Bradshaw On, page 9
Let us look next at how the poisonous pedagogy dysfunctions a family system. This will give you an idea of how dysfunctional your family of origin may have been. As you read the next five chapters, keep an open mind. Remember that the idealization of family and parents is a natural and inescapable process, and that children who were severely abused or abandoned are set up to compulsively try to protect their parents. The issue here is not intentionality or blame. Most parents would have done things differently if they had known that what they were doing was abusive. Most were probably abused themselves. Intention is not relevant. The issue is to discover our own actual history. What we want is accountability. By knowing your personal history, you will not have to repeat it. By knowing what actually happened to you, by making the abandonment real, you can change. You cannot change what you’ve denied or what is embedded in unconscious ego defenses and therefore isn’t real. You cannot know what you don’t know. Terry Kellogg states that,
By connecting with the past and making the abuse real, you can express the hurt and pain you had about the abuse. By expressing the anger or sadness, you can relieve the shame. You can then understand that a lot of your behavior was about what happened to you and not about you.3
_____________
3 From an audiotape by Terry Kellogg.
With that realization, a new self-acceptance and self-love can begin. Each of us has a real surprise in store for us, the surprise of rediscovering our own unique, valuable and precious self, and with that discovery will come new self-esteem.
The key points covered in this chapter can be summed up using the letters of the word FUNCTIONAL.
Five Freedoms Expressed
In order to be fully functional, each human being needs to express freely the five basic powers that constitute human strength. These are: the power to perceive; to think and interpret; to emote; to choose, want (desire) and love; and to take risks through the use of imagination.
Unfolding Process of Intimacy
The marriage, as the chief component of the family, needs to be in the process of becoming intimate. This process goes through the stages of falling in love; working out differences; compromise and individualization; and high-level intimacy.
Negotiating Differences
Negotiating differences is the crucial task in the process of intimacy formation. To negotiate differences, a couple must have the desire to cooperate. This desire creates the willingness to fight fairly.
Clear and Consistent Communication
Clear and consistent communication are keys to establishing separateness and intimacy. Clear communication demands awareness of self and the other, as well as mutual respect for each other’s dignity.
Trust
Trust is created by honesty. Accurate expression of emotions, thoughts and desires is more important than agreement. Honesty is self-responsible and avoids shaming.
Individuality
In functional families, differences are encouraged. The uniqueness and unrepeatability of each person is the number-one priority in a functional family. When uniqueness is valued, a strong sense of self-esteem can be developed. When differences are acknowledged, a person can separate while staying connected. Strong individuality is based on self-awareness—the ability to know the differences between one’s thoughts, feelings, needs and desires.
Open and Flexible
In a functional family, the roles are open and flexible. One can be spontaneous without fear of shame and judgment.
Needs Fulfilled
Happy people are people who are getting their needs met. A functional family allows all of its members to get their needs filled.
Accountability
Functional families are accountable. They are willing to acknowledge individual problems as well as family problems. They will work to resolve those problems.
Laws Are Open and Flexible
The laws in functional families will allow for mistakes. Laws can be and are negotiable
Four
Profile of a Chronically Dysfunctioning Family System
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are playing a game, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play the game of not seeing that I play the game.
R. D. Laing
Dysfunctional families are primarily created by high levels of anxiety due to some form of stress. Our ability to deal with stress is a mark of our maturity level, which is partly measured by our ability to cope with the stressor effectively.
When two people with high levels of de-selfment and low self-esteem marry, the marriage is often characterized by the inability to cope with the stresses and strains of marriage and family life.
Think of the husband and wife as the architects of the family. When they cope in a dysfunctional way, the family starts dysfunctioning.
One of the tragic facts about dysfunctional individuals is that they almost always find other individuals who operate either at the same level of dysfunctionality or at a lower level. Remember the family SPELL we discussed in chapter 2? Each person carries the whole family within himself. Individuals tend to exclusively seek relationships with which they have experience. The most impactive relationships a person has are those with his family of origin. We almost always choose a partner who bears many of the positive and negative traits of our parents. You may object that you have a relationship just the opposite of your parents’ relationship. To choose the opposite is to still be dominated by the original trance. We are defined both by what we like or want and by what we don’t like or don’t want.
An observable fact about dysfunctional families is that they are part of a multi-generational process. Dysfunctional individuals who marry other dysfunctional individuals have come from dysfunctional families. So the circle remains unbroken. Dysfunctional
families create dysfunctional individuals, who marry other dysfunctional individuals and create new dysfunctional families. Bowen called this the “multi-generational transmission process.”
Five-Generation Genogram
Let me expand on this process by commenting on a family genogram. If you look at figure 4.1, you will see a five-generation genogram. A genogram is a family generational map. Genograms can be very useful for establishing multi-generational patterns. This genogram shows several striking patterns of dysfunctionality. First, there are five generations of alcoholism. Second, there are four generations of actual physical abandonment. Third, there was inappropriate and cross-generational bonding by both parents of the identified patient (IP). This is what I referred to as Surrogate Spousing. The IP carried on this generational pattern by marrying someone who was also a Surrogate Spouse. All the members in this genogram are co-dependent in the sense that they have a highly diminished sense of solid self-esteem. All members of this genogram need some form of treatment for emotional recovery. There are other subtleties in this multi-generational map, but they are of clinical concern. There are, however, many exceptions to the inevitability of the multi-generational process, and a great deal more work needs to be done to understand how and why certain individuals escape the consequences of the families’ dysfunction.
In the last chapter we explored the components of a good marital relationship. Good functional marriages are dependent upon each partner’s relationship to his/her self. If mother/wife loves herself and feels centered and growing in wholeness, she feels complete; likewise with the husband/father. I suggested that both partners feel complete and, therefore, don’t look to the other for completion.
Without self-completion and self-esteem, we can hardly love another. When any natural organism is incomplete, its natural life drive is toward completion. So when two incomplete human beings come together, their drive will be toward self-completion rather than affirming each other. If we are in the process of self-completion, we can help the other to self-completion. In fact, a more realistic concept of marriage would be a state of union in which each partner is providing the other with the opportunity to self-actualize or self-complete. This is possibly what Rilke meant when he said:
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.1
_____________
1 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Jane Barnard Greene and M. D. Hester Norton (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969).
This is also the sense of differentiation discussed in the previous chapter. Two people who have good differentiation are aware that:
1. Their feelings are distinct from their thoughts.
2. Their physical, emotional and intellectual selves are different from their partner’s selves.
3. They are responsible for their individual personal happiness.
People with such a solid sense of self-esteem are truly individuated and undependent. Being individuated and undependent does not mean that marital partners don’t care for each other. It means that while they desire to love and care for each other and to be loved and cared for by each other, they know they can survive alone. They know that they are responsible for their own lives and happiness. They know that the other cannot make them happy. They know that the other is not their better half.
Arithmetic Lesson
The notion of husbands and wives being the other’s “better half” actually exposes the common fallacy of our cultural patriarchal script on marriage. Our rigid sex roles promote two half-people joining together to make one whole person, as if one-half times one-half equaled a whole. One-half times one-half equals one-fourth, which is less than one-half. So two people who marry to be completed end up less complete than when they were incomplete.
Two half-people create an entrapment or enmeshment, rather than a relationship. In an entrapment, neither person has the freedom to get out. Each is entrapped by needing the other for completion. As the years roll on and the fear of going it alone increases, each becomes more and more trapped. I saw many entrapments in my marriage counseling. Such couples actually can’t divorce. They are held together in an emotional symbiosis. They reenact the fantasy bond we described in the introduction. They are bonded by their neediness. The symbol I like for entrapment is the symbol of two people in a canoe. Whenever one moves, the other is forced to move.
In a healthy relationship, each person is bonded by desire and not out of neediness. Therefore, each is in the process of becoming whole. Two whole people who guard each other’s wholeness come together and grow because of the guardianship of the other. Each, as Rilke suggests, provides the other the solid space (solitude) to grow. Each helps the other grow by giving up control, criticism, blame and judgment. In such a nonjudgmental space, each is free to exercise the five freedoms.
In a healthy relationship, such freedoms (which really amount to being loved unconditionally) let each partner accept himself or herself unconditionally. Unconditional self-acceptance is the royal road to wholeness. When you cannot feel, want, perceive, think or imagine what you are actually feeling, wanting, perceiving, thinking and imagining, you are split. The shoulds, oughts and musts of conditional love become internal measuring rods that cause you to split and alienate from self.
An inner warfare of self-talk ensures a constant enervating struggle. Existence itself is problematic rather than spontaneous. Everything is argued over. “Should I” or “shouldn’t I” plays like a broken record. The self gets lost in the internal dialogue. You literally are beside your self. This is a good picture of dysfunction.
Dysfunctionality in a family sets up shoulds, oughts and musts by which each member is measured. The poisonous pedagogy measures all perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions and imaginings. “You shouldn’t feel that way” or “Why do you want such and such?” or “How can you be so stupid?” or “You’re just a dreamer,” etc., etc., etc. In such an environment, natural powers are continuously discounted and judged as unacceptable. If you can’t feel angry, your anger is split off and numbed by ego defenses. That anger is defended against and ultimately lost to consciousness. The same is true of your sexual feelings, your fearful feelings, your sad feelings, your thoughts, your desires and your visions. As pointed out in chapter 1, once you can’t feel what you feel, your ego defenses take over and you become psychically numb.
When people marry out of deficiency and incompleteness, the relationship is headed for trouble. Each needs the other for completion. In courtship, each is willing to give because of the long-range fantasy that by giving each will ultimately get the other to complete herself or himself. This giving-to-get is one of the most troublesome and deceptive dynamics in relationships. Giving to get is a counterfeit form of love. However, each needy partner is connected by the illusion that the other is actually going to fulfill the incomplete self.
Courtship is a very deceptive and confused form of counterfeit love. Being “in love” is not love. It is probably a form of genetic bonding. Nature wants babies. So people “in love” have very powerful erotic drives for each other. When we are “in love,” sex is “oceanic” in its feeling. Being “in love” is characterized by strong emotion. Actually, the emotion is undifferentiated from reason. You are literally “out of your mind” when you are in love. This out-of-mind state restores the primal symbiosis of the mother/child. If you are still in a state of undifferentiation apropos of this early state, you will feel that all of the deprived emotional needs of that earliest state can be fulfilled. This phenomenon is worth giving up parts of your self in the short term. There are no longer any boundaries. And so the dysfunctional cycle continues.
Power Struggles and The Need for Completion
Once marriage occurs, those evaporated boundaries return. Sally Hatfield is married to Bill McCoy. Now comes the power struggle between the two original families. The attitudinal, behavioral and emotional rules for each family swing into full consciousness. Both partners feel “at home” with their own familiar boundaries. Each family of origin system now vies for supremacy. “The way my family did it is what feels right.” It’s what is family-iar. The power struggle begins and the differences must be negotiated. The “selected awareness” of being “in love” has given way to the new focus on actual differences.
The ability to accept others as different in whatever way they are different depends on your own level of differentiation. Two people with low-level differentiation cannot handle each other’s differences. As the power struggle between these two people intensifies, both partners despair of ever getting the other to complete him or her. Either consciously or unconsciously, each begins to believe that by having a child or children, he or she can get completed. This belief is the beginning of the children’s dysfunctionality. Born in the soil of their parents’ alienated split selves, there is no way for the children to get what they absolutely need for healthy growth. More than anything else, they actually need models of good self-love and social interest. Since their parents are split and are not self-accepting, they cannot model good self-nurturing love. There is no way for the children to learn self-love and social interest. What they will learn are various forms of counterfeit love, resulting from contamination by their parents’ weak, incomplete egos. They will be shamed through abandonment, and ultimately they will internalize the shame just as their parents did.
When children cannot get their dependency needs met, they become dysfunctional. And this is the best scenario we can paint. Add physical, sexual and emotional abuse to this picture, and we’re talking about severe damage that can prevent a child from becoming fully functional.
Most parental mistreatment and abuse stems from the parents’ own needs for completion. And the parents need completion because their own needs were never met because their needy parents were not there for them.
Parents who abuse their own children are struggling to regain the power they once lost to their own parents. Dysfunctional parents have usually been cheated out of their own feelings through abandonment. As children they were humiliated, laughed at, manipulated, intimidated, brushed aside, ignored, played with like a doll, treated like an object, sexually exploited or brutally beaten. What is worse, they were never allowed to express their rage, shame and hurt. Especially the hurt of wondering why their own parents were treating them so terribly. Beneath that hurt lies the magical egocentric belief that they must be very bad to be treated this way. This is what survives in the child who has now become parent—he is bad. As long as his own parents are idealized in the fantasy bond, the child continues to blame himself and to feel shame. Parents who were abused as children were not even allowed to know what was happening to them. Any mistreatment was held up as being necessary for their own good. When this mistreatment was most violent, they were told it hurt their parents as much as it hurt them. Or if that didn’t work, they were taught to honor their parents no matter what. As children, their most fundamental need was their parents’ protection; hence, abandonment was equivalent to death. So they obeyed and denied their own awareness (a) out of self-preservation, (b) because they possessed a magical and immature form of thinking and (c) because they in fact did love their parents. The fact that as children we cannot know what is happening to us is a crucial point to grasp.
The child-rearing rules that comprise poisonous pedagogy make it impossible for people to accurately remember the way they were actually treated by their parents.
The poisonous pedagogy demands that children give up their own wills and minds. The only emotion that is allowed is fear, as long as it is not so cowering as to make the parents feel guilty. Without their will, mind and emotions, children effectively lose any sense of self. They learn that they are most lovable when they are not being themselves. It is because of this radical deselfment that these children become adults who cannot understand that they were treated abusively by their parents.
