A placator tends become enmeshed with his partner and lose his own identity. He appears conciliatory and passive, shy and vague, not fully “there.” He is overly accommodating and neglects his own needs. After some time, he typically will find that being so accommodating burns him out and also brings up old resentments. Controlling MEM are arrogant,

As wounded children themselves, our parents defend against the return of their own difficult, buried feelings when they are stimulated by a child’s natural spontaneity, raw emotion, and eroticism. As their defenses flounder, the parents often protect themselves by unknowingly judging and condemning their young ones through shame and rejection.

To his surprise, he told me, he found himself crying and shouting in the therapist’s room about his own father leaving him. Therapy helped me put the feelings where they needed to be—with the desertion of my dad, rather than thinking I just wasn’t cut out to be in this relationship or to be a parent.