Spartacus was ODD

 

“Oppositional defiant disorder is a childhood disorder that is characterized by negative, defiant, disobedient, and often hostile behavior toward adults and authority figures primarily. In order to be diagnosed, the behaviors must occur for at least a period of 6 months.” (From PsychCentral)

Children who are defiant toward their parents are trying not to die. There is the phenom­enon of “engulfment,” where the child (or infant) feels his mind is being overcome, he is being obliterated, by the greater force of his mother’s needs, personality, emotions. You may be able to image this. Picture being very young, maybe four or five years old, or even three or two, and your hold on your self-thinking, your self-feeling, your self, is being swamped from above by this other consciousness. This all-powerful other says “I am first,” “Be this,” “Feel this,” when you need to be first, when you are something else, when you feel something else. Now, most (or many) parents mirror their infant’s feel­ings, reflect her identity, as she is the “central actor”* in her own life. She exists on her own, and is loved for being herself. But other parents see only themselves when they regard their child, though they are unaware of this. They are trapped within their never-met needs, and this child is their impertinence or their redeemer: he who interrupts them or will finally love them.

Under such gravitational pressure, the child will fall somewhere on a continuum of non-existing to existing:

The infant is poisoned by his mother’s merciless solipsism and withdraws deep within himself, later becomes a Schizoid Personality. Or he fuses with the parent’s expecta­tions, becomes the “as-if” personality.** Or somewhat older, she must rescue herself from their predation, from being erased, becomes “Oppositional-Defiant.” This one has the best chance of remaining alive.

I suppose children should be considered pathological if the defiant behavior becomes ingrained, becomes their character where everything parental is denied. I won’t do chores. I won’t do homework. I only say “no.” I disagree with everything. The sky is not blue. But I believe we’re required, here, to be fair: They are not different from us. All personalities are defense, all are safety-making. We are “people pleasers.” We are macho or girlish. We are intellectuals, contrarians. Some are “empaths” or expansive Mother Earth types or Narcissists or founts of equanimity or the Responsible Child.*** We have become what is needed to run from our earliest pain and injury. The only difference is that they are children, and our self-medication is for them to know their place.

Therapy can sometimes break open the adult personality to safety and healing. It takes a parent to heal a child.

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* Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, p. 7. “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.” Basic Books, 1981.

** http://www.angelfire.com/ut/inorbit/Alice%20Miller/Alice1.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helene_Deutsch.

*** https://elunanetwork.org/resources/family-roles-in-addicted-families-dr.-claudia-black.