Shrapnel #1: Facts to hate but swallow

Poisonous grandparents

I have heard way too many clients claim that their awful, even monstrous, unrepentant parent is nevertheless a wonderful grandparent to the children. In a kind of self-hypnosis, they say: “My children need a grandparent” or “they adore their Pa-Pa.”

I believe – no, I insist – this is impossible. Paterfamilias has never lost his poisons and will have invisible poisons that go straight into the grandchild. He had no love for you, so what he gives your child is not love. Father preferred your younger brother over you – and look how he turned out. Grandparents like this – who may have shamed you, raped you habitually, called you worthless and a fuck-up whose every action he had to sadistically do over, who made you go back outside and defeat the bullies who had just beaten you up and not return until you had “won,” who kicked you out of the house at 13, who beat you with high heels or big belt buckles, who lied to hospital staff about your suicide attempt: “It was an accident,” so you could continue working and supporting his drugged ass, who gave you a full bottle of whisky on your twelfth birthday, who sabotaged your going to college, who let her “man” sexually abuse you so he’d stay around, who donated you to his best buddy Ken, who wailed, when her brother died, that she now had nothing to live for, or edified you that she had never wanted children* – are “good” by the power of spite, by sneering revenge to make you feel awful all over again. They are preferring your son or daughter exactly as they preferred your sibling, from the same immaturity. They know how to get down on the floor and play: They can use that part of their inner child. And, the same as competent psychopaths, they can impersonate the patient and wise elder.

They are doing damage to your child that will be lifelong. Your little boy knows grandpa or grandma sees you as sorry baggage, but he can’t say anything. You are wilting in his eyes, slowly and inexorably. And you are being rejected again, time-release fashion, by two generations. Grandmother’s poison pours in her tone, her sarcasm, the tension in the room, the likelihood that one grandchild is favored over the other, in her hegemony in the house that turns you, too, into a child.

You are blind, and you are needy, and you are a dearly needy child if you think this is a “wonderful” grandparent. Do you even know what love is?

Non-evolution

 

In this Year 2018, the preconscious** of men still feels superior to women; of whites, superior to blacks; of the rich, superior to the poor; of adults, superior to children; of the intellectual, superior to the “other.” These sicknesses are not vestigial to history. They are viruses continuously swept to the four winds and seven seas, nourished by the words and faces and actions of the parent generation.

Psychohistorian Lloyd deMause writes of the evolution of childhood through the “six psychogenic modes” that prevailed at different stages in history. They are: Infanticidal mode, abandoning mode, ambivalent mode, intrusive mode, socializing mode, and the present-era helping mode. Ambivalent mode, for example, around 1200 A.D.***, embodied the “parental wish”: “Mother: ‘You are bad from the erotic and aggressive projections put in you.’” Socializing mode, around 1700 A.D.: “Mother and Father: ‘We will love you when you are reaching our goals.’” Intrusive mode, after 1500 A.D.: “Mother: ‘You can have love when I have full control over you.’” Studying “the history of child abuse,” deMause said that “The propensity to reinflict childhood traumas upon others in socially approved violence is actually far more able to explain and predict the actual outbreak of wars than the usual economic motivations, and we are likely to continue to undergo our periodic sacrificial rituals of war if the infliction of childhood trauma continues.” Nevertheless – “Our task now must be to create an entirely new profession of ‘child helpers’ who can reach out to every new child born on earth and help its parents give it love and independence.” And “such a parent outreach movement is already under way in a few cities. . . .”****

Will there be a next psychogenic mode, in several hundred years, where the feeling of superior no longer exists?

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* These examples are gleaned from around three weeks of sessions.

** Preconscious: “In psychoanalysis, preconscious are the thoughts which are unconscious at the particular moment in question, but which are not repressed, and are therefore available for recall and easily ‘capable of becoming conscious’ – a phrase attributed by Sigmund Freud to Joseph Breuer.” (Wikipedia)

*** Rough dates, from my looking at deMause’s rough chart. http://psychohistory.com/books/foundations-of-psychohistory/chapter-4-the-psychogenic-theory-of-history/.

**** deMause – https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/the-history-of-child-abuse-lloyd-demause-the-journal-of-psychohistory/.