Bradshaw On, page 18
challenged.
Attention, Direction, Time and Good Modeling
Children need caretakers who give them time, attention, direction and good modeling. To do this, parents need to get their own needs met.
Dependency Needs Neglected
When a child’s dependency needs are not met at the proper time and in the proper sequence, the energy of that developmental stage gets blocked. This blocked energy arrests emotional growth. The child grows up to be an adult with an unfulfilled inner child.
Checklist for Emotional Violence
The list outlines the range of reactions that normally result from emotional violation and neglect. The list is offered to help victims of emotional violence see that their behavior is more about what happened to them, than it is about them.
House and Doorknob
The house with doorknobs on the inside is a symbol of a person with good boundaries. The house with the doorknobs on the outside is a symbol of a person with bad boundaries. And the house with no doors is a symbol of a person with no boundaries at all. (See figure 7.1.)
Internalized Shame
Shame moves from being a feeling to being a characterological state of being in three ways: (1) through shame-based modeling; (2) by being shamed (neglect, abuse); (3) by having our feelings and drives shamed.
Loss of Affect
When feelings are not affirmed, they are split off from our sense of self. We are beside ourselves. The energy needed for direct coping with the world is lost to the inner warfare of keeping the prohibited feelings in check. We lose all spontaneity.
Developmental Psychology
The work of Erikson and Kohlberg show how emotional and moral development take place.
Eight
The Most Common Impact of Chronic Family Dysfunction: Co-dependency
There is nothing so rare as an act of your own.
Henry Thoreau
You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. . . . Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never leave or lose.
Jo Coudert
Co-dependence is a dis-ease of the developing self causing various degrees of deselfment. I hyphenate the word disease to indicate that co-dependency is not a medical condition. It is a loss of ease with oneself, a feeling of inner emptiness, a state of not being at home with oneself. When we look at the rules of the poisonous pedagogy, it seems clear that selfhood would be a unique achievement for anyone raised with these rules. In other words, achieving selfhood in spite of these rules is a remarkable achievement.
Blind obedience asks a person to give up his own mind and will. It also asks that a person repress all emotions except fear. Monarchies of old disdained anger in their subjects because anger leads to revolution. “Rule by fear” keeps people in their place. It is a way to control people and keep them in conformity. Without a mind and will of our own and without anger, the energy of self-protection, we cannot develop a solid sense of self-esteem.
The co-dependency spawned by monarchial patriarchy was once a way of life—a way of ensuring security and survival. In the new world of deep democracy, with its emphasis on holistic thinking, individuality and personal power, what was once a normal adaptation for survival has become a dis-ease.
Co-dependency can be understood as a characteristic of an adult who is contaminated by childish dependency needs. The reason almost everyone identifies with many characteristics of co-dependency is that the monarchial patriarchal rules (the poisonous pedagogy) created an environment wherein children could not get their developmental dependency needs met.
When children are nurtured properly, their developmental dependency needs are, on some level, met. This is never achieved perfectly, but certainly in a manner that allows them to grow into adulthood with a certain degree of autonomy. When these dependency needs are not met, children become adults with a child’s “neediness.” This is the general meaning of what is described by the words “adult child.”
A co-dependent person is an adult with mild to severe developmental deficits. These developmental deficits are the reason adult children experience spontaneous age regressions. These regressions take place primarily in significant adult relationships.
For example, I was feeling quite good about myself when I married at the age of 35. I had been sober for a year and a half and had worked hard on myself during that time. At the time of my marriage, I was teaching high-brow philosophy at Dominican College and a psychology of religion course at Rice University. However, early in my marriage, I found myself frequently pouting and periodically raging.
Pouting and raging are childish behaviors, which in my case were age regressions to toddlerhood. I learned to pout and rage because anger was punished in my family and needs were often labeled as selfish. Children need their adult source figures to name their feelings for them and to model functional ways to express their feelings. Children also need to have their basic needs validated. It is the parents’ job to show their children how to affirm their needs and how to get them met. I never learned how to recognize and express anger, so I repressed it. What is repressed doesn’t go away. Years later my anger came out in bursts of primitive rage.
The Response to Stress
We humans have a built-in protection system that allows us to defend ourselves against stress. When a demand is made that threatens us, we adapt to it in several ways. In the face of the threat, the body prepares to fight or take flight. The heartbeat increases; the muscles tense; the blood is taken from the sections of the body that don’t need it; the muscles of the bowels and bladder are constricted or released in order to have greater mobility; the blood is sent to the upper muscles and legs. The person becomes hypervigilant.
This state of readiness was intended by nature to be a survival state. In a chronically dysfunctioning family, it is often the normal state. When a threat actually occurs in the forms of abandonment I have described, the person responds with survival behaviors. Such behaviors include denial, dissociation, repression, withdrawal (flight responses) or anger, identification with the persecutor, and reactive and reenacting behavior (fight responses). These survival behaviors are the traits I have been describing in the checklists.
Survival Behaviors
Even if the stressor stops (Dad quits raging, drinking, working, being violent), the members of the family still carry the impact of the stress. In chronically dysfunctioning families, the stress often goes on for years, even generations. The degree of stress ranges in intensity from mild (chronic fear) to severe (traumatic events). The child in a chronically dysfunctioning family learns to survive by developing certain patterns of behavior. These behaviors are the survival behaviors that were the actual responses to the violence. As the child from the dysfunctioning family grows up, these survival behaviors continue even though they are now disconnected from the original source of distress. These survival behaviors feel normal since they are the patterns the family member used every day of his early life in order to survive. As an adult they are not only unnecessary, they are actually unhealthy. While once they were protective, now they are destructive.
The psychologist Robert Firestone has compared these defenses to the body’s physical reaction when it forms pneumonia. In pneumonia, the body’s defensive reaction is more destructive than the original assault. The presence of organisms in the lungs evokes cellular and humoral defenses that lead to congestion that can destroy the organisms. In a similar way, the ego defenses created by the vulnerable child to protect against abuse become, in adult life, more troublesome than the original trauma. One’s ego defenses literally become the core of one’s co-dependency.
Survival behaviors are hard to give up. They are old friends that served us well. We did survive. But we survived by developing a kind of power that resulted from sacrificing ourselves. We learned to control people by becoming Caretakers, Stars, Heroes and Heroines, or by being Lost Children, Perfect, the Problem, the Rebel, or the Scapegoat. We were Surrogate Spouses, our Parent’s Parent, Little Parents, etc. In these early role decisions, we developed a dependency on things outside ourselves to the point of self-neglect. We gave up our own reality in order to take care of our parent(s) or the needs of the family system. In short, we survived by abandoning our true selves. We survived by not being there. We learned all our defenses in order to cover up the pain of being toxically shamed.
In the end our survival behaviors left us powerless and spiritually bankrupt. Co-dependency is a set of survival behaviors we learned in order to have some control over the chronic distress that was threatening us.
According to Dr. Timmen Cermak in his book, Diagnosing and Treating Co-dependence, co-dependence is now clearly definable enough “to warrant the diagnosis of mixed Personality Disorder as outlined in DSM IV.” This means that co-dependence has enough significant clinical status to be recognized and labeled as an emotional disease entity in its own right.
Another way I like to describe co-dependency is with the word “otheration,” as used by the Spanish existentialist José Ortega y Gasset. In describing the essence of man, Ortega y Gasset contrasts the life of man with the life of animals. Man, he says, lives from within himself (ensimismamiento), while animals live constantly on guard against the outside. Their lives are dominated by the outside. They constantly guard against the threats from the outside. They must guard against the ever-present dangers to their lives. They must constantly stalk and look for food. If they cease their endless vigilance, they will die. The life of an animal is “otheration” (alteration). “Otheration” is a good description of co-dependence.
The discussion and labeling of co-dependence has an interesting history. Originally the word co-dependence was limited to the study of alcoholic families. It was first used to label the spouse of the alcoholic. As the definition of addiction was expanded to include the wider range of addictions (activities, feelings, thoughts), the awareness dawned on observers that any type of dysfunctional family exhibits the same co-dependent structure. Co-dependence is the most common impact of chronic family dysfunction because when there is constant and chronic stress in a family, no one can attend to his own needs. Each member of the family adapts to the distress in an attempt to control it. Each becomes co-dependent on the stressor. Each becomes outer-directed. This outer-directedness prohibits family members from focusing on their own feelings or needs. Without awareness of these internal cues, there is no way for the family members to know what they need or what they are feeling.
In my television series, I extended the discussion to include our entire society. With our new awareness of deep democracy, we see that the rules of the poisonous pedagogy naturally create co-dependent families.
As society is modeled after the monarchial patriarchal families we grow up in, society itself becomes a dysfunctioning family system.
Society can become a closed system. Like the individual families we have examined, when society becomes a closed system, it dictates the roles (sex roles) and behaviors the individual can choose from. Society as a closed system calls forth certain characteristic behaviors and processes in the individuals who make it up. Our current society encourages co-dependence. Many of the traits that have emerged as components of co-dependency are traits that in one way or another are culturally normal. Sociologists have clearly outlined the process of “consensus reality” formation. They have shown how we create what is normal by our social consensus.
For example, Erich Fromm pointed out that during the Vietnam War, it was normal to hear someone say that the way to end the war was to drop a hydrogen bomb on Hanoi. If the same person suggested that the way to end air pollution was to level all the factories, most would think of him as crazy. The two suggestions are actually identical.
Societal Regression
One of the components of The Bowen Theory is a concept called societal regression. Societal regression refers to the way that emotional problems in society are similar to the emotional problems in the family. I don’t know which taught the poisonous pedagogy first, the family or the society. But our society bears the mark of many normal co-dependent traits. We will discuss them now.
OUR NOTION OF MARRIAGE
I once watched a man play a $25 slot machine in Las Vegas. His very obedient wife coyly stood next to him. Every once in a while he reached in his pocket, grabbed a handful of nickels and generously gave them to his wife. He saw me watching him and introduced himself to me, then asked if I’d like to meet his “better half.” It was hard for me to believe that he believed she was his better half!
This notion of two halves making the perfect marriage is an extremely dysfunctional notion. Two incomplete people cannot make a good relationship. A good relationship demands that there be two whole people who choose to be in the relationship and know that each can live without the other. The opposite of this is an enmeshment or entanglement, wherein both persons involved are convinced they cannot make it without the other. We are taught at an early age to call this inseparable relationship true love. Women especially are taught that their destiny is to find their true love and give their life to him. What is described as true love could be viewed as an addictive relationship. Enmeshment takes the place of intimacy. Two people come to believe that they can’t live without each other. Such a relationship is jeopardized if either partner grows or changes.
Our popular music also reinforces that two halves make one whole notion. These songs glorify suffering and promote the idea that happiness and completion lie in the other person. Some examples are songs like Stand By Your Man, She’s the Sunshine of My Day, Lord She Took Me In and Made Me Everything I Am Today; Good-Hearted Woman who “loves him in spite of his wicked ways” and Last Blues Song where it says, “I’m getting high on feeling low.” We could go on and on. We grew up with these songs. We heard many of them during our adolescence, when our identities were forming.
Music has a profound impact on the nonverbal unconscious part of our brain. Just at the time when love and relationships are focusing, our unconscious is being grounded in beliefs that we are nothing unless somebody loves us or that we can’t survive without a love partner.
The marriage relationship is the foundation and architect of the family. Little wonder millions of adult children have been robbed of their childhood because they were enmeshed in their family system’s intimacy vacuum.
OUR NOTION OF LOVE
Our beliefs about marriage condition our notion of love. Our cultural beliefs about love are often forms of addiction. (I expand on this in my book, Creating Love.) Many religious preachers teach a form of passive-dependent love. They teach that the highest act of love is self-sacrifice. The highest love is to set aside one’s own physical, emotional and intellectual needs to serve and take care of others. They teach long-suffering and martyrdom as two of the major ways to attain goodness. Acting good and acting righteous are more important than actually being good. Acting loving is more important than being loving.
Helping and giving up ourselves for others can often be a way to attain moral superiority. Helpers are always helping themselves. Taking care of others is a way to feel powerful, and in the moment of helping, we can overcome our feelings of emptiness and powerlessness. The feeling of goodness or righteousness is a euphoric feeling. Feeling righteous is a powerful way to alter our mood. I have some personal experience with this.
I was in a seminary for a number of years, studying to be a Catholic priest. I wore a Roman collar and a black robe. I preached goodness and righteousness. I was a counselor and spiritual advisor. Certainly, I would not discount all that I did. I acted out of the best awareness that I had.
Nevertheless, it was a rude awakening for me when I realized how helping and caretaking can be a subtle disguise for self-gratification. My shame-based inner self could feel as though I was really okay when I was preaching and helping. I ultimately had to realize that this was a counterfeit form of love.
Being in love is perhaps the most addictive of all. “In love” is not “love.” It is a state of biological bonding. When we are “in love” our boundaries collapse and there is a profound mood alteration.
M. Scott Peck has written brilliantly about our culture’s various forms of counterfeit love. His book The Road Less Traveled offers an enlightening, and for many, surprising discussion of this matter. Love, according to Peck, is a form of work. It involves commitment and overcoming laziness and fear through the courage to risk exposure and rejection. Love is therefore not a feeling—it is an act of the will and a decision. All true love begins with self-love. The work and discipline of love flow from a true sense of self-value. We have to know how to value ourselves before we can value others.
RATIONALISM—THE DENIAL OF FUN, EMOTIONS AND SPONTANEITY
The family, schools and churches that I experienced growing up taught me to control myself when it came to fun, spontaneity and emotions. The schools I went to taught me not to talk, to stand straight in line, not to ask too many questions, to memorize great quantities of material, to learn a number of things I’ve never used again (solid geometry, years of Latin, diagraming sentences). I was discouraged from laughing exuberantly at school and certainly never in church. To be excited, noisy, happy, full of energy was reprimanded as bad behavior. When I was sick (especially at home)—quiet, depressed, obedient, orderly—I was rewarded and called good. Children were good and well-behaved when they obeyed silently and promptly.
Our schools and churches are still highly rationalistic. Reason and logic are desirable; emotions are weak and suspicious. We do not educate the right hemisphere of our brain. Right hemispheric activities include intuition, music, creativity and holistic thinking. Our logic is still characterized by black and white kinds of thinking and judgment. If you believe in one thing, you must by that fact reject its opposite. There is no synthesis—no gray area.
