Bradshaw On, page 17
Gwenella was born to take care of her mother’s grief over her brother, who died one and a half years before she was born. She learned that when she smiled and pretended to be happy, it made her mother happy. The facade of laughter and happiness that Gwenella came to counseling with was truly deceiving. She had been in a terrible marriage for 18 years, taking care of a cocaine-addicted spouse. Both of her children were acting out with drugs. When she finally took off her smiling, “little Mary Sunshine” mask, she wept buckets.
TOUCHING, WARMTH, STROKES, BELONGING, ATTACHMENT
If our mothering figure is defended against her emotions and cut off from her spontaneity and warmth, we will not be touched in the way we need to be. Children need to be touched in order to establish a sense of warm contact. Physical touching is referred to as stroking in some psychological models. Such warm contact tells us that there is someone out there whom we can trust and depend on. Our hope for getting our dependency needs met rests on this. If we can feel the touch and the warmth of an emotionally
available person, we can begin our life with a sense of trust. We will believe that the world is friendly and warm. We can depend on what’s out there to get our needs met. If our mothering person is not there for us emotionally, we will feel her coldness and mistrust the world. We will have to create a fantasy bond, an illusion of connectedness, in order to go on.
Depriving a child of physical strokes can literally kill the child in the earliest stages of life. As we grow older our need for physical strokes is extended into the need for emotional strokes. Emotional strokes mean getting attention, being prized and valued, and having our growth achievement applauded.
When we cannot get these strokes in a healthy manner, we will do whatever we have to do to get them. Strokes are a basic need. Strokes are to the psyche what food is to the body. Children who do not get strokes in a healthy way get them in unhealthy ways. Being singled out as bad, causing trouble or being the family failure are all negative forms of recognition.
SELFNESS, SELF-ESTEEM, SELF-ACCEPTANCE, SELF-ACTUALIZATION
We need to be valued for the special person we are. We need to see all of our selves in the eyes of our caretakers as we interact with them. All our emotions, all our needs, all our drives need to be echoed back to us so we can get a sense of ourselves and establish an inner unity. If parts of us are accepted (when we giggle and coo) while other parts are rejected (when we have a temper tantrum or cry too loudly), the parts that are rejected split off. Each time we feel those parts of ourselves, our internalized parental eyes and voices reject them. These rejected parts of self (most often our sexuality, anger and aggressiveness) operate underground. They continue to grow outside our consciousness and have a life and power of their own.
Anger, for example, can explode on us without warning. People often say, “I don’t know what came over me today” or “I lost it today,” meaning, “I lost my temper. I got out of control.” The same is true for sadness or fear.
Growing up, I was not allowed to have anger. It was one of the seven deadly mortal sins. A well-meaning Catholic nun passed an X ray of a diseased lung around the room and told us our souls looked like that under mortal sin. I vowed never to get angry again. I was urged to be nice. I was compared (a form of shaming) to a rat fink down the street named B.W. “Why can’t you be nice like B.W.?” I was asked. B.W. actually set fires in garages, but he was a saint around adults.
I also grew up, like most males, being told, “Real men don’t cry” and “Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Even when I was joyous, I couldn’t be joyous too long because “there are starving children in Latin America.” If you can’t be glad, mad, sad or afraid, you have to shut down. Your true self indeed shuts down and a false self is created. This false self meets the needs of both the parents and the covert needs of the system for balance.
When a child is allowed to experience his own emotions, he can individuate in the proper developmental sequence. But when a child is used to taking care of his parents’ emotions, he loses contact with his own emotions and becomes dependent on others to verify his feelings.
AUTONOMY, DIFFERENCE, SPACE, SEPARATION
Children have a need to be different. They have a need for physical space. In fact, the need for physical space is the foundation for a person’s physical boundary. My children never performed a task exactly the way I showed them or asked them to do it. They did it their way. And as frustrating as that often was, it’s the way God and nature intended it.
Each person is unique, unrepeatable and incomparable. Each has a basic need for individuality, autonomy and difference. This need emerges at about 15 months. This is the beginning of the long journey of separation. After symbiotic bonding, we start separating.
The Terrific Twos mark the beginning of solid selfhood. In this period, a child learns that his name is “Don’t.” The child starts saying “No” and this is wonderful. If we allowed children to say no the way nature and God designed it, we wouldn’t have as many molested children and we wouldn’t have to have a national campaign trying to teach teenagers to “just say no.”
Child molesters are like hunters going after prey. A man once convicted of child molestation told me that he learned to look for the most needy and the most obedient child on the playground.
The great danger in the autonomous stage is shame. The child needs to learn a sense of shame and doubt. These are important limits. Shame is the emotion that lets us know we are finite. It tells us we will and can make mistakes. It lets us know we are in need of help; that we are not omnipotent. Shame is what tempers the child’s omnipotent willpower. However, too much shaming turns the child’s need to exercise his will and manipulate the environment against himself. As the psychologist Erik Erikson writes in Childhood and Society:
He will over-manipulate himself. He will develop a precocious conscience. Instead of taking possession of things in order to test them by purposeful repetition, he will become obsessed by his own repetitiousness . . . he learns to gain power by stubborn and minute control . . . such hollow victory is the infantile mold for the compulsive neurosis. It is also the source of later attempts to govern by the letter, rather than by the spirit.2
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2 Erikson, 252.
The danger for parents at this stage is over-control and perfectionism. When parents are perfectionistic, the generational cycle takes on a repetitive pattern. The compulsive, controlling parent shames the child . . . who will become an adult with a compulsive, controlling, immature child inside.
Shame results from all forms of abandonment. Actual physical abandonment is shaming. When I was a child, my father was never there. I felt worth-less than his time. We have seen how physical and sexual abuse are shaming. All forms of psychological abuse are shaming: yelling, name-calling, labeling, criticizing, judging, ridiculing, humiliating, comparing and contempting are all sources of shame. Shame-based parents are models of shame. How could shame-based parents possibly teach their children self-love?
The most destructive aspect of shame is the process whereby shame moves from being a feeling to a state of being, an identity. (For a full discussion of this process, see my book Healing the Shame That Binds You.) The feeling of shame becomes an identity when one’s emotions, needs and drives are shamed. I’ve discussed how one’s emotions get shamed. When I’m taught that anger is a deadly sin, I am ashamed when I am angry. My anger gets bound by shame. What this means is that when I feel anger I also feel shame—likewise with fear, sadness and joy.
In the system I grew up in the only emotion you could have without feeling shame was guilt. Guilt is an important emotion. In healthy family systems, guilt is the conscience former. It makes the family members accountable and responsible. Guilt is developmentally more mature than shame. It presupposes the presence of some internalized rules. Guilt is the feeling of regret when your behavior violates a sense of personal value. Shame is a feeling of inadequacy about oneself. Guilt is a guardian of doing; shame is a guardian of being.
When shame is toxic, repair and reparation are closed off. If there is something wrong with my very being—there is nothing I can do about it.
When guilt is toxic, it is a mask of co-dependency. Toxic guilt occurs in dysfunctional family systems that are enmeshed. In such systems each person plays his rigid role in order to keep the closed system in balance, and each gives up his uniqueness in order to perform his false self role in loyalty to the system. Toxic guilt denies us any sense of uniqueness. In fact, in dysfunctional families any attempt to leave the system, to give up your rigid role, to individuate, to differentiate, to be unique and different is met with anger and rejection. Anyone who is in a chronically dysfunctioning family and tries to be his own unique self will feel guilt. It’s important to see that this neurotic guilt is a symptom of the dysfunctioning system.
Individuals in a dysfunctional family exist for the family. The family does not exist for the individuals.
Internalized shame also results from your drives being shamed. A curious three-year-old will start finding parts of his body. I can envisage the following scenario:
One day little Farquahr finds his nose. He calls it by name, which greatly pleases Mom. Mom invites Grandma over, who promptly asks Farquahr to show her his nose. He proudly responds and receives many strokes. Later on he finds his ear and gets the same response. Likewise with his elbow, fingers and navel . . . and then one Sunday with all the family in the living room (and maybe even with the preacher visiting), he finds his penis. To his little mind, “If the nose got ’em, this is really going to get ’em.” Not so. Never has little Farquahr been removed so fast from a room. He has never seen such disdain on his mother’s face (not even as bad as when he covered his bedroom wall with shit). He gets it: “There will be no genitals in this family.” From that moment on his sexual feelings and drive will be shamed. His sexuality will have to live in secret. It certainly cannot be a part of an open, spontaneous, vibrant family life. And we wonder why Masters and Johnson found 68 percent of marriages sexually dysfunctional. How can we live in a family where genital sex is totally secretive (or banal) for 20 years, and then get married and expect to have an open and vibrant sex life? Many people can only be excited sexually as long as it’s illicit. It’s when it’s licit that many people turn off. What a tragedy! Sexuality is probably the most shamed of all our human drives.
Children also get their aggressive drives shamed. They are curtailed in their rambunctiousness. They are curtailed in their curiosity and desire to explore and learn. Often their drives to eliminate are shamed in potty training so that they wind up like me, having to run water in bathrooms so that no one will know I’m doing the dastardly thing. And God help me if I’m caught in public with a need for number two. That is a catastrophic nightmare. Once the drives are shamed, each time a person feels a natural urge or drive, he will also feel shame.
Likewise with all the needs I’m describing. If no one was there to touch you and you were shamed for wanting to be close and touch, when you felt the need to touch, you also felt shame. Lots of men have been shamed in their need to hug, cuddle and touch. They learn to project or use the ego defense of conversion when that need comes up because they were shamed for being needy. Real men don’t need.
A lot of men end up converting the need to be touched and to be close into sexuality. They sexualize their affectional needs. They come home from work. They feel the need to be warm and close so they say, “I’m horny.” Women have also been shamed for their sexual needs, maybe even more so than men. So women learn to be ashamed of their sexual needs. They affectionalize their sexual needs. They may be hugging and close and start to feel sexual. Then they feel shame and cut off those feelings. All needs can be shamed. If one cannot be who he is and no one is really there for him, then any feelings, needs or wants he has are not okay.
PLEASURE, PAIN, STIMULATION
Children need pleasure and fun. They need to be stimulated by age-appropriate challenges. Children also need to experience their legitimate suffering. Overindulgent and oversubmissive parents are abandoning and abusing their children by not letting them experience the normal amounts of pain that life brings. Pain is the vehicle of growth and the carver of wisdom. “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain,” writes the poet Kahlil Gibran. It is abusive to protect a child from this source of growth, courage and wisdom.
On the flip side of the coin, over-perfectionistic and overly punitive parents deprive their children of the fun, laughter, joy and spontaneity that are our childhood rights. The stern, authoritarian, often somber religious parent cuts off these life-giving and spontaneous emotions. Children growing up in such families are deprived of the joys of childhood.
DEPENDABILITY, PREDICTABILITY
Children need dependable parents. They need to count on their parents’ presence and support as they test their personal limits. This testing of personal limits is a requirement for identity formation. It demands that a child be able to push against reasonably healthy solid persons.
For example, when the two-year-old toddler ventures out in exploration and autonomy, he needs the mothering person to be there. He may say, “Let me do it,” but if Mom leaves the room, he’ll follow her and do it where she’s in his peripheral vision. He needs to find his boundaries and self-identity within the limits of safety. This will hold true all the way through adolescence. An adolescent needs to test and experiment and have a dad and mom with a pretty firm identity who is there for that teen. If Dad is needy and wants his son to show him how grateful he is for all Dad has done, then the son has to interrupt his identity formation to take care of needy Dad.
The need for dependency is the need for predictability and meaning. Children need their parents to be there for them in a reasonably predictable manner. In chronically dysfunctioning families, the children never know what to expect. Dad may be getting drunk—that’s why he’s not home. Mom may be hysterical or hypochondriacal. The children have to walk on eggshells. They never know what’s coming next. The rageaholic father may have an outburst at the most unexpected times.
Parents who are adult children often use their children as a substitute for their own parents. The child can become the object of both adult and childish wishes, which are often contradictory.
In such an atmosphere the children have no time to tend to their own feelings, needs and wants. They are often hypervigilant. They are constantly on alert to what may happen next in the family.
There are no bad children. Children are born precious, unique and incomparable. We must fight to protect children so that each child has the right to a good childhood.
I certainly don’t believe that everyone always stays good and pristine. I believe that evil is an obvious fact in the universe. People can become vicious—but there would be far less evil in the world if more children had a healthy emotional environment to grow up in.
Children are confused by the moralistic measures imposed on them at an early age. We ask two-year-olds if they’ve been a “good” boy or a “bad” boy. We call them good boys or good girls when they please us. We call them bad boys and bad girls when they displease us. Such distinctions are parents’ projections and come from the moralistic presuppositions of the poisonous pedagogy.
Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist at Harvard, has spent the better part of a lifetime researching moral development in children. His studies are built on the monumental work of Jean Piaget, who spent 50 years studying how children’s minds work. Piaget wrote a dozen books and 100-plus articles showing us his researched data on the stages of mental development. Kohlberg’s data suggest the following: From birth to seven years old, children are pre-moral. The good is what they want and like. They begin to think logically at about age seven, although their logic is limited to the concrete literal. With proper challenge, they move from thinking that the good is what you want and can get away with, to a kind of concrete reciprocity—you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Only in adolescence are they cognitively capable of altruistic thinking. Adolescent morality is dominated by interpersonal conformity. Only later on is the mind capable of thinking that the good has intrinsic value. At this level of moral thinking, the individual does good because good is good to do. He does good because of the principles and beliefs that he adheres to. It takes 25 years for an individual to get to this level of thinking. According to Kohlberg, many adults never make it.3
Parents who model goodness and who firmly establish behavioral consequences for antisocial behaviors provide a much more stable moral foundation for their children than do parents who spank and punish them. To label children bad throughout the first seven years does damage to their self-worth. Calling children “bad” and spanking and punishing them for being “bad” causes shame. Shame-based people feel flawed and defective as human beings. If anything sets people up to be immoral, it’s shame.
Look at the following checklist for adult children of emotionally violating families.
The key points covered in this chapter can be summed up using the letters of the phrase BAD CHILD.
Basic Dependency Needs
All children need someone they can depend on; to have someone to mirror and echo them; to be touched; to have their feelings affirmed; to be taken seriously and to be stimulated and
