Who’s to blame for a bad childhood?

Who’s to blame for a bad childhood? Accountability, responsibility, blame and victims
Torrey Orton July 28, 2009

Accountability*: giving an account for personal responsibilities or for those undertaken by others on our delegation.

This is a terrible field to step into. Much travelled and trammelled. Who am I to add another step…even to be presumptuous enough to try? This is one I have to try because my confusions are so great. Others seem equally confused. I have been here before while exploring the Royal Commission on the Black Saturday bushfires. Here I will focus on this quartet as it applies in psychotherapy. I do not think that’s the same thing as the great worlds of politics and world changing surrounding our everyday lives. But my patient clients feel this greater world in their own distresses and are touched by their place(s) in it.

The problem for us all as adults is that there’s a part of our life we are not responsible for. Sometimes we need to be able to give an account of it!! One such time is if we are in psychotherapy. Most therapies acknowledge that our family of origin experiences shape our potential for family making (and many other group) experiences as adults. Our gender roles are learned there and the nature and variety of attachment is developed and embedded. Some cultures think of themselves as families and construct all social roles in family terms.

… our parents’ children

So, in important respects, we are always our parents’ children. This is recognised in everyday observations to that effect about children. And, we all honour the part(s) of our shared heritage we delight in. The undelightful is usually omitted. Sometimes it is systematically excluded from family conversation by explicit punishment of anyone who strays into the guarded territory. Therapeutically, I would say the most important breakthrough for many of my traumatised clients is to speak to the power of the family’s denial by actually opening previously closed doors with parents or sibs, or both, or virtually doing so in imaginary role-play of such openings.

Similar dynamics of denial and speaking to it can be seen in our societies at large – e.g. child abuse by trusted figures like priests, carers, etc. Acknowledgment of these abuses is resisted by the responsible organisations (seeking deferral of their accountability) like churches (Catholic most prominently, but certainly not solely) and social service agencies like the Salvos recently. The only thing worse than a bad family experience is no family at all.

Again therapeutically, family of origin appears as a source, a cause, of both the foundations and the distortions of our everyday relationship functionality. Some distortion is unavoidable. Parents can be no more perfect than the rest of us. Imperfection has its prices, though, and this acknowledgment meets a barrier in the same everyday world of this type: ‘thou shalt not blame, nor a victim be’. Probably this is because someone would have to be uncomfortable in the process and so it would be aggressive and selfish and therefore undesirable. About this time we can forget justice, forgiveness or many other everyday attributes of a ‘normal’ life.

Blame and intent to injure

Blame has to do with perceived intent to injure. Human intent is the only true cause of anything, and then often of not much or not what was intended! Without intent we have no actions, goals, progress… a view for which I might make a case in another argument! If I am injured in fact, I am a victim of the injuring force. Its actual blameworthiness is a matter for discussion or negotiation. The discussion process may reveal that I have not been victimised, though I am pained – that is, what happened arose from my wandering into the path of another’s intentions.

Or, it may reveal that the actions expressing that intention were inappropriately designed, executed, etc. The other is still ‘to blame’ but not condemnable. This is recognised in law, but recently is being deformed by the assumption that any injury I incur is someone else’s fault and worthy of compensation by them, especially if they are a legal person. Whence warnings in national parks like “Limbs may fall” or on the roads to them like ”Overhanging trees” to defend the relevant authority from suits for supposed maintenance malpractice.

Who’s to blame?

Not a few of my clients wonder at some point if talking about family history suggests their parents are “to blame” for whatever presenting issues they have. And, consequently, are they “victims”? It seems to me that both of these are their rightful usage if the hurt is great enough. Now there’s the lynch pin. Establishing for me that something hurts enough is easy. I decide for myself. But establishing the hurt is big enough to warrant an acknowledging apology is another thing. It requires some kind of negotiation, or intermediation, when the level of hurt reaches which mandates notification by public authorities like teachers, police, health workers of all sorts, etc.

In our cultures we have defined levels and types of evidence of hurt which require intervening action by others and condemnation for failure to act (which is a virtual collusion) by relevant others like the above authorities and parents, siblings, etc. These levels and types vary significantly from culture to culture, so much so that some feel proud to stand on a notional high ground declaiming the sins of others. This ground is often built in turn on their own relatively recent development from the close neighbours of the attitudes and behaviours they are decrying. That these are extremely difficult matters to adjudicate is affirmed almost daily with stories here of children abandoned to incompetent parents’ rages at their own social and personal non-entity. The authorities trying to handle child protection services are caught between saving lives and the social commitment to saving families. As close to pure lose/lose as I can find, at least for the kids and the workers!

Anxieties sustained by long-term childhood abuse, and often continuing family denial, are almost always experienced by the patient as their own fault, even while they are aware that they were (and, often, still are) being abused! This is the deep meaning of ‘victim’ - the meaning which holds people over the long term in sub-functional experiences from which moving on is not a choice unless the relationship system members choose together to change. Not easy to do if they are already under-powered. Taking the pathway of no blame and no victim begs the question of right for the sake of avoiding a dispute of power. Not disputing power may be a smart move, but to assume it away is to leave the victim stuck with their self-perception: ‘It must have been my fault.’

The multi-generation, multi-family challenge

To complicate matters a bit – part of the exploration of long term trauma usually reveals that it is multi-family and multi-generational, extending back 2 or more generations in the conscious memory of living descendants. Alcoholism, and other addictions, personal violence, distant relationships with no intimacy or affirmations – all have family histories sometimes anchored in major socio-political cataclysms like wars, social breakdown (depressions), natural disasters. This means the apparently to blame are themselves more or less victims with their own blaming to do! Have a look at “Who do you think you are?’ for some trails followed back hundreds of years.

With this complexity in mind, plus the need to allocate responsibility across time to meet the current calls for accountability, we can ask what criteria should we use for giving accounts and/or for demanding accounts be made by others of public damaging events? Here’s a go. Accounts of events should:
…treat all adult participants in the events being judged as partially blameworthy (a recognisably Asian perspective), and so as victims, too.
…make clear what actions were intentional, or predictably likely as consequences from intended actions.
…make clear who and what were truly collateral / accidental damages and who and what were ‘targetted’ damages
… specify that the time frame for accountability extends backwards to include the precursor or preparation periods – something like 30-50 years for many public services like education, health, and water systems.
…establish who among the affected put themselves knowingly in harm’s way, thereby mitigating their inclusion as victims and ensuring some membership in the collateral damages category.

These are just a start. Your thoughts???

*The state of being accountable; liability to be called on to render an account; accountableness; responsible for; answerable for; The obligation imposed by law or lawful order or regulation on an officer or other person for keeping accurate record of property, documents, or funds. ...
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/accountability
The pretentious nature of my undertaking any discussion in this area is highlighted by a few webfacts: rates of occurrence of accountability related searches (Oz websites only!): “accountability and responsibility difference in government” - 5,490,000 webhits; 165,000 for ‘accountability transparency’; 43,300 web hits for ‘ethical accountability’.