Adult clients, talking about their childhood, sometimes say that they were expected or required to “respect” their parent. This is typically described as an assumed feature of their punitive or unloving home. One “respects” one’s parents because . . . simply “because” the parent, or parenthood, merits it. This notion is almost universally internalized by the young innocent and carried into adulthood, where even middle-aged clients assume their parents deserve respect.
Heretofore, there’s been occasion to state the unpleasant obvious: Authoritarian parents may believe they deserve their child’s admiration or even hero-worship, but that would be a delusional belief in many circumstances: You can’t possess the chemical feeling of admiration for someone who hurts, disrespects or intimidates you. I will say that these parents conflate respect with “fear,” that it’s their child’s fear and awe they require.
As true as this is, a significant, outlier point is missed, a point I have missed until this week. It’s that “respect” is not a feeling a young child is capable of experiencing. It is a sophisticated feeling based on years of life experience, some depth knowledge of the proposed recipient of it, and a sense of moral value. It is a feeling about someone’s moral action or attitude or philosophy – something well beyond the ken of a child. A child doesn’t respect his friend for his football skills: He likes or admires him or envies the skills. A man respects (or envies) another’s integrity or courage. We don’t “respect” someone for winning at arm-wrestling or for finishing a crossword puzzle. We respect his losing with grace, his humble acceptance of his ignorance. By this understanding, we see that pathological parents are not just requiring something they don’t deserve: They are requiring the non-existent.
We also see that adults often live on illusory or brand-name concepts to which we attach misinterpreted and tendentious feelings. It would serve people well to drop some acid on certain well-worn assumptions.
