"Attack Self"

Raising children is difficult on average, and always has been. Little more than a hundred years ago if that, childhood in fact barely existed. The common man’s life expectancy, once one made it past the early years was still short, and was often not past the mid-thirties and women often died in childbirth.

This is to set a stage for some “reality” that life has, yes, been for the most part nasty brutal, and short. Simply a fact that it does not take much to realize that in a world without heat and in the cold it was not too easy to feed a baby, carry it around or clean it. It might be easy to see how babies were seen as the devil incarnate. Evil made flesh now in “our hands” to be made “good.” Ergo the finger pointed at me the evil one that “I” the child am bad.

This has the most profound implications as the child often becomes the bearer of the family’s emotional burdens.

Following logic, I believe what I have stated so far. I also believe that we have a biological glue that holds us together as a family unit and that is “interest” and “joy.” – My goal in these words is to limit myself to the “here and now”, to the tangible, to what we can glean from everyday life. - We need companionship. But the journey to where we are has been rough. We are beginning to recognize in all of the modern psychology the dominance of our “negative” feelings or what Silvan Tomkins preferred to call our punishing feelings. These keep us alive in a punishing environment that, by the way, is still punishing just made more pretty by suspended ceilings and bridges that are just as easily swept away by tsunamis and earthquakes. That is, our punishing feelings tell us what is “wrong” at the moment and that we should take care of. 

As babies, these are what keep us alive. They are the only way we have of communicating with our caregivers that something is wrong but boy can we get on their nerves. We become the “bad” ones.

 We have evolved ever so slightly from this idea that children are bad. The idea persists because it has always been a difficult balancing act to raise children; to make a go of it. 

Lloyd DeMause, a founder of what is called “Psychohistory,”’ delineated six stages of child rearing all of which persist today. They are infanticide, abandonment, ambivalent, intrusive, socializing, and helping mode and he feels the last mode which takes into consideration what the child wants for his life only to have arisen around 1950 and he claims that it is only practiced by a minority of parents.

The mother “has” to emotionally abandon her children or worse for fear of her own life as the father demands that the mother follow his orders or she is beaten or worse. One outcome: “Look what happened to your mother because of you!” The adult result of this is overwhelming guilt and shame.

My point is to concentrate on this legacy of us as children bearing the burden of the family’s emotional pain. The theory goes that it has just been inevitable as the world is not perfect. Things only will get better slowly. Parents “have to” dissipate negative feelings somewhere. Yes, terrible thoughts, and yes not “excuses” just facts. Can we do better tomorrow?

Then what are the consequences of this legacy for all of us? It is that we grow up with many ideas that we are to blame for much of our problems and everyone else’s. Simply “I am a bad person.” Why would I not think so? Since I am been told so all along?

I cannot give many examples here but they come in all varieties. Just recently someone was enthusiastic about getting a job after a long hiatus and focusing on all their attributes and the positive aspects of the job, the good hours and low stress that the job was presented as offering. Unfortunately, the job did not work out, and when they came in the next time some of the very first phrases were self-accusatory phrases such as “I was not ready for that job.” “I was not right for it.” I stopped the person and made them realize this was not at all the case that it was, according to what they had said to me, simply not true.

Or the seventy-year-old who calls me late at night devastated and “ready to die” as she still hears her father’s voice every time she tries to fix something. “You’ll never be able to do anything.” “You’ll never amount to anything.”

This self-blame becomes a way of “fixing” all kinds of problems it “avoids” all kinds of problems and “stuffs” severe emotional pain. It helps us “affiliate” with others so we “at least have someone.” We end up buying too many of the rounds. We are the “sucker” or “mark in the room.” It is a deep belief that I believe I deserve to get “screwed.”  

I once read a small study done on the general population in a Family Practice waiting room and it asked if patients in any way had done something to hinder their care. My analysis of the data was that a good 2/3 had; they had missed an appointment, not changed a bandage, skipped a medication dose, or something, all of these things with some conscious element. We somehow are punishing ourselves.

All of this is to say is what I believe to be the case as a medical doctor is a majority of what I see as “physical” illness is greatly influenced, if not caused at some level, by our “subconscious” affect system diverting “negative” affect/feelings/emotion to places where it cause hare. We end up in doctors’ offices.

Brian Lynch

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