Parental Rescue Fantasy: Exploration of the Psychological Concept

From Daniel Mackler: “About ten or fifteen years ago I came up with the phrase ‘parental rescue fantasy,’ and for me it’s been an incredibly helpful concept in understanding human psychology, particularly people’s motivations. What I have seen in the world is, some people, most people — perhaps all people, to a degree — had childhoods in which their parents did not fully meet a lot of their very legitimate needs. At some level, people were neglected, rejected, abandoned even; not entirely, necessarily, but in big ways, in so many different areas of their childhood need. And the result is, these children grew up to become adults who still had a lot of unmet need inside of them, a lot of unresolved need, all sorts of longings, and grew up with the deep, deep hope that finally somebody out there would love them and nurture them and witness them in the way that their parents from childhood never did. Someone out there, they hope, in their fantasy, would make up for all the bad things that happened to them and be their perfect parent. And from what I’ve seen . . . people have that fantasy and they live with it and they’re not aware of it. And they’re even less aware of it if they’re less connected to their history of childhood abandonment, childhood neglect, various forms of childhood trauma. So what does this parental rescue fantasy look like? How does it play out in adulthood?

Romance

Perhaps the most obvious way that parental rescue fantasy plays out is through people’s romantic relationships. It starts when people fall in love; I think falling in love at basic is parental rescue fantasy in so many cases. It’s this feeling that that other person is going to save me, that other person is my ideal of perfection, that person is going to love me and be there for me and care for me and respect me and nurture me and take me in, and be all the things that I really wish my parents had always done but didn’t do or didn’t do effectively.

Now what I see is that parental rescue fantasy is an unconscious process. So when people fall in love, they don’t think, ‘Oh, that woman or that guy or whoever it is that I’ve fallen in love with is going to be that parental figure for me.’ They don’t even necessarily connect it at all to their parents. All they think is, ‘That person is it for me.’ But really, what’s motivating it under the surface is all that unmet childhood need — that horrible, painful, fulminating loneliness and sense of dissatisfaction and harm that still lives within people, that doesn’t go away just because people have grown up; it’s just split off, it’s buried, it’s dissociated. So what they do in their relationships so often when they fall in love is, all of those feelings, all those ancient historical feelings of neediness, of unmet need, of longing, of pain, sometimes even of rage and anger and sense of dissatisfaction, of rejection and abandonment that so often come up in romantic relationships — it’s all motivated by what happened back then. There’s an expectation that so many people can so easily get that their romantic partner is going to save them. And sometimes they even take it a step further — lots of people do — they can feel it’s actually the job of their romantic partner to save them, it’s the job, the expectation of their romantic partner to be that perfect, ideal ‘object’ for them.

Now why do I say parental rescue ‘fantasy’? For me, it seems pretty clear — because when people have an expectation that it’s another person’s job to save them… they’re wrong, it’s no one else’s job to save us, to heal us. But, it actually was our parents’ job to meet our emotional needs in childhood. And where our parents failed us… they failed, as parents. And so when people get failed as children, it doesn’t mean those needs go away; they live on and on and on into their adulthood. And many people, most people, perhaps, never actually take the leap into realizing it’s not somebody else’s job to save me, because the only person that can save an adult from all that history of trauma and longing and pain and neglect and abandonment is ourselves, once we become adults. And it’s really not fair. It’s a terrible thing. But the only person who can really save us is us. Other people can help us in that process; but, really, we’re the one in charge. We have to take over the responsibility of becoming our own parents.

Now the sad thing is a lot of times, a partner will try to meet that fantasy, will try to be a perfect parent for their partner, will do everything, will meet all their needs, will listen, will witness, will care, will be there for them over and over again, even take a lot of abuse, take a lot of really disrespectful, horrible behavior to try to meet that parental rescue fantasy. But it doesn’t work. Most of the time it doesn’t even help; sometimes it even makes the people worse, the people who have this fantasy, because it then sends them a distorted message that it’s okay for them to have this parental rescue fantasy. And at basic it’s really not okay to have that parental rescue fantasy because it’s a setup for failure; it is a fantasy. Ultimately, the fantasy has to be broken and the person has to take the responsibility back for themselves.

The problem is, taking back that responsibility in itself is an extremely painful thing. Because what it means is looking at the horrible things that one’s parents did to us [or] didn’t do for us. It means going back and becoming again, embodying, acknowledging what’s within us — that very pained, wounded, neglected, abandoned, vulnerable little child that we once were, and to some degree still are.

Having Children

Now, a lot of people have children to play out their parental rescue fantasy. They look at their own children as parental figures; they want their children to save them. They have an expectation in their very relationship with the children that they create that it’s the job of those children to make up for what they themselves didn’t get when they were children. They want their children to love them unconditionally, to be there for them, to listen to them. And to me, that’s a horror. Because the problem is, when people look at their children that way . . . when they project parental rescue fantasy onto their children, the problem [is that children] are so needy themselves, so profoundly full of need that they have no choice but to try to meet their parents’ needs. And that’s the basic thing that happens to children when they become parentified children: They want to make their parents happy, they want to make their parents feel satisfied, they want to make their parents feel useful, feel stable, feel loved. And the reason that children do all those things, and do it to the best of their ability and profoundly distort their own personalities in the process, is because children have no choice. They are so full of need themselves that they’ll do anything — literally transform themselves into anything they can, including into the parents of their own parents — to get their parents to love them. It’s a profound distortion.

And the irony in this is by children trying to meet the parental rescue fantasy of their parents, the children end up getting neglected and don’t get their own needs met. And they grow up into adults who themselves are full of parental rescue fantasy, and they’re looking for someone else outside of them, something outside of them to save them in the way that their own parents never did. This is the intergenerational replication of trauma, the transgenerational transmission of trauma. It just gets passed right down the generations.”

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