Albert Pesso on "Holes In Roles"

My work with individuals, couples and families over four decades has lead me to believe that human infants enter the world genetically supplied with an innate template that prepares them to automatically recognize and intuitively respond to the various, familial, kinship figures they will encounter as they grow up. Furthermore, in addition to this innate ability to "see and react to" those kinship roles, I have discovered that children seem to have the innate, rudimentary potential to "take on" and "act the part of" each and every one of those kinship roles as situations seem to require in the family settings they grow up in. I call those categories of capacities "stem selves" which seem to be cultivated by external circumstances to the kind of role function seemingly called upon by the outside world.

If a child has had the misfortune of learning and experiencing that their parents were wounded, due to apparent neglect those parents must have experienced in their childhood, that appears to awaken the child’s little heart and compassionate soul which innately knows that all children need and have an inner expectation of experiencing care. This immediately awakens the unspoken, perhaps also unconscious, but deeply felt wish that his or her parents could have been better cared for.

Clients who have unwittingly filled the holes in the roles of their parents maturational needs, have distorted their own personalities, leading to dysfunctional patterns in their own adult lives and adult partner choices. In PBSP® presentations I demonstrate this phenomenon and teach how to release clients from those burdensome roles thus enabling them to live more satisfying lives in their partnerships and within their actual family structures.