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.