Name: Are You Stuck Playing These 3 Roles in Love?
Uploaded: 2026-01-02T07:34:06.000Z
Duration: 5 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

One of the stranger but more useful suggestions of psychotherapy, and

Reflexive pronouns

in particular a branch of it known as transactional analysis, is that all of us contain within ourselves three essential a child, a parent, and

To flesh these out a little, the child is typically vulnerable, touching, trusting, weak in need, incapable of properly looking after themselves, and

crying out for assistance, tenderness, support, structure and some rules.

For their part, the parent is strong, dominant, in control, responsible, but

also often chiding, critical in hectoring, and

Meanwhile, the adult is sane, thoughtful in command, neither too weak nor too strong, creative and kind.

In an ideal world, we would all be able to toggle between these three personality types with relative ease.

In a good relationship, we would constantly be moving between all three roles in ourselves, mostly hovering in the adult zone, but

able when occasions demand this, to go into parent or child mode.

For example, when we're feeling sad and under pressure, it should be part of health to know how to become a child again.

That is, to show our need, ask for help, curl into a ball, become small, and

trust that we can be met with kindness and sympathy without fearing attack or belittlement.

Then again, there should also be moments in a relationship, particularly when our usually adult partner has hit a crisis and descended into a childlike mode, when we are powerfully able to step up into a parental role and become ministering, indulgent to weakness and tantrums, calm in the face of irrationality, and

secure enough in ourselves to know that the child partner will, in a little while, revert back to the maturity and self command that we typically expect from them.

If a couple have small children, then for long stretches both people may need to act as parent.

But then once the kids are in bed, they might both have a go at being sweet, slightly naughty children, or one might play adult to the other one's needy younger self.

The difficulty for couples and individuals is when people get stuck in particular positions when they can only ever be children, or only ever parents, or only ever adults.

There are relationships where, for example, one partner is always child and the other is always parent.

One person is forever being a bit irresponsible, a bit naughty.

They leave their clothes everywhere, they don't book in for driving lessons, they don't go to the dry cleaners, they forget to do the shopping and they lose the keys.

They can be highly endearing when once in the mood, but

you'd hesitate a lot before leaving them in charge.

And on the other side of the ledger, there is, in such relationships, often a parental type partner who is always chiding, always reminding the child what to do, super competent, forever rather stressed, alternately indulgent to the child, but

also on the edge of being cross and punitive.

Associated with this can be a deep reluctance on the part of the parental figure ever to access their own child self.

Why, we might ask, do people, and therefore couples, get stuck in these roles?

Why can it be so hard to move out of them?

Why are some people rigidly incapable of feeling their way into the role of, be it parent or child or adult?

In all cases, we are typically looking at something in the past which has made an easy transition to a particular position untenable or frightening.

There are people stuck in the child role for whom adulthood and parenthood present insuperable difficulties.

Perhaps they are the offspring of a loving parent who couldn't tolerate their maturity.

To be deemed worthy of love, they had to stay a baby.

Or else, alternatively, one may feel one has to stay stuck in the child mode because a parent would be angry, castrating and humiliating if one dared to show independence and pride in one's adult ideals.

At the other end of the spectrum, very poignantly, there are people whose younger selves were so badly treated, who experienced such anxiety and lack of support when they were children, that the idea of being small, even for a few hours, presents unbearable challenges to their integrity.

They may be very happy playing mummy and daddy.

The root out of all these impulses is, as always, self exploration and mutual honesty.

In relationships, problems are never as bad as they might be once we get them into consciousness and circulate them in discussion.

To admit to being a child who doesn't dare to be an adult or a parent who doesn't dare to be a child isn't just a peculiar sounding confession.

It suggests the presence of someone profoundly committed to eventual maturity and on their way to being the best kind of grown up.

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Are You Stuck Playing These 3 Roles in Love?

vulnerable

anxiety

stick

essential