There is a moment in every child’s development when love is no longer only about belonging.

It becomes about becoming.

In systemic work, we can look at this movement as a rite of passage: the gradual movement from the early symbiotic bond with the mother, toward the father and the world beyond her.

The mother gives us life.

The father, symbolically, introduces us to the world.

And eventually, we are asked to take both - so that we can become fully ourselves.

The First Bond: Mother and Child

Our first home is the mother.

Before we know ourselves as separate beings, we experience life through her body, her nervous system, her presence and her absence. We grow inside her. We are nourished through her. And after birth, we continue to depend on her - or on the person occupying that primary maternal role — for survival.

Systemically, the mother represents our first relationship with life, belonging, receiving and existence itself.

This is why the mother wound can reach so deeply.

When the relationship with mother is interrupted, painful, rejecting, engulfing or emotionally unavailable, the child may unconsciously struggle not only with mother, but with receiving life itself.

But we are not meant to remain in this symbiotic space forever.

At some point, another movement begins.

The Movement Toward the Father

In the systemic map I work with, around the age of eight to ten a child begins an important energetic movement toward the father. This does not mean leaving or loving the mother less. It represents expansion.

The father introduces another principle: direction, structure, boundaries, agency, responsibility, movement and our place in the world.

Through the father, the child encounters something beyond the original mother-child field.

The world becomes bigger.

Who am I out there?

What can I do?

Where is my place?

Can I stand on my own feet?

Can I move toward life rather than remain protected from it?

For both boys and girls, this movement toward the masculine can be an important initiation.

But eventually their paths diverge.

The Daughter: Toward Father - and Back Toward Mother

For a girl, the movement toward her father can offer an encounter with healthy masculine energy.

Through him, she may experience what it feels like to be seen, respected and met by the masculine without having to become responsible for it.

She can discover her own capacity for direction, boundaries, courage and action. But with puberty, another movement becomes important. The girl becomes a young woman.

And symbolically, she turns again toward the mother — not necessarily toward her mother’s personality, choices or wounds, but toward the line of women from which she comes.

There is something she can receive there that her father cannot give her. Permission to become a woman. This is where a complicated mother relationship can create a profound inner conflict.

If becoming a woman unconsciously means becoming like my mother, and the daughter has rejected her mother, judged her, competed with her or had to become emotionally stronger than her, she may also reject aspects of her own femininity.

Healing does not require agreeing with everything our mother did.

It asks something different:

Can I take the life that came through her without having to repeat her destiny?

The Son: From Mother Toward Father

For the boy, the movement has another quality.

He begins life in the body and field of a woman.

But he is not becoming a woman. At some point, the early symbiotic bond with the mother must loosen enough for him to move toward his own masculine identity.

In systemic terms, the boy moves toward the father and increasingly toward the world of men. This usually happens around the age of 10 and is crucial for a boys development. The father becomes a bridge, because the son cannot become a man by remaining psychologically responsible for his mother. He must be allowed to leave her. And she must be willing, internally, to let him go.

This becomes particularly difficult when the mother is lonely, abandoned, unsupported or wounded by the father.

Sometimes the son unconsciously becomes the man beside her.

Her protector.

Her emotional companion.

The one who worries about her.

The one who must not leave.

The one who must make her happy.

It can look like closeness.

Systemically, however, it may carry a heavy price.

Because a son cannot fully become the man of his own life while occupying the place of a partner, protector or emotional caretaker for his mother.

He is the child.

She is the big one.

He is the small one.

And his life is waiting in front of him.

When Mother Rejects Father

One of the most difficult dynamics occurs when a mother communicates to her son:

“Your father is a bad man. Don’t become like him.”

Perhaps she has every reason to be angry.

Perhaps the father abandoned her.

Perhaps he betrayed her.

Perhaps he was addicted, irresponsible, violent, unavailable or simply absent.

Her pain may be completely understandable.

But the child hears something different.

Because the father is not only outside of him.

The father is also inside of him.

Half of the child’s life came through the father.

So when a boy hears:

“Don’t be like your father.”

something inside him may hear:

“Don’t become fully who you are.”

He may remain suspicious of his own masculinity.

His power.

His aggression in its healthy form.

His ambition.

His sexuality.

His authority.

His capacity to lead, decide, protect and take responsibility.

Sometimes the result is not that he becomes less like his father.

Paradoxically, he may become more entangled with him.

Because what is excluded from a family system does not simply disappear.

We often remain unconsciously connected to exactly what we are trying hardest to reject.

The Absent Father and the Boy Who Grew Up Too Soon

The opposite dynamic can happen when father is absent and the boy is pushed into masculine responsibility before he is ready.

He becomes the man of the house.

He takes care of younger siblings.

He protects his mother.

He manages emotions that were never his responsibility.

Everyone may praise him for being mature.

But maturity and parentification are not the same thing.

A boy carrying adult responsibility is not necessarily standing strongly in his masculine.

Sometimes he is simply a child who had no permission to remain a child.

Later, this can become hyper-responsibility.

He may believe love means carrying everyone.

He may struggle to receive support.

He may feel responsible for women’s emotions.

Or he may eventually reject responsibility altogether because responsibility has never felt like freedom.

It has always felt like burden.

The healing movement is not:

“Become even stronger.”

It may be:

“You were the child. The adults were responsible. You can give back what was never yours.”

When Father Is Absent

A father does not need to have been a good father for the child to have an inner relationship with the paternal line.

This distinction is essential.

Taking the father does not mean approving of his behavior.

It does not mean denying abuse, abandonment or harm.

It does not require reconciliation or physical contact.

It means separating two truths:

What happened to me through my father is one truth.

That life also came to me through my father is another.

Both can exist.

A person may say internally:

“What you did belongs to you. I leave the consequences of your choices with you.

And the life that came through you, I take.

I will do something good with it.”

That is a very different movement from forgiveness forced before the body is ready.

It is a movement toward freedom.

Healing the Rite of Passage

Many adults are still standing somewhere inside an unfinished rite of passage.

The woman who is still waiting for her father to finally see her.

The man who is still emotionally married to his mother.

The daughter who refuses her femininity because she refuses her mother.

The son who refuses his masculinity because masculinity reminds him of his father.

The adult who became responsible far too early.

The successful person who can achieve everything but cannot receive.

The person who has physically left home but is still psychologically standing between their parents.

Healing asks us to move again.

Not backward into childhood.

Forward into adulthood.

The movement may look something like this:

Mother, you are my mother.
I am your child.
You gave me life, and I take it.

Father, you are my father.
I am your child.
Life also came to me through you.
What belongs to you stays with you.
What belongs to me, I will carry forward.

And then, perhaps most importantly:

You are the big ones.
I am the small one.
I no longer need to save either of you.
I no longer need to judge one parent in order to love the other.
I take the life that came through both of you.
And now I turn toward my own life.

The Final Rite of Passage

Perhaps adulthood is not ultimately about becoming independent from our parents.

It is about becoming free enough to stop organizing our lives around them.

We stop trying to repair mother.

We stop waiting for father.

We stop carrying their marriage.

We stop fighting their battles.

We stop proving that one was right and the other was wrong.

We stop becoming the opposite of them.

And we stop unconsciously repeating them.

We allow them to be who they are.

And we allow ourselves to become who we are.

Because the deepest healing movement is not from mother to father.

It is not even from childhood to adulthood.

It is the movement from entanglement into life.

Mother behind us.

Father behind us.

Our ancestors behind them.

And life in front of us.

We take what was given.

We leave what was never ours.

And then we walk.