Monday, May 26, 2014

Theory platform: Elliot Rodger, age 22


I have read most of the murderer’s ‘manifesto’ and find some scattered ideas about cause coming to me and coalescing loosely.  However, I do not want to produce a polished article: That would feel presumptuous, as there are many people who have thought deep about these things.  So for humility’s sake and also to have a drawing board for later thinking, this post will be left in the form of some speculative bullet points.

* I believe the young man’s problem proves the fused union of immaturity (he remained a psychologically pre-pubescent child in a growing body), primal neediness, Asperger’s disorder, personality disorder, delusional psychosis, and death compulsion (suicide and homicide as two sides of a thin coin) as the outcome of birth trauma (“biological lovelessness”) and/or separation-individuation trauma (“psychological lovelessness”), with secondary factors of divorce/disruption, formative lovelessness (father, mother, stepmother), and a likely backdrop of a materialistic morality.

* Rodger is the consequence of the emptiness that comes from having had no identity-forming bond at the beginning of life.  An empty self faces only two diametrical choices: absorb all the pain or reject all the pain.  (With feeling-identity intact, a child can “take” pain, soothe and heal it and place it in a benign context with the help – including introjected help – of another.)  Rodger did both, alternately and sometimes simultaneously: He was meaningless or he was “magnificent”; he was the rejected and the rejecter; he admired then hated, admired and hated the same persons; he was suicidal and homicidal.  Antithesis is also known in the Borderline personality – idealization then devaluation of the other; engulfment panic then abandonment panic.

* There has to be a Self to be able to accept responsibility (which is different from an abject accepting of guilt or blame, which an empty self can do).  For there to be a self, there had to be some critical-phase loving bond.  In Rodger’s entire manifesto which encompasses early childhood to the end, there is not a single word of comprehension that Self qualities – character, virtue, interests – are what will win a woman’s interest and admiration.  He could never grow these qualities; there was nothing that he could be to accept responsibility for, and therefore must externalize all responsibility.

* Masterson’s ideas about the elemental flaws coming out of this failed bond are instructive:

“Normally, the real self and its capacities emerge allowing the child to mature into an autonomous adult capable of self-activation and self-expression, with a sense of entitlement and the self-confidence to live creatively in the face of challenges and disappointments.  However, when the child experiences the abandonment depression during the first three years of life, the real self shuts down to avoid further aggravating the feelings of abandonment.  This shut-down arrests psychological development and produces varying degrees of impairment in all the capacities of the self.  Unable to tolerate feeling the abandonment depression, the child engages in a number of measures to protect himself from feeling depressed, at the cost of growth and adaptation.  He avoids activities that would further the emergence of the real self, and consequently all the self’s potential capacities are impaired.  In addition, the need for defense causes a similar arrest of what is classically described as ego development so that it, too, continues to function on a primitive level.
“Certain functions of the ego – reality perception, impulse control, frustration tolerance, and stable ego boundaries – can only develop through successful separation and individuation.  The child who cannot separate from his mother will not internalize these functions, which she had performed for him, and make them his own.  Consequently, he exhibits deficiencies in all these areas.”*
* Other areas of low-high, empty-full, pathetic-sublime defense structure have been described in the literature.  Breggin (Toxic Psychiatry) states that a severely shamed and abused child may later suffer delusions of grandeur: He is Jesus or a famous person.  The Narcissist rides his egoistic fantasy above a hell of abortive child development, disintegration and rage.  Modrow (How to Become a Schizophrenic) describes the impending schizophrenic, approaching the horrifying insight that he has never been fully human** – has always been empty – as constantly thinking, never sleeping, obsessed with religious and philosophical beliefs.  Rodger, a void of smoke and mirrors that reflected others’ prestige, grew his rabid philosophy at a boil as the day of “retribution” approached.

* The loved child is, over time, less needy; the unloved one, more needy.  A precariously attached little boy hounds his mother most when she is on the phone: Any greater distance between them incites his abandonment fears.  Fairbairn’s ‘return to the bad object’ insight brings the child, and later the adult, back to an unloving and detached, not a loving and mirroring, parent-figure.

* Asperger’s syndrome will exist on a continuum of failed symbiosis and mother-child mirroring (which may start with birth trauma).  Just as a baby can’t converse with a college professor, a child who “failed” in-arms life with his mother will never be in sync with others speaking a more mature language.  The psychically stalemated infant – Rodger – will be out of his medium forever.

* I have treated individuals who had grown a defensive delusional philosophy by the time they reached puberty.  It speaks to the utter emptiness (though this exists on a continuum, too) of the childhood template: the air has been starving, the crib spiked and hard.  We can sometimes, in adolescent therapy, leaven the delusion to some degree – but probably only by means of a different delusion: ‘Life has good possibilities’; ‘we care about you now.  This is an offered delusion because our client is not in the now, only the then.  The therapist cannot really be blamed, then, because whether he knows it or not his powers are essentially nonexistent.  The client’s absurd nihilistic philosophy – the world is barbaric, humanity is a plague – is entirely the pain of the discarded child.  There are no other words it could find, at age 13 or 15 or 22, to explain death of self.

* The phenomenon of leaving home applies to this adult-infant.  The first leaving home failed: separation-individuation from mother.  The second leaving home failed: the child, empty and ungrown, is not able to have the greater autonomy required of puberty and adolescence.  And now, failed at both landmarks and every second and minute in between them, he must face the final horror: leave all nests, nurturance, dependency, need, simplicity, and become a grown-up.  This will be a living dying with the added human component of knowing it.  There has never been a bond, no Self involved in a relationship that could feed him psychic supplies to carry him through the winter, sustain him in the desert.  Therefore he can only need instant and magical gratification: winning the lottery.  Rodger could only supply himself with physical gratification, the rudiments of love: all the gourmet meals, and so much of them, he so voluptuously describes.

* The condition of many of my adolescent clients brings to mind, in the context of Rodger’s desperation, a quote from Woody Allen’s 1986 movie, Hannah and Her Sisters:
“You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz. More gruesome film clips, and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question ‘How could it possibly happen?’ is that it's the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is ‘Why doesn't it happen more often?’"
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Excerpts from Rodger’s manifesto:

“Despite father’s move to a much larger house and all the benefits that came with it, I still preferred my time at mother’s house, just because of her gentle and fun attitude and the energy of her household.  My mother indulged in me more than my father and Soumaya ever did.  She knew what I liked and what I didn’t like, and she would go out of her way to make my life pleasant and enjoyable.”

“Even the girls were taller than me.  In the past, I rarely gave a thought to it, but at this stage I became extremely annoyed at how everyone was taller than me, and how the tallest boys were automatically respected more.  It instilled the first feelings of inferiority in me, and such feelings would only grow more volatile with time.”

“By nature, I am a very jealous person, and at the age of nine my jealous nature sprung to the surface.”

“Jealousy and envy . . . those are two feelings that would dominate my entire life and bring me immense pain.  The feelings of jealousy I felt at nine-years-old were frustrating, but they were nothing compared to how I would feel once I hit puberty and have to watch girls choosing other boys over me.”

“As my fourth grade year approached its end, my little nine-year-old self had another revelation about how the world works.  I realized that there were hierarchies, that some people were better than others.”

“The time of fair play was at its end.  Life is a competition and a struggle, and I was slowly starting to realize it.  When I became aware of this common social structure at my school, I also started to examine myself and compare myself to these ‘cool kids.’  I realized, with some horror, that I wasn’t ‘cool’ at all.”

(Age 9).  “My first act was to ask my parents to allow me to bleach my hair blonde.  I always envied and admired blonde-haired people, they always seemed so much more beautiful.”

“My new hair turned out to be quite a spectacle, and for a few days I got a hint of the attention and admiration I so craved.”

“I was now a skateboarder, though not yet good enough to reveal myself as one to the kids at school.  This was the start of an obsession to copy everything the supposed ‘cool kids’ were doing.”

“They said that I would get a bedroom downstairs, one without my own bathroom or balcony.  I was furious, and I threw a huge crying tantrum.  Soon enough, father went ahead with the decision to buy this house.  I made a big deal about the possibility of not getting that lovely bedroom I wanted, and I kept sulking to father and Soumaya about it.”

“Childhood is fun, but when a boy reaches puberty a whole new world opens up to him . . . a whole new world with new pleasures, such as sex and love.  Other boys will experience this, but not me, it pains me to say.  That is the basis of my tragic life.”

“For the first week of Fifth Grade, I was at mother’s house.  I considered myself to be very ‘cool’ by now.  I had gotten better at skateboarding, I had blonde hair, and I dressed like a skateboarder.  I felt great anticipation for what the cool kids would think of me once they saw my transformation.  To my disappointment, no one really cared.  They were all in their own worlds.”

“When father’s week came, I felt frustrated because I didn’t have enough cool clothes there, and it took a while for me to get father to find the time to buy some for me.  Mother always got me what I wanted, right when I wanted it.  At mother’s house, all of my needs were met with excellent precision, whereas at father’s house, there would always be a time delay because father and Soumaya had less time for me, and paid less attention to me.”

“I didn’t want the school year to end.  Once Fifth grade was over, I will have to go to Middle School, and the prospect filled me with anxiety.  My little innocent mind always looked at Middle School as something far in the future, when I grow up.  I didn’t want to grow up.  I was enjoying my life as a kid right at that moment.  I didn’t think about the future.”

“My school arranged a camping trip for the entire Fifth Grade class before graduation day.  At first I didn’t want to go because I would be away from my parents for five days, something I was never used to.  I was afraid I would get too homesick.  I never spent more than one night away from my parents.  On the rare occasion that they had to go out of town for a few days and left me with a nanny, I would cry at night.”

“Only after the advent of puberty does the true brutality of human nature show its face.  Life will become a bitter and unfair struggle for self-worth, all because girls will choose some boys over others.  The boys who girls find attractive will live pleasure-filled lives while they dominate the boys who girls deem unworthy.”

“I saw eight-year-old boys at the skatepark who could do a kickflip with ease, and it made me so angry.  Why did I fail at everything I tried?”

“We traveled on Virgin Atlantic Upper Class.  I was extremely enthusiastic about this, as I always loved luxury and opulence.”

“As the Sixth Grade year came to a close, I felt dissatisfied and insignificant.  Indeed, a whole new world had opened up before me, and I had no idea how to prevail in it.  I still wanted to live as a child.”

“After I blew out my candles, I remember going outside and sitting by my mother’s pool to contemplate my life.  Sixteen . . . what an age to be.  I still felt like I was twelve.  Most teenagers will start driving at this age . . . I couldn’t even fathom myself driving.  The thought of it scared me.”

“At the end of the dinner, a few of Pollina’s friends came over.  They were all popular, good looking girls and boys.  They were the kind of people who I’ve always had the desire to be a part of, but was never able to fit in with.  Popular kids . . . cool kids.  When I heard them talking about their awesome lives and their parties, I had a breakdown right then and there.  I realized how much I’ve been missing out in my life, and I cried in front of everyone.  I felt like I would never have a life as good as theirs.  I told everyone that I wanted to commit suicide.”

“I began to have fantasies of becoming very powerful and stopping everyone from having sex.  I wanted to take their sex away from them, just like they took it away from me.  I saw sex as an evil and barbaric act, all because I was unable to have it.  This was the major turning point.  My anger made me stronger inside.  This was when I formed my ideas that sex should be outlawed.  It is the only way to make the world a fair and just place.  If I can’t have it, I will destroy it.”

“I spent more time studying the world, seeing the world for the horrible, unfair place it is.  I then had the revelation that just because I was condemned to suffer a life of loneliness and rejection, doesn’t mean I am insignificant.  I have an exceptionally high level of intelligence.  I see the world differently than anyone else.  Because of all of the injustices I went through and the worldview I developed because of them, I must be destined for greatness.  I must be destined to change the world, to shape it into an image that suits me!”

“I decided that my destiny in life is to rise to power so I can impose my ideology on the world and set everything right.  I was only seventeen, I have plenty of time.”

“I never thought nor cared about money before I turned 18, because I was still living like a child, with my parents handling the money and giving me the things I needed.  However, the more older I grew, the more I realized how important money was, and the more obsessed I would become about getting rich.  This obsession, which was barely taking root at the time, sparked a long relationship [with] the Lottery that would only end in disappointment and despair.”

“My mother never told me or my sister about any men that she dated.  She always kept that strictly private.  I hadn’t even met Jack yet.  He was worth well over $500 million, and he owned other mansions in Bel Air and Beverly Hills.  When I found out about this, I started to harbor the hope that my mother will get married to this man, and I will be part of a rich family.  This will definitely be a way out of my miserable and insignificant life.  Money would solve everything.  I started to frequently ask my mother to seek marriage with this man, or any wealthy man for that matter.  She always adamantly refused, and demanded that I stopped talking about it.”

“In truth, the move [to] Santa Barbara was actually a chance that I was giving to the world, not the other way around!  I was giving the world one last chance to give me the life that I know I’m entitled to, the life that other boys are able to live with ease.  If I still have to suffer the same rejection and injustice even after I move to Santa Barbara, then that will be the last straw.  I will have my vengeance.”

“My life would only have meaning if I could go through college with a girlfriend like her.”

“For the last months of Spring, I went home a lot because the loneliness in Santa Barbara was too stifling.  Going home to visit my parents was always an emotional refuge for me.”

“I am not part of the human race.  Humanity has rejected me.  The females of the human species have never wanted to mate with me, so how could I possibly consider myself part of humanity? Humanity has never accepted me among them, and now I know why.  I am more than human.  I am superior to them all.  I am Elliot Rodger . . . Magnificent, glorious, supreme, eminent . . . Divine!  I am the closest thing there is to a living god.  Humanity is a disgusting, depraved, and evil species.  It is my purpose to punish them all.  I will purify the world of everything that is wrong with it.  On the Day of Retribution, I will truly be a powerful god, punishing everyone I deem to be impure and depraved.”


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* James F. Masterson, M.D., The Search for the Real Self, The Free Press, 1988, p. 75.

** “According to Sullivan, schizophrenia occurs with the total collapse of those security operations upon which we depend to maintain our self-esteem.  When such defensive – or self-deceptive – measures fail altogether, the individual goes into an intense state of panic and simply comes ‘unglued,’ so to speak.  In this panic state, the individual has a terrifying vision of himself as a person of no value or worth.  Painful memories once repressed rise and come flooding into awareness with a gruesome, hallucinatory vividness.  As if in a trance, he suddenly ‘realizes’ that at no time in his life had he ever been a person who was fully human.  And, worst of all, comes the realization that as an individual he will always be hopeless and irredeemably flawed, that any action on his part would only be meaningless and futile, and that things will only continue to get worse as he is inexorably swept to his destruction.”  (p. 23)


Saturday, May 17, 2014

What a joker


Quite a few clients say they don’t remember their childhood.  Trauma is the rule-out explanation for this, generally.  For example, a 26-year-old man I counseled remembered nothing of his first sixteen years because of early trauma.  But more often, I believe the reason is the failure of life to stick to the depressed or depressively anxious child’s brain.  Existence is underlain by the music of pain, which distracts by dissociation and buries by repression.  Experience bounces off the brain, or slides down and under.

That was my childhood.  I have a few handfuls of memories, the sharpest no more than dust on powder, the rest a single cell or molecule’s worth and beneath snow.  What mostly stuck are body-mood sensations of condensed experience, and only a few of those.  I don’t remember any birthdays.  We had a Cape Cod vacation, I may have been eleven – I don’t confidently remember a restaurant’s wooden communal table, crowded convivial atmosphere, lobster and butter and bib.  There was a hyper-bleak Florida vacation, off-season, at my uncle’s West Palm Beach condominium: I had rubbed one eye so much that my parents took me to the emergency room.  What memories formed, always, were those accompanied by feeling.  I now picture, faded as a forgotten dream, Carlton West, my family’s guide during our Nantucket Island visit.  He was a lovely, engaging old black man who talked warmly to me as an individual.  I believe no one had ever done that before.  Most of the memories – elementary school boys and girls, they who touched or bothered me in some way.

What I want to touch on here is my peculiar root system where depression affected memory, and memory in depression made character.  Not a good character but a repugnant one, had anyone cared to look, to awaken it.  It took me many years, in child obliviousness, to realize my mother was a snob, maybe a contemptuous snob, maybe even a heartless snob.  She disclosed with a laugh one day that family friends, fellow Jews named Arsht, were known as “Ar-shit.”  I knew that “joker,” which she would label some inoffensive stranger, was the most ineluctable trashing of personhood possible.  By my early elementary school years I had absorbed that a joker was a pathetic, meaningless embarrassment of a person, so ludicrously shameful that all his efforts to be serious were a joke.

I remember never seeing one moment of charitable giving or hearing a kind word for someone from either parent, though these absences were numbed in a home with no anger or drama or energy anyway.  That is, until a day during my fifteenth or sixteenth year, after my neurotic shell had begun its growth, when my parents went for a ride in the country and I joined them.  We were on a road passing hills and in a tiny hollow there was a trailer park, the first in my sheltered life that I had ever seen.  Mother looked over at the encampment and uttered the word “junk.”  I was startled, not knowing what she meant.  I asked for clarification.  She meant the people living there.  This was the first, and in fact the only time that the molecular structure of the air in which I had grown up was revealed to me clearly.

A little boy who is quiet and shy, who leaves no footprint, never gets angry (I quietly went about sizzling ants on a light bulb and collected hundreds of ant corpses) and offends no one.  And who after first or second grade, maybe as far as third, had no heart for other people, only fear of the poor, distaste for the unlucky, no compassion for the sick.  (Two decades later, if my stepdaughter were ill and had a cough, my only reaction would be the puerile pun, “Dr. Cough-man, where is Dr. Cough-man?”)  My father was injured in a small explosion at his workplace during my mid-teens.  I don’t even recall that the family shared this with me beyond a passing mention, though he had been hospitalized, and I know that my only feeling was some pulsing oblivion.

My family never gave direct instructions in misanthropy.  The only race-tainted attitude I ever heard came from my aunt, a nurse at an elementary school which served black neighborhoods.  Some mild disdainful remark, once or twice.  But I absorbed my home, the feelings of the adults.  Later, sixteen years old and driving, I’d observe another driver being irresponsible and would get riled.  But then I’d see it was a black person and the anger would vanish: Can’t expect any better.

I believe the swan song of my loving feelings was my world of turtles.  From about age eleven to thirteen I had cumulatively shoplifted a dozen little red- and yellow-eared ones from Woolworth’s at Reisterstown Road Plaza, and had a fine mini-aquarium set up.  I loved those guys, would fondle them with ardor (they’d get a kiss or two), kept their home sparkling clean, fed them meal worms and grasshoppers, read about them, was aggrieved when one would get “sideways disease” (I guess my research was a bit lacking) and start swimming at a forty-degree angle, a harbinger of its eventual failing and dying.  When the first one left me, I was heartbroken and would have been inconsolable had I been able to reach out with a feeling to anyone.  I still wonder if Turkle remains buried, fifty years later, in the backyard of my Chisholm Drive home, in a wooden box with a new Kennedy half dollar.

But then some months later, a second one died, and the feeling was not there.  Flushing him down the toilet was adequate.  My closest friend Vincent and I, from first grade, became ships passing though we had some eighth grade classes together.  The depressive alienation, loss of heart and childhood, was so palpable and so impossible to do anything about as we drifted away.

I used, above, the term “condensed experience” to mean cumulative impact seeping into the floorboards of one’s life and to suggest that ‘you are what you breathe.’  The term comes from Stanislav Grof’s esoteric theory of birth trauma and its lifelong wake.  In an interview, Grof describes the Coex, or Condensed Experience:

“Let me clarify first what I mean by a Coex system. In traditional psychotherapies there's the idea that we have experienced a number of traumatic things in the course of our life, and that it's kind of a mosaic of trauma, whereas if you work on these past issues using experiential psychotherapy -- whether it's with psychedelics or some powerful non-drug techniques -- what you find is that these traumatic memories seem to form certain kinds of constellations. So for example, when somebody has problems with the self image, in this kind of work what can come up is a series of traumas that have damaged that person's self image, that come from different periods of that person's life, and they create a kind of psychological constellation where the connecting factor is the quality of the emotion. Sometimes it could be also a quality of the accompanying physical feelings. This kind of constellation functions in the unconscious, and when the individual is under the influence of that constellation, it colors the self-perception, self-image of that person, attitudes towards the world, certain specific forms of behavior, and so on. What is fascinating here is that each of those Coex systems seems to be anchored in a particular facet of the birth trauma.”*
Character is, like self-esteem, a concept that most people understand only by what they feel or want it to mean.  Self-esteem is not pride or egotism (or humility) or conviction of competence to handle life or justice anger or awareness of self-value, as much as it is the existence of a core feeling-identity.  It is not something a narcissist can have or that a brilliant achiever will necessarily have.  Similarly, character is not personal morals or humane behavior public or private as much as it is the core preconscious self: the electrons, the interstices of behavior and thought.  It is a scattered kaleidoscope of internal feelings bent mostly in this or that direction.

If I am representative, “moral” character as it reflects off other people and nature is the preponderance of positive self-feeling, or the absence of it.  It may seem to come from the child’s being treated well, but there is a deeper source which is the definition, the constituents, of “being treated well.”  I was handled with charity and kid gloves by all the adults, but I didn’t exist.  Birth trauma and parents’ depression and dissociation, their own absence of self, left me to be and to be treated as a role – boy, son, child, future piano virtuoso – whose unique energy could never emerge.  Without it, how can character grow?

There is another factor.  When a child’s self cannot emerge, it is pain that cannot be taken away by others.  “The people in the environment”** become disappointments.  Alienation, disappointment and pain hide beneath a complaisant persona but they seek egress,*** and possibly projective vengeance.  Had my parents been warm-hearted altruists it couldn’t have answered the pain and would have only confounded the terrain, just as mother’s holding a baby while stressed will teach his nervous system more tension than love.****  But words of pain and contempt – “he’s a joker” – would feel more ego-syntonic, like home.

I believe that character botches from these reasons and grows from love.  The love that helped me change, so many years later, was not self-love but grief: self-compassion.  I have found that there is no way to acquire this but to de-repress, to descend to the wounds at the beginnings of our life, to finally own rather than disown the child we had to forget in order to live.  But as this is a process that will succeed or fail on a continuum, so resurrected character will exist in different pieces and strengths.  Full grief will be full reunification, and we will return to primordial love and loving character.  Or so that is my theory.  I have only become a partial reclamation, capable of some empathy and selfless love.  Others feel and give more than I.  And beneath the stubborn repression, some parental shards of prejudice remain, quirky, vestigial.  If you prefer Miracle Whip to Hellmann’s mayonnaise, I will doubt your quality as a person.


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* “The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, presents the following transcript from the series Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.”  The Adventure of Self-Discovery with Stanislav Grof, M.D. at http://www.intuition.org/txt/grof.htm.  As Wikipedia says, “Grof is known for his early studies of LSD and its effects on the psyche – the field of psychedelic therapy.  Building on his observations while conducting LSD research and on Otto Rank’s theory of birth trauma, Grof constructed a theoretical framework for prenatal and perinatal psychology and transpersonal psychology in which LSD trips and other powerfully emotional experiences were mapped onto a person's early fetal and neonatal experiences.  At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Grof.

** Phrase borrowed from Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, also referenced at blog post Solipsism, http://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_20.html.

*** Word borrowed from Janov, from The Primal Revolution: “I believe that in every neurotic, by definition, there is some kind of secret craziness – some hidden sickness that erupts.  The psychotic is ‘up front’ with his insanity.  He can’t hide and put on a good social face.  But the neurotic has learned to do just that; he acts.  The act is perfected and unconscious.  But the early thwarted needs and impulses find devious routes for egress.”

**** “Conversely, a mother may sense in her infant a small negative reaction to the way she holds him and tense up in fear.  She is afraid she is a bad mother who does not know how to hold her baby.  Or else she decides that his negative response is directed against her; that he is a bad child who does not love being held in her arms.  So she is the mother who is likely to firm up her grip, and in doing so prove to the child that his efforts at bettering his lot, at adapting to how she holds him, have no such results and are better given up.”  Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress, p. 28, The Free Press, 1967.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Casual thoughts about parents and adults


I’m sure that one of the more objectionable parts of my being, manifest in my work, is a lack of pro forma respect for parents.  Another is my lack of pro forma respect for adults.  I do not assume that parents are ipso facto more right and rational and wise than their children; I do not assume that adults have some elevated status – prestige or droit du seigneur over children.  They do not deserve to sit in the front of the bus and relegate the kids to the back.

My reason for both convictions began as experience and attitude and later became considered.  While writing an autobiographical paper for a family counseling class, I discovered that over the course of my childhood I had grown a felt sense that adults are powerful but incompetent.  Years of watching adults being impotent to see or help me had crystallized this impression.  Later, looking at hundreds of parents and children and at my own largely incompetent rearing of my step- and adopted daughters, corroborated the sense.  Reading Gordon’s classic Parent Effectiveness Training, which states that “parents are persons not gods” and are not always wiser* than their children, added fuel.

Even ditching the attitude, I believe it is provable that all mental processes – grown-up and child – are equal.  A healthy adult consciousness – one that can consider factors intelligently and objectively and not through a warping agenda – must evolve from a child mind that is free to consider and reconsider, make mistakes without shame, be heard with respect.  Ages ago I read some historical passage opining that it is right for a man to “stammer” when describing his qualities.  If a child stammers while describing why he wants a pet tarantula not a dog, or why he dislikes his teacher, shouldn’t that be as respectable?

I am certain that adults would not like to feel that they are not special.  They do assume they are: It’s in the ether, much more adamantine and explicit than male superiority once was and still is to some degree.  Picture it: What would we have left if we are not the governors of our world, Caesars over the plebeians?  We’d be more Montessori-like, giving children great freedom.  We’d ask with deference their opinions, considering them as meaningful as our own, and would educate them without patronizing when they don’t have enough information to form an opinion.  We’d learn from them, and realize there’s a lot more ignorance in the world than we had thought – our own ignorance.

Imagine the atmosphere, the different tone of the world, where children have weight, equality.  You wouldn’t bark at your son for failing to turn in a school project any more than you’d slap your friend for failing a lunch date.  You’d inquire, be flustered, concerned.  The landscape would be crowded with more possibilities, much less grass we'd be allowed to step on.  But most of all, children would grow up to be very, very different, in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where they were equal participants in feeling and thinking and were the “central actor” in their own lives.**

Adults – I believe this is obvious – are the bullies, the entitled, because they are still embattled children pulled down beneath the waves and fighting – pushing other heads out of the way – for air.  Their needs were not met and they still need the goods, the respect, the power.  As hurt kids are jealous of others’ fun, psychologically dysfunctional teens see normal peers as “superficial” and have contempt for their immaturity or frivolity, so parents see the child’s mind as less, her feelings as childish, her wants as competition or as impertinent.  This is why I often try to help the parent feel heard, to cry for herself, though it’s her little son or daughter who is being tortured in the warped atmosphere of home.  If she can finally unload her grief impacted from a lifetime, finally be loved, then she has arrived, can “be there” for her child.


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* “How can anyone refute the idea that parents are wiser and more experienced than children?  It seems to be such a self-evident truth.  Yet, when we ask parents in our classes, whether their own parents made unwise Method I [authoritarian] decisions, they all say ‘Yes.’  How easy it is for parents to forget their own experience as children!  How easy to forget that children sometimes know better than parents when they are sleepy or hungry; know better the qualities of their friends, their own aspirations and goals, how their various teachers treat them; know better the urges and needs within their bodies, whom they love and whom they don’t, what they value and what they don’t.”  (Parent Effectiveness Training, pp. 253-254; Three Rivers Press, 1970, 1975, 2000.)

** Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, p. 7, earlier edition on-line facsimile: “The child has a primary need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center – the central actor – in his own activity.  In contradistinction to drive wishes, we are speaking here of a need that is narcissistic, but nevertheless legitimate, and whose fulfillment is essential for the development of a healthy self-esteem.”  Basic Books, 1981.