When a child's psyche is abused, there is no escape route

An advice-seeker in therapist Lori Gottlieb’s New York Times column (October 22, 2026) expressed her frustration and implied a dilemma. Her brother’s wife cheated on him and emotionally abused their four-year-old daughter, calling her a “stupid little girl” and saying she hated her. The brother has stayed in the marriage through the cheating and child abuse. Letter writer, angry at her sister-in-law, has stayed away from family gatherings and informed her brother not to gift her with bad news about his marriage unless he is going to leave it. What to do? she asked Gottlieb. Miss the “fun times” of family gatherings or attend them and seethe with anger?

Gottlieb said the writer was * punishing herself by missing family events, * giving her brother an unfair ultimatum, and * depriving the child (and one-year-old sibling) of her “aunt’s warm and calming presence.”

TPS published this globally ignored comment (four “recommends”) to the question-and-its-answer:

If the sister follows Gottlieb’s advice and attends family gatherings to enjoy and “be there” for her niece; and if she assumes (per advice) this will give her niece her “warm and calming presence,” I’m suggesting that it will not work that way at all. The little girl will inevitably internalize the sense that the adults who love her are helpless and incompetent. She will not know that this sense is being planted in her psyche – it’s too nonintuitive and obscure for a child to detect. But it will be there, affecting her present and future relationships with authority figures and intimate partners. It may even lead her someday to be drawn to an effete partner: A competent mate would painfully accentuate what she missed in her childhood: a caring, effective savior.

Gottlieb was being her mellifluous self – not appropriate. The child would see but not see her father either condoning or helplessly acquiescing to his wife’s abusiveness. She would see but not see her aunt’s warmth that will look like blindness to the pain being caused, or she would feel that “this pain is right and sanctioned by good people.” Or she would compartmentalize feeling loved from feeling abused which would surely, later in life, expand to other kinds of dissociation.

I had hoped that some other NYT commenter would add a rejoinder to my unpleasant explanation: “How can you say it would be destructive for the aunt to be present for her niece? Better to make the girl feel ghosted and left to the wolves?” I would have re-rejoined: “You are right. The child would either feel crazy-made – receiving love that was oblivious to her abuse – or abandoned. There are no happy alternatives. There are no happy endings when the parent-child bond is sick.”

Our inner child in the real world

Is there any reason to dwell so much on the “inner child”? On the wounds inflicted in specific passing or repeated moments in our earliest years? Even if it’s true that the unhealed child in us is prepotent, the law underlying our life, it’s obviously not where we live. It is not our present thoughts and plans, the activities we do every day, our ideas of meaning, the energy or inertness of our relationships. It is not our intelligence and competence.

Does that historical self actually manifest now, or is it comatose in the deep and dark bilge of our ship? A less theoretical question: If our simple, younger, brighter words and feelings are somehow diffused throughout our aged chemistry, does it matter?

The answer, I'd say, is that it depends on how delusional we want to be and have to be. We can believe, insanely, that every thought and feeling and behavior is on the plateau of adultness or is the more or less successful evolution of our child self. We can be psychologically laden, a mongrel of insane adult and sane child: remembering and feeling abuse, abandonments and other injuries, and even allowing them to enervate our present energies. There are those, the most grounded, who remain predominantly stunted and don’t know it. The weaker their delusion of adulthood, the more incapacitated they’ll be in the world.

Our inner child may inevitably make us fail, but if we’re delusional, we won’t see failure.

This speaks to a paradox: In a background of dysfunction, the most real person is the ungrown child who can’t handle life with any competence: the psychotic inpatient, the man or woman in chronic crisis, self-medication and projection. The unreal person is an organism of defenses and delusions that, cobbled together, enable dictionary-definition success. It could be a billionaire or a Nobel Prize winner in Economics.

The most troubling ramification of the inner child, possibly, is that awareness of it can make us feel that time has never passed, we have never moved on, we are still the infant. We still need sick substances for comfort; we still have only primitive likes and dislikes, or diametrically, fantasy candy notions; we still follow our parents or lie in their hands; we are estranged, cosmically. Individuals in regressive therapy may grasp some strand of that (“ha ha, I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up”) but don’t let themselves fall into the deep end of its implications. I have never heard clients name full existential desperation. Thank goodness for their insanity.

Military life is a second abusive childhood

For many soldiers and veterans, the military years are a second abusive childhood. There is the recapitulated flawed separation-individuation phase, the first few years when recruits are the vassals of superiors who establish arbitrary rules, exercise sole power and require absolute obeisance. They are essentially tabula rasa again, with a few genetic predispositions. They sacrifice and subsume themselves or don't survive. Immature parents create sick bonds during the first three years which are the starting gate of personality disorders such as Borderline Personality. Will the infant gain the potential for healthy autonomy, or will the psychic umbilical cord remain attached in engulfment and rejection, in abject dependency, in schizoid alienation, in psychopathy or narcissism? Will the infant soldier somehow become an individual, or will his fundamental inchoateness be schooled by a new troubled master?

Following this second separation-individuation is their second latency stage and adolescence (the remainder of their original four- or six- or eight-year contract) where this time they must ditch whatever sense of a complex and caring world they may have had. Their friendships are forged in the landscape of subjection, humiliation, near-seamless surveillance and a life whose theme song is “we live to kill people.” Friendships that form in combat are a unique blood bond, or rather a bleeding bond where love is trauma. In an ambiance of two-dimensional humanity – right/wrong, good/evil, strong/weak, masculine/feminine, categorical/indecisive, calloused/emotional, superior/inferior – the formatively-injured psyche is recaptured and re-tortured right at the moment (late teens, early twenties) when it might have meaningfully escaped the family hypnosis.*

A veteran, twenty years post-service, said during a session: “They try to break you then rebuild you into the kind of person they want you to be. They put a way of thinking into your brain, different from normal people. You’re told to end people’s lives.” “They take empathy away from you. They definitely strip you of that.” “They want you to be submissive to them. They want to break your mindset. It’s definitely a cult.”

A Psych textbook, many years ago, cited research indicating that soldiers who came from a troubled childhood were, in similar combat or combat-adjacent circumstances, more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than those who came from a healthier childhood. They are also the ones who, in high school, are more likely to choose the military, a peculiar choice – and occupation – when one’s country's survival is not at stake. Few if any other professions feature a prisoner re-education camp format or require the calcifying of one’s heart and the re-infantilizing and concretizing of one’s psyche.

More than a few of the veterans I’ve seen suffered deliberate, ongoing mental torture by one particular psychopathic superior officer, someone who should have been cowering in a dungeon, not cavalier in the upper ranks. These veterans were changed forever, raped to a new philosophy by the evil they endured in lonely, masculine indifference within a Kafka-esque FUBAR bureaucracy conceived by sociopaths over many illustrious generations.

It's one of the amazing ignorances of the world that recruits don’t know they are entering their second childhood when they join the military. They believe they are starting their adult life, maybe a life of great meaning and idealism. Instead, they have fallen backwards into the formative tragedy of their lives – child's helplessness and confusion and powerlessness, bullying, loneliness, unfair punishments, tedious chores, that awful second- or seventh-grade teacher – a nightmare of psychological regression. And permanent regression, because they leave the military as they left their childhood, having never formed their own center. The “false self” – a seminal principle in psychology – is the consequence of most lives that adapted, from infancy, to the needs and neuroses of powerful others. The military man and woman have redoubled that falseness, present upon past. They don’t know their self, twice co-opted.

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* A term conceived by psychotherapist David Calof in Multiple Personality and Dissociation: Understanding Incest, Abuse and MPD.

The most eye-rolling of defenses

My client, a retired physician, has always gone astray in her search for a good man. She is attracted to confident, masterful (and well-dressed) men, feeling implicitly just right to want to be taken care of and protected. I, on the other hand, a hard-working male therapist, feel manly and good to be the earner, providing a sense of security for my wife.

Here we are, two of the billions of adequately intelligent people who marched brainwashed into the right belief system bequeathed to us by history and television, the stalwart man and the limp starry-eyed woman.

This may be a stretch (I don’t think so), but I suspect that even the sweetest guys and the toughest women harbor, beneath their Freudian preconscious, these same ego-syntonic* and delicious urges: protectee and protector. Ayn Rand, most adamantine of women with her “virtue of selfishness,” her casting deviators from her Objectivist philosophy into the fire, her apotheosis of atheism and capitalism and her deification of rationality, believed that the essence of femininity is male hero-worship and therefore that a woman should never be, for example, president of the United States.

I think it’s valid to ask if these stereotypes (or archetypes**) are fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong. Can there actually be something instinctively “looking up” (at a man) in the female genome, something “looking down” in boys’ and men’s? What if world history has simply perpetuated certain self-medicating defense mechanisms as prosthetic egos when real self-esteem is lacking? “Boys better than girls” no different than "men superior to women" no different than “Whites superior to Blacks,” no different than Jews more “chosen” than you,*** no different than parents better than their children?

If we look to depth psychology – the terrible place where we are all still three years old, the inner child crawling wounded from infancy to grave – we’ll find that my client's and women's need to need is half right and that men's script of superiority is all wrong. How? The women have allowed themselves, maybe unconsciously, to feel dependency, the unfinished child’s rightness to have someone to lean on, to collapse to, to look to for wisdom, the eternal bond to the perfect(-seeming) Mother or Father. Where women have erred is in accepting that it is the opposite sex, rather than the Platonic parent, who stands on a pedestal in their DNA.

The emotionally ingenious men who can feel this dependency in themselves will be holistically cleared of a poisonous obstruction in their lives, the conceit of macho godliness. They will be rid of a delusion that slowly breaks their backs, warps their spirit, and cuts short their lives. Ayn Rand was right about this: These false Atlases need to shrug. She didn’t know that they need to fall into their mother’s arms, in fact or memory or loss.

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* “Ego-syntonic” – basically meaning “in harmony with one's dysfunction.” For example, someone with Major Depressive Disorder doesn't like being depressed. But a Depressive Personality-disordered person is ego-syntonically fine to be miserable, morose, pessimistic, sure that the future will be as bleak as the past and present.

** Carl Jung conceived a few archetypes embodying traditional male and female roles, such as the hero, the great mother, the wise old man, the maiden, the anima and animus.

*** TPS is of Jewish lineage and therefore feels that he has standing to make objective comments about the tradition.

Anger or dissolution

A middle-aged woman said that her father was absent in her childhood. “I didn’t like him.” Growing up, she felt that she always had to be “big, strong and brave” because “there was no one to take care of me.” Her stepmother beat her severely. “That’s why I’m angry at women.” Despite “good” therapy a few years ago, her inner child still feels alone and afraid.

“I don’t give mercy and grace to women.” “I don’t like weak women.”

When she got cancer, her husband failed to be her caretaker. “He was concerned for himself.” However, she was “independent.” She joked about having to “kill him.”

Once she was a “pathetic people-pleaser,” a codependent enabler. No longer.

I confronted one of her statements: “I don’t like weak women.” What did she mean by “weak”? Sensitive, feelings easily hurt. I told her that she had been a child whose feelings mattered to no one, she had had to be “big,” and still feels she must be brave and strong and independent. She doesn’t dislike “weak” women: She sees sensitive, feeling women and her aged child feels envious, down to the soles of her feet, of their normal humanity. She was made to be a hard shell and they could be filled with hurt, love, need, life.

She saw that this was true. What could help her? Grieve her stolen childhood, the greatest tragedy that can happen to a person. Dismantle the barbed barricade around her heart. But that unraveling would demolish her powerful anger, her identity attitude, her bigness, her “independence,” her strength. She gave me a saucy stare.

We should all be able to predict, correctly, that she is a Trump admirer and voter.

I probably should have written "here-and-then"

Third in a likely sporadic series of Pessimistic tidbits

There are doubtless some do-gooders who do prosocial acts for sick reasons. They may, for example, hate the rich or be “people-pleasers” whose self-value is to exist for others. (Which is not real self-esteem.) One can bet, though, that most liberals are average people with a good heart. “Populists,” on the other hand, can be globally categorized as neurotic, a term describing persons who unconsciously seek redress for childhood needs and pain through present means. Psychologically, their present is their revenge for their past. The main reason Democrats are feeling helpless to reach their Trumpian nemeses is that they are trying to reason with people who seem to be in the here-and-now, but are in the there-and-then. (Comment to David French's 2/9/25 New York Times article "The Populist Cure Is Worse than the Elite Disease," https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/455qtk?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

Therapy is a nonjudgmental process. But can we help a bad person?

Here is an indigestible paradox: Therapy is the most “successful” when it’s the shallowest and least effective. This is to say that Cognitive Therapy can work for anybody, as it’s based on the assumptions that (a) dysfunction is a matter of wrong thinking, and (b) irrational or pessimistic thoughts can be changed by logic and optimism. These assumptions could apply to anyone regardless of their moral system or political ideology. As it goes, the Cognitive approach can only help people who are heavily invested in their severed head, who live in their head and prefer to banish their historical body of emotion, felt sense, pain and developmental abort.

Depth therapy, that changes emotional chemistry by reaching to the origin causes of dysfunction, cannot help individuals who are married to blaming the world, to their love of a sociopathic president, to their antisocial ideologies and attitudes. These cognitive-conceptual stances are based in deep, early-onset pain that they will critically resist feeling else they will collapse into inchoate helplessness.

A woman whose childhood anger is redeemed in hateful leaders and governmental policies. A married couple who prefer the military life – seventy percent of the year – to raising their children, leaving them with friends and relatives. People with a vengeance sense of good and evil, who are deeply and complacently repressed, living on the surface of themselves and not wanting to reach or know their truth. Therapy will not help them.

But Cognitive Therapy can.

Maybe who we really are

Another in a possible sporadic series of Pessimistic tidbits.

I’ve seen a few thousand people in therapy over the past 26 years. Regardless of what they may initially say – “I had a great childhood”; “My parents never hit me” – the fact is that none of them received respectful empathy and unconditional love in their childhood. This doesn’t necessarily mean they had terrible caregivers They may have had distracted, or weak, or immature parents who “meant well.” (Note my challenge: “Parents don’t do their ’best.’ They do their feeling.”) When you consider that the therapy population is only a fraction of the people who are hurt and damaged in their formative years, it is theoretically plausible that a majority of our citizens harbor buried anger, feeble and selective empathy, and a fundamental lack of prosocial feeling. It would take a powerfully inspirational personage – like Obama – to pull them out of their primary self-regard and into a prosocial spirit (“We are all brothers and sisters”; “I care about the poor, the homeless, etc.”). Trump may represent the default id that is angry, self-focused and nihilistic. He may have to fail spectacularly before people’s better angels again find room in their psyche. (Comment to a Washington Post article.)

Ruminating / Overthinking

One in a possible sporadic series of Pessimistic Tidbits.

Overthinking is a form of self-medication, similar to alcohol and drug use, excessive exercise, continual social media immersion, chocolate, etc. It often is kick-started in adolescence, when unhealed childhood pain and injustice must be escaped, moved on from. People escape from feeling by falling upward into their head. It will feel better to think questions and options than to drown in helpless feeling. Like other self-medications, what starts off being helpful or even life-saving will eventually become a major encumbrance. Depth therapy says that returning – regressing – to the original pain and expelling it in its raw form will undermine the need to escape into ruminating and racing thoughts. (New York Times comment, https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/44or4o?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)