, writes Young-Bruehl in Childism (2012). They do not meet them, emotionally, as they really are but rather through the filter of their own, unresolved disappointments, humiliations, unmet longings and terrors. The child is an unwitting participant in the adult’s struggles to regulate feelings that were never made sense of in their own early life. This doesn’t necessarily require cruelty or overt abuse of any sort, though it can certainly manifest in that form. But it also often happens in ordinary moments, such as when impatience outweighs the situation, or when anxiety is masked as moral certainty, or harshness is cast as ‘teaching a lesson’, or intrusive overprotection hides a fear of dependency.
Adults unconsciously expect children to do the emotional work that they were not able to do themselves. A parent who grew up feeling unseen may insist upon endless admiration or compliance. One who grew up fearful of conflict may insist the child be ‘good’ at any cost. The adult who felt intruded upon as a child may experience a child’s natural neediness as claustrophobic. These expectations do not rest upon who the child is, but on the adult’s private and often unarticulated history, which becomes an inherited emotional script that the child must follow.
The child is an emotional surrogate, a stand-in for the adult’s childhood self
In my work with parents of young children, this dynamic was often especially transparent, as if the compressed emotional intensity of parenting young children stripped away much of the insulation between past and present that we often take for granted. Consider a mother, capable in almost every area of her life, yet almost paralysed by her infant’s crying. Not frightened for the baby, who she knows is safe, but disorganised by the sound of crying itself. Her baby’s helpless need resonates with something unresolved in her own history, a childhood where need was associated with weakness and weakness with contempt. In her own life, she learned to manage this feeling by becoming extremely competent. But her son’s dependence isn’t so easily managed. In its rawness, it confronts her with an aspect of herself she was not prepared to feel. She is not a bad mother. She is a person who hasn’t yet metabolised the asymmetry of her own childhood, and her baby’s cries have the extraordinary power to bring it to the fore.
Here is where Phillips and Young-Bruehl meet. Phillips describes the residues of asymmetry, with lifelong tension between the longing to be cared for and the terror of being controlled. Young-Bruehl shows how adults manage this tension by projecting it onto children.
In this way, the child is an emotional surrogate, a stand-in for the adult’s childhood self. Often, the child senses the adult’s needs long before they can give voice to their own, and so they accommodate. Many children suppress their impulses, attune to the adult’s feelings, and interpret the adult’s reactions as measures of their basic worth. Children do this not because they are obedient by nature but because the asymmetry makes adaptation feel like survival.
Adults mostly don’t set out to use children in this way. Usually it happens unconsciously, through deeply established patterns. Nonetheless, the effect is real, and the child becomes involved in the adult’s unresolved past, holding feelings that do not start with them. What appears on the surface as ‘parenting’ is often, at a deeper level, an effort to soothe an old wound, master an old fear, or correct an old humiliation – all the while using the child as the medium. This is how the adult’s emotional history becomes, in time, a central organising force in the child’s inner world.
If adults relate to their children predominantly through the lens of their own unresolved childhoods, the child’s task is impossibly complex: they must grow a self beneath the weight of someone else’s fantasy. Inevitably, a child who is repeatedly treated as overwhelming starts to feel that way, even if some part of them instinctively resists. Or a child who is responded to as innately disobedient begins to feel that they are, in fact, difficult. And a child who is confronted with fear, contempt or moral scrupulousness learns to feel that there is danger in their own impulses, even long before they can describe them.
Because children rely entirely upon adults for survival, they usually cannot allow themselves to see that important adults are distorted or defensive. They simply assume that adults are correct. This is a primitive emotional safeguard. The emotional logic here is this: if my caregiver is wrong, I am unsafe; but if I am wrong about myself, I can be fixed, forgiven and even loved. In this context, the child pursues the only workable option: turning the adult’s projection inward.
We should not conceive of this inward turn as passive; it is creative and adaptive. Over time, the child actively constructs an internal image of themselves that is largely based on the reactions of important adults, and then organises their behaviour, expectations and emotional life around that image. If the caregiver experiences neediness as an irritation, the child will tend to suppress need. If the adult casts curiosity as threat, the child will often minimise their exploratory drive. If the adult feels that dependence is suffocating, the child will find ways to hide their longing. These accommodations feel like safety to the child, and safety feels like love, even when moments of protest or defiance break through.
This could be the start of a lifelong confusion between who one really is and who one was required to be
Young-Bruehl’s insight is crucial in this area: the child comes to feel that their impulses are freighted with danger, their feelings too much for others, and their desires somehow contaminating; so their existence must be managed or attenuated. They follow the role that the adult’s fantasy assigns them because not stepping into it would threaten the relationship upon which their life depends – though they may push back in moments the adult rarely understands.
This could be the start of a lifelong confusion between who one really is and who one was required to be. The child sees themselves through the adult’s imagination and feels responsible for emotions that were never theirs. In time, these projections become self-perceptions. The child takes on the adult’s gaze as their own. And since all of this happens before there are words for it, the internalised image feels less like a belief and more like a fact, obvious and incontrovertible, even to the child who, from time to time, has the inchoate sense of ‘This isn’t me.’
This is where the sadomasochism of early experience, proposed by Phillips, starts to take shape: the child now pre-emptively monitors, judges and restrains themselves in the way the adult did. The asymmetry of childhood is now an asymmetry within the self. The adult’s fantasy, which was once external, now lives inside the child as a quiet but robust structure through which the child interprets the world.
Once the adult’s fantasy has been internalised, something that is at first subtle begins to take up residence inside the child’s mind: a sense of inner badness that feels like a given of existence. This isn’t ‘badness’ in the moralistic sense, but instead a diffuse conviction that one’s needs are burdensome, one’s feelings are too much for important others, and one’s simple presence may be found to be lacking. It is the residue of preserving the bond with an adult who cannot abide some aspect of the child’s aliveness.
In the Deep South where I grew up, whippings were spoken of with a strange, almost ritualistic pride. Adults spoke about being whipped as if it were a rite of passage, a moral tonic, even a sign of love. And the children who suffered whippings usually adopted the same script: it kept me straight. It showed they cared, and I needed it. In this way, pain was cast as instruction, and domination was framed as devotion. This is pure identification with the aggressor. The adult cannot tolerate the child’s dependency or disobedience, so they beat it; the child cannot tolerate the adult’s fallibility, so they interpret the beating as a necessary goodness. The whole culture participates in the alchemy. What stays with me even now is the confidence with which people insisted that whippings were good. The adult’s fantasy that children must be hurt to become decent and law-abiding had burrowed so deeply that it persisted inside the same people it injured.
What made this cultural alchemy so persistent is that it extended beyond the level of individual families or even communities. It had a theological foundation. The Church promoted a cosmology in which the child’s badness was written into the nature of things. Original sin could be seen as a doctrine about smallness, about our fundamental inadequacy before something that is larger than we can imagine. A child brought up in this tradition received more than just an adult’s projection about their deficiency; they also received a metaphysical verdict. The inner badness that Young-Bruehl and Phillips cast as a residue of relationship is here a fact of creation. This adds a quality of inescapability. You can, in principle, disappoint a parent and later repair the damage. But you cannot revise what God has determined about the nature of children. In a sense, the whipping and the sermon are continuous: both inform the child that their impulses are corrupt and that the adult’s correction flows from love. Emotionally, this is awfully hard to metabolise, because the aggressor is not just an important person but an entire moral order.
I reflect upon a patient, a composite drawn from many years of clinical work, whom I will call Daniel. He came to therapy in his late 20s, overtly for anxiety, but what unfolded over months was more specific and more corrosive: a ruthless inner voice that catalogued his inadequacies with exacting precision. I felt he was a thoughtful, even gifted, man, but he felt himself to be perpetually on the edge of being found out. He had grown up with a father who was volatile. Not brutal, exactly, but given to explosions of contempt, usually triggered by Daniel’s mistakes or uncontained feelings. ‘Stop being so sensitive,’ his father might snap. ‘You’re too much.’ Over time, Daniel did what children do: he agreed. He decided that the sensitivity itself was the problem, that there was something excessive about him at his core, and that exhausting and unrelenting vigilance was the price of being tolerated in a relationship. In the therapy, what impacted me the most was the moment he began to consider an alternative: that he was not a bad child but that his father had been unable to bear his own feelings, passing this difficulty on to his son.
This inner badness is not just a marker of pathology; it is, in a way, a creative solution that allows the child to carry on. For the child, casting oneself as the source of the adult’s reactions is safer than seeing the adult as unreliable or frightening. If I’m the problem, then I can adapt. But if the adult is the problem, I have no power and am in a fraught situation. In this context, the child chooses the reality in which agency, however painful it may be, remains a possibility. Young-Bruehl observes that children instinctively protect their caregivers from recognition of harm, instead carrying the blame to sustain the story, however illusory it is, of love and safety.
Adults typically inhabit this inner architecture through compulsive attempts at self-improvement or self-criticism. Sometimes, they discover a persistent belief that intimacy is conditional, or they harbour a sense that their real self must be hidden, controlled or attenuated. The inner badness is more than just an echo of the past. It is an emotional atmosphere outlasting the childhood that gave rise to it.
A wish to be held closely is followed by a fear of being overpowered
By the time we reach adulthood, the internalised asymmetries of childhood no longer feel like adaptations. They are our personalities. What started as a creative adjustment to the adult’s projections becomes ways of relating, an irresistible pull toward repeating certain patterns of love, authority, closeness and self-regulation. The child who found ways to circumvent criticism now strives for perfection. And the child who felt like too much now keeps their needs small. The child who felt responsible for other’s feelings is now exquisitely attuned to every feeling around them.
Some escape the feeling of smallness by compensating and developing (or projecting) authority and achievement. For them, power becomes a bulwark against the vulnerability of dependence. Others go in the opposite direction, moving toward submission and finding a strange relief in giving up agency before it can be taken away from them. For still others, the pattern oscillates: a wish to be held closely is followed by a fear of being overpowered, with moments of assertiveness trailed by guilt or self-reproach.
I think of yet another composite, a woman I will call Maya, who attended therapy after the failure of her second significant relationship. Both relationships had followed a similar trajectory. She would meet someone, feel a rush of relief at being chosen and, over time, find herself getting smaller: deferring more often, expressing her needs less often, and building her life around her partner’s moods. Then, at some point, something would break. There would be an unanticipated moment of self-assertion, disproportionate to the occasion, that startled both her and her partner. Afterward she would feel shame, and then a renewed effort to re-establish the old pattern. As a child, she had a mother who was loving yet subtly controlling and who experienced her daughter’s growth toward independence as a form of rejection. Maya had discovered early that closeness demanded compliance. In adulthood, she recreated this arrangement with remarkable consistency by unconsciously selecting partners who responded positively to her accommodation and, in time, periodically erupting with the angry protests she had suppressed. The asymmetry of her childhood, constituted by the sense that love and submission were joined, became the grammar of her adult relationships. Therapy was focused not merely on helping her find a better partner, but recognising that the choice of partner was a result of something older and more internal.
Growing up in Mississippi, I watched these asymmetries play out well before any of us were adults. Our middle- and high-school hallways throbbed with racial tension, rural/urban rivalries, and the brutish hierarchy of boyhood. There was a small kid we all called Little Billy who was thin, soft in the face, and always a target. He was humiliated in the way groups of boys often distribute dominance between themselves. And one afternoon in the locker room, Billy snapped. He grabbed one of his tormentors, someone nearly a foot taller, and slammed his face into a metal locker with a force that stunned us all. For a split second, the order inverted. Billy’s smallness exploded into something volcanic and the larger boy folded. What stays with me isn’t the violence but Billy’s expression: terror interwoven with excitement, as if he had discovered a forbidden form of bigness he didn’t know how to fully embody. The roles had flipped; but the asymmetry persisted.
Phillips’s sadomasochism rears its head yet again, and again and again. It persists throughout life. Not because adult relationships are fated to cruelty, but because traces of this early dependency persist in the conflict between longing for emotional connection and fear of its costs. We tend to find ourselves drawn into dynamics that retain the atmosphere of our childhoods, whether partners who are only intermittently available or friendships built around caretaking. The familiar, though painful, often feels more workable than the unknown. Research on attachment patterns in adulthood clearly shows repetition of early relationship patterns, even when they are sources of distress.
At the same time, the search for respite can become a primary adult pursuit. Some seek it through relationships that seem to promise unconditional acceptance, whereas for others it is spiritual practices, aesthetic experiences, career success or forms of self-development. But beneath the surface often lies the same hope: to be big without being domineering, to be small without feeling ashamed, to belong without surrendering oneself.
What we call ‘personality’ is, in many ways, the residue of a child’s best efforts to manage the impact of another’s mind. The adult is followed by both sides of this asymmetry and spends the rest of their life trying to work them through without re-experiencing the old injuries.
When the old interpretation – ‘there’s something wrong with me’ – loosens its grip, the logic of being small shifts
In this context, healing doesn’t mean correcting the past. And it doesn’t mean crafting a version of yourself somehow untouched by your unresolved history. To envision that form of recovery is to misconstrue the nature of early experience: it’s not something we outgrow but is something we grow through and from. The traces left behind are structural.
What can change is our relationship to these early structures. When the old interpretation – ‘there’s something wrong with me’ – loosens its grip, the logic of being small shifts. The prejudices about our needs, our dependency, our fundamental vulnerability become available for reflection instead of repetition.
This is not primarily an intellectual process but a slow unlearning. The adult must reacquaint themselves with aspects of experience they once learned to fear, whether wanting and needing, relying upon or protesting, disappointing or being disappointed. In the end, these are not weaknesses but the basic elements of human life. Yet they may feel fraught when, early in life, they provoked withdrawal, punishment or overwhelm in someone bigger.
So the therapeutic relationship is not just a chance for insight but the mechanism of change. The early structures can only be truly restructured in relationship. When a patient takes the risk of expressing need and finds that the therapist is neither overwhelmed nor contemptuous, or when they voice protest and discover that the relationship endures, or when they disappoint and are not abandoned, something more than intellectual insight takes place. What accumulates over time is a new experience of being small in the presence of someone big who does not use that advantage against them. I have come to see this as a fundamental mechanism of change. Not the unfolding of memory, though that has its place, but the creation of a different emotional environment that begins, slowly and unevenly, to feel like a new potential way of organising experience.
Over time, the patient forges a relationship to their own dependency no longer weighted down with shame. They come to understand that the important adult who failed to meet our needs was also struggling with their own childhood ghosts, an emotional inheritance they did not choose and could not escape. This recognition does not excuse harm, but it does contextualise it. It changes the narrative from ‘I was too much’ to ‘They couldn’t tolerate what they were feeling.’
Childhood teaches us that bigness is precarious. The big person can protect or intimidate, soothe or silence
In a sense, healing is the step-by-step redistribution of compassion away from the adult’s projections and toward the child who was forced to carry them. As this takes place, the internal asymmetry begins to soften. The part of the self that polices, manages and submits loses authority. And the part that previously carried the adult’s unrecognised fears starts to feel itself as truly human.
Ultimately, we must learn a different way of being big. Childhood teaches us that bigness is precarious. The big person can protect or intimidate, soothe or silence. The child feels this in their body long before they have words for what they are feeling, and the traces persist throughout life. But adulthood offers the possibility of redefining what bigness means. Now, bigness may become less about the capacity to give shape to another person’s world and more the capacity to inhabit one’s own.
This new form of bigness rests on the recognition that maturity has little to do with dominance. It’s about the ability to hold one’s own needs, hurts and vulnerabilities without displacing them onto someone smaller, weaker or dependent. It entails relating to other people without insisting that they carry the ghosts of your own childhood, allowing dependency without feeling threatened by it, and providing care without insisting upon gratitude or submission in return.
In this way, adulthood is a second chance to foster experience that does not repeat the internal logic of the past. Phillips suggests that nobody recovers from the sadomasochism of childhood, and maybe he’s right. Yet we can transform what those residues become. We can develop a version of bigness that does not require diminishing someone else and that makes room for vulnerability without shame, and strength without threat.
This is the potential, and the responsibility, of becoming an adult: to become the sort of big person a small person can safely rely on, including the small person we once were.