Parent corrective #2: Own it

When I was stepfathering my first wife’s two daughters (ages five and eight when I appeared on the scene), I was so poorly constructed a human being that I could not have qualified, on any learnèd scale, as father, husband or adult. A deceptive part of my makeup was a fusion of emotional repression, dissociative passivity, intellectuality and humor, which made me seem much more benign than I was. The girls grew up and survived me and their Borderline mother with more good qualities than deficits, though that is, of course, difficult to measure. They’ve had long less-toxic relationships, productive lives, your standard mixture of healthy and neurotic attitudes. Despite what I assume to be their generally and maybe strongly negative feelings about me, I know that I snuck in a few good influences.

However, if they (now in their forties) had grown up to become, or later became, criminals, rageaholics, abusive parents, petty human beings, therapy and psych unit patients, I would be able to take significant credit for that, too.

I don’t mind being what the hell I am.

You see, it’s not for me to determine that they “should” be any certain way (or think about me in any certain way) based on the child­hood I provided them. Let’s say that Karen, who is in what I assume to be a fine marriage, fell into hypomanic nonsense mode (silly happy thinking and bubbly acting) along with depressions of feeling empty and meaningless. What might be called “bipolar.” That would be strongly related to my influence. Her body might have felt-sensed,* at age eight through fifteen, that my humor and graciousness were all performed for me (to make me feel narcissistically good about myself). Acute a child as she was, she would have felt something odd, something missing and emptying in those involved moments. And then, all the poison between me and the girls’ mother; my failure to know what happened at home when I was at work; my momentary ejaculation of a terrible trashing of her friend; the unthinkable neglect of our pet; my staying, my leaving, my returning without even noticing their feelings. Ad infinitum. Those losses, the chemistry of those sensations, could later manifest in a cornucopia of dysfunction. Of course, there would be countless non-family ingredients along the way, of air and time and human interaction coming to and from her affected being. There would be her own agency, succumbing to her injuries, fighting them, using them, denying them. But beneath all of it there would be the parent blueprint, the conductor’s baton. “But there be bad and good, as the pirates say,”** and we parents need to own them. All of them.

Of course, wouldn’t it have been lovely to know enough and care enough when the blueprint was still being drawn? 

⛮          ⛮          ⛮

In turn, the parents too often tend to reject responsibility for their children’s emotional anguish. This phenomenon may well explain the positions taken by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), a national organization of 100,000 parents of disturbed offspring, whose informal rallying cry can be characterized as “We are not to blame.”***

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing process. See – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/01/rabbit-hole.html.

** Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Prologue, https://www.amazon.com/Something-Wicked-This-Comes-Greentown-ebook/dp/B00C2C637I#reader_B00C2C637I.

*** Peter R. Breggin, M.D., Toxic Psychiatry, St. Martin’s Press, 1991, p. 34.