Maternalistic Orientation: When Benevolence Distorts the Stakes of Choice

🧸 "Listen to yourself. You already have the answers. You have everything within you." This is the reassuring tune we often hear in orientation guidance or LinkedIn posts.

A message that many parents internalize as THE approach to follow.

The intention is good: to support, soothe, help the young person feel "aligned." But what we call benevolence can sometimes become a trap.

👉 We avoid talking about what is disturbing: power relations, family and social injunctions, internal contradictions, real constraints.

👉 We turn doubt into a symptom or an objective of fulfillment, rather than recognizing it as a process of choice to be questioned.

👉 We confuse listening with abandonment, making it seem like everything will be fine as long as we "trust ourselves."

Result? Comfortable guidance, but one that deactivates critical reflection.

The young person leaves reassured, but not necessarily freer.

What we then call "autonomy" is merely a carefully constructed illusion.

🧠 Orientation cannot be a simple affective parenthesis.

It requires demanding frameworks, structuring confrontations, real empowerment, and awareness.

And this starts by facing what some discourses avoid.

📘 I explore all this in depth in my freely accessible book on Zenodo: 👉 Zenodo Link

Or on Amazon (at the minimum price imposed by the system) in paperback to facilitate reading: Amazon Link