He Blamed Himself for His Wife’s Illness Because It Felt Safer Than Chance

Marco came to therapy because his wife was going through medical procedures and he had started having panic attacks.

At first, the reason looked obvious. Galit Atlas, a psychoanalyst, assumed he was simply afraid that something terrible would happen to his wife. Then, as she listened longer, she heard a much younger voice underneath the fear.

Marco had been born to a lonely mother. His father had died before he was born, and all his life he had worried that his mother would be sad if he left her alone. When he wanted to play with friends, he told her he was going to study with them, sneaked out of the house, and stashed his going-out clothes outside so she would not see him dressed to leave.

That is the story of what Atlas calls the guilty child. It is the part of an adult that still uses an early survival strategy, taking responsibility for bad things in order to keep the people around him feeling good.

In Marco's adult life, the pattern had become compensating care. He took care of others, pushed his own needs into secret, and tried to be fully unselfish. With his wife ill, the old logic returned in a stark form. His fear was not only that he might lose her. It was that her illness was happening because of him.

Atlas calls that belief an omnipotent fantasy, and a kind of moral defense. A child who decides he caused the trouble preserves the idea that his mother is good, the world is good, and the damage can be repaired if he just fixes himself.

Ronald Fairbairn, a Scottish psychoanalyst, put it in a sentence Atlas loves: “It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the devil.” For a child, it is less devastating to be the problem than to accept that his parents are fragile or the world is random and unsafe.

That painful bargain has hope built into it. If everything depends on you, you still have control. If you caused it, you might be able to undo it. Marco's guilt was also his safety.