A different Golden Rule

I learned something disturbing during a recent group teletherapy session. As the person who provided the information was not my client, but her boyfriend who joined the session from England, it seems OK to reveal it and discuss it a little.

The young man told me that “growing up in England,” the doctrinal atmosphere and clear message was that “you’re not special for having a problem.” My note continued: “He suggested that this was the adults’ approach not only to other adults, but to children, too.”

Hearing this, I could instantly feel the depressing atmosphere of that indictment. How? I believe there must have been something in my childhood that agreed with the sense that the adults’ world was the world and that it would be impossibly absurd and absurdly impossible to stop it in its tracks to attend to children’s grievances. Though I some­how “knew” this philosophy, I experienced a very sick feeling – a sense of its insane rightness, its inevitable prevailing – and the knowledge that this sick culture had ruined the young man comprehen­sively: by the snuffing out of his emotional center, and by his “brainwashed” acceptance of it. This proved to be one-half of my client’s relationship problem: She was often extreme, emotionally wounded and bleeding. He was sedate, reasonable, intellectual, corpse-like.

I do not know if England in a general way writes off its youth, or if this individual was so perceptive to have read the air of his history and distilled its terse meaning: “You’re not special for having a problem.” Picture what this means. A “problem” for a child is pain and emotional injury that will develop into structural disorders that, if not helped, will warp him for the rest of his life. And it should be ignored. And the parent’s construing pain and injury as an unworthy “problem” is to be fatally cynical about oneself, abdicating of one’s self, and then abdicating the child.

I don’t think this is the American emotional culture. Is it British? Is the widespread, if not universal, problem of absence of empathy compounded there by the “golden rule of indifference”: Freeze others the way you’ve been frozen?