Family systems

Who Keeps Saving You?

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  6 min read

The most famous non-rescue in Scripture is almost always read as a story about a son.

A young man asks for his inheritance early — which in that culture is roughly equivalent to telling his father he would prefer him dead. And the father gives it to him.

Then he lets him leave.

Then, and this is the part that goes unremarked in most sermons, he lets him spend it. All of it. He lets the famine come. He lets him take a job feeding pigs, which for a Jewish son is about as far down as the story can go. He lets him get hungry enough to look at what the animals are eating.

Read it as a story about the father

That father had resources. He had standing in his community. He had servants he could have sent, and there is no indication he did not know roughly where his son was — when the boy finally comes up the road, the father sees him while he is still a long way off, which is not the behavior of a man who had stopped thinking about it.

He was watching. He did not go get him.

In the parable, the running happens at the return. In most families, the running happens at the departure.

This has to be held carefully, because it is a parable about God’s welcome and it is not a parenting technique. But the structure is worth noticing, because families routinely reverse it — sprinting toward the departure to prevent it, and then, when the person does come back, meeting them with a ledger instead of a feast.

The finding that turned out to be backwards

For fifty years psychology taught learned helplessness: animals, and later people, exposed to aversive events they could not control stopped trying to escape even after escape became possible. The lesson everyone drew was that they had learned that nothing they did mattered.

In 2016 the two researchers who ran the original experiments published a paper saying the theory had it the wrong way round.

Working from fifty years of subsequent neuroscience, they concluded that passivity under prolonged aversive events is not learned at all. It is the default — a built-in response, mediated by specific brainstem circuitry, that requires no teaching whatsoever.

What has to be learned is the other thing. Agency. The felt sense that what I do changes what happens next is not the starting condition a person is issued; it is something built, by repeated experience of acting and seeing a result.

Why that changes the argument entirely

If passivity were learned, then a person who cannot act would need to unlearn something, and protecting them from further discouraging experiences would be sensible care.

If passivity is the default and agency is what gets built, then every intercepted consequence is a missed rep. Not a harm avoided — a construction step skipped.

That reframes the sentence families say most often about the person they protect: he would fall apart. Perhaps. But the honest follow-up is the one almost nobody has an answer to: has he ever had the chance to find out?

The question turned around

The title of this is not rhetorical, and it is not only for parents.

Most of us are protecting somebody and being protected by somebody, usually at the same time, usually without an inventory of either. There is generally a person who has quietly absorbed something of ours — a spouse who handles the call we will not make, a colleague who covers the thing we are bad at, a parent still paying for something we have stopped noticing is being paid.

So: who keeps saving you? Name them. Then ask what it has cost them, and whether you have ever said the number out loud.

It is a much harder question than the one about your adult child, and it is the one that makes the first question askable without contempt.