At work, blood is not always thicker than water
Stefanos Tsitsipas’ open clash with his father and the role of the overprotective Greek family: What do psychoanalysts have to say?
Stefanos Tsitsipas is 26 years old and already a very successful and wealthy tennis player, much wealthier than his parents. But his parents are not just limited to their familial role. They are also his partners and guides in cultivating his talent. It is to be expected that this confusion of roles can cause tensions and psychological complications.
The Greek public watched in shock on August 8 as the country’s biggest tennis player kicked his coach out of the tennis court during his match against Kei Nishikori at the ATP Montreal Masters. The shock was due to the fact that Tsitsipas’ now-former coach is also his father, Apostolos.
An outcry followed on social media with people dismissing Tsitsipas as a spoiled rich kid who doesn’t even respect his own family.
Such family dramas that play out in the media are not a uniquely Greek phenomenon. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is locked in a legal battle with three of his children. The multi-millionaire American pop singer Britney Spears was under a conservatorship until 2021. After her court victory, she said her parents should be in jail.
Psychiatrist-psychoanalyst Savvas Savvopoulos tells Kathimerini there is no family that has not faced clashes at some point, it’s just that most of them happen privately. “In the modern world, where there is a camera and a microphone always close to a public figure, when there are conflicts they are immediately recorded and made public,” he says. Savvopoulos says it is pointless or even harmful to comment on any particular case without knowing what is really going on, especially because oftentimes, we judge others just to say “that our family is more harmonious and doing better.”
Codependency
Nevertheless, such incidents can be an occasion for reflection on the gray lines of family and professional relationships, but also in general on the dependent relationships that can be built within a family. When a child learns to be dependent on the parent, in terms of what career or dream to pursue, for example, they may later not be able to define themself, Savvopoulos says. “And how will they be able to do so if their parents haven’t taught them, if their parents don’t teach them from the beginning to be self-sufficient, if they put them on their own path? Later on, because the child will not have developed their own desires, their own dreams, they are going to hate them for it,” he explains.
“We see many parents who do not let their children grow up, in the hope that they will remain young, not realizing that, eventually, they all wither together. Codependency is created when a parent cannot endure not being a parent and thus keeps their child a child forever, even when they become an adult,” psychologist-psychotherapist Anna Kandaraki tells Kathimerini. “Parenthood is a role – it cannot be an identity,” she says.
Of course, for a person to be independent from their parents, there must also be financial independence. “You cannot be existentially independent if you are financially dependent,” Savvopoulos says.
What happens when parents are financially dependent on their children? “A patient once told me, ‘At 17 I was making in a month what the whole family was making in a year.’ There is a reversal of roles: When a child supports the whole family, it is very difficult for both the child and the parent not to get confused regarding their roles,” Kandaraki adds.
‘We should teach parents to make their children more independent, but in order to do that, the state must start treating citizens as mature people’
The role of a parent is so important that it should not be confused with professional relationships and financial transactions, she explains.
Parental love
“We see this very often in clinical experience in family businesses or in the case of professional sports, where the child registers that in order to win the love of the parent they have to fight, and parental acceptance passes through either the amount of business sales their child records or the conquest of a medal,” Kandaraki says. This is not done deliberately by the parents but automatically, when the parent is also the boss or coach or manager.
On the other hand, when a child adopts the role of the adult early on, they are not allowed to experience childhood or adolescence. “And adolescence is a period of anger, tantrums. If you don’t get through it at the appropriate age, you may go through it later, more awkwardly.” But even an awkward outburst can be a step toward adulthood, empowerment, liberation.
For there to be liberation, both sides need to set some limits, Savvopoulos says. “Τhere is the tendency from both sides [parent and child] to merge but also to move away. The most important thing is for someone to be autonomous. That is the only way to be able to live one’s life somewhat safely,” he says. The successful parent is the one whose child does not need them, but who at the same time has given the child the sense of security that if they need help, their parent will be there.
Is it something we are not doing in Greece, the third country in the European Union after Croatia and Slovakia with the highest average age for when young people leave the family home?
“In Greece we feel great insecurity with freedom because there is insecurity in society, because there is no public sector that will be like a parent for all the children, the person is forced to attach themself to their family,” Savvopoulos explains. “There is an economic, psychological and social transaction where mental and material factors also come into play and this relationship is two-way. These relationships do not exist abroad,” he says, explaining that in Sweden, after adulthood, the state becomes the “parent.” It is the state that a will help young people find a home or study. “In the most underdeveloped countries, this is done by the family,” he says.
In Greece, it is a transgenerational practice. “In the past, in the villages, they used to say, ‘I will pass on my wealth to the child who will take care of me in my old age,’” says Savvopoulos. “Even today, there are many cases where parents consider their children as their property ‘because I have made so many sacrifices.’ Mothers travel to the UK to wash their clothes, to make moussaka for their children, so then they say, ‘Don’t they owe me something for all this?’”
In other cases, parents build an apartment building so that family members can live in the other apartments. They argue but they still think this is happiness, Savvopoulos says. “And then the parents die and everyone rents out these apartments and never sets foot in them again.” Parents need to show their children that they can stand on their own two feet, he adds. If the parent cannot be independent, how will the child learn to be independent?
Research
Kandaraki also agrees that in Greece, the family weighs heavily on the children. It was one of the conclusions of a large survey conducted last year by Kapa Research. In the survey, 89% of the respondents said that they trust the institution of the family a lot or quite a lot, 87% felt satisfied or rather satisfied with the family in which they grew up in, and 81% answered that they felt closer to their family than to their friends.
“We often say, ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ ‘Love your parents and your siblings,’” says Kandaraki, clarifying that this is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem arises when parents try to make their child feel guilty for trying to gain their independence. “Then come comments like ‘You owe us.’ We see this especially in professional sports, but not only there. That ‘we made so many sacrifices. Will you now leave it all behind?’”
For Savvopoulos, there is only one solution: “We should teach parents to make their children more independent, but in order to do that, the state must start treating citizens as mature people.”
Stefanos Tsitsipas played on Wednesday in Cincinnati. He won against Jan-Lennard Struff and lost against Jack Draper. They were his first matches without his father in the stands.
