Military life is a second abusive childhood

For many soldiers and veterans, the military years are a second abusive childhood. There is the recapitulated flawed separation-individuation phase, the first few years when recruits are the vassals of superiors who establish arbitrary rules, exercise sole power and require absolute obeisance. They are essentially tabula rasa again, with a few genetic predispositions. They sacrifice and subsume themselves or don't survive. Immature parents create sick bonds during the first three years which are the starting gate of personality disorders such as Borderline Personality. Will the infant gain the potential for healthy autonomy, or will the psychic umbilical cord remain attached in engulfment and rejection, in abject dependency, in schizoid alienation, in psychopathy or narcissism? Will the infant soldier somehow become an individual, or will his fundamental inchoateness be schooled by a new troubled master?

Following this second separation-individuation is their second latency stage and adolescence (the remainder of their original four- or six- or eight-year contract) where this time they must ditch whatever sense of a complex and caring world they may have had. Their friendships are forged in the landscape of subjection, humiliation, near-seamless surveillance and a life whose theme song is “we live to kill people.” Friendships that form in combat are a unique blood bond, or rather a bleeding bond where love is trauma. In an ambiance of two-dimensional humanity – right/wrong, good/evil, strong/weak, masculine/feminine, categorical/indecisive, calloused/emotional, superior/inferior – the formatively-injured psyche is recaptured and re-tortured right at the moment (late teens, early twenties) when it might have meaningfully escaped the family hypnosis.*

A veteran, twenty years post-service, said during a session: “They try to break you then rebuild you into the kind of person they want you to be. They put a way of thinking into your brain, different from normal people. You’re told to end people’s lives.” “They take empathy away from you. They definitely strip you of that.” “They want you to be submissive to them. They want to break your mindset. It’s definitely a cult.”

A Psych textbook, many years ago, cited research indicating that soldiers who came from a troubled childhood were, in similar combat or combat-adjacent circumstances, more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than those who came from a healthier childhood. They are also the ones who, in high school, are more likely to choose the military, a peculiar choice – and occupation – when one’s country's survival is not at stake. Few if any other professions feature a prisoner re-education camp format or require the calcifying of one’s heart and the re-infantilizing and concretizing of one’s psyche.

More than a few of the veterans I’ve seen suffered deliberate, ongoing mental torture by one particular psychopathic superior officer, someone who should have been cowering in a dungeon, not cavalier in the upper ranks. These veterans were changed forever, raped to a new philosophy by the evil they endured in lonely, masculine indifference within a Kafka-esque FUBAR bureaucracy conceived by sociopaths over many illustrious generations.

It's one of the amazing ignorances of the world that recruits don’t know they are entering their second childhood when they join the military. They believe they are starting their adult life, maybe a life of great meaning and idealism. Instead, they have fallen backwards into the formative tragedy of their lives – child's helplessness and confusion and powerlessness, bullying, loneliness, unfair punishments, tedious chores, that awful second- or seventh-grade teacher – a nightmare of psychological regression. And permanent regression, because they leave the military as they left their childhood, having never formed their own center. The “false self” – a seminal principle in psychology – is the consequence of most lives that adapted, from infancy, to the needs and neuroses of powerful others. The military man and woman have redoubled that falseness, present upon past. They don’t know their self, twice co-opted.

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* A term conceived by psychotherapist David Calof in Multiple Personality and Dissociation: Understanding Incest, Abuse and MPD.

The most eye-rolling of defenses

My client, a retired physician, has always gone astray in her search for a good man. She is attracted to confident, masterful (and well-dressed) men, feeling implicitly just right to want to be taken care of and protected. I, on the other hand, a hard-working male therapist, feel manly and good to be the earner, providing a sense of security for my wife.

Here we are, two of the billions of adequately intelligent people who marched brainwashed into the right belief system bequeathed to us by history and television, the stalwart man and the limp starry-eyed woman.

This may be a stretch (I don’t think so), but I suspect that even the sweetest guys and the toughest women harbor, beneath their Freudian preconscious, these same ego-syntonic* and delicious urges: protectee and protector. Ayn Rand, most adamantine of women with her “virtue of selfishness,” her casting deviators from her Objectivist philosophy into the fire, her apotheosis of atheism and capitalism and her deification of rationality, believed that the essence of femininity is male hero-worship and therefore that a woman should never be, for example, president of the United States.

I think it’s valid to ask if these stereotypes (or archetypes**) are fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong. Can there actually be something instinctively “looking up” (at a man) in the female genome, something “looking down” in boys’ and men’s? What if world history has simply perpetuated certain self-medicating defense mechanisms as prosthetic egos when real self-esteem is lacking? “Boys better than girls” no different than "men superior to women" no different than “Whites superior to Blacks,” no different than Jews more “chosen” than you,*** no different than parents better than their children?

If we look to depth psychology – the terrible place where we are all still three years old, the inner child crawling wounded from infancy to grave – we’ll find that my client's and women's need to need is half right and that men's script of superiority is all wrong. How? The women have allowed themselves, maybe unconsciously, to feel dependency, the unfinished child’s rightness to have someone to lean on, to collapse to, to look to for wisdom, the eternal bond to the perfect(-seeming) Mother or Father. Where women have erred is in accepting that it is the opposite sex, rather than the Platonic parent, who stands on a pedestal in their DNA.

The emotionally ingenious men who can feel this dependency in themselves will be holistically cleared of a poisonous obstruction in their lives, the conceit of macho godliness. They will be rid of a delusion that slowly breaks their backs, warps their spirit, and cuts short their lives. Ayn Rand was right about this: These false Atlases need to shrug. She didn’t know that they need to fall into their mother’s arms, in fact or memory or loss.

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* “Ego-syntonic” – basically meaning “in harmony with one's dysfunction.” For example, someone with Major Depressive Disorder doesn't like being depressed. But a Depressive Personality-disordered person is ego-syntonically fine to be miserable, morose, pessimistic, sure that the future will be as bleak as the past and present.

** Carl Jung conceived a few archetypes embodying traditional male and female roles, such as the hero, the great mother, the wise old man, the maiden, the anima and animus.

*** TPS is of Jewish lineage and therefore feels that he has standing to make objective comments about the tradition.

Anger or dissolution

A middle-aged woman said that her father was absent in her childhood. “I didn’t like him.” Growing up, she felt that she always had to be “big, strong and brave” because “there was no one to take care of me.” Her stepmother beat her severely. “That’s why I’m angry at women.” Despite “good” therapy a few years ago, her inner child still feels alone and afraid.

“I don’t give mercy and grace to women.” “I don’t like weak women.”

When she got cancer, her husband failed to be her caretaker. “He was concerned for himself.” However, she was “independent.” She joked about having to “kill him.”

Once she was a “pathetic people-pleaser,” a codependent enabler. No longer.

I confronted one of her statements: “I don’t like weak women.” What did she mean by “weak”? Sensitive, feelings easily hurt. I told her that she had been a child whose feelings mattered to no one, she had had to be “big,” and still feels she must be brave and strong and independent. She doesn’t dislike “weak” women: She sees sensitive, feeling women and her aged child feels envious, down to the soles of her feet, of their normal humanity. She was made to be a hard shell and they could be filled with hurt, love, need, life.

She saw that this was true. What could help her? Grieve her stolen childhood, the greatest tragedy that can happen to a person. Dismantle the barbed barricade around her heart. But that unraveling would demolish her powerful anger, her identity attitude, her bigness, her “independence,” her strength. She gave me a saucy stare.

We should all be able to predict, correctly, that she is a Trump admirer and voter.

I probably should have written "here-and-then"

Third in a likely sporadic series of Pessimistic tidbits

There are doubtless some do-gooders who do prosocial acts for sick reasons. They may, for example, hate the rich or be “people-pleasers” whose self-value is to exist for others. (Which is not real self-esteem.) One can bet, though, that most liberals are average people with a good heart. “Populists,” on the other hand, can be globally categorized as neurotic, a term describing persons who unconsciously seek redress for childhood needs and pain through present means. Psychologically, their present is their revenge for their past. The main reason Democrats are feeling helpless to reach their Trumpian nemeses is that they are trying to reason with people who seem to be in the here-and-now, but are in the there-and-then. (Comment to David French's 2/9/25 New York Times article "The Populist Cure Is Worse than the Elite Disease," https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/455qtk?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

Therapy is a nonjudgmental process. But can we help a bad person?

Here is an indigestible paradox: Therapy is the most successful when it’s the shallowest and least effective. This is to say that Cognitive Therapy can work for anybody, as it’s based on the assumptions that (a) dysfunction is a matter of wrong thinking, and (b) irrational or pessimistic thoughts can be changed by logic and optimism. These assumptions could apply to anyone regardless of their moral system or political ideology. As it goes, the Cognitive approach can only help people who are heavily invested in their severed head, who live in their head and prefer to banish their historical body of emotion, felt sense, pain and developmental abort.

Depth therapy, that changes emotional chemistry by reaching to the origin causes of dysfunction, cannot help individuals who are married to blaming the world, to their love of a sociopathic president, to their antisocial ideologies and attitudes. These cognitive-conceptual stances are based in deep, early-onset pain that they will critically resist feeling else they will collapse into inchoate helplessness.

A woman whose childhood anger is redeemed in hateful leaders and governmental policies. A married couple who prefer the military life – seventy percent of the year – to raising their children, leaving them with friends and relatives. People with a vengeance sense of good and evil, who are deeply and complacently repressed, living on the surface of themselves and not wanting to reach or know their truth. Therapy will not help them.

But Cognitive Therapy can.

Maybe who we really are

Another in a possible sporadic series of Pessimistic tidbits.

I’ve seen a few thousand people in therapy over the past 26 years. Regardless of what they may initially say – “I had a great childhood”; “My parents never hit me” – the fact is that none of them received respectful empathy and unconditional love in their childhood. This doesn’t necessarily mean they had terrible caregivers They may have had distracted, or weak, or immature parents who “meant well.” (Note my challenge: “Parents don’t do their ’best.’ They do their feeling.”) When you consider that the therapy population is only a fraction of the people who are hurt and damaged in their formative years, it is theoretically plausible that a majority of our citizens harbor buried anger, feeble and selective empathy, and a fundamental lack of prosocial feeling. It would take a powerfully inspiration personage – like Obama – to pull them out of their primary self-regard and into a prosocial spirit (“We are all brothers and sisters”; “I care about the poor, the homeless, etc.”). Trump may represent the default id that is angry, self-focused and nihilistic. He may have to fail spectacularly before people’s better angels again find room in their psyche. (Comment to a Washington Post article.)

Ruminating / Overthinking

One in a possible sporadic series of Pessimistic Tidbits.

Overthinking is a form of self-medication, similar to alcohol and drug use, excessive exercise, continual social media immersion, chocolate, etc. It often is kick-started in adolescence, when unhealed childhood pain and injustice must be escaped, moved on from. People escape from feeling by falling upward into their head. It will feel better to think questions and options than to drown in helpless feeling. Like other self-medications, what starts off being helpful or even life-saving will eventually become a major encumbrance. Depth therapy says that returning – regressing – to the original pain and expelling it in its raw form will undermine the need to escape into ruminating and racing thoughts. (New York Times comment, https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/44or4o?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

Reparenting

Reparenting in psychotherapy is a term, and concept, fraught with mischief, nonsense and some valid theory and practice. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy can regress adult clients back to childhood and infancy by memory-feeling access not hypnosis. They might “call out for Mommy and Daddy” and let “imprinted” pain out, a healing process. Paul Vereshack, a Primal Therapist of a slightly different stripe, sometimes encouraged patients to regress to a child state where he, the parent figure, could facilitate reliving and healing:

A woman in her thirties lies in my primal room, adrift in the winds of time. She unconsciously reaches for my hand and begins to play with my fingers. The object of her touching is not romantic or sexual. It is something deadly serious in her search for growth. Slowly she plays with each finger and then, quite unconsciously, she closes my hand and makes it into a fist. She begins to whimper. She is six years old now and she recalls how her daddy used to beat her with his fist. Unconscious necessity, below the level of logic, has impelled her to arrange a congruence; the fist of her therapist has been brought to match the fist of her father. The tumblers fall, defenses clear away and the original event is re-experienced.

Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis featured, for a long time, a Nazi-like version of reparenting ruled over by cult leader-like Jacqui Schiff. Physical violence and pain, authoritarian power and control were inflicted on adult patients who would be treated like infants and prisoners – diapered, toileted, tied down and beaten. (See “A Most Dangerous Method” by Tori Marlan, Reader, August 10, 2000.)

Most contemporary definitions of reparenting have avoided these extremes. They were, I believe, chastened by the scandals associated with Schiff’s use of Transactional Analysis and, to a lesser degree, the radical nature of early Primal Therapy. Now, reparenting is “the conscious act of providing ourselves with the consistent care and understanding we may have missed as children.” It is “a process where an adult works to meet emotional or physical needs that were not met in childhood.” “By nurturing and validating this vulnerable aspect of ourselves, we learn to provide it with the love and protection . . .” Wikipedia features a throwback definition: “Reparenting is a form of psychotherapy in which the therapist actively assumes the role of a new or surrogate parental figure for the client.” “Typically, reparenting starts with the regression of the client to the child ego state. The therapist accomplishes this by partaking in child-rearing acts such as bottle feeding, lap pillows, and other techniques.”

Steven Levenkron, specialist in anorexia and other self-destructive behaviors, described his creation, “nurturant-authoritative psychotherapy,” as reparenting. He worked with adoles­cents who had lost trust in their adult caregivers, no longer emotionally leaned on them, and came to depend on their own self-soothing and identity-forming behaviors. (An anorexic girl might pride herself on being “especially thin.”) Levenkron wanted his young clients, set adrift within themselves, to eventually regress to the child needy of a strong and caring parent figure – himself. To do this, they would have to reach a crisis of dependency, the stressful dilemma of choosing to remain in their pathological state or giving their pain to their therapist re-parent.

I see reparenting as theoretically radical yet valid and therapeutically gentle yet unlikely to happen. No adult can or should be regressed to his baby on fire in the crib – birth trauma – or to helpless, preverbal infancy. For this to be accomplished, all adult defenses, especially the concept-forming, concept-infested mind, would have to be extin­guished – an impossibility. While adults are, in essence, their inner child as identity and feeling founda­tion, they are nevertheless always in the present and must maintain their adult persona. By default, then, Levenkron’s method of reparenting is the only one that may be possible. His anorexic, self-mutilating and obsessive-compulsive children and teens really do need someone to lean on once they are alienated from their parents. Whether this can actually happen in once, twice, or three-times-a-week therapy is the question. Fairbairn’s theory of “return to the bad object” would object. The child would be at a loss – the greatest loss possible – to forsake her frustrating parent for a new-and-improved professional version.