If you live with a Holding Up Defense, you most likely were raised by a narcissistic caretakers. You adopted this defense in order to protect yourself from feeling the painful trauma of being used and exploited by them. The origin of the Holding Up Defense may be quite different depending upon how your narcissistic caretakers used and exploited you. For example, your caretaker might have been like the classic ‘stage mother’ who lives her life vicariously through the artistic expression of her child—that is, you were used by your childhood caretakers in hope that they could remedy the disappointments and deficiencies in their life through you and your accomplishments. In living up to their expectations and ministering to their narcissistic needs, you denied and lost yourself. Or, one of your childhood caretakers may have idealized you as a way to meet his/her own needs by making you a surrogate spouse, thus causing the actual spouse to be threatened by your special relationship; this caused him/her to take out her/his jealous anger and rage on you. As a result you got a double dose of trauma for simply being in the middle of your caretakers’ narcissistic battle. Or, you may have been covertly or overtly used and exploited by your same sex childhood caretaker who made you into a surrogate partner such as starting to train you, at age fifteen months, to take over the family business one day. These efforts to high jack your soul at such an earlier and vulnerable age sounds and appears to outsiders as crazy and absurd but for you, at that age, it was all too real and profoundly damaging.
This Holding Up Defense is much more prevalent among men who are treated in childhood as ‘mama’s little man’, although in the last decades, this defense is on the rise among women who are treated in childhood as ‘daddy’s little special girl’. It can also take other forms such as a father who treats his son as his ‘son & heir’ or his daughter as his ‘star & heir’ in order to insure for himself a lasting legacy by preparing his young son or daughter to take over his real-estate empire, for example, Or by the father expecting his son or daughter win the Nobel Prize—which was the case for one of my clients. Or, it can take the form of a lonely, friendless mother who uses her young daughter as a ‘surrogate confidant’, or a sick mother who exploits her young daughter as a ‘surrogate caretaker’, for example. In all of these cases, the young child is used and exploited to serve the needs of the childhood caretaker rather than the caretaker serving the needs of the child. Also, depending on whether the childhood caretakers use power or seduction to exploit the child, the Holding Up Defense will take a corresponding Power Controlling Holding Up Sub-type Defense or a Seductive Controlling Holding Up Sub-type Defense.
