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A widow's only son
Marco's father died before he was born, and his mother grieved alone. All his life he worried that she was sad and lonely, so leaving her to play with friends filled him with guilt.
The hidden shirt
He found a way around it. He told his mother he was going to do homework at a friend's house, lied about where he was really headed, and kept a nice shirt hidden in the garage to change into. He grew into a man who could not be fully himself, who took care of others to make up for having needs of his own, and who kept those needs out of sight.
What the panic meant
In therapy, the panic turned out to be about something other than his wife's survival. Marco feared that her illness was happening because of him, that he had caused it. Guilty children often carry this kind of fantasy of enormous power, and it works as a moral defense: seeing yourself as responsible for bad things keeps the world and the people in it good.
Why do children blame themselves for family misfortune?
Jean Piaget described young children as egocentric, assuming that events revolve around them. Sigmund Freud used the phrase omnipotence of thoughts, in his 1913 book Totem and Taboo, for the belief that wishes can change the outside world. A child who once wished a parent gone in a flash of anger can later feel that a misfortune followed from the wish. Clinicians who work with grieving children have long described this kind of magical thinking.
What happens when a child guards a parent's feelings?
Family therapists Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy and Geraldine Spark named the pattern parentification in their 1973 book Invisible Loyalties. In it, a child takes on a caregiving role toward a parent and learns to read the parent's moods early. Boszormenyi-Nagy was a Hungarian-born psychiatrist who worked in Philadelphia.
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