My Husband Treats Me Like a 2-Year-Old & I’m Weirdly Into It (My Therapist Is Too)

So here’s the back story: I spent many years in a very high conflict relationship with the father of my kids and the experience left me feeling like people just can’t and shouldn’t live together; that it’s a quixotic notion to think that two individuals can really compromise enough to live in harmony. When my ex and I separated five years ago, I told myself I would never be in a relationship again, and that parenting and every other aspect of my life would just be so much easier if I did it on my own.

Then, I met my current husband…and with great effort on his part he broke through my defenses and proved me completely wrong. Let me tell you about the very unconventional way he went about it.

My husband, we’ll call him S, has a childlike way about him that I couldn’t really relate to but found charming, nevertheless. He’s also very nostalgic; I am not. It was early on in our relationship that childhood came up in conversation, and with my characteristic, dry sense of humor, I casually told him, “my inner child is dead.” Except I wasn’t joking, and he knew it. After that, he started trying to resurrect it with remarkable resolve. And that’s how Baby Emma was (re)born.

Baby Emma (aka, me) is eternally 2.5 years old. (This age was determined rather organically, but surely it’s not coincidental that this happens to be the age at which I lost my mother.) Baby Emma likes to poke people when she wants more attention and she likes to be spoiled. She has a smug smile when she gets her way and growls and huffs when she doesn’t. And Baby Emma is currently thriving in her adult relationship.

Listen, I’m acutely aware of how bizarre this might sound, but I want to emphasize that I’m not talking about some kink. When it comes to my sex life, I am very much a 36-year-old woman in my own eyes and the eyes of my partner, thank you very much. And now that I’ve got that awkward bit out of the way, let me share with you how and why I think this unusual set-up works for us.

At first I thought it was kind of cringy, then it became funny and now I am fully committed to bending space and time on a daily basis in my relationship. Why? Well, it’s not that hard to understand, really: I’m being nurtured. My needs are being put first the way a child’s needs should be…and that’s not something I ever really experienced in my childhood, let alone in any romantic relationship. It’s awesome. If I groan when the kids wake up earlier than usual, S tells me he’ll get up instead because “two-and-a-half-year-olds need more sleep anyway.” When I get up to do the dishes, S beats me to it and says “don’t be silly, you’re too short to reach the sink.” I don’t know any working mother who wouldn’t enjoy that kind of treatment.

I’m not telling this story to humble brag about my partner though; he has his shortcomings like anyone. I’m telling this story because I don’t think you need to have lost a parent at the age of two to feel like something was missing from your childhood. Almost everyone I know has some mixed feelings about their childhood and what they did or didn’t get from their parents. For many people, it’s what they end up talking about in therapy.

For me, receiving that kind of nurturing from S creates a really safe space. I’m not as high-strung or, well, downright angry as I used to be before S breathed some life into Baby Emma. I still pull my weight when it comes to adult responsibilities, but I have a partner who cuts me all the slack I want, whenever I want it.

I brought all this information to my own therapist of 18 (!) years—Dr. Gibbs A. Williams, PhD, author of Attitude Shifting and a licensed psychoanalyst with 50 years of clinical experience—to really understand on a psychological level what makes this dynamic work for me, and whether or not it might work for others, too. Read on for the highlights and takeaways of my session.

My first question for Gibbs was, “is this just super weird?” His response was, “who cares? If it works, don’t change it.” OK, noted. Now let’s introduce a few concepts that explain why it works.

S had no idea what he was doing when he decided to start treating me like I was a toddler; he just identified a need. But according to the expert, there’s a precedent in psychology for this sort of thing, and it’s called psychodrama. This is where volunteers—typically individuals with some kind of problem they’ve been trying to solve to no avail—identify some crucial experience or concern and literally act it out and dramatize it, while picking out other people to be characters in their play.

I, of course, did not hop on a stage and knowingly act out the lingering effects of early childhood loss to a bunch of strangers. In fact, if you asked me to do any experimental therapy like that in a clinical setting, I’d take a hard pass. Interestingly enough, though, S created the conditions for me to do it naturally, in the context of my own home. “What you and S are doing, it seems to me, is very playful. As a therapeutic idea, we call it constructive play and it typically emerges around the age of three or four. It makes perfect sense to me that by participating in play of this sort with your partner, you’re both feeling some constructive effects,” says Gibbs.

Basically what this means is that whenever I’m Baby Emma, I’m roleplaying in a way that lets me have some sort of do-over—or at least some healthy escape from the drudgery of adult life—and it’s fun. Happy people in happy relationships have actual fun together, and that can look a lot of different ways. It turns out that 36-year-old me isn’t always that much fun, but Baby Emma is a riot. That brings me to the next principle Gibbs explained: regression in the service of the ego.

Gibbs tells me that regression often gets a bad rap, because in psychoanalytic theory it refers to a defense mechanism that can often be maladaptive—namely because it implies a return to an inferior and lower-functioning state. That’s just one type of regression, though. Per the expert, there is another concept—an adaptive type of regression known as regression in the service of ego.

“Therapeutic progress is often thought of as climbing mountains in inner space,” Gibbs explains. “[But] it’s incremental at best, proceeding in fits and starts.” The expert adds that while it may seem that regressing to a younger version of myself is a “total collapse of progress,” this type of regression could actually be “a golden opportunity to resolve a key issue that would have been otherwise missed.” In other words, one small step for Baby Emma, one giant leap for mental health.

That’s a lot to chew on, I know. But psychobabble aside, my interpretation of all this is that submitting to an earlier state and letting your inner child be part of your day-to-day (within reason, of course) might be the kind of therapy you never knew you needed. And if you can find a partner who facilitates this for you, and vice versa, through whacky roleplay, then all the better. Now if you'll excuse me, baby Emma needs to take a nap.