Mal12345
Permabanned
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2011
- Messages
- 14,532
- MBTI Type
- IxTP
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
Infantalization is not a new idea, but the term itself was unknown to me until recently (thanks to Google).
My wife's mother recently moved into an assisted living facility for the elderly. She is only 77 but members of her immediate family rarely live over 80. My wife doesn't treat her mother like a child, but her mother's sisters do. These two sisters had been quietly out of touch while my wife took care of her mother almost every day, driving over there to change the water sprinklers, buying her groceries and take-out, sweeping and mopping. She also took care of paying her bills for her, took her to the doctor, and made sure she got her prescriptions filled. She watched over her over-consumption of oxycodin and tried to prevent this by only giving her the meds that she needs. (Her mother is like her deceased father, both uncontrollable pill poppers.) My wife has been doing these things for years.
Now that it's time for her mother to move to an assisted living facility (because of very bad arthritis), the two sisters have suddenly come out of the woodwork to "help out." They did help out for a couple days of cleaning the old place, taking things out to the trash (as far as the front porch, I had to take it the rest of the way), and they took her out for an 8-hour outing on one occasion. But there are certain things that don't help. Laughable things. The day she moved into assisted living her sister made a daily time schedule for her to follow which went something like: get out of bed at 6:00 AM, go to breakfast at 7:00 AM, etc, etc.
My wife's mother is not a child, and she doesn't want to be treated like one. Most people don't. There may be a few who appreciate being infantalized, but she can react quite violently to this even if she doesn't show it out of respect for her direct relatives.
People don't stop and think about their behavior. They may believe their "generosity" will automatically be appreciated, but this is a delusion. Unless a person *has* a mind like a child, they will likely not appreciate being treated like a child. But people don't know what they're doing. They don't know anything about infantalization or treating others like children. They are acting automatically according to some custom they learned somewhere. They don't think. They are Gurdjieff's mechanical beings.
My wife's mother recently moved into an assisted living facility for the elderly. She is only 77 but members of her immediate family rarely live over 80. My wife doesn't treat her mother like a child, but her mother's sisters do. These two sisters had been quietly out of touch while my wife took care of her mother almost every day, driving over there to change the water sprinklers, buying her groceries and take-out, sweeping and mopping. She also took care of paying her bills for her, took her to the doctor, and made sure she got her prescriptions filled. She watched over her over-consumption of oxycodin and tried to prevent this by only giving her the meds that she needs. (Her mother is like her deceased father, both uncontrollable pill poppers.) My wife has been doing these things for years.
Now that it's time for her mother to move to an assisted living facility (because of very bad arthritis), the two sisters have suddenly come out of the woodwork to "help out." They did help out for a couple days of cleaning the old place, taking things out to the trash (as far as the front porch, I had to take it the rest of the way), and they took her out for an 8-hour outing on one occasion. But there are certain things that don't help. Laughable things. The day she moved into assisted living her sister made a daily time schedule for her to follow which went something like: get out of bed at 6:00 AM, go to breakfast at 7:00 AM, etc, etc.
My wife's mother is not a child, and she doesn't want to be treated like one. Most people don't. There may be a few who appreciate being infantalized, but she can react quite violently to this even if she doesn't show it out of respect for her direct relatives.
People don't stop and think about their behavior. They may believe their "generosity" will automatically be appreciated, but this is a delusion. Unless a person *has* a mind like a child, they will likely not appreciate being treated like a child. But people don't know what they're doing. They don't know anything about infantalization or treating others like children. They are acting automatically according to some custom they learned somewhere. They don't think. They are Gurdjieff's mechanical beings.
