Bradshaw On, page 10
Another reason abused children who are now adults do not grasp the poisonous pedagogy as abusive is because it was the normal way children were treated. They believe that because everyone for generations raised their children with the poisonous pedagogy, then it must be right. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called this the “naturalist fallacy.” When we believe that some form of behavior is “right” simply because everyone else believes as we do, we risk the naturalist fallacy.
As adults, people act the same way their parents acted in an attempt to prove that their parents behaved correctly toward them—i.e., really loved them and really did it for their own good.
Alice Miller suggests that only when we have children of our own do we see for the first time the vulnerability of our earliest years (which has been dissociated or denied with the ego defenses that created the fantasy bond). In controlling our own children and putting them through what we went through, we struggle to regain the power and dignity we lost to our own parents.
All recovery from dysfunction depends on our leaving the family trance. This amounts to self-differentiation. As long as we remain in the trance, we remain in delusion and denial. I’ll return to this point in chapter 9 when we discuss recovering your disabled will.
Narcissistic Deprivation
Children need to have their healthy narcissistic needs met. Narcissus was the Greek god who was condemned to fall in love with his own reflection in the lake. The story is almost always interpreted in a way that makes narcissism, or self-love, seem bad. The story needs to be seen as a symbolic statement about emerging self-image and self-consciousness.
We humans would never know who we were without a mirror to look at in the beginning. That mirror needs to reflect ourselves as the person we really are at any given time. The original mirror is almost always the mothering person who raises us, especially in the first three years of life. The mothering person needs to mirror, admire and take us seriously. Each child needs to see his instinctual drives (orality, defecation, sexuality) and aggressive feelings mirrored in the mothering person’s face. Obviously, this requires a high degree of security, self-confidence and completeness in the mothering person. When this is the case, Alice Miller writes, the child can:
1. Have his aggressive impulses so they don’t upset parents’ confidence.
2. Strive toward autonomy and be spontaneous because such strivings are not experienced as a threat to the parents.
3. Experience his true self—his actual feelings, wants, perceptions, thoughts and imaginings because his parents do not impose moralistic shoulds, oughts and musts at a time when the child is pre-moral.
4. Learn to please himself and doesn’t have to please his parents, since they are self-confident and complete.
5. Separate successfully from his parents, i.e., achieve differentiation.
6. Use his parents to meet his dependency needs, since his parents are mostly complete and unneedy. These dependency needs are insatiable in the early years. The child needs his parents’ time, attention and direction all the time during the early years.2
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2 Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 33-34.
Obviously, this is a large order. Parents who never had these needs met are themselves needy. They therefore cannot give to their children what they do not have themselves. When the mothering persons have been deprived of their own healthy narcissism, they will try to get it for the rest of their lives through substitute means.
The most available object of gratification for narcissistically deprived parents is their own child or children. The children are in their control; will obey them because not to obey is equivalent to death; will never abandon them; will possibly try to extend their parents’ lives through the fruits of their achievements and performances. The child becomes the sole possession of the parents’ lost narcissistic gratification.
The child thus becomes an instrument of the parents’ will. Once this occurs, the child’s true self is abandoned and a false self must be created. The false self is a cover-up for the being wound suffered by one’s true self. If I can’t have my feelings, my needs, my thoughts, my wants, then something must be wrong with me. I must be flawed as a person. I am worthless of my parents’ time and attention. I am worth-less. This is internalized shame. The tragedy of all this is that individuals or generations get caught up in a repetition compulsion, a vicious cycle of repeating over and over again the quest for the lost paradise, only to find that each substitute is an illusion. Compulsively seeking fame, status, new sex partners, a certainty of salvation, security in a political party and so on cannot give you that deep inner unity that was lost with your child-self. The lost self is an inner problem, not an outer one. Nothing on the outside can bring back what was lost. Your lost child is lost forever.
The poet Omar Khayyám writes:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.3
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3 Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday, 1879), st. 71.
However, your tears are the beginning of your healing. And it is only through mourning that we can be completed and comforted. It is what many will have to do in order to leave home and break out of the fantasy-bonded poisonous pedagogy.
What is crucial here is to see that dysfunctional parents reenact their own original pain on their children. It is very difficult for us to understand that most persecutors were once victims. But understand it we must, or the sins of the fathers go on and on. The abused child in the persecutor is angry and hurt. Directing that anger toward our parents is forbidden. Since the anger is strictly forbidden, we project it onto others, turn it against self, or “act it out.”
Boundaries
Dysfunctional families have either enmeshed or walled boundaries within the system. Enmeshment is the term used to describe the violation of ego boundaries. Figure 4.2 is a drawing of enmeshment. As you can see, all the boundaries are overrun. There is no real possibility of intimacy in such a family because there are no whole people to relate to. Each one plays at being intimate. What exists is pseudo-mutuality. The rules in enmeshed families are confused and covert. They are never direct and concrete. No one has a solid sense of self. Murray Bowen described the enmeshed family with the phrase “undifferentiated ego mass.”
The other extreme of a boundary problem is “walled” boundaries. As you can see in figure 4.3, the boundaries are so thick, no interaction or intimacy can occur. This family can look good on the outside, but on the inside each family member has lost contact with his true self. Each is playing his respective role. Each is in an “act” and even though the boundaries are walled, each person is still ruled by the family system. Members of families with walled boundaries are usually lacking in spontaneity. There is little real contact between members, a situation described clinically as non-mutuality. Members of walled families experience loneliness. There are high levels of anxiety in both types of families.
Roles
In enmeshed families, the members play rigid roles. Their roles may be those of loving family members or good Christians. However, the role is an act. No one is really in touch with his own feelings, needs or wants. Since all are pretending, no one really knows anyone else. As we look at these families, we see a collage of images who are eternal strangers to each other. Each false self covers a core of secret inadequacy and shame. Each false self is rigid and creates a narrow range of concealing behaviors, which keep family members from revealing what they really think, feel or want.
Shame governs the entire family. The rigid roles are cover-up defenses against the shame core. Each person is in hiding and each is afraid to be his true self. This shame is inherited generationally and is perpetrated through the rigid roles and ego defenses. Shame begets shame. The self-contempt experienced in shame is maintained through the idealization of the parents and their rules for parenting. Shame is the organizing principle in most dysfunctional families.
Ego Boundaries
Figures 4.2 and 4.3 describe the intrafamily boundaries. Feeling incomplete inside is an individual ego boundary problem. Not having the ability to differentiate thoughts, desires and feelings is an individual ego boundary problem. Boundary problems contribute to the intimacy vacuum in dysfunctional families. I refer to this overall condition as the yin/yang disorder. People with ego boundary problems poison their thinking with unresolved feelings. These unresolved feelings block freedom of choice through the contamination of the mind.
Loss of Freedom
The blocking of choice is what I call the “disabled will.” Once our will is disabled, we lose our freedom. Since toxic shame binds all one’s emotions in a chronically dysfunctioning family, all its members have greatly impaired freedom. This is perhaps the greatest casualty of dysfunctional families.
Figure 4.2. Dysfunctional Family System with Enmeshed Boundaries
Figure 4.3. Walled Boundaries
In the following diagrams (figures 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6), I try to give you a visual picture of what happens to the power of choice when our feelings are repressed. In these diagrams I borrow freely from Harvey Jackins’ presentation of blocked emotion in his book, The Human Side of Human Beings. Jackins developed a method of working through the blocked emotions from the past called Reevaluation Counseling. I have borrowed his basic diagrams, but I’ve changed these drawings for my own purposes. While Jackins’ focus is on the blocked emotion, my concern is on how the human will becomes disabled by the emotionally contaminated mind. I also believe that there is a higher level of consciousness beyond what Jackins describes in his drawings.
The drawings are quite rough and are not intended to be scientific specimens. They will give the reader a visual glimpse of what happens to our will when the mind is blocked by emotion.
The will needs the eyes of perception, judgment, imagination and reasoning. Without this source, the will is blinded. The mind cannot use its perception, judgment, reasoning and imagination when it is under the impact of repressed emotion.
One part of the brain, the amygdala, is especially impacted by repressed emotion. The amygdala is part of the limbic brain (the seat of emotion), which bypasses reason. We have the ability to react without thinking for the purpose of survival. When our brain signals us that something is dangerous, we respond immediately with either fight or flight.
Childhood abandonments, especially in the form of traumatic abuse, dramatically imprint the amygdala. Thereafter, when something seems to resemble that original moment of distress, the amygdala recognizes the similarity and guides our response in a split second, before the thinking brain has time to ponder what is happening or what the consequences of our reaction will be.
Trauma needs to be grieved through expressing the emotions appropriate to grief. When we repress the appropriate emotions (because our source figures prohibit their expression), they come out in inappropriate hysterical outbursts of anger, fear or sadness. We may also act them out in irrational behaviors, like choosing one abusive partner (resembling our source figure) after another.
The repressed energy has to be discharged before the mind can function effectively. When the emotion is repressed, it forms a frozen block that chronically mars the effective use of reasoning. Anyone who has had an outbreak of temper or been depressed has experienced how difficult it is to think under the power of these emotions. In figure 4.4 we see a model of what our raw
intelligence looks like in an uncontaminated state. Our 3 trillion-circuited, 13 billion-celled computer brain is capable of a new and creative response to any new experience that occurs in our life.
Figure 4.4. Uncontaminated Raw Intelligence
Our external senses take in new data that is given meaning and stored in our memory banks. When new information comes in, it is compared against what is already known and either stored accordingly or becomes a new bit of stored memory. The information cannot be computed if it has emotional content that is unresolved. When an experience is not resolved, it cannot be stored appropriately. Unresolved experience results from the lack of emotional discharge and meaning. The mind cannot function when biased by emotion.
When a child is abandoned through neglect, abuse or enmeshment, one of three transactions usually occurs:
1. Mythologies are created to explain the abandonment.
2. The child is given reasons for the abandonment that make no real sense and shame the child.
3. The child is told he cannot express the feelings he has about the abandonment—usually fear, hurt (sadness) and anger.
All three transactions are aimed at repressing the child’s true feelings, which are the core of his inner self.
Mythologies are meanings given to events or actions in order to distract from what is actually happening. For example, in a family dysfunctioned by work addiction, the work-addict father, who is actually emotionally abandoning his children, is explained away by the enabling wife/mother by saying, “Your father works so much because he loves you and wants you to have nice things.”
In the second transaction, the poisonous pedagogy has all kinds of reasons for the abuse. For example, “I’m doing this because I love you” or “This hurts me more than you.”
In the third transaction, the emotionally blocked parents cannot handle their child’s emotions. Mother’s own sadness is stimulated by the child’s crying. This is distressful. So Mom forbids the child to cry.
In every case, the distress experience cannot be stored because the emotions cannot be discharged. What occurs is a frozen pattern of blocked energy, pictured in figure 4.5.
This frozen pattern dogs your creative intelligence. It forms a trigger that functions like the “on” button of a tape recorder. Whenever any new or similar experience happens, the old recording starts to play. Here we see the force and power of behavioral conditioning. Like Pavlov’s dog, whenever stimulation occurs, the response automatically takes place. This is the basis of reactions or reenactments. The past so contaminates the intelligence that new and creative responses are not possible. Blocked emotions take over the reasoning and judgment of intelligence, and the effect is cumulative.
Whenever we are confronted with a new experience that is in any way similar to the original unresolved stress, we feel compulsively forced to reenact the old experience. We act compulsively; we do the exact same things that never worked before; we say things that are not pertinent and we have intense feelings that are totally inappropriate to what is actually happening.
Figure 4.5. Frozen Pattern of Blocked Energy
UNDISCHARGED EMOTIONS
Like a snowball rolling downhill, getting larger and larger, once shamed, we act out of shame and create more shame. Once a false self is created to cover the secret private self, each new shaming event solidifies the false self even more. With each new abuse that precipitates anger and sadness, the old triggers are turned on and the old frozen record starts playing. This is the basis of what we refer to as reactive behavior or overreactions. When a person represses over the course of a number of years, intelligence is greatly contaminated and diminished. The frozen patterns become chronic patterns. It is as if the “on” button is stuck and plays all the time. Figure 4.6 shows how little intelligence is left uncontaminated.
Figure 4.6. Chronic Frozen Emotions
The Disabled Will
Contaminated intelligence seriously lessens one’s decision-making process, since the will needs perception, intelligence and imagination in order to make decisions. The human will becomes “disabled.”
Since the will is blinded by contaminated intelligence, it has no resource for its choice-making. The only object left for the will to use is itself. When we will ourselves to will, we become willful (literally full of will). As Leslie Farber points out in The Ways of the Will, the will becomes the self. With each act of willing for the sake of willing, we feel whole and complete. This is the basis of impulsiveness. To act on impulse is to will just because you can. In every “act of will,” we feel complete. Just by willing we can get a feeling of oneness with self.
When we can only will to will, we become grandiose. We play God. Self-will has run riot. As Farber so brilliantly points out, we become addicted to our own will.
As children we are naturally willful, grandiose and absolutist. By not getting our developmental emotional needs met (especially the need to identify and express emotions), we are set up to become grandiose as adults.
Most children from chronically dysfunctional families have the disabled will problem. The forms this disability takes in actual life experience are:
1. We are impulsive; doing things for no reason.
2. We are gullible.
3. We have trouble with decisions and make faulty decisions, especially in matters of trust.
4. We attempt to control what cannot be controlled—e.g., an addict believes he can control his addiction, the spouse believes she can cure the addict, parents believe they can control their children. We believe that we can control our emotions.
5. We always look for the grand experience—the perfect spouse, lover, child, parent, orgasm, etc.
