Bradshaw On, page 16
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS
The theory of learned helplessness attempts to explain the paradoxical bonding to violence. This theory was developed by Martin Seligman. He hypothesized that dogs subjected to non-contingent negative reinforcement could learn that their voluntary behavior had no effect on controlling what happened to them. If the original kind of stimulus was repeated, the dogs’ motivation to respond lessened.
Various types of experiments have been conducted to support this hypothesis. These have included testing dogs, cats, birds, rats, mice, fish, primates and humans. Some animals learned to be helpless at a faster rate and became more helpless across a greater number of situations. For some the learning only occurred in one situation; others generalized it and were helpless in all areas of stressful behavior.
Seligman’s study is the most illustrative. His research team placed dogs in cages and administered electrical shocks at random and varied intervals. The dogs quickly learned that no matter what response they made, they could not control the shock. In the beginning, the dogs tried various movements in an attempt to escape. When nothing they did stopped the shocks, they ceased any voluntary action and became submissive. Later the researchers changed the procedure and attempted to teach the dogs that they could escape by crossing to the other side of the cage. The dogs still remained passive and helpless. Even when the door was left open and the dogs were shown the way out, they refused to leave and did not avoid the shock.
The earlier in life the dogs received such treatment, the longer it took to overcome the effects of this so-called learned helplessness.
A graphic illustration of learned helplessness was reported in a Florida paper I once read. It seems that 100 nice hotel beds and rooms were made available for some of the street people in a Florida city. Only four people took the offer.
When applied to the physical battering of women and children, this theory helps demonstrate why battered children and battered wives believe that they are helpless. The children tend to set up the exact kind of relationships later on, and the wives do not attempt to free themselves from the battering relationship.
The battered person’s belief in helplessness is the most important aspect of this phenomenon. The battered child or wife is determined by a negative cognitive set, a negative belief system. They really believe that the situation is hopeless. This is the reason victims of violence do not attempt to free themselves from the battering relationships.
Children are actually as helpless as they believe themselves to be; women believe they are helpless, but they are not. Children victimized by physical violence tend to generalize the feeling of helplessness. They feel helpless in other adverse situations. Such children become “externalizers.” They believe that most of the events that occur in their lives are caused by factors outside their control.
Often the physically abused child is in a family where the mother is being battered. A little girl victimized by witnessing her mother’s violation grows up to believe that she cannot escape being battered. She believes with her mother that women cannot escape men’s overall coercion.
A little boy may become the victim of the mother’s repressed rage and be battered by her. If he witnesses his father’s violence, he may grow up believing in male supremacy and in the stereotyped picture of male supremacy in the family. Boys identify with the violent offenders and become offenders more often than girls. Bonding with the offender is a way to overcome the feeling of helplessness and powerlessness. The person bonding with an offender literally loses his own reality and becomes the offender. In that way he feels he can survive. Most offenders were once victims who bonded with their offenders. Battering husbands and parents were probably once helpless victims.
I was fascinated at my own intense response to the movie First Blood. Obviously massive numbers of others were fascinated with it, too. In this movie, Rambo is hunted by abusing and unjust authority figures, represented by the sheriff and his deputies. Rambo subsequently kills them all and totally annihilates the town where he encountered them. The abusive treatment of Rambo touches the abused and revenge-seeking child in all of us. While my law-abiding adult is horrified by Rambo’s mass killings, my child cheers him on.
BOUNDARIES AND ABUSE
Both sexually and physically abusive families tend to be dominated by the rules of the poisonous pedagogy. The family profiles show strong and rigid boundaries around the family. The boundaries are often established by strong religious beliefs as well as the belief in following perfectionistic and rigid rules. Thus the whole family is oriented toward an externalizer-type boundary dynamic. The hurt and pain are carried as the family secret. The child is forbidden to talk because of the rule of obedience to the adults. No new information can come into the family because of the rigidity of the system and the hierarchical control. The religious rules often call anything outside the family religion (usually fundamentalistic or highly authoritarian) “secular humanism.” Anything psychological is looked upon with suspicion. Hence, the very material that could give new permissions and offer guidance is rejected.
Physical violence affects a level of shame second only to sexual abuse. Slapping, jostling, pinching, shoving, etc. are often done in public. It may be in public places or in front of brothers and sisters or older children. Shame is the feeling of being exposed before you are ready to be exposed. Shame is often associated with being looked at—having eyes on you before you’re ready to be seen. Shame is associated with being caught naked, with your pants down, as it were.
Children are frequently made to take their pants down to get spanked. Many other debilitating consequences flow from the shame. Feeling flawed lessens a person’s motivation to initiate action. Believing that there is nothing you can do to control your life greatly reduces your ability to learn and to solve problems. Thus the range of responses a person can choose from is greatly narrowed by shame. The will becomes disabled; the person becomes blind to options. A deep, profound, chronic depression sets in.
Look at the following checklist. Many of the symptoms of adult children of physically and sexually violent families are identical to the symptoms of people who have been chronically stressed, such as war victims or victims of concentration camps. Using the letters of the phrase Adult Children of Physical Violence, check out whether you may have damaged your true self-esteem through physical violence.
You may be beginning to see the overlap in these responses to violence. Being violated is traumatic. The symptoms I have been describing are the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. These symptoms vary in intensity depending on the kind of traumatic abuse the victim experienced, the chronicity of the abuse, and whether there was anyone who truly cared about the child.
Sexual and physical violence are devastating forms of abandonment. The child is left alone. The child is a victim of his parent’s or caretaker’s shamelessness. The child is used and abused.
The key points covered in this chapter can be summed up using the letters of the word PERSECUTED.
Physical Violation—Our Body as the Ground of Our Being
Physical and sexual abuse violate the ground of a person’s being. Our body image is our most fundamental boundary. When our body is violated, the core of the self is injured.
Extent of Incest and Sexual Abuse
Because the common conception of sexual violation is the “horror story” kind, few people are aware of the many other forms of sexual abuse. In this chapter we looked at four categories of sexual violation: physical, overt (voyeurism, exhibitionism), covert (verbal and boundary violation) and emotional (cross-generational bonding).
Responds to Physical and Sexual Violence as Normal Behavior
Because physical and sexual abuse are so traumatic, the dissociation from the trauma is intense. The victim loses the connection between the violence and the response to violence. Victims believe their reactive behavior is their normal behavior. They condemn their behavior as crazy and neurotic. In reality it is a normal reaction to violence. Learned helplessness and bonding to violence are outcomes of this disconnection.
Setup for Physical Violation by the Poisonous Pedagogy
The poisonous pedagogy promotes a master/slave kind of ownership relationship between parents and children. This belief in ownership implicitly opens up the possibility of physical and sexual abuse.
Entire Family System Involved in Incest and Physical Violence
There is frequently a collusive role played by the spouse of the offender. The nonabusing parent either consciously or unconsciously permits the victimization. Every member of the family is severely affected by the abuse.
Checklists
These checklists for sexual and physical violence offer victims a way to connect the violence with the natural reactions to the violence. Identifying the behavioral reactions can help victims determine what happened to them.
Universality of Physical Abuse
In this chapter I pointed out that the battering of women and children is part of an ancient and pervasive tradition. Even with the achievements of the women’s movement, the extensive battering of women still goes on.
Typical Offenders
The common characteristics of both sexual and physical offenders are: poor self-image, lack of empathy, shame-based, often abuse victims, unrealistic expectations for children, in delusion and denial, isolated, compulsive.
Ego Defenses
Special emphasis was placed on dissociations and ego defense. This defense allows the victim to leave his body when it is being violated. Victims learn to cut off feelings and physically numb out. This sets victims up for compulsive/addictive behavior.
Denial (Keeping the Secret)
The greatest problem with physical/sexual victimization is that victims cannot express their fear, hurt and anger. The incest victims are in a true catch-22. If they tell, they risk losing their family. Physical abuse victims are abused more if they express their hurt and anger.
Seven
The “Bad” Child: Checklist for How Your Self-Esteem was Damaged in an Emotionally Abusive Family
If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight.
If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel ashamed.
Dorothy Law Nolte
The most dominant need that any child has is to gradually move from the complete environmental support of infancy and childhood to the self-support of maturity.
In order to grow, children need their parents’ good modeling, attention, time and teaching. Children also need their own feelings affirmed.
In many ways children also offer parents a chance to learn and grow. As children go through each of their developmental stages, their parents encounter their own developmental deficits associated with that stage. Infancy is an opportunity for parents to be aware of how they fared with their own infancy needs. Children offer parents a chance to look at the rich emotional life they once had and could have again. In her book, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelties in Child Rearing, Alice Miller writes:
Children need a large measure of emotional and physical support from the adult. This support must include the following elements:
1. Respect for the child.
2. Respect for his needs.
3. Tolerance for his feelings [emphasis mine]
4. Willingness to learn from his behavior . . .
a. About the nature of the individual child
b. About the child in the parents themselves
c. About the nature of emotional life, which can be observed more clearly in the child than in the adult because the child can experience his feelings much more intensely and . . . undisguisedly than the adult.1
_____________
1 Miller, For Your Own Good, 100.
Instead of learning from our children, the poisonous pedagogy exhorts us to mold and train them like animals. It asks us to crush their vitality, spontaneity and emotional expression.
Anger, Sex and Emotional Energy
At any given moment we are having emotions. While our emotions are not all of who we are, they are our vital connection with life as it is now. Our emotions are one of our basic powers. They are like the gas gauge on our car, monitoring our basic need fulfillment. Our degree of happiness and self-satisfaction depends on getting our basic needs met. When we are out of touch with our emotions, we have no way to know what our needs are or whether we should attend to them. To deny our emotions is to deny the vital energy of our life.
I have been offering you checklists to see how you may have lost your self-esteem. The checklist I now propose should have relevance for everyone. It’s my opinion that no one had a “perfect” childhood, since no human parent is perfect. When it comes to emotional development, the poisonous pedagogy is clear. Strong feelings are harmful and weak. They mar rational clarity and they must be controlled. The two emotions that are especially dangerous are anger and sexual feelings.
Anger is essential as the core energy of our strength. Without the energy of anger, we may become apathetic, a doormat and a people-pleaser.
Anger is an emotion that is often confused with behaviors like hitting, screaming and cursing. The latter are behaviors based on judgment. They are not emotions. Angry emotions protect and preserve the individual.
Sexual emotions, on the other hand, promote and preserve the species. Without sexual emotions and the mature, age-appropriate behaviors based on them, the human race would die out in 100 years.
Emotions are energies in motion. If they are not expressed, the energy is repressed. As energy, it has to go somewhere. Emotional energy moves us. We are moved to tears when we’ve lost something dear to us. We are moved to action when we feel our shame. We are moved to joy when our needs are met.
Because our emotions are forms of energy, we can only stop feeling them by mustering counter energy. We do this with muscle tension, shallow breathing, fantasies of punishment or abandonment and critical self-talk. This tensing, internal talking and shallow breathing are the ways we physically numb out. After years and years of practice, we can literally no longer feel our emotions. Psychic numbness is the soil out of which our addictions are born. Our addictions are a way we can feel alive.
In my drinking days, I felt much more alive and sane when I was drinking than when I was sober. As the chemicals relaxed my muscles, I felt my feelings. I felt high. Being high or euphoric is the way we often feel when we are fully functional. When I was drunk, I felt alive; sober, I felt numb and dead.
Emotional repression is perhaps the most common symptom of our current cultural crisis. Our problems with addiction and family violence are rooted in the denial and repression of our affective life. This repression of emotion is supported to some degree by our schools, our churches and our legal system.
Figure 7. l. Ego Boundaries
Epigenetic Development
Human development occurs epigenetically. This means that one stage builds upon the previous one. Nature has her developmental rhythms. There is a time of developmental readiness. At a certain age, humans move toward muscle development, walking and talking. At approximately 18 months, children start saying, “No, let me do it.” At three and one-half years, they start asking, “Why?” At six years they get obstinate again. By 15 they have reached puberty and begin moving away from home. Each stage marks a crisis. Each crisis is a time of heightened vulnerability as well as a time of potential growth.
If the developmental tasks are not accomplished at the proper time and in the proper sequence, we go on without the age-appropriate developmental strength. The strength of our ego is the result of each properly resolved developmental crisis. If the crisis is resolved and the need is met, the ego grows in strength. If the developmental task is not met, the ego does not obtain the structure it needs for the next developmental task. It is weakened, and when the need is not met at all, it is broken.
In figure 7.1, I’ve tried to show three symbols of ego structure. These ego structures are what I referred to earlier as ego boundaries. A child needs to develop strong ego boundaries to move into adolescence. If we can become solidly a child while we are a child, we then have the foundation to enter adolescence on our way to becoming an adult. If we cannot be children while we are children, we become adult children. Strong ego boundaries are like a door that can only be opened from the inside by the owner of the house. Weak boundaries are like a door that can be opened from the outside and inside, but has no lock. Broken ego boundaries are like a house without any doors.
When an adult abuses a child emotionally, the adult replaces the child’s way of seeing, thinking and feeling with his own. This results in the developmental tasks of the child remaining unmet, leading to a weak ego and weak or broken ego boundaries.
Emotional abuse is a form of psychological battering. Psychological battering includes all forms of abuse because victims cannot be physically or sexually violated without also being psychologically battered. Emotional violence is involved in all abuse and causes the neglect of developmental dependency needs.
MIRRORING, ECHOING, AFFIRMING
Children’s earliest needs are for a warm, loving person to be there to mirror, echo and affirm them. This means that in the first 15 months of life (called the symbiotic stage), a child needs a face with accepting eyes to reflect his self. Whatever is in the mothering person’s eyes becomes the core and foundation of the child’s identity.
Alice Miller has argued that the infant child’s inner sensations form the core of the child’s self. These earliest sensations come from the mother’s feelings about the child. Since the child is nonverbal, everything depends on feelings. These early feelings about the self are the core out of which the child’s self-esteem will be formed. This earliest need is called the healthy narcissistic need. If parents never got their narcissistic needs met, they will use their children as objects of narcissistic gratification. When this is the case, the children intuit very early on that they must take care of the parents’ emotional needs if they are to survive.
The theory of learned helplessness attempts to explain the paradoxical bonding to violence. This theory was developed by Martin Seligman. He hypothesized that dogs subjected to non-contingent negative reinforcement could learn that their voluntary behavior had no effect on controlling what happened to them. If the original kind of stimulus was repeated, the dogs’ motivation to respond lessened.
Various types of experiments have been conducted to support this hypothesis. These have included testing dogs, cats, birds, rats, mice, fish, primates and humans. Some animals learned to be helpless at a faster rate and became more helpless across a greater number of situations. For some the learning only occurred in one situation; others generalized it and were helpless in all areas of stressful behavior.
Seligman’s study is the most illustrative. His research team placed dogs in cages and administered electrical shocks at random and varied intervals. The dogs quickly learned that no matter what response they made, they could not control the shock. In the beginning, the dogs tried various movements in an attempt to escape. When nothing they did stopped the shocks, they ceased any voluntary action and became submissive. Later the researchers changed the procedure and attempted to teach the dogs that they could escape by crossing to the other side of the cage. The dogs still remained passive and helpless. Even when the door was left open and the dogs were shown the way out, they refused to leave and did not avoid the shock.
The earlier in life the dogs received such treatment, the longer it took to overcome the effects of this so-called learned helplessness.
A graphic illustration of learned helplessness was reported in a Florida paper I once read. It seems that 100 nice hotel beds and rooms were made available for some of the street people in a Florida city. Only four people took the offer.
When applied to the physical battering of women and children, this theory helps demonstrate why battered children and battered wives believe that they are helpless. The children tend to set up the exact kind of relationships later on, and the wives do not attempt to free themselves from the battering relationship.
The battered person’s belief in helplessness is the most important aspect of this phenomenon. The battered child or wife is determined by a negative cognitive set, a negative belief system. They really believe that the situation is hopeless. This is the reason victims of violence do not attempt to free themselves from the battering relationships.
Children are actually as helpless as they believe themselves to be; women believe they are helpless, but they are not. Children victimized by physical violence tend to generalize the feeling of helplessness. They feel helpless in other adverse situations. Such children become “externalizers.” They believe that most of the events that occur in their lives are caused by factors outside their control.
Often the physically abused child is in a family where the mother is being battered. A little girl victimized by witnessing her mother’s violation grows up to believe that she cannot escape being battered. She believes with her mother that women cannot escape men’s overall coercion.
A little boy may become the victim of the mother’s repressed rage and be battered by her. If he witnesses his father’s violence, he may grow up believing in male supremacy and in the stereotyped picture of male supremacy in the family. Boys identify with the violent offenders and become offenders more often than girls. Bonding with the offender is a way to overcome the feeling of helplessness and powerlessness. The person bonding with an offender literally loses his own reality and becomes the offender. In that way he feels he can survive. Most offenders were once victims who bonded with their offenders. Battering husbands and parents were probably once helpless victims.
I was fascinated at my own intense response to the movie First Blood. Obviously massive numbers of others were fascinated with it, too. In this movie, Rambo is hunted by abusing and unjust authority figures, represented by the sheriff and his deputies. Rambo subsequently kills them all and totally annihilates the town where he encountered them. The abusive treatment of Rambo touches the abused and revenge-seeking child in all of us. While my law-abiding adult is horrified by Rambo’s mass killings, my child cheers him on.
BOUNDARIES AND ABUSE
Both sexually and physically abusive families tend to be dominated by the rules of the poisonous pedagogy. The family profiles show strong and rigid boundaries around the family. The boundaries are often established by strong religious beliefs as well as the belief in following perfectionistic and rigid rules. Thus the whole family is oriented toward an externalizer-type boundary dynamic. The hurt and pain are carried as the family secret. The child is forbidden to talk because of the rule of obedience to the adults. No new information can come into the family because of the rigidity of the system and the hierarchical control. The religious rules often call anything outside the family religion (usually fundamentalistic or highly authoritarian) “secular humanism.” Anything psychological is looked upon with suspicion. Hence, the very material that could give new permissions and offer guidance is rejected.
Physical violence affects a level of shame second only to sexual abuse. Slapping, jostling, pinching, shoving, etc. are often done in public. It may be in public places or in front of brothers and sisters or older children. Shame is the feeling of being exposed before you are ready to be exposed. Shame is often associated with being looked at—having eyes on you before you’re ready to be seen. Shame is associated with being caught naked, with your pants down, as it were.
Children are frequently made to take their pants down to get spanked. Many other debilitating consequences flow from the shame. Feeling flawed lessens a person’s motivation to initiate action. Believing that there is nothing you can do to control your life greatly reduces your ability to learn and to solve problems. Thus the range of responses a person can choose from is greatly narrowed by shame. The will becomes disabled; the person becomes blind to options. A deep, profound, chronic depression sets in.
Look at the following checklist. Many of the symptoms of adult children of physically and sexually violent families are identical to the symptoms of people who have been chronically stressed, such as war victims or victims of concentration camps. Using the letters of the phrase Adult Children of Physical Violence, check out whether you may have damaged your true self-esteem through physical violence.
You may be beginning to see the overlap in these responses to violence. Being violated is traumatic. The symptoms I have been describing are the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. These symptoms vary in intensity depending on the kind of traumatic abuse the victim experienced, the chronicity of the abuse, and whether there was anyone who truly cared about the child.
Sexual and physical violence are devastating forms of abandonment. The child is left alone. The child is a victim of his parent’s or caretaker’s shamelessness. The child is used and abused.
The key points covered in this chapter can be summed up using the letters of the word PERSECUTED.
Physical Violation—Our Body as the Ground of Our Being
Physical and sexual abuse violate the ground of a person’s being. Our body image is our most fundamental boundary. When our body is violated, the core of the self is injured.
Extent of Incest and Sexual Abuse
Because the common conception of sexual violation is the “horror story” kind, few people are aware of the many other forms of sexual abuse. In this chapter we looked at four categories of sexual violation: physical, overt (voyeurism, exhibitionism), covert (verbal and boundary violation) and emotional (cross-generational bonding).
Responds to Physical and Sexual Violence as Normal Behavior
Because physical and sexual abuse are so traumatic, the dissociation from the trauma is intense. The victim loses the connection between the violence and the response to violence. Victims believe their reactive behavior is their normal behavior. They condemn their behavior as crazy and neurotic. In reality it is a normal reaction to violence. Learned helplessness and bonding to violence are outcomes of this disconnection.
Setup for Physical Violation by the Poisonous Pedagogy
The poisonous pedagogy promotes a master/slave kind of ownership relationship between parents and children. This belief in ownership implicitly opens up the possibility of physical and sexual abuse.
Entire Family System Involved in Incest and Physical Violence
There is frequently a collusive role played by the spouse of the offender. The nonabusing parent either consciously or unconsciously permits the victimization. Every member of the family is severely affected by the abuse.
Checklists
These checklists for sexual and physical violence offer victims a way to connect the violence with the natural reactions to the violence. Identifying the behavioral reactions can help victims determine what happened to them.
Universality of Physical Abuse
In this chapter I pointed out that the battering of women and children is part of an ancient and pervasive tradition. Even with the achievements of the women’s movement, the extensive battering of women still goes on.
Typical Offenders
The common characteristics of both sexual and physical offenders are: poor self-image, lack of empathy, shame-based, often abuse victims, unrealistic expectations for children, in delusion and denial, isolated, compulsive.
Ego Defenses
Special emphasis was placed on dissociations and ego defense. This defense allows the victim to leave his body when it is being violated. Victims learn to cut off feelings and physically numb out. This sets victims up for compulsive/addictive behavior.
Denial (Keeping the Secret)
The greatest problem with physical/sexual victimization is that victims cannot express their fear, hurt and anger. The incest victims are in a true catch-22. If they tell, they risk losing their family. Physical abuse victims are abused more if they express their hurt and anger.
Seven
The “Bad” Child: Checklist for How Your Self-Esteem was Damaged in an Emotionally Abusive Family
If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight.
If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel ashamed.
Dorothy Law Nolte
The most dominant need that any child has is to gradually move from the complete environmental support of infancy and childhood to the self-support of maturity.
In order to grow, children need their parents’ good modeling, attention, time and teaching. Children also need their own feelings affirmed.
In many ways children also offer parents a chance to learn and grow. As children go through each of their developmental stages, their parents encounter their own developmental deficits associated with that stage. Infancy is an opportunity for parents to be aware of how they fared with their own infancy needs. Children offer parents a chance to look at the rich emotional life they once had and could have again. In her book, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelties in Child Rearing, Alice Miller writes:
Children need a large measure of emotional and physical support from the adult. This support must include the following elements:
1. Respect for the child.
2. Respect for his needs.
3. Tolerance for his feelings [emphasis mine]
4. Willingness to learn from his behavior . . .
a. About the nature of the individual child
b. About the child in the parents themselves
c. About the nature of emotional life, which can be observed more clearly in the child than in the adult because the child can experience his feelings much more intensely and . . . undisguisedly than the adult.1
_____________
1 Miller, For Your Own Good, 100.
Instead of learning from our children, the poisonous pedagogy exhorts us to mold and train them like animals. It asks us to crush their vitality, spontaneity and emotional expression.
Anger, Sex and Emotional Energy
At any given moment we are having emotions. While our emotions are not all of who we are, they are our vital connection with life as it is now. Our emotions are one of our basic powers. They are like the gas gauge on our car, monitoring our basic need fulfillment. Our degree of happiness and self-satisfaction depends on getting our basic needs met. When we are out of touch with our emotions, we have no way to know what our needs are or whether we should attend to them. To deny our emotions is to deny the vital energy of our life.
I have been offering you checklists to see how you may have lost your self-esteem. The checklist I now propose should have relevance for everyone. It’s my opinion that no one had a “perfect” childhood, since no human parent is perfect. When it comes to emotional development, the poisonous pedagogy is clear. Strong feelings are harmful and weak. They mar rational clarity and they must be controlled. The two emotions that are especially dangerous are anger and sexual feelings.
Anger is essential as the core energy of our strength. Without the energy of anger, we may become apathetic, a doormat and a people-pleaser.
Anger is an emotion that is often confused with behaviors like hitting, screaming and cursing. The latter are behaviors based on judgment. They are not emotions. Angry emotions protect and preserve the individual.
Sexual emotions, on the other hand, promote and preserve the species. Without sexual emotions and the mature, age-appropriate behaviors based on them, the human race would die out in 100 years.
Emotions are energies in motion. If they are not expressed, the energy is repressed. As energy, it has to go somewhere. Emotional energy moves us. We are moved to tears when we’ve lost something dear to us. We are moved to action when we feel our shame. We are moved to joy when our needs are met.
Because our emotions are forms of energy, we can only stop feeling them by mustering counter energy. We do this with muscle tension, shallow breathing, fantasies of punishment or abandonment and critical self-talk. This tensing, internal talking and shallow breathing are the ways we physically numb out. After years and years of practice, we can literally no longer feel our emotions. Psychic numbness is the soil out of which our addictions are born. Our addictions are a way we can feel alive.
In my drinking days, I felt much more alive and sane when I was drinking than when I was sober. As the chemicals relaxed my muscles, I felt my feelings. I felt high. Being high or euphoric is the way we often feel when we are fully functional. When I was drunk, I felt alive; sober, I felt numb and dead.
Emotional repression is perhaps the most common symptom of our current cultural crisis. Our problems with addiction and family violence are rooted in the denial and repression of our affective life. This repression of emotion is supported to some degree by our schools, our churches and our legal system.
Figure 7. l. Ego Boundaries
Epigenetic Development
Human development occurs epigenetically. This means that one stage builds upon the previous one. Nature has her developmental rhythms. There is a time of developmental readiness. At a certain age, humans move toward muscle development, walking and talking. At approximately 18 months, children start saying, “No, let me do it.” At three and one-half years, they start asking, “Why?” At six years they get obstinate again. By 15 they have reached puberty and begin moving away from home. Each stage marks a crisis. Each crisis is a time of heightened vulnerability as well as a time of potential growth.
If the developmental tasks are not accomplished at the proper time and in the proper sequence, we go on without the age-appropriate developmental strength. The strength of our ego is the result of each properly resolved developmental crisis. If the crisis is resolved and the need is met, the ego grows in strength. If the developmental task is not met, the ego does not obtain the structure it needs for the next developmental task. It is weakened, and when the need is not met at all, it is broken.
In figure 7.1, I’ve tried to show three symbols of ego structure. These ego structures are what I referred to earlier as ego boundaries. A child needs to develop strong ego boundaries to move into adolescence. If we can become solidly a child while we are a child, we then have the foundation to enter adolescence on our way to becoming an adult. If we cannot be children while we are children, we become adult children. Strong ego boundaries are like a door that can only be opened from the inside by the owner of the house. Weak boundaries are like a door that can be opened from the outside and inside, but has no lock. Broken ego boundaries are like a house without any doors.
When an adult abuses a child emotionally, the adult replaces the child’s way of seeing, thinking and feeling with his own. This results in the developmental tasks of the child remaining unmet, leading to a weak ego and weak or broken ego boundaries.
Emotional abuse is a form of psychological battering. Psychological battering includes all forms of abuse because victims cannot be physically or sexually violated without also being psychologically battered. Emotional violence is involved in all abuse and causes the neglect of developmental dependency needs.
MIRRORING, ECHOING, AFFIRMING
Children’s earliest needs are for a warm, loving person to be there to mirror, echo and affirm them. This means that in the first 15 months of life (called the symbiotic stage), a child needs a face with accepting eyes to reflect his self. Whatever is in the mothering person’s eyes becomes the core and foundation of the child’s identity.
Alice Miller has argued that the infant child’s inner sensations form the core of the child’s self. These earliest sensations come from the mother’s feelings about the child. Since the child is nonverbal, everything depends on feelings. These early feelings about the self are the core out of which the child’s self-esteem will be formed. This earliest need is called the healthy narcissistic need. If parents never got their narcissistic needs met, they will use their children as objects of narcissistic gratification. When this is the case, the children intuit very early on that they must take care of the parents’ emotional needs if they are to survive.
