The disappointment

If there is to be a Volume II of my book, “I Forgive” and Other Delusions (at Amazon Kindle and soon to be in paperback), it may be comprised of my most unpleasant, dismal and hopeless articles. The following mini-piece is a sneak preview of that sort of content.

 

Innumerable adults remain emotionally dependent on their poisonous parents. “Emotional dependency” means, in these cases, that the parent, by abuse and neglect, did not cultivate the psycho-developmental growth of their child, so the child-now-adult remains in a permanent state of neediness and partial state of regression. Ask a healthy adult if he still “needs” his good parents and he may say (if he were poetical): “Yes, I cherish their love and my loving them, because I need love and beauty in my life.” Ask an emotionally damaged adult if he still needs his toxic parents and he may say “not really, but I indulge them or I feel an obligation to maintain a relationship.” But it is the person with love who will survive on his own, and the deprived one who will be needy, as needy as a four-year-old is for his mommy and daddy.

 

Some clients care to consider “autonomy” and self-esteem as values in their life and goals in their therapy. To these clients I may propagandize about “cutting the toxic umbilical cord” or, less ultimate, reconfiguring the cord to where it’s they who now set the terms. “Yes, mother, you were quite the dud. Thanks to the environment you and father created, I grew up to have no desire to live, no sense of the value of life, a feeling of cradle-to-grave torturous tedium. I won’t cut you out. But if we talk, it will be when I’m up to it. I won’t be picking up the phone when you call: It’s not enjoyable. We won’t be coming to each other’s place for dinner, for Christmas, or for family conversations. You can see your grandchildren under supervision.”

 

Even this rewriting of the relationship will be too much for most clients, which I understand. The idea – or the feeling – of taking a position that says “it’s over” in a complete way will feel like death, a new kind of death never before considered. I then point out that there are no happy choices. Staying tied to a starving and destructive parent will be to remain enslaved and to never grow. Seeing the parent through different eyes, termination resolution, will feel like a kind of suicide. But if the goal is to be more of a person, no longer a baby in a cold crib, then there is only one choice.

 

A client said that she dearly wants a hug from her solipsistic mother. We’ve talked about the parent’s universe-deep imprisonment inside her repression of her own childhood disaster, six walls that keep her safe from pain and don’t allow empathy or love out. But what if . . . what if the mother could crack open the wall and feel the truth, her childhood losses, ignite her self-protected frozen heart? Wouldn’t that rebirth their bond, enable her to finally see her daughter as a separate loved person? Wouldn’t that "automatically,"* as Alice Miller said in The Body Never Lies, produce empathy to others?

 

It would not. Emotional reliving would only shrink her to her bereft and needy child. It could not turn her into an adult, least of all a wise, strong and compassionate one. The daughter, my client, would not be receiving the hug she craves but would be giving one, to her little mother in shambles.

 

Best to walk away or stand apart, best to try to be a free adult, as awful as that may seem.

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* "Anxious to stay in line with the system of moral values I had accepted, I did my best to imagine good feelings I did not possess while ignoring the bad feelings I did have. My aim was to be loved as a daughter. But the effort was all in vain. In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place. On the other hand, I learned that a feeling of love will establish itself automatically (for example, love for my children or love for my friends) once I stop demanding that I feel such love and stop obeying the moral injunctions imposed on me. But such a sensation can happen only when I feel free and remain open and receptive to all my feelings, including the negative ones." Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2004, page 20.