Background
 |
No one is an island, according to the old saying, and so
it should be recognized that no psychological problem is ever a purely individual
problem. Therefore, any psychological distress felt by an individual has
roots in society at large.
Contemporary
American society certainly offers ample opportunity for psychological distress.
Ever since the 19th century, traditional pre-industrial family values have
been pushed aside in favor of the various pleasures of mass consumption.
In a permissive, self-indulgent society, there is less and less use for
self-discipline and self-restraint. When anything goes, nothing means anything,
and all paths lead nowhere. And right in the middle of nowhere you are sure
to find anxiety, depression, and distress.
This does not
mean, however, that all psychological problems can be solved by changing
society. Some political groups may try to suggest such a solution, but ultimately
the individual must be responsible for recognizing and transcending—or
“seeing through”—all the social illusions that can lead a
person astray. Many persons have been brought to disaster by believing that
they can change, control, or be responsible for anyone else.
In fact,
any attempt to “control” the thoughts or behavior of another person
is just an
unconscious
attempt to control—rather than face up to and
heal—your
own
“ugly”
inner life. And until you have made peace with yourself, you will never be
able to live in peace with anyone else. So
in this world you can’t change anyone but
yourself. Then, it can be hoped, your example
might influence others to change themselves.
This is how it
works in life, and this is how it works in a family. |
The
Rationale
for
Family
Therapy
|
In the early part of the 20th century, the psychologist
Carl Jung noted that children tend to live out the
unconscious
conflicts of their parents. And, as Family Systems Theory teaches, all too
often a child will be marked as a “problem,” the
“scapegoat” or “black sheep” of the family—the
Identified Patient, in Family Systems language—when really the
entire family is locked into some dysfunctional pattern of
interaction.
An
Example |
A truly stunning
example of a child “acting out” a family dysfunction can be seen
in the 1964 movie, The Chalk Garden. I won’t describe the plot
of the story here, so go rent the movie. But the basic problem is that parents
often have children because of their own desires: they need to feel loved
and they believe that a child’s helplessness will be a source of love;
or perhaps they have in mind a particular role for the child to fulfill.
As a result, they end up expecting that the child will grow up to be totally
obedient to them as a sign of love. But the child feels suffocated by the
parents’ desire and tries to find his or her own destiny. This search
for independence only marks the child, in the parents’ minds, as
disobedient, ungrateful, and unloving. Love quickly turns to hate and disaster
follows. |
|
Many of
the clinical disorders of infancy, childhood, and adolescence, such as the
Learning Disorders,
Communication
Disorders (e.g., stuttering),
Attention-Deficit and Disruptive Behavior
Disorders (e.g.,
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, or
ADHD), Conduct
Disorders, and
Elimination
Disorders (e.g.,
Enuresis, or
bedwetting), as well as the general Sleep
Disorders (e.g.,
Nightmare Disorder
and Sleep Terror
Disorder) can all have origins within the overall
family system.
In such cases,
it’s always easiest to medicate the “Identified Patient” and
then forget about the rest of the family. It would be far better, and more
clinically appropriate, to ask some specific—and painful—questions
about how the child’s symptoms may be reflecting parental conflicts
and family anxiety. |
Marriage
|
How many people ever contemplate the meaning of
marriage?
“Marriage”
as an economic contract, for example, has been around for ages, and
it has nothing to do with love or romance. It simply guarantees the closed
transmission of wealth, status, and power. Even the concept of
“family” is irrelevant to this kind of marriage, except in so far
as children serve as necessary and vital agents of hereditary
transmission.
But marriage
as a religious contract (Holy Matrimony) is another matter entirely: it’s
based in a commitment to protecting family and children, and grounded in
the concept of a man and a woman giving themselves to each other for
life in order to bring new life into the world: to have children
and to create a family in which the children are raised to honor such values
as faith, hope, and charity—not to
fear
love. The conjugal act between the man and the woman guarantees this
generation of life. Marriage, therefore, is an act of service, not a
psychological way to soothe your fear of emptiness through a
“relationship” with another person.
When most people
think of marriage, however, they think of
love.
They talk about committed relationships, but to what is the
“commitment” really? Free sex? Financial security? Self-indulgence?
What sort of commitments are these? And so here is precisely where the
psychological problems begin.
|
The great philosopher
and theologian Thomas Aquinas said that “To love is to will the good
of
another.” [1]
So if you think about it, all the moral decisions about marriage and family
actually derive psychologically from
love—real
love, not the “love” of popular fantasy. Infidelity, contraception,
abortion, divorce, euthanasia, and even embryonic stem-cell research, all
defile love through a focus on personal pleasure and convenience, at the
expense of the dignity—and even the life—of another human being.
And what is depression and trauma if not the despair of seeing life turned
into a piece of garbage? |
|
Unfortunately,
contemporary culture tends to think of “love” as a way to find
personal fulfillment in life. That is, each person in a
“relationship” expects the other to fill up the existential void
in his or her life. Ultimately, this is
impossible, and so when there are problems,
the conflicts are usually about one person complaining of not getting what
he or she wants. In this situation, only one psychological solution can be
possible: Take responsibility for your own
life satisfaction. True love is about giving,
not receiving. If you’re mainly concerned about getting pleasure or
security, you’re being selfish, not loving.
|
This means that
you have to look carefully at your own life and stop
blaming others. If you are not satisfied with your
life, it’s probably because you are not living up to your inner potential
or are in one way or another betraying your life values. This can be a hard
lesson to learn, but be honest—an adulterous
sexual affair that defiles your marriage commitment, for example, is just
a perverted attempt to avoid the real problem: yourself. |
|
|
Divorce
|
In 1997, a prominent psychologist wrote an article which
appeared in an American psychological journal. The author reviewed several
commonly held beliefs about psychology, and one of his claims was that the
brain is quite resilient to the effects of trauma. He noted that rats which
had been subjected to trauma as infants developed into apparently well-adjusted
adults.
I wrote
a
response [2] to his claim in which I noted that, unlike animals, we
humans have language—along with a memory system with which to process
it—and that
trauma
has a unique linguistic way of lingering in our
unconscious minds. Humans, just like rats, may give
the appearance of being well-adjusted, but, as any experienced mental health
clinician has seen over and over, many of the seemingly
“well-adjusted” individuals walking around in our society are tormented
by inner lives of emptiness and self-destructive
despair.
Professor, physician, lawyer—they all say the same thing to me: “I
feel like mush inside.”
And most of them, as children, saw their families shattered by divorce or
adultery—often the “adultery” of child sexual abuse.
We take divorce so much for granted today that it is hard not to find
someone who has been divorced or who has married someone who has been divorced
or who has parents or relatives who have divorced. And like that prominent
psychologist, we brush it off and say, “It doesn’t matter.”
But it does matter.
Children need to have both a mother and a father who will protect them, care
for them, teach them, and guide their feet through darkness into the way
of peace. Even the
trauma
of losing a parent to death is less a trauma than losing a parent to divorce,
for in divorce a parent essentially says to a child—and to a
spouse—“My personal desires are more important to me than is your
welfare. This family is nothing to me, and you are just an object to be moved
around like a pawn in my self-indulgent search for happiness.”
Laboratory rats have only cheese and mazes. What can they say about trauma?
Children, however, have phobias, eating disorders, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs,
sex, unwanted pregnancies, sexual diseases, abortion—and suicide, and
guns—to “speak” about their traumas.
And yet we continue to look at divorce and say, “It doesn’t
matter.” |
The
Role
of
a
Father
|
A father must “come between” a mother and her
child to sever the child’s natural bond of dependence on the mother
and to lead the child out into the world so that the child can develop his
or her talents and take up a meaningful, productive life of honesty and
integrity.
|
All of us have
experienced the delight of being fed and protected when we were helpless
infants. In fact, if we don’t experience it, we die. And the delight
of this early infantile experience, which makes no demands on us and leaves
us free simply to enjoy it, is at the root of our adult yearnings for a
“utopia” in which all of our needs are taken care of
effortlessly.
But to function
responsibly as an adult, a child must pass beyond this care-free infantile
state of dependence. If this task fails, the child will remain neurotically
dependent on maternal protection and will be afflicted with doubts and anxieties
about assuming personal responsibility in the world. Moreover, the child’s
talents will either remain buried in fear or will
be expressed largely through an unconscious grandiosity.
And, in its most severe manifestations, alcoholism and drug addictions can
develop in adolescence and adulthood, because all addictions have their roots
in a desire to escape the demands of personal responsibilities and return
to an idyllic feeling of care-free bliss. |
|
A child, therefore,
has three essential tasks which must be accomplished under the guidance of
a father.
1. To learn how
the world works.
The father must
teach the child not only about the abstract—and often
dangerous—dynamics of social relationships beyond the family itself
but must also provide instruction in the practical rules governing the physical
world, including honest, productive work in the world.
|
Imagine a primitive
society of forest dwellers. To teach the child how the world “works,”
the father must take the child out into the depths of the forest and show
the child how to survive and eat by using weapons, building fires, and making
shelters. Now, the modern world may not be a forest anymore—though it
is often enough called a jungle—yet the forest metaphor aptly describes
the process by which a father must teach a child “how the world
works.” |
|
2. To learn to
trust.
Yes, a child
will more-or-less “trust” a nurturing mother. This sort of trust,
though, is a necessary part of mother-infant bonding for the sake of the
infant’s physical survival.
Real trust requires
that the child grow to depend on and respect the father, a person different
from the mother from whom the child originated; that is, the father is a
different body and a different gender from the mother. The
father—and only a father—can therefore teach the child to enter
the world and encounter difference confidently. But, to be a successful
teacher, the father must teach this from the place of his own faith and
obedience. In other words, the father must live from his heart by the rules
he teaches to his children. In this way the children can learn to trust him
through his own integrity. Otherwise, the children will see him for a
hypocrite and will disavow—openly
or secretly—everything he represents.
3. To learn to
trust oneself.
As a child receives
instruction from a trustworthy father and develops a sense of confidence
under the father’s compassionate guidance, the child will then be able
to function more and more independently, assimilating the father’s external
guidance into an internal, psychological confidence.
|
First the father
builds a fire, saying to the child, “Watch me.” Then the father
encourages the child to build the fire. Finally the child goes off into the
forest alone, and builds a fire on his own, confident in what he learned
from his father. |
|
Lack
Now, considering
all of this about the role of a father, look about you and see how many fathers
fail miserably in their responsibilities. How many fathers are absent from
the family because they were nothing more than sperm donors in a moment of
lust? How many fathers are absent from the family because of divorce? How
many fathers are absent from the family because their adultery draws them
away to another woman? How many fathers are absent from the family because
they are emotionally insensitive to their children’s needs? How many
fathers are absent from the family because they are preoccupied with work
or sports? How many fathers are absent from the family because they are
preoccupied with their own pride and arrogance? How many fathers are absent
from the family because of alcoholism? How many fathers are absent from the
family because of illness? How many fathers are absent from the family because
a woman decided she didn’t need a man to have a child? It can go on
and on. And it does.
And the sad thing
is that when a father is absent—whether physically or emotionally—his
lack causes a lack in the children. Lacking understanding of how the world
works, lacking trust in others, and lacking trust in themselves,
children—whether they be boys or girls—become lost, insecure, and
confused. They lack confidence. They lack real faith. They lack a spiritually
meaningful future. They lack life. All because their fathers were
lacking.
|
Please note,
though, that all of this lack resulting from the lack of a father
is, in many cases, largely unconscious.
Yes, some persons are truly crippled—both emotionally and socially—by
the lack of a father, and their lives become dysfunctional and stuck. And
sadly, some of them die in childhood from
abuse. [3]
But other persons are able to keep up a surface appearance of functionality;
they hold jobs, they get married, and they have children. Yet under the surface
of normality a deep secret of anger and
victimization is buried. Here are the dark
roots of symptom after symptom of secret resentment for the father.
Argumentativeness. Passive-aggression. Suspiciousness.
Trying to make others “face the truth.” Being late for appointments.
Procrastination. Learning disorders. Difficulty following directions or reading
maps. Getting lost. Mental confusion at just the times when
clarity of thought is needed. And all
addictions—not just drug and alcohol addiction, but also
obesity, cigarette
smoking, and pornography. This list can go on
and on. And it does. All because a father, in his physical, emotional, or
spiritual absence, failed to instill in a child a sense of inner stability,
trust, and confidence. |
|
|
Anger
|
Anger, and coping with anger, can be a big problem for
many persons. Part of the problem, though, is that most of us don’t
understand the difference between feeling hurt and getting
angry.
Anger usually begins with some emotional hurt; that is, in being threatened
or frustrated in some way. Adrenaline pumps into your bloodstream. Your heart
rate jumps. Your blood pressure surges. You feel insulted and threatened.
However, even people who can’t list off the Seven Deadly Sins—Pride,
Wrath, Envy, Lust, Greed, Gluttony, and Sloth, if you’re
interested—know that there’s something wrong about anger.
Well, what is it?
Wrath, or getting angry, refers to one way that people manage the
feeling of being hurt and insulted: usually by loud, cruel, hate-filled
words. And often the hate erupts into physical violence. So the problem
isn’t with feeling irritated at the insult—which can be
managed
quite peacefully, believe it or not—but with a desire for revenge which
is always hurtful and often outright abusive.
Anger,
therefore, has no place in a family because, to be healthy, a family should
be oriented toward love, growth, and support, not revenge and
hostility. |
Domestic
Violence
|
As sure as there are marital problems, there are many couples
who resort to violent confrontation. Those who seek to console, to understand,
and to love are strong in wisdom, and violence has been said to be the last
resort of the weak.
Although some
people claim differently, domestic violence is not so much a political problem
rooted in “male domination of women” as it is a psychological problem
rooted in an unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s own life.
Granted, there are some persons—male and female—who are so filled
with
frustration
and anger
that they will attack anyone—including children, and pets—without
provocation. But just as often there is provocation, and violence becomes
a sly family dance. There are even some people so good at subtle provocation
that they always come off looking like innocent victims. It’s a dirty
business overall.
|
The
DSM-IV [4]
diagnosis called Intermittent Explosive
Disorder is characterized by several
discrete episodes of failure to resist aggressive impulses that result in
serious assaultive acts or destruction of property, and it describes
a sort of aggressiveness that is way out of proportion to anything that could
have precipitated it. For example, a family member might go into a rage because
the mashed potatoes have lumps in them. Or someone might throw a punch and
start a fight after he accidentally bumps into another person who then says,
“Watch where you’re going!”
Unfortunately, this diagnosis, like any other psychological
diagnosis,
tells us little, if anything, about the underlying reasons for the behavior.
It really amounts to nothing more than a fancy way of describing a bad temper
in a person who cannot manage
anger,
forgive
others, or live with true
peace
of mind. |
|
Even in a case
that seems
“political”—say,
for example, the wife wants to work outside the home and the husband does
not want to allow her—the real problem derives from a lack of loving
communication. The woman harbors anger and frustration toward her husband
and criticizes him at every opportunity; the husband feels threatened, rejected,
and humiliated, often triggering traumatic memories of abuse he suffered
as a child. And violence erupts because real communication has degenerated
into a power struggle. Neither partner has approached the problem from a
position of empathy and unconditional acceptance of the needs of the other.
And when empathy is lacking, everyone, including the children,
suffers.
|
California law
mandates that when a psychotherapist or any other mandated
reporter has knowledge or suspicion of it, the “unjustifiable mental
suffering” of a child witnessing family violence is to be reported as
child abuse. |
|
Offenders
Many persons
who get violent have been abused in some way as children. When a child is
abused, he of course feels very helpless and vulnerable, and so
unconscious defenses work very hard to keep this feeling
under “control” by pushing it out of conscious awareness. When
that child grows up, he may feel the unconsciously motivated need to control
and manipulate everyone in his home; whenever he feels insulted, all the
old vulnerability “leaks out,” and he can resort to violence out
of pure frustration for not being able to do anything else. (Remember:
Violence is the last resort of the weak and powerless.) In the end,
he “loses control” because he never had it in the first
place.
So, if you are
prone to violence, the real “cure” in all this is in (a) admitting
your old emotional wounds, with therapeutic help; (b) recognizing when those
wounds are being triggered by a provocation; and then (c) mustering the
self-discipline to walk away from the situation before the tension builds
to violence. This is an emotional process, not an intellectual process, so
you don’t learn it by reading about it; you learn it from encounter
with others in a safe setting.
The most effective
treatment for men who are prone to domestic violence is group education and
treatment in a men’s group, rather than individual psychotherapy. Many
domestic violence programs offer such treatment for men, whether they come
voluntarily or whether they are mandated into treatment by the court after
being arrested for violence.
|
In California,
domestic violence is illegal
(Penal Code 273.5), period. It’s considered a
crime against the state, regardless of whether the abused person presses
charges or not. |
|
Non-offenders
As for those
who are abused by violent offenders, there can be many reasons why a person
gets involved with someone prone to violence. Sometimes it’s a matter
of having been abused as a child and unconsciously
seeking out the “familiar.” Sometimes it’s a matter of being
attracted to the illusions of control and power in another person that on
the surface seem protective but that only mask the underlying aggression
and violence. And sometimes it’s a matter of having a
rebellious and argumentative nature of one’s
own that “plays off” the hostility of another.
In any event,
once subjected to violence, a person can begin to perceive the violence from
the perspective of an external locus of control
and can then make the tragic mistake of trying to appease the offender.
Unfortunately, this only makes the victim all the more susceptible to further
manipulation by the offender.
The only real
solution then is to (a) seek physical safety; (b) learn to recognize the
dark human capacity to harm
others in order to make oneself feel powerful; (c) encourage the
offender’s healing through proper treatment; and (d) work to achieve
one’s own capacity for forgiveness, and, if
possible, reconciliation. |
Child
Abuse
|
Whenever parents are violent, with or without provocation,
there is always the possibility of child abuse—and even animal abuse.
Families can be very good at hiding their “secrets,” so it might
take an alert physician who notices a child’s injuries, a teacher who
notices a child’s neglect, a veterinarian or animal control officer
who notices a pet’s neglect or injuries, or a dentist who notices facial
injuries, to uncover the hidden violence in the
family.
And, with or without violence, child sexual abuse can be another hidden secret
of even the most apparently upstanding families. The
DSM-IV [4a]
diagnosis called
Pedophilia
is characterized by recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual
urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a child or children
generally less than 13 years old. Technically, though, this diagnosis cannot
be made unless the fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically
significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important
areas of functioning. It’s an open question how much most child
molesters are distressed by their behavior—unless it be the distress
of worrying about getting arrested for their crimes.
|
In its
unconscious
dimension, “pedophilia” is really a sort of sexual vampirism in
which the adult seeks to cheat his or her own emotional death by preying
on the vitality of young innocence.
Through my clinical work I have seen that pedophiliac fantasies are
“fueled” at the core by feelings of unconscious anger. The pedophiliac,
lacking an innocent childhood himself, craves to devour the innocence of
his victim child, and, in devouring it, to defile it. To his conscious mind,
all the pedophiliac sees is desire, and he might even interpret this desire
as “love,” as the name pedophilia (from the Greek
paidos, a child, and philos, loving) suggests. But, ironically,
in its deep unconscious reality pedophilia is nothing but envious hatred
for the good and the innocent.
And when priests, rabbis, and ministers molest children, it only goes to
show how much they are caught in the grip of
false
spirituality. Instead of seeking divine sustenance through spiritual
denial of self, they choose to deny the good in order to glorify their
own perverted emptiness. |
|
TYPES
OF CHILD
ABUSE
• |
PHYSICAL
ABUSE
(bruises; burns; internal injuries;
fractures; etc.)
|
|
• |
PHYSICAL
NEGLECT
(lack of medical or dental care;
lack of food; lack of sleep; inadequate hygiene; unsanitary living conditions;
etc.)
|
|
• |
SEXUAL
ABUSE
(sexual contact between minors and
non-minors or between minors; sexual exploitation such as pornography or
prostitution)
Sexual
contact can refer to penetration (genital, anal, oral); fondling; kissing
and/or hugging in a sexual way; and “showing” the genitals.
Note that the above definition applies even if a child says the experience
was pleasurable or non-threatening. On the purely physical level, some aspects
of coercive sexual contact can feel pleasurable to a child. Moreover,
men who have been abused as children are particularly apt to deny that the
experience was abusive because many cultures socialize boys with the false
belief that males should be always eager for sexual activity. But abuse is
abuse, simply because using a child for erotic pleasure strips the child’s
vulnerable ego of its dignity and humanity and makes the child’s body
into a mere object; this experience leaves the child with the life-long
psychological scars of guilt and anger and of feeling
unconsciously like a piece of
garbage.
|
• |
EMOTIONAL
MALTREATMENT
(belittling; screaming; threats;
inconsistent parental responses; family violence; etc.)
Note that even
dog bites can be a sign of emotional maltreatment. Why? Well, remember
that dogs are pack animals and are very sensitive to each other’s status
within the pack. A dog that bites a child may perceive the child as being
lower in status than itself because it has witnessed the child being maltreated
by other family members. |
|
|
Guilt
|
It’s bad enough for a family to be burdened with guilt
over all the mistakes and injuries that have occurred in it over time—even
across generations. But the narrow psychological path out of guilt is more
painful than the guilt itself. It’s a classic situation in which the
cure is more painful than the symptom. That’s why alcoholics and addicts,
for example, remain stuck in their
addictions.
The cure is too painful compared to the relative ease of denial and
self-destruction.
For the dreaded cure is nothing other than
repentance,
penance, and forgiveness.
To understand
this, you need to realize that any damage that was ever done to you has in
turn led you to damage others. Those who are hated learn to hate; those who
are abused learn, if not to abuse, at least to hold on to
anger,
a lack of trust, and an
unconscious
desire for
revenge.
But if you allow
yourself to step outside your own
identity
and to feel
sorrow
for the pain others experience because of the damage that you have done to
them, then you will be ready to find healing from the
damage that was done to you in the first place.
In other words, it’s the sorrow for others—out of
true
love—that makes it possible to accept that terrible, painful
“cure” for your own guilt. |
Growth
|
The beginning of the solution to all family problems is
to realize that just as plants can’t grow in chalky soil unless you
add to the soil whatever is needed to make it healthy, so children—and
husbands and wives—can’t grow unless you give them whatever support
and encouragement they need to become independent and responsible. No one
can grow in the “chalky soil” of pre-existing desires and expectations.
And what a child or spouse needs might not be what you had expected—or
wanted.
It’s
unfortunate, but parents who do not raise their children with truly unselfish
love thereby contribute to the child’s tendency to fall into
perversion
in seeking acceptance from the world—and then these wounded children
have their own children who start the cycle all over again.
Therefore,
it’s important for all family members to be aware of what other members
are experiencing, and healthy
communication
within a family becomes an essential element of this
awareness.
All too often,
communication becomes unhealthy and takes the form of unconscious
anger through
|
• |
sarcasm; |
|
• |
innuendoes and hints; |
|
• |
not saying anything at all. |
In contrast,
healthy communication is direct, immediate, and clear, and it is a good model
for learning healthy
assertiveness.
It depends on Facts, Opinions, Emotions, and
Needs.
An
Example |
Facts |
I had an important
appointment this morning, and when I got in the car I found that you had
left it with barely enough gas to get to the gas station. Stopping for gas
made me late. |
Opinions |
I believe that none
of us should park the car at night if it’s almost out of gas. |
Emotions |
The whole experience
left me feeling irritated and frustrated. |
Needs |
I need to be able
to leave in the morning without having to deal with unnecessary delays, and
I need the car to have a reasonable amount of gas in it at all times, no
matter who used it last. |
|
Note also
that, in most Western cultures, women have been socialized to depend on emotions
as the basis for communication while men have been socialized to depend on
thinking and intellect for communication. This
gender-based communication
bias can cause considerable problems. For
example,
|
• |
a woman might seek emotional support
and a man will offer an intellectual problem-solving response, or |
|
|
• |
a man might seek concrete information
(“just the facts”) and a woman will offer an emotional
response. |
|
|
Quite often men
are socialized to be aggressive and hostile in their communication, but when
women try to attain “equity” with men through aggression and hostility,
it only makes matters worse, not better, because then all communication
degenerates into endless arguments and rebuttals, and the underlying emotions
get trampled underfoot on the battleground. |
|
Therefore, remember
that healthy communication generally involves both emotions and facts,
unless the situation (e.g., an emergency) specifically requires one side
or the other (e.g., emotions) to be suppressed. |
Physical
Affection
|
Many years ago, just about the time that I was becoming
interested in psychology, a nurse in my physician’s office suffered
the sudden death of her father. Just out of kindness, I sent her a sympathy
card. The next time I saw her, not too long thereafter, she ran up to me,
threw her arms around me, and gave me a big hug. I almost fainted. The fact
that an attractive, blond nurse was putting her arms around me was one thing,
but the real surprise—as odd as it sounds—was that no one had ever
given me such an innocent, spontaneous hug before.
Needless to say,
that hug initiated a radical change in my life. It opened both my heart and
my intellect to an awareness of the origins of my own behavior.
|
In the early
1960s, H. F. Harlow’s experiments with monkeys showed that when physical
contact was withheld from infant monkeys, they became fearful, withdrawn,
and apathetic.
And we know now that the same is true for human infants. Without physical
affection, infants cease to thrive. |
|
I was raised
with all the affection an infant needs. My family, however, was not an
emotionally open family. Yes, we were close, and we did everything together.
But, beyond infancy and early childhood, aside from a handshake or a kiss
on the cheek, I never learned to touch or be touched.
Fortunately,
once I saw the problem, I had the emotional and intellectual resources to
remedy it. I learned how bodily awareness relates
to emotional awareness. And I learned how to hug. Many children, though,
are not so fortunate. Lacking touch and emotional spontaneity in their families,
they don’t even know how to recognize their own emotional experiences.
They repress their emotions, they suffer psychosomatic illnesses, and they
confuse a need for simple physical affection with sexual desire.
So, in order
to develop emotional intimacy, children need to be touched and caressed.
Surprisingly enough, it can all begin with one hug.
|
A lack of physical
affection and emotional intimacy can cause great psychological pain to a
child. Moreover, this emotional pain can persist even into adulthood as the
underlying cause of social dysfunction. These emotional wounds can be healed
in psychotherapy, but the healing doesn’t
happen by receiving hugs from your
psychotherapist; the healing occurs through your talking about the
pain of not having received affection from your parents. |
|
Clinical
Considerations
When an infant
perceives its mother as consistently protective and nurturing, it will actively
seek out contact with her. In psychological language, a child who demonstrates
this kind of comfort with its mother is said to be securely attached
to her.
Impediments to
a secure attachment can manifest in several ways. There can be an
avoidance of contact, as exhibited by withdrawal, inhibition, or
hypervigilence; there can be a resistance to contact, as exhibited
by pushing others away, hitting and slapping them, or angry outbursts; and
there can be indiscriminate sociability, as exhibited by excessive
familiarity with strangers, or a lack of selectivity in choosing attachment
figures.
These impediments
can result because the child has been physically, sexually, or emotionally
abused, or, even more specifically, has been
witness to domestic violence or has suffered
the emotional betrayal and confusion of a mother who abuses drugs or
alcohol.
Insecure attachment
styles can be diagnosed as Reactive Attachment
Disorder if the cause of the non-attachment can be attributed to
pathogenic care: persistent disregard for the child’s emotional
or physical needs, or repeated changes of primary caregiver (as in foster
care). |
Discipline:
Overview
of
Behavioral
Techniques
|
Techniques of behavioral psychology offer many different
ways to shape a child’s behavior so that it becomes obedient to the
values the parents want to teach. This shaping can happen through strategies
to increase selected behaviors or to decrease selected
behaviors.
Increasing Behaviors
through Reinforcement
There are two
ways to increase a particular behavior; one is called positive
reinforcement and the other is called negative
reinforcement.
Positive
Reinforcement occurs when you give
something in response to your child’s behavior. What you give can
be pleasant, such as a reward of money or food, or unpleasant, such as a
verbal reprimand.
For positive
reinforcement to be effective it must
|
• |
follow the child’s
behavior, |
|
• |
be delivered immediately after the
child’s behavior, |
|
• |
be large enough to be significant
to the child, |
|
• |
be consistently applied, and |
|
• |
have verbal clarification. |
Negative
Reinforcement occurs when you take away
something in response to your child’s behavior. This can be a hard
concept to understand, so consider the example of relieving a child from
washing the dinner dishes after you have noticed that he or she just
completed a special report for school. The idea here is that in being relieved
of an unwanted task the child will be motivated to keep doing well in school.
Even though taking away the task may seem like a reward, it technically involves
removing something, so it is a “negative”
reinforcement.
Decreasing Behaviors
through Punishment and Other Methods
Several psychological
methods can be used to decrease a particular behavior.
Overcorrection is a two-step process which involves first making restitution
for the undesired behavior, and then performing correct behaviors. For example,
a child might be required to pick up all the clothes from the floor of her
bedroom and then to clean the floors of all the rooms in the
house.
Time
Out involves removing positive reinforcement
for a brief, specified time. For example, each time a child has a temper
tantrum, he can be sent to a place away from family activity (such as a chair
across the room) and ignored for a short time (such as 30 seconds).
For more details, see below. Note that locking the
child in a closet, for example, is abuse, not a healthy form of
psychological correction, and serves no good. And sending a child to his
or her room as a so-called “time out” can, ironically, be perceived
by many children as a form of reward.
Extinction is a technique to decrease a previously reinforced behavior
by removing the reinforcement for it. A parent won’t have much use for
this technique—unless you happen to read this section and find out that
you have been unwittingly reinforcing a bad behavior and now want to remedy
it. For example, you might stop giving attention to a child when she performs
the undesirable behavior.
Differential
Reinforcement involves positively reinforcing
all behaviors except the unwanted behavior. Like extinction, this technique
is unlikely to be used by a parent. Unlike extinction, this technique requires
you to actually give something to a child for all behaviors except the undesired
behavior during a certain time period.
Punishment occurs when you do something (which the child finds to be
unpleasant) in response to your child’s behavior. An example would be
removing driving privileges or adding extra tasks for a child
to perform in response to a speeding ticket—all with the goal of decreasing
unsafe driving habits.
For punishment
to be effective, it must
|
• |
follow the child’s
behavior, |
|
• |
be delivered immediately after the
child’s behavior, |
|
• |
hurt enough to be significant to
the child, |
|
• |
be consistently applied, and |
|
• |
have verbal clarification. |
The average person,
untrained in psychology, often misunderstands the simplicity and benefits
of punishment, so this leads to the next
section . . .
|
Punishment—
and
Values
|
As long as families have to exist in a permissive culture,
psychologically healthy families need more than healthy communication. Children
also need to be punished when they have done something wrong. After all,
punishment is a part of the
reconciliation
process, and unpunished guilt can cause psychological problems of its
own.
As I said in
the previous section, punishment is just a simple psychological technique
to decrease specific behavior. But to be effective, it must be used properly.
The punishment, then, must be just: it must be consistent, fair, and
adequate to the transgression. And it must be tempered with mercy.
|
In its psychological
sense, mercy means to withhold some—or all—of the punishment
demanded by justice if the guilty person shows deep
sorrow for his or her behavior. |
|
But this is just
the easy part. A parent can’t expect to administer punishment by remaining
uninvolved. In fact, to administer punishment is to get
involved.
|
Don’t expect
to take away a child’s driving privileges and then say, “Well,
you need to drive to school, so you can use the car for that. Just come home
right after school.” What child couldn’t see through that
nonsense—and learn to abuse it immediately? So wake up. You will have
to drive your child to and from school, no matter what the inconvenience
to you.
Don’t expect to confine a child to the house and then expect that you
can come and go, leaving the child alone in the house, while saying
“Don’t go anywhere.” Wake up again. You will have to stay
home and monitor your child, never letting him or her leave your sight. Homework
must be done under your supervision, not alone in a bedroom. Meals must be
eaten together. Entertainment must be in your presence. Everything must be
done in your presence, and, as a result—like it or not—you will
be drawn closer to your child.
Sound hard? Well, that’s why there are so many family problems: the
parents are always too busy to really get involved in the punishment. In
the end, you have to accept the fact that the punishment will hurt the parent
as much as the child. If it doesn’t, it will never be
effective. |
|
Finally, parents
cannot provide healthy punishment unless they themselves live by healthy
values—courage, integrity, and responsibility, for example—that
they can pass on to their children through teaching and
action.
|
Sadly enough,
most adolescent
“acting
out” derives from the fact that many parents’ values aren’t
really grounded in a deep devotion to something greater than themselves,
such as religious faith. And so the adolescent in effect says, “Your
values are all a fraud. They’re arbitrary. So why should I do what you
say? It’s not fair. I’ll do what I want because my desires are
just as valid as any of yours.” |
|
As strange as
it might seem, a permissive parent who fails to administer discipline actually
causes a child to fear punishment and to associate it with irrational violence.
These fears can become so strong that the child actually engages in
violence
as an
unconscious
plea to be punished for an unspoken, aching sense of guilt for other acts
that were never justly punished.
Guidelines for
Punishment
1. The
best form of punishment (removing something to decrease a specific behavior)
is time out. But, for this to work, there
has to be in place both a system of positive recognition and a clear set
of family rules. With these in place, “time out” then becomes the
response of choice when the child breaks a rule: the child is removed from
the positive family activity in such a way that he or she can still witness
it while being excluded from it. For example, if a child swears, the
parent responds—in a neutral tone, not angrily—“That’s
a time out.” The child then goes to the time-out location, such as a
chair on the other side of the room, and is ignored by everyone else. Then,
after about 30 seconds, the parent says OK and calls the child back.
And then the parent must offer positive recognition to the child, such as
by giving a hug and saying, “I like the way you accepted the time out
so willingly and how, even though you felt angry, you handled your frustration
very well.”
2. Any
infliction of punishment can easily become abuse, in which the punisher
takes pleasure in the punishment. In terms of
parental-child discipline, this is clearly not acceptable. Period. Many adults
use the excuse that the abuse they inflict on children is
“punishment,” but this is just a smoke-screen to hide the adult’s
unconscious sadism—or sado-eroticism, for sadly
enough many adults derive a sort of perverse erotic pleasure in inflicting
pain on children.
3. Physical
punishment can also be an “easy way out” for a parent who has botched
up the whole job of parental discipline all along and tries to “save
face” once in a while by lashing out at the
child. I feel sorry for any children in these
circumstances because there really isn’t anything that can help them.
They will be wounded for life. The lucky ones will seek psychotherapy as
adults, and the unlucky ones will end up in prison—or in their own private
hell of drugs and alcohol or whatever.
4. As for
“just” punishment, I personally cannot see any reason for punishment
that involves a series of repeated blows, as in caning (whether with a cane
or a belt) or with “spanking” as it is commonly
conceived. So for older children the
punishment should be focused on the removal of privileges or perhaps the
assignment of extra tasks. For younger children in circumstances involving
obstinate behavior, rather than simple childish desires, a gentle
whack on the butt, along with a strong “No!” can be quite effective.
But even this has to be done in compassion. And it needs to be done only
once. If the child doesn’t get the idea with one whack, then something
else is going on, and the parent needs to re-evaluate the whole
situation.
According to
California law, striking a child anywhere other than on the butt, or with
an instrument (such as a paddle), constitutes child abuse. |
Shaping
Positive
Behavior:
The
Best
Way
|
He was a “latchkey kid.” That is, he came home
from school to an empty house while both his parents were still working.
He spent his time watching TV and neglected his homework. When his parents
came home, his mother was too tired to do anything with him, and his father
blew up at him in anger. The child became disruptive in his classes; he began
to set fires and to shoplift. He was given medication for ADHD. It seemed
there was nothing he could do right. Nothing, that is, except play video
games.
Maybe he
couldn’t sit still in school, but he could focus his attention for hours
on the games, achieving advanced levels of play. He was one of the
best.
So how do we
understand this?
Well, the video
games offered three things that were sadly missing in his
family:
|
• |
Clear
Rules. He knew exactly what he had to do
to get points and exactly what would happen if he made any
mistakes. |
|
• |
Rewards
for good behavior. As long as he followed
the rules, he earned his points. Immediately. |
|
• |
Punishment
for breaking the rules. If he did make a
mistake, the game punished him for it. But the punishment was never critical
or belittling. It was just a fact: You did this, so this is the cost.
And then the game resumed. |
So what can we
learn from this? Well, several things.
1. Families
need rules of conduct that are clearly
stated. This includes the no’s (no
swearing, no hitting, no lying, etc.) and the do’s (do your homework,
come to dinner clean and on time, go to bed at the appointed time,
etc.).
|
Needless to
say—although in today’s world it may be necessary to say it
anyway—the parents must abide by the same rules
as the children. Period. |
|
2. Families
need to give children positive
recognition. Like the child in the story
above, many children are ignored until they do something wrong, so they
unconsciously are motivated to strive for even negative attention just to
get some attention. But a healthy family will give a child positive
recognition (a) for behavior that tends toward the desired behavior and (b)
for not breaking the rules:
I like the way you [hung up your
jacket, did your homework, helped your sister,
etc.]. That shows
[consideration for others, integrity,
compassion,
etc.].
I notice that you haven’t
[fought with your sister, used swear
words, thrown a tantrum,
etc.]. Thank you for
[being kind, having good manners,
using self-control,
etc.].
Note that this positive recognition, though largely verbal, is best offered
with affectionate touching as well.
|
Some theories
of dealing with difficult children advocate the use of a credit system, or
token economy, in the school classroom and in the family. Such
systems, however, tend to reduce human interactions to the level of commodities
to be purchased. Token economies may be necessary in classrooms to keep order,
but in families, though they may seem to be convenient, they ultimately subvert
the deeper values of life. |
|
3. Families
need a fair and defined way to punish broken
rules. But the punishment
must be clean—it cannot be given in anger, and it cannot belittle
or shame the child. |
Death,
Dying,
and
Bereavement
|
Everyone has heard of the predicament of a person who receives
a diagnosis of a terminal illness and is given only several months to live.
You might then stop to ask yourself, “What if I had only six months
to live? What would I do now?” Unfortunately, the usual answer is something
like, “I would sell everything and take that trip to Tahiti I’ve
been dreaming about all my life.” I say “unfortunately” because
such an answer does little to get at the real spiritual and human point of
the matter.
Better to ask, “What would I do if I had only six hours to
live?”
What would you do? And what would you do if you knew your parents or your
children or your spouse had only six hours to live?
Notice that the Five Stages of
Dying identified by Elizabeth
Kubler-Ross [5] are based on a life that is unprepared for
death:
|
1. |
Denial |
|
2. |
Anger |
|
3. |
Bargaining |
|
4. |
Depression |
|
5. |
Acceptance |
The truth of
the matter is that a life unprepared to die—or unprepared for the death
of someone close—is not much of a life in the first place. It’s
a life whose first impulse is denial. It’s a life just waiting to be
slapped in the face with
trauma.
In contrast, some of the saints lived lives of perfect joy and peace because
they lived as if they were dying in every moment.
So, to have a family life that is truly intimate, learn to talk about death.
Learn to ask “What would you do if . . . ?” questions. Learn
to walk out the door with the awareness that you might not come back. Because
it might be the last thing you ever do.
Bereavement
Mourning
after the death of someone close, clinically diagnosed as
Bereavement, actually
takes a full year, because you have to live through a full cycle of holidays,
anniversaries, and birthdays—and ultimately the anniversary of the death
itself—without the loved one.
The process
of bereavement can also have many symptoms in common with a
Major
Depressive Episode, such as feelings of sadness, along with insomnia,
poor appetite, and weight loss. The diagnosis of
Major Depressive
Disorder generally would not be given to a grieving
individual unless these symptoms are still present 2 months after the
loss and the full criteria for the diagnosis are met. Remember what I
said in the above paragraph: the bereavement cycle takes a whole
year—so if you are still crying over the loss at nine months, but
if you do not meet all the criteria for major depression, then you are simply
still grieving, and a clinical diagnosis is not
warranted.
Here is a comparison
of normal bereavement with clinical depression:
Bereavement |
Major
Depression |
The survivor may feel guilt about
actions taken or not taken at the time of the death. |
Guilt extends beyond actions around
the death. |
The survivor may feel that he or
she would be better off dead or should have died with the loved one. |
Thoughts of death extend beyond an
identification with the deceased. |
The survivor may feel empty and
useless. |
There are morbid feelings of
worthlessness. |
The survivor may feel lethargic or
move slowly. |
There is obvious and considerable
psychomotor retardation. |
The survivor may lose interest in
work and daily tasks or experience them as a heavy burden. |
There is obvious and considerable
functional impairment. |
The survivor may think that he or
she hears the voice of the deceased person or sees the transient image of
the deceased person. |
Hallucinatory experiences extend
beyond thoughts of the loved one. |
|
When depression
complicates bereavement, the root of the problem is often unrecognized
anger
toward the deceased. The dynamics are quite simple: one
part
of you feels anger for all the hurt the deceased ever caused you, and
consequently you feel relief for—and even satisfied by—the death.
But another part of you, which cannot accept the “scandal” of being
angry with someone you love, feels guilty about your relief. So you end up
unconsciously
turning your anger against yourself. And that’s what depression is:
anger turned inwards. Once the anger is recognized for what it is,
and once you can accept honestly all the positive qualities and the
shortcomings of the deceased, then you can
forgive
the person—and the depression dissolves.
|
Anger at the
deceased may not always be turned inwards, as in depression, but it may also
be felt as irritability. In this case you may feel that you have been
cheated—or victimized—by the death,
and you may find yourself expressing this feeling with complaints of being
poorly treated and with subtle (or not so subtle) acts of hostility toward
others. |
|
|
The
Loss
of
Innocence
|
Once a child is born, its continued survival depends entirely
on someone to feed it and care for it. So it comes to expect the world to
be caring. And as the child grows and develops, its mental health and sanity
depend on the innocent belief that the world is not completely irrational
and hostile.
So what is a
parent to do when social violence and natural disasters around the world
shatter the child’s sense of innocence?
1. Don’t
try to hide anything from the child. Parents
sometimes believe that if they don’t talk about tragedies then it will
protect a child from fear. But children, in one way or another, know as much,
if not more, about what is happening in the world than their parents. So
not talking about an event only increases a child’s inner, unspoken
anxiety. And parental silence “tells” the child that the parent
can’t be a source of trust and support.
2. Talk
about the event from the child’s
perspective. Parents often believe that
“talking about” something means telling the child what they themselves
believe. But usually, the parents are more anxious than the child, and so
they end up making the child anxious. The fact is, children think
about things that might not even occur to an adult. For example, hearing
that an entire family was killed in a terrorist attack, a young child might
not be concerned at all about his or her own death but might be worried about
who will take care of the family cat that will be left alone in the house
without food if anything happened to the family.
3. Help
the child express emotions. Children need help
putting complex emotions into words. By listening carefully to the child’s
concerns, parents can help the child distinguish anger from fear
from anxiety from vulnerability from frustration
from sadness and so on. Of course, you, the adult, are perfectly capable
of sorting out your own emotions, aren’t
you? Aren’t you?
4. Don’t
overwhelm—or brainwash—the child with your own
anxiety. Parents who become overly protective
of a child after a tragedy only instill a sense of paranoia in the child.
If a child is kidnapped in your city, bolting the doors, keeping the drapes
closed, and refusing to let your child out of the house only cause additional
trauma in your child.
5. Speak
of positive and good things. Bad things happen,
yes, but far more good things happen each day. Thousands of airplanes take
off and land every day without incident. Hundreds of millions of children
go about their lives every day without getting hit by cars, abducted, or
shot at. Teach your child to trust in the good, not to fear the
bad.
6. “Why
do bad things happen?” Parents often freeze
when a child asks this question—or they offer a cynical answer that
reflects their own bitterness. Here’s the best and simplest answer of
all:
God is love, and God created the world to share that love with us.
But love can’t be commanded; if we are to love, we must love by our
own free will, and that means we must have the capacity to not
love. Therefore, God gave us free will, and with it came the freedom
to do evil. So the more you see evil around you, the more you should
be reminded to love from your own heart. |
Family
Therapy
|
Family therapy requires a counselor who can listen closely
to the family’s communication patterns and intervene to break through
dysfunctional communication styles so as to facilitate healthy,
honest
interactions.
Forgiveness
is also an element involved in healing family wounds.
This same style of counseling can be applied to organizational
situations. |
Special
Hint
|
I’m always deeply saddened when someone attempts to
discourage a child’s behavior by saying, “You don’t want to
do that.” But of course the child wants to do that! It’s perfectly
obvious he wants to do it, or he wouldn’t be trying. So why confuse
the child by denying what you both know is perfectly
true?
Here, then, is
a special hint on how to say “No” to a child without causing
psychological hurt. You do this by acknowledging what the child wants
and then, without making the child feel guilty or bad simply for having childish
desires, explain why the child cannot have what he or she
wants.
To a young child
say the following:
I know you
want to [have some candy, play in the water, chase the birds,
whatever . . .] and there are times when
you can’t always have what you want.
To an older child
(or another adult, for that matter) try saying something like
this:
I know that
you really would like to [stay out past dark, bungee jump off
the Golden Gate Bridge, or whatever . . .]
and [the danger of getting mugged, the law, insurance
regulations, etc.] just won’t allow
it.
The point of
such statements is to show the child (a) that you recognize and respect the
child’s desire and (b) that since the world is filled with
conflicting desires, one’s own desires can’t always be fulfilled.
This is an important lesson for children to learn. (Too bad most adults
haven’t learned it.)
Said in
another way, it’s not that the child’s desire is wrong, it’s
simply that, because the world is unfair, all desires cannot always be fulfilled.
It’s important to learn that apparent “evil” is, in many cases,
simply the conflict between two “goods.” This is why you use the
word and, rather than but, between the two parts of your
statement. |
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
|
|
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Additional
Resources
References:
1. St. Thomas
Aquinas,
Summa
Theologica I-II, 26, 4.
2. Richmond, R.
L. (1997). The fourth pleasing idea. American Psychologist, 52,
1244.
3. Schnitzer PG,
Ewigman BG. Child deaths resulting from inflicted injuries: household risk
factors and perpetrator characteristics. Pediatrics. 2005
Nov;116(5):e687-93.
“Young children who reside in households with unrelated adults are at
exceptionally high risk for inflicted-injury death. Most perpetrators are
male, and most are residents of the decedent child’s household at the
time of injury.”
4,
4a. American
Psychi | |
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