Why do so many people split off and project their childhood hurt and anger into the world, hating or blaming individuals, entire races, enemy political parties, “God” or “life” for their problems, while many other people internalize, do not project, and find acceptance and grace with their formative psychic injuries? It can’t simply be a matter of emotional immaturity, as those who stuff their pain, or sublimate it into positive pursuits, or fail, or develop psychosomatic illnesses, can also possess the prepotent ungrown “inner child.”
It’s also not just a factor of receiving the listening ear and empathy of an “enlightened witness,” Alice Miller’s concept of the one person in a child’s lonely life who hears her pain. While I attribute many of my problems to my parents’ failure of love and bond, and full absence of any such witness, I am not cruel or blaming, do not send ill will to others, though I do practice justice. In my case, it was a powerful though incomplete emotional breakthrough that turned a scarred-over heart into an open one. Before this happened, I would feel grim superiority and satisfaction at others’ misery. I would be blind to my daughters’ distress.
Many people, though, never have a breakthrough to their real, child self. Yet they don’t become delusional haters and blamers as so many adults are today.
I suspect that the parents of externalizers preached and enforced a world of injury, lovelessness and other-blame upon them. These were parents – like those of my clients – who could not accept responsibility for their own problems, for their hurtful parenting, or for their children’s valid reactions of rage, defiance and misbehavior. With no support and empathy given them, the children could only be alone in the world to suffer, which would be intolerable. They would necessarily grow up to send their pain outward and away from themselves. They would now not be alone.
I have implied that we must grasp
the rightness of a young person’s externalizing of responsibility. Children are not
blamable when they react negatively to mistreatment. They are right to believe
other people are the cause of their problems. This should be obvious. But for parents to see that their children are innocent victims is to feel their own innocence neglected, the hardness with which they were treated when they were children, their own invisibility.
It's true that developmental abort and anger, as much as blaming, are the hallmarks of the Republican-Trumpian character. It is astonishing to me that “How immature!” isn’t the verdict we hear from the mountaintops when botched infants like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Lauren Boebert, Josh Hawley, Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and other delusionists speak their nonsense. Cries about a stolen election or the condoning of an insurrection are a child’s ejaculations of misery and impotence. How do responsible voices in the media not name this?
I’ve suggested that the ungrown psyche is the theme uniting most people’s character. Could it be that liberal-progressive ideology is the childlike counterpart to infantile right-thinking? It imagines, as children are pushed to do, that we should all be here for each other, holding hands, that people should not be selfish, that benign authority should establish our goals and give us inspiration. If this is so, then we are left with differences more nuanced than principled, where hurt children may move imperceptibly toward rage and blame or toward depression and self-canceling. I know that many of us see nothing nuanced or subtle in the new Republicans, lying and fantastical as they are. But they are young and see us, fearfully, the same way.
