Seventh anniversary dismal summary

Yes, yes, yes, I’m sure there are some great parents out there. But I offered this obser­vation to my wife this morning, one that she recognized was true of her own long exper­ience: I have never known anyone who had a good childhood.

Not one person.

Of course, many people would disagree. Borrowing Christopher Hitchens’s homage to memedom: “The people who have to leave the island right away”* are those therapy clients who say their childhood was good or great. They are therapy clients.

For one, there’s all the first-person evidence, the stories of dysfunction that we know from Dr. Phil, Oprah, on-line magazines articles, op-eds, billboards, neurotic siblings, children whose friends are cutters and “emo’s,” public service announcements, first ladies, presidents with malaise or psychopathy, etc. ad infinitum. I have long been bone-tired saying and writing the legitimate terms that dry into clichés: trauma, abuse, neglect.

But then there’s the law, the psychological law that says children need certain gifts in their formative relationships and that without them, they will suffer. The suffering might be ignorant until a therapist comes along to identify it, or until the adult wonders what’s wrong or someone else notices it in that person.

The main gift is love with empathy. From my cautious perspective, I’d say the word “love” is such a formless receptacle for what anyone thinks or claims it is, and for feelings that may be its opposite – need and power, for example – that it must always be refined by the addition of empathy.

Empathy, meaningfully understood, is to be heard and accepted for who you are and to be respected and appreciated for it.

So, I am affirming that none of my clients or present or past friends had parents who knew love with empathy. The parents were incomplete people themselves, too preoc­cupied with their own lives and their own subterranean burden of childhood history to have clear eyes and pure, patient attention to their children. They were burdened by attitude: unhealed pain and unmet needs that morphed into feelings of entitlement and ascendancy, impatience and superior wisdom. They were burdened by depression and anxiety and personality disorder and solipsism, which infected their children, often invisibly.

I think it’s time to recognize, as a truth worthy of our landmark age of Trump, that being a parent is one of the most peculiar fates possible to a human being. It is natural, but so is death, and most people are not ready for that. A person lives with her own struggles, her own starved need for an empathic dependency, then has a child whose life requires the nearly abject sacrifice of hers for all the years that might otherwise be spent repairing or consoling her deep wounds. I believe it makes sense to say that the absence of instinct in our species and its replacement by “free will” that is perpet­ually bent by our past, is the essence of human nature and the saboteur of the caregiving relationship.

Look around you and see that almost everything felt and acted comes from buried, unknown reasons. That good acts are produced by love or pain or manipu­lation, that a kind and giving person may be the “cancer personality.”** That no one knows what fairness is. That failure may be success: the success of one’s painful truth emerging and screaming and deserving its breakdown. That intelligent people are among the most wounded, with beliefs that are destructive of society. And see that our blind endless carnival was born of two people.

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* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjKJ92b9Y04, at 11:25.

** https://selfcareresource.sg/the-cancer-personality/, http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2014/05/on-developing-cancer-and-how-to-stop-it.html.