Early in my
counseling career I noticed what may be a psycho-analogue to Newton’s third law
– ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.’ Though less reliable than physics, it is:
The specific kind of
psychic injury a child suffers is the specific kind he feels impelled to suffer
upon others later in life.
A man who was
humiliated as a child feels right to humiliate his own children or other
people. The patronized girl will someday
condescend to those who strike her as inferior, or possibly, superior. The “sarcastrated” child will, as father or
coworker, shoot sarcastic darts and believe it’s just humor. The physically abused boy presents a good,
though imaginary, illustration of this process.
Picture a young person in whom a muscular indentation is pounded,
progressively, into his chest by an angry father. At some point the indentation, under great
pressure, will feel forced to push itself back out, explosively. A poisonous splinter is embedded in him: It
is that splinter, with that poison, that needs to come out, not a laugh, or passive-aggressive
vengeance, or codependent martyrdom, or some soft-spoken grievance. Individuals who practice such convoluted
mis-translations of their true feeling are neurological liars to themselves.
Alice Miller describes
one retribution shard of what I believe is a bigger hand grenade:
“Why, indeed, did these parents behave
with so little empathy? . . . Why did they both stand there laughing, eating so
slowly and showing so little concern about the child’s obvious distress? They were not unkind or cold parents; the
father spoke to his child very tenderly.
Nevertheless, at least at this moment, they displayed a lack of empathy.
“We can only solve this riddle if we
manage to see the parents, too, as insecure children – children who have at
last found a weaker creature, in comparison with whom they can now feel very
strong. What child has never been
laughed at for his fears and been told, ‘You don’t need to be afraid of a thing
like that’? What child will then not
feel shamed and despised because he could not assess the danger correctly? And will that little person not take the next
opportunity to pass these feelings on to a still smaller child? Such experiences come in all shades and
varieties. Common to them all is the
sense of strength it gives the adult, who cannot control his or her own fears,
to face the weak and helpless child’s fear and be able to control fear in
another person.
. . . . “Disregard for those who are
smaller and weaker is thus the best defense against a breakthrough of one’s own
feelings of helplessness: it is an expression of this split-off weakness.”*
DeMause’s
theory of the “poison container” describes a reciprocal dynamic:
“The main psychological mechanism that
operates in all child abuse involves using children as what I have termed
poison containers – receptacles into which adults project disowned parts of
their psyches, so they can control these feelings in another body without
danger to themselves. In good parenting,
the child uses the caretaker as a poison container, much as it earlier used the
mother’s placenta as a poison container for cleansing its polluted blood. A good mother reacts with calming actions to
the cries of a baby and helps it ‘detoxify’ its dangerous emotions. But when an immature mother’s baby cries, she
cannot stand the screaming, and strikes out at the child. As one battering mother put it, ‘I have never
felt loved all my life. When the baby
was born, I thought he would love me.
When he cried, it meant he didn’t love me. So I hit him.’ Rather than the child being able to use the
parent to detoxify its fears and anger, the parent instead injects his or her
bad feelings into the child and uses it to cleanse his or herself of depression
and anger.”**
I once read a
study that related toddlers’ repellent social personalities to the kind of
parenting received. In daycare, they did
not bully other children in common ways but by a peculiar invasive badgering, a
persecutory hovering. One can picture
how the parent’s mental smothering and picking and demeaning torture into her
child – an unwrapped festering package from her
own parents – would come to discolor the child’s innocent and good
character.
Is it
possible that there is a unique poison, a special hue of hurt breathed by children
of a cheating parent, which compels them twenty years later to be unfaithful to
their own spouse? If so, it would have
to be discerned in the body-feeling through the Focusing process,*** too
complex for emotion words and psychiatric labels.
Regressive
psychotherapy offers an explanation for the equal-and-opposite dynamic. Pain, we know, must be discharged by holistic
expression such as crying or raging, twisting and grimacing, doubling-over and “primal
screaming” and vomiting and whimpering – whatever the body knows, contains. Defenses protect the child who can’t express
– protect him from others and from himself.
If we conceive each kind of pain having its own chemistry, it makes
sense to see that chemical, and only it, lying beneath the defense, whether we
send it to another person or change it from lead to fake gold.
I value this Newtonian
logic in a client because he or she needs to feel the exact pain and bring it
home to its source, its parent. Sometimes
we know this pain only through its revenge: anger or contempt or narcissistic
haughtiness toward others, including the therapist.
Casual though
it is, this idea may help us understand those who murder in signature
ways. Children who set fires or torture
animals; the beheadings; choking or smothering (the BTK strangler). We might go deeper inside the equation that a
killer is someone who already feels killed, dead or un-alive,**** to the
particular chemistry of his deadness. What
happened in Dennis Rader’s childhood that was answered by watching a child or
adult failing to breathe? What inner
death might a future terrorist feel –
“It is not surprising that these
mutilated, battered women make less than ideal mothers, reinflicting their own
miseries upon their children. Visitors
to families throughout fundamentalist Muslim societies report on the ‘slapping,
striking, whipping and thrashing’ of children, with constant shaming and
humiliation, often being told by their mothers that they are ‘cowards’ if they
don’t hit others. Physical abuse of children
is continuous. . . .”*****
– that lets
him desecrate the temple of a man’s mind and soul?
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* Alice Miller,
The Drama of the Gifted Child,
revised edition 1997, Basic Books. Part
3, “The Vicious Circle of Contempt,” pp. 71-72.
*** See
Eugene Gendlin, PhD’s books on Focusing, plus the website and youtube videos.
**** Search
references to James Gilligan, M.D., maximum security prison psychiatrist and
Shengold’s concept of “soul murder” in this blog’s posts.
