Family members, relatives and friends of a person who marries a proverbial “loser” and stays with that person no matter how much abuse, frustration, sadness, and suffering he/she dishes out, shake their heads in utter disbelief. I have worked with a number of lovely, highly intelligent people who fall, sometimes more than once, into the trap of making a damaged person their project, never giving up the naive hope that they can fix him/her. How can such behavior possibly be explained. Turns out it’s much easier to understand than to change. Sometimes it begins in childhood when a child is forced to take care of an invalid parent who is unable to care for himself/herself due to a medical condition, severe depression or substance addiction. The child may come to find her value and life meaning in the caretaker role and never stops to consider that giving up on meeting her own needs is highly costly. Sometimes this kind of parent guilt trips his/her child into caretaking so the child always associates meeting her own needs with being a bad, shameful person. Other times a child is raised by a do-gooding parent who sacrifices his/her time, energy, and money into caring for one or more helpless individuals out of a sense of ethical or religious duty. Parents like this not only model extreme self-sacrifice but often preach it to their children as something noble and fulfilling even when their caretaking efforts go for naught. A third example occurs when a narcissistic parent never expresses approval of a child, so the child seeks symbolically to win that parent’s approval as an adult by marrying a narcissist and doing the equivalent of handstands to get his/her attention and love without success. One manifestation of this is overachieving to win love that will not be given. Changing such ingrained patterns of relating that are largely unconscious is not easy but can be done if the individual is willing to fully engage the change process in psychotherapy. Sometimes the motivation comes from reaching an inner breaking point related to the defense of one’s own personhood, dignity, and sanity, and sometimes it comes from the need to defend one’s own children from psychological harms dished out by the dysfunctional spouse. Ultimately the simple fact is that people are who they are, nobody can fix them (especially against their will), and it is fruitless to try. When you see someone you love making a damaged person their project, suffering terribly from it, and angrily refusing the advice of others to leave, don’t try to wake them up. Better to persuade them to go into psychotherapy to explore the dynamics of the relationship to improve the quality of their life.
