Torrey Orton
Sept. 16, 2013
“I have to send you back again…”
A few months ago I wrote here on “Disrespect
without intent” (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/learnertherapist-30disrespect-without.html
), arguing that we are responsible for damages we have done to others without
intending to do so. I want to extend that claim from the relatively benign
damage of my inappropriate “Uh huhs”* to the decidedly malignant damages of
long term childhood victimisation which often compose the backgrounds of the
deeply anxious and/or depressed. The deforming damages may be experienced in
self-harming and suicidal intents / attempts, with the crystallised defences of
PTSD, OCD, body/eating disorders and the various social phobias along the life
paths of the damaged – constituting a reasonable chunk of the DSM V diagnoses.
Occurrences and forms of unintended
damages
In child raising - Catch 22’s
A
mother, having been abandoned with three children, decided to start ensuring
she never had to depend on a man again. She did this by getting herself an
education and then the work history which made her highly employable and
repeatedly promotable. Along the way she had to be out of home for much of the
day. In the space between end of school and end of work home time her three
kids were home alone and into this unsupervised space arose the sexual abuse of
the youngest child (girl, age 7) by the eldest (boy, age 12).
Similarly,
the mother with two female primary aged children split up from her first
husband after periods of violence at his hands. Dad eventually remarried (quite
soon in fact) and the divorce settlement provided child access for him a weekend
fortnightly. Unfortunately his new wife was also a graduate of a failed
marriage with children, who were living with them.
She
was utterly incapable of managing the blending demands of the visitation
weekends, leading her to victimise the girls persistently and intensively. The
degree of verbal violence was sufficient to leave the girls crying on the way
home to mother and pleading with her not to be sent back. She had to say: “You
have to go. The family court requires me to share you with your father.” For my
patient, one of the two girls 20 years later, this went on until she left home
for a violent boyfriend at age 16 and the cycle continued down the generations.
In marriages / families
The
couple nothingness condition – when there is a space between the couple into
which both have learned not to tread because the ground is rough, the air
frosty and the lighting undimmable. This kind of space produces constant low
grade irritation with occasional outbursts of rage. The irritation signals the
constant presence of nothingness, which the individuals express in a persistent
sense the other disrespects, disregards, dislikes them and the other’s failed coupling is described
in negative absolutes (he/she always,
never does…) which imply catastrophic outcome expectations for the
relationship. These cannot be resolved because both experience it as what the other
should do – take a chance to change things.
Family
nothingness condition – when feelings are prohibited and opportunities for
arousing or engaging them are reduced to the minimum and yet they still stay
housed under one roof. For example, the family which eats meals separately (I
know two of these), where almost no feelings
are explicitly expressed and where implicit expression is severely repressed
(making passive-aggressive anger the only OK public feeling and guilt the de
facto private feeling when its private version rage is not in play). Alcohol is
the lubricator of the frozen joints of these two relationship worlds.
The dilemma of engagement in
recovery
These
four examples are all violent, though not in the sense the genpub or popular
press imagines them. In principal, they would seem to be easier to deal with
than family violences as we usually hear of them – either by friends or news
reports. However, they are not easier, partly because they are somewhat
invisible violences, leaving no broken bones or cuts except the victims’ self-inflicted
ones.
The
challenge for both victims and abusers is to engage with the part good / part
bad abusers’ behaviours. The victims cannot escape this dilemma because it is
constantly present to them in the viscous mixture of self-blame and
self-defence, which sticks them to recurrent patterns of daily life ineffectiveness
– in work, relationships, self-care, etc. Out of this sticky mix they often generate
their own history of damaging behaviours both to themselves (the self-harming
and crystallised defences mention above) and others (reproducing the violences
they have been subject to), …and so the damaging passes from generation to
generation it often seems.
That
this is no mean struggle is attested by the society level discussion over
historical guilt, notably the 20th century German ones (World War II
guilt and political guilt for the DDR for 45 years thereafter). Positions on
the virtues and abuses of remembering and atoning are exquisitely set out by David
Rieff in Against
Remembrance and dramatised in Bernhard Schlink’s fictions of war
and self-oppression - The Reader and
The Weekend - and theorised recently
in his Guilt About the Past. The apposite by omission example is Japan. These
are all multi-generational matters. They do not go away in societies any more
than they do in families.
The problem of blame and
responsibility
The
desire to avoid the dilemma of responsibility (which entails potential blame
and praise one way or another) shows up in funny places like famed works of
self-development and injury recovery that falter around holding the parents
responsible for their injuries to children (assailing the victims with the need
to deny their victimhood), failing which their children can never extricate
themselves from the cycles of self-blame which bring them to therapy in the
first place. Correct blame locates responsibility where it belongs, which
certainly is NOT wholly with the child. It also helps to clarify those things
which are not changeable by the child because they were not the child’s
responsibility.
There’s
another level to this struggle – a conceptual one. Dilemmas are those kinds of
things which cannot be reduced to black and white, digitised, constructs. A
very large part of human populations are not presently capable of holding two largely
conflicting versions of the same story in mind at once. So maybe my efforts to
get patients to engage such dilemmas are misplaced and the strategies of other
therapists (see above) which I see as avoidant of the dilemmas are in fact
intellectually and morally prudent. That is, the strategies reflect and honour
the developmental potential of patients under stress. However, they do so by starting from an
avoidance - namely, assuming that confrontation with abusers is wrong because uncomfortable
for the abusers and so not even to be raised as an option by the abused. This
is a little too close to self-protective institutional procedures for my
comfort!!
My
impression is that many patients make only modest efforts down the pathway of historical
reconciliation with their abusers. There are good reasons for this, but one of
them is not that the abusers are blameless. Rather they may be now incompetent
to play the role of responsible adult, either through moral weakness of the
sort demonstrated by public figures and institutions of all sorts these days
(or, has it not always been thus?) or the constitutional weaknesses of advanced
age.
* by the way,
that uncontrollable spontaneous dismissal of others seems to have almost fully disappeared
in the last couple of months…sliding out of my natural communication repertoire
with not a peep of resistant protest. How that came to be is a wonder for
another time.
