"Compassionate Child-Rearing is a wonderful book. I feel priviledged to have had the opportunity to read it. Dr. Firestone has done a thorough, comprehensive piece of work – an important work to be read not only by parents, but by any therapist who works with children, families, and individual adults as well. Dr. Firestone beautifully expands on the effect of the 'child-within-the-adult' and its relationship to adult functioning."
- Violet Oaklander, Ph.D., Author, Windows to Our Children:
A Gestalt Therapy Approach to Children and Adults
"Imagine trying to apply the foster-child learnings of a therapist to the infinitely complex behavior patterns and decisions of a real loving and responsible parent. This author puts the two worlds in perspective. The results are very thought-provoking. The stimulus may even be therapeutic to the parent. Try it!"
- Carl A. Whitaker, M.D.
"… gets to the core issue in child-rearing and helps us to understand how abuse occurs from a parent's own unmet needs. Combining thorough research with acute therapeutic insight and practical experience, Dr. Firestone's book is a significant contribution to our understanding of the parent-child bond. More than that, he gives a clear vision of those elements that have remained obscure in the past – emotional hunger versus love, the power of the fantasy bond, and the inner voice. This is a 'must read' for caring parents and professionals in the field."
- Pamela E. Butler, Ph.D.
"In this book, Dr. Firestone clarifies the dynamics underlying the patterns of anxious attachment described by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth and the abusive child-rearing practices described by Alice Miller and R.D. Laing on a phenomenological level. The book presents a comprehensive theoretical description of the mechanisms by which neurotic defenses are maintained and conveyed from one generation to another, a process which is responsible for much human unhappiness and despair."
- Richard H. Seiden, Ph.D., M.P.H., Director of Research Programs,
Suicide Prevention and Crisis Intervention Center of Alameda County, California
ISBN: 9780967668475
Published by The Glendon Association
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Firestone, Robert.
Compassionate child-rearing: an in-depth approach to optimal parenting/ Robert W. Firestone: forward by R.D. Laing.
I met R. D. Laing face to face for the first time this summer, a chance meeting in Austria; perhaps it was magic. Before that we were familiar only through our writings and viewing each other as we appeared in documentary films. I found a friend, the hours passed quickly, and I sailed on.
Later I received a call: "I read your book, it is a strong book, an important book, but it needs some work on literary style. I fear that without these stylistic changes it will fall on even more deaf ears."
My response, "Join me for a sail. Come to Portofino or Nice and we'll talk."
He agreed and we worked on the book straight through many days and nights. There was a sense of urgency in the work. We shared ideas of all varieties, and came to know and love each other. When he first arrived I noted his frailty and ill health, yet days of sun, and the companionship of other friends and loved ones, seemed to help. A light came back into his eyes. He was truly happy at sea. He swam, he socialized, he embraced his children, and he made new friends. In St. Tropez, six days after coming aboard, he died suddenly. And I cried for the loss.
Let me tell you what I know of this man. He was a hurt man, angry in the best sense; strong and stubborn, with an uncanny brilliance. He cared deeply and passionately about people, human rights, and psychological justice. He was uncompromising in his honesty. Tortured by what he saw, there was not much that he didn't see. He was very pained by all that was phony, perverse, and cruel. He remained finely tuned to all that was contradictory and paradoxical, exhibiting a wonderful insight and humor about existential issues.
Lastly, he had enormous love and tender feelings for the plight of children. When commenting on Bettelheim's contribution to psychology at the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference in Phoenix in 1985, tears filled his eyes as he suggested that Bettelheim deserved the Nobel Prize for his work with disturbed children.
Ronnie was a truly compassionate man. He brought his compassion to our work on this book and there are no words that can do justice to the gratitude I feel.
Robert W. Firestone
Suffer the little children to come unto me. Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Do we believe it? This is not a plea for regression.
This is not a suggestion that we should spend time with our children, for their sakes.
It is, as I understand it, not a threat, but a warning. We can never be fully human unless we suffer, that is, unless we carry along with us, unless we "bear" the little child in ourselves, to come along with us, all the way with us.
Over one hundred years ago, a fellow Scotsman, Calvinist theologian and mathematician McLellan, came out with the extraordinary proposition that "it" all began with killing children, especially little girls. This had the unintended consequence of creating a scarcity of women, and that led to a phase of matriarchal communism. The balance tipped again to patriarchal possession of women, who became little more than cattle, used by men to breed more men. McLellan's student Robertson Smith, another Scotsman, took up the theme and wrote a book called "The Religion of the Semites," in which he envisaged infanticide, the killing of children, and the eating of children, as the dark totemic pole right at the dead center of the Mesopotamian origins of Western social organization.
Engels hated the book. The American anthropologist Morgan greatly admired it, and Sigmund Freud used it as his take-off point for "Totem and Taboo" wherein he imagined the band of brothers who forestall their father's eating them, by eating their fathers first.
It is not difficult now for us to see these nineteenth century historical anthropological mythologies as projections from the present to the past.
In this book, Firestone has no hesitation, on the basis of his thirty years of clinical experience with parents and children and "normal" adults, in characterizing a great deal of parental so-called "love," as parental hate and hunger. He documents here ways in which parents kill and eat their children, not physically, but psychologically. The living ghosts of these dead devoured children grow up to become normal adults and are now, in our generation, continuing to pass on this living death to their offspring. As he says, "unfortunately."
Unfortunately, his message is going to fall on many dulled and deadened ears and many blinded eyes will not be opened.
Firestone is not a preacher. He is a clinician through and through. But maybe he should take a chance on preaching what he practices. He calls it compassion. It is also called love.
A strange idea of love in this post-Freudian era, where Jacques Lacan has many backers when he quips that to love is to get what you don't need from someone who has not got it, etc.
They are wrong. It is a lie that you need love to love. Love needs us to resurrect it from the cave of our hearts.
This is a desperately sad book. But it is not despairing. It is based on case study after case study, which Firestone claims are "typical." Everyone would like to believe they are not and he is wrong. So would he. But the only way to prove he is wrong—not by argument, statistics, or counter-instances, as far as we are concerned—is to show he is…. Let us hope and pray that if he is not wrong yet, he will be proved to be by the next generation of loved and loving parents and children.
There is an issue that runs through this whole book. It is the shift from what Freud called the "Psychopathology of Everyday Life" to what Fromm called "The Pathology of Normalcy." The shift is seen in Freud. Up until "The Future of Illusion," Freud conceived a normal person intruded upon by psychopathological features, even in everyday life. These intrusions are seen as aberrations from a norm. Normal persons reach the promised land of opportunity if they can pass through the oral, anal, phallic, urinary stages to get to mature genitality. Those who don't, fall by the wayside—neurotics, psychopaths, perverts, and psychotics. However traces of these aberrations are acted out, even in the everyday life of "normal" people, they also carry psychopathological features which stem from the failure to work through completely these earlier stages of development. By the time he comes to "Future of Illusion," Freud sees the norm of society as itself an aberration, as itself an alienation from these possibilities of humanity which are most desirable, worthwhile, and, as the humanists like to say most: "human." And then in "Civilization and Its Discontents," he says that he doesn't even believe that ordinary, simple, human love between human beings is any longer possible.
This book crosses back and forth over that line between the psychopathology of what you might say is "everyday life" and in many places what is regarded as the norm of everyday life.
Who is Firestone talking to? To those whose idea of "maturity" has nothing to do with his. "Mature" individuals now have canceled dry eyes. They do not need to avoid eye contact with infants. They don't have need to defend their psychophobic psyches. They have nothing to defend. The war is over, you can disarm, the fortress is empty…. Yet ghosts still fight for their lives.
Diaphobia: The fear of being affected, of being directly influenced by the other.
Babies, and infants, before they have become normalized (dulled and deadened, etc.) have to be defended against. They are tiny foci who emit signals genetically programmed to elicit reciprocity from adults. The schizoid, narcissistic, autistic, paranoid adult who is diaphobic is terrified of spontaneous reciprocity. The baby's genetic programmed devices to evoke responses which are cultured out of the normal adult pose a paranoid danger therefore to the normal adult.
However, the normal adult may still be "soft." The smiles, eyes, the outstretched arms of the still healthy baby "demand." Their genetically programmed evocative qualities, programmed to elicit happy, effortless, complimentary, returning, reciprocal responses in the adult, are experienced by the normal schizoid, narcissistic, autistic, paranoid parent as assaultive, demanding, draining.
The normal adult has had his/her genetic own responses either completely cultured out, or, has learned at least to be suspicious, very, very ashamed, or guilty of them. He/she senses those of the baby as a threat, a danger, a manipulation, a demand, a pull, a tug, a drain, a trap. If the normalized adult gives into them, he/she will invite catastrophe. One has to resist them.
For example, it is necessary to avoid the eye contact. That eye "contact" is more than mere "contact." "Contact" is just the opening of the vertical barrier, the letting down of the barrier.
Those outstretched arms open up a well of loneliness. The resistance to being drawn into the sphere of horizontal reciprocal influence out of the stable isolation across the vertical dividing line, the invisible wall, brings up gushes of "bad" feelings—physical feelings, horrible feelings, feelings one has never felt before. But in these feelings, mixed up in them at once physical smells new and stale of ghosts of awakened sensations in oneself, are evoked, by that dead me, that me that was me, I see in the baby.
I feel responsible. This sense of responsibility is a cruel ironical play on the sense of the word "responsibility," which means, literally, response-ability. My response-ability, my ability to respond, benignly, neither assaultively nor demandingly, has been cultured out of me.
I live, I am vulnerable. But to the normalized autistic paranoid "I," my softness is a dangerous softness. I am soft. I can weaken. But I am thrown into an awfully confused state. The greatest threat to the paranoia of normalcy is love. Both the threat of being loved, and the threat of loving.
I can't distinguish me from the baby. I see my feelings in hisher-your/its eyes. I tell myself that that baby is not-yet a you, a him, or a her, much less another me. It is just an it. But I "know" emotionally that is not true. This is another paranoid danger. I am in danger of seeing it as a him, or as a her. The baby is still appealing to me with the language of the heart, the language I have learned to forget, and to mistrust with all my "heart." I can go in different directions. I can hate the baby for making me feel bad. I can envy the baby for still being human. I can feel bad/guilty/for feeling bad. I can feel a terrible burden of responsibility because I feel incapable to respond spontaneously.
I feel I ought to respond, but I feel I ought not to respond. Two feelings demand, forbid, and cancel, each other. I forget. I feel nothing. I feel—nothing. Finally I do not feel—anything.
The less I feel response-ability, the more I feel this hateful, envious, piteous, guilty mix or mush of responsibility.
Last night I dreamed a dreary dream.
Beyond the Isle of Skye
I saw a dead man win a fight
and that dead man was I.
The sort of thing described here is not coming from the typical neurotic, not coming from typically psychotics, typically. It comes out of observations of and self-descriptions by typically normal people typically. Firestone is forced to the conclusion that not only are many "normal" patients bogged down in psychopathology destructive to themselves and to those closest to them, especially their children, he has to conclude that what is now "normality" is pathology.
Pathology has, or has almost, taken over, and has become the norm, the standard that sets the tone for the society he lives in. This is a social document which testifies to what Eric Fromm, Karen Horney and others after them, characterized as the pathology of normalcy.
This book documents the epidemic proportions to which Wilhelm Reich's endemic "Emotional Plague" has expanded. Maybe a plague of love will break out. Why not? Are we so immune to the virus of compassion?
R. D. Laing
The integration and organization of this Foreword were interrupted by the untimely death of R.D. Laing on August 23,1989, in St. Tropez, France.
R.W.F.
This book is addressed to people who, out of a deep concern for children, want to better understand parents' limitations in giving their children the most they have to offer. The emotional life of parents, indeed of all adults, depends to a considerable extent upon the sensitivity, care, and feeling that they experienced when they were growing up. Unfortunately, in the process of being mishandled and misunderstood as children, we suffer trauma that causes us pain and even terror. We spend the rest of our lives defending ourselves from feeling this pain, concomitantly limiting ourselves as sensitive, feeling people. In becoming closed to our deepest feelings, we necessarily damage those persons closest to us, especially our children.
To understand the basic problem involved in raising children, we need to understand the fundamental ambivalence with which we view life, other people, and ourselves. All of us have strong desires to live and fulfill our potential on the one hand, while at the same time, we have self-destructive tendencies that compel us to limit our lives. These self-limiting propensities generally exist on an unconscious level. Parents exhibit the same mixed feelings and attitudes toward their children; they have strong desires to nurture their children and help them fulfill their potential, and, on the other hand, they often limit their children, stifle their excitement, and cut off their emotional responses in order to protect their own defenses.
No technique or method set forth in traditional child-rearing books can have a long-lasting or profound effect on the ways parents treat children, because any attempt to play out roles that are "proper" or "constructive" inadvertently causes more damage. The child is confused by parents whose actions contradict their words or whose words and actions contradict their underlying attitudes and feelings. Children intuitively sense the real motivation of their parents, and their sense of reality is distorted by duplicitous communications.
Furthermore, children tend to idealize or protect their parents at their own expense. Patients in therapy often feel guilty about exposing the truth of what happened to them in their families because they feel sensitive about hurting others and being disloyal for revealing family secrets. In addition, they are fearful of recriminations from their parents for exposing the "real people" behind the facades. In my clinical experience, I have encountered considerable guilt and resistance to my discoveries about the true conditions within most families. However, coming face to face with painful issues in one's development can lead to a deeper understanding and break the chain of damage that links the generations, despite the inclination to rationalize and defend one's family.
As we explore the basic conflict that characterizes all human experience and as we uncover the ambivalence that all of us manifest to varying degrees toward our children, parents will encounter material that is threatening to their accustomed ways of thinking. However, they can come to understand the basic source of the problems inherent in their own self-protective defenses. Through a growing awareness of important issues in child-rearing, they can learn to cope more effectively with core issues that previously demoralized them and made them mindlessly critical of themselves. Learning about and understanding the contents of this book can help parents and educators to reach into their own experience and find the lost child in themselves.
As a father of eight children, I have come to recognize that there are no easy solutions, no short cuts to "good parenting practices." As a psychotherapist, I have learned that there are methods that parents can utilize to develop understanding and compassion for themselves and feeling for what happened to them as children. Parents are enabled to achieve better relationships with their children through the recovery of feelings for themselves and their lives.
For the past 30 years, I have been deeply involved in tracing the roots of the emotional problems of my patients and devoted to studying the problem of resistance in psychotherapy—the fundamental resistance to a "better life" and the fear of change. This book is an out-growth of that study. The material is based on empirical data gathered during these years of investigation, observation, and participation with people in a variety of therapeutic settings and psychosocial milieus.
This work focuses on parental interactions and the psychological and emotional issues in child development. However, it does not deny or minimize other powerful influences on the psyche of the child. Biological tendencies, inherited temperamental differences, and physiological predispositions combine with personal environmental influences to form unique and complex phenomena (Chess & Thomas, 1987). There is no single cause of specific symptoms or mental aberrations. All psychological functions are multidetermined. In some cases, somatic aspects clearly outweigh environmental components in the etiology of ego weakness, maladjustment, and psychological disturbance. However, in most cases, the impact of psychological elements on the child's development in all probability exceeds the influence of innate predispositions. Maladaptive attitudes and behavior of adult patients appear to be overdetermined by interactions in the family.
Moreover, the view that environmental influences play a central role in the mental life of children and in their subsequent mental adjustment as adults, as well as being true, is optimistic. Remedial action and preventive measures can be taken in relation to many of the psychological factors that cause human misery. By contrast, it is difficult, if not impossible, to alter hereditary patterns that originate in a biological substrate. Thus, it is our fundamental responsibility to give full weight to those causative agents within the family structure that are within our power to change.
My associates and I have observed that, without exception, all our patients and volunteer subjects suffered a certain amount of trauma during their developing years. In other words, despite the best intentions of their parents, unconscious malevolent forces were at work, hurting these children at a time when they were most vulnerable to hurt. Our efforts have been continuously devoted to trying to understand the sources of this incidental damage and to developing a psychotherapy and a social milieu that could minimize the hurt and repair the damage from the hurt. It is to these subjects, volunteers, patients, parents, and to our own families that this book is dedicated: To Parents: The Lost Children.
Part I of the book sets forth our theory of parental ambivalence and its origins, and it provides insights necessary for parents and professionals to change their attitudes and behavior constructively. Part II offers guidelines for child-rearing, derived from this general theory. For parents to have full use of these guidelines, they need to develop a more compassionate view of themselves, through understanding the sources of their difficulties in relating to their children. Part III describes therapeutic interventions undertaken in an effort to prevent the perpetuation of the mistreatment of children and includes references to the work of others as well as to my own.
Robert W. Firestone
The author would like to express his appreciation to Joyce Catlett, associate and collaborative writer, for her incredible effort and intellectual contribution to this work. We thoroughly shared this project from inception to completion.
I thank Barry Langberg, Jo Barrington, Tamsen Firestone, Frank Tobe, Susan Short, and Bob Feinberg for their comments during the editing phase. I am very grateful to Jerome Nathan, Lisa Firestone, and Jina Carvalho, who researched relevant material in the literature, and also to Anne Baker who organized and helped complete the final drafts. She was ably assisted by Catherine Cagan, Eileen Tobe, Ana Blix, Leticia Lopez, Louise Firestone, Gretchen Stein, and Richard Tubis.
I would like to thank each person who contributed his/her experiences to this volume thereby opening a window to the core dynamics affecting patterns of child-rearing. I feel privileged to have been able to share their lives.
In addition, I want to thank The Glendon Association, a group of associates and friends who have been staunch supporters of my work. They have expended considerable time and effort to disseminate my theoretical ideas, and completely financed the films that express the concepts visually. I want to thank all of the people who participated in those films for the honest expression of their struggles and their willingness to share their emotional reactions.
I want to personally acknowledge Geoff Parr, who organized, edited, and directed the films, for his sensitive handling of the psychological issues he documented.
Last, and most importantly, I want to express my gratitude to R. D. Laing for his help in critically evaluating the current work, improving the mode of expression, his integrity and unwavering courage in exposing the "psychopathology of normalcy" in his work, and, more recently, for his friendship.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint excerpts from the following:
"Family Psychotherapy with Schizophrenia in the Hospital and in Private Practice," by Murray Bowen, in Intensive Family Therapy: Theoretical and Practical Aspects, edited by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, M.D., and James L. Framo, Ph.D. Copyright 1965 by Hoeber Medical Division, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, M.D.
The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy. Copyright 1986 by Pat Conroy. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
The Motherhood Report: How Women Feel about Being Mothers, by Louis Genevie, Ph.D., and Eva Margolies. Copyright 1987 by Dr. Louis Genevie and Eva Margolies. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company.
Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, by Murray Bowen, M.D. Copyright 1985, 1983, 1978 by Jason Aronson, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, M.D., and James L. Framo, Ph.D.
The Mother, Anxiety, and Death: The Catastrophic Death Complex, By Joseph C. Rheingold, M.D., Ph.D. Copyright 1967 Little, Brown and Company (Inc.). Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, Inc.
The Politics of Experience, by R. D. Laing. Copyright 1967 by R. D. Laing. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd.
The Death of the Family, by David Cooper. Copyright 1970 by David Cooper. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.
The Fear of Being a Woman: A Theory of Maternal Destructiveness, by Joseph C. Rheingold, M.D., Ph.D. Copyright 1964 by Grune & Stratton, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Grune & Stratton, Inc.
Schizoid Phenomena Object-Relations and the Self, by Harry Guntrip. Copyright Harry Guntrip. Reprinted by permission of International Universities Press, Inc.
The Politics of the Family and Other Essays, by R. D. Laing. Copyright 1969, 1971 by The R. D. Laing Trust. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.
"Punishment Vs. Discipline," by Bruno Bettelheim. Copyright 1985 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. Reprinted by permission of The Atlantic Monthly Company.
Somewhere a Child Is Crying: Maltreatment—Causes and Prevention (Revised Edition), by Vincent J. Fontana, M.D. Copyright 1973, 1976, 1983 by Vincent J. Fontana. With permission of Macmillan Publishing Co.
Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness, by Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke. Copyright 1971 by Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke. Reprinted by permission of Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke.
Family Therapy for Suicidal People, by Joseph Richman, Ph.D. Copyright 1986 by Springer Publishing Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Springer Publishing Company, Inc.
My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity, by Nancy Friday. Copyright 1977 by Nancy Friday. Reprinted by permission of Delacorte Press.
Psychotherapy: A Basic Text, by Robert Langs, M.D. Copyright 1982 by Jason Aronson, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Jason Aronson, Inc.
"Limitations of Marriage and Family Therapy," by Robert A. Harper. Copyright 1981 by The Journal of the Institute for Rational Living. Reprinted by permission of The Institute for Rational/Emotive Therapy.
The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright 1923 by Kahlil Gibran; Renewal Copyright 1951 by Administrators C.T.A. of Kahlil Gibran Estate, and Mary G. Gibran.
Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, by D. W. Winnicott. Copyright the Estate of D. W. Winnicott, 1986. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing, by Bruno Bettelheim. Copyright 1987 by Bruno Bettelheim. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
The Shoemaker: The Anatomy of a Psychotic, by Flora Rheta Schreiber. Copyright Flora Rheta Schreiber, 1983. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster.
"The Influence of Family Studies on the Treatment of Schizophrenia," by Theodore Lidz, M.D., in Progress in Group and Family Therapy, edited by Clifford J. Sager, M.D., and Helen Singer Kaplan, M.D., Ph.D. Copyright 1972 by Brunner/Mazel, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Clifford J. Sager, M.D.
The Nature of the Child, by Jerome Kagan. Copyright 1984 by Basic Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, Inc.
"Interview: R. D. Laing," by Anthony Liversidge. Copyright 1988 by Omni Publications International Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Omni Publications International, Ltd.
The names, places, and other identifying facts contained herein have been fictionalized, and no similarity to any persons, living or dead, is intended. In the excerpts from videotaped material, many names were not fictionalized, as several individuals specifically requested that their names remain unchanged.
Because of the awkwardness inherent in constructing sentences so as to avoid sexist language, the author has chosen to use the generic "he" at those times when "one," "they," or "he/she" would have been cumbersome.
Only if we become sensitive to the fine and subtle ways in which a child may suffer humiliation can we hope to develop the respect for him that a child needs from the very first day of his life onward, if he is to develop emotionally.
Alice Miller (1979/1981), Prisoners of Childhood (p. 76)
This is a true story about how young people are damaged, inadvertently, by those who consciously wish them the best—their parents. I am writing about every person whose life has been fractured by the perpetuation of the myths of family and society. We can think of human experience as a series of feelings that flow through us; sensations, perceptions, and thoughts impact on our unique personal attributes and predispositions, leading to an individual style of coping with environmental conditions. If any aspect of our experience is damaged—if, for example, we repress feeling for ourselves and others—we lose much of what is most alive and human. Parents who have themselves suffered emotional deprivation and rejection, and who have shut down on themselves, cannot but pass on this damage to their offspring. This form of destruction is the daily fare of most children, despite their parents' good intentions and efforts to love and nurture them.
In this book, I will show how parents' fundamental ambivalence toward their children—both their desire to love and nurture them on the one hand, and on the other, their unconscious hatred of and resentment toward them—profoundly affects the child's development. It is not my premise that parents have no love for their children or that they merely imagine that they do. Quite the contrary: in my experience, most mothers and fathers love their children and are fond of them, and wish them the best. My concern has always been with understanding why, despite the love and fondness parents have for their children, they so often behave in ways that are not sensitive, loving, or even friendly. Why, despite their wishes to instill a sense of independence and self-reliance in their offspring, do parents demand conformity and submission? And why, despite their desire to foster spontaneity and vitality in their children, do they actually create deadness and dullness in them?
My observations of family interactions, as well as my clinical findings, indicate a core ambivalence in parental reactions. Parents' feelings toward their children are both benevolent and malevolent. These conflicting attitudes coexist within all of us. Many mothers and fathers honestly believe that they love their children even when an outside observer would view their parenting patterns as indifferent, neglectful, or even abusive. They mistake an imaginary connection and anxious attachment to their children, which is a destructive dependency or fantasy bond,1 for genuine love, affection, and regard for the child's well-being. To be effective, any child-rearing approach must take into account the fundamental ambivalence of parents and its sources. However, negative, hostile feelings toward children are generally unacceptable socially. Parents show strong resistance to recognizing such negative and hostile feelings. They tend to deny aggression toward their children, whether it be covert or overt.
Understandably, parents have considerable resistance to recognizing how divided they are and how aggressive and hostile they may be toward their children as well. This resistance parallels strong conflicting attitudes they have toward themselves. In both cases, they unconsciously fear that if they become aware of these negative feelings, they will be more likely to act on them. They anticipate terrible consequences from acknowledging these "unacceptable" emotional responses. They are afraid that they will become more guilty or even more punishing to their children if they openly admit their hostility.
On the contrary, I have discovered that this recognition actually has positive effects. Far from feeling more guilty, parents generally have benefited from sharing these reactions with other parents who expose similar feelings. Catharsis not only reduces their guilt but also helps them to gain control over acting out hostility in family interactions. I believe that it is necessary, even vital, to uncover these unconscious feelings of resentment and hostility toward children, because only then can parents master and overcome these tendencies.
Although many parents feel guilty about their anger toward children and make every effort to maintain control over hateful, punishing thoughts and feelings, certain characteristics and behaviors in the child can trigger intense feelings of rage and angry outbursts. Incompetence, messiness, whining, crying, helplessness, or a look of vulnerability in a child frequently bring out punishing rebukes from parents. In these instances, generally the child is seen to be at fault and is perceived to be the cause of his parents' anger and irritability. If parents act on their anger toward the child, they will attempt to justify their actions, claiming it was the child who was "out of line" or was "driving them crazy." Once this pattern is established, the child may well become annoying and is no longer the "innocent, pure" child he once was. He tends to display passive-aggressive behavior in relating to his parents, thereby preserving an image of the "bad child" formed during earlier stages in his development.
Even when parents refrain from blaming or attacking the child and attempt to do the "right" thing, their children intuitively sense their underlying tenseness and irritability and become confused by their attempts to disguise this underlying anger. To compound the problem, many child-rearing books teach parents to "act" proper roles and say the "right" words in relating to their children, thereby contributing to a subtle form of damage—a distortion of the child's reality—that can be even more insidious than outright rejection or anger (E. J. Anthony, 1972; Bateson, Jackson, Haley, & Weakland, 1956/1972; Satir, 1983; Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967; Wynne, 1970/1972).
Very often, parental behavior contradicts any generally acceptable definition of love. Consequently, we must consider the observable actions of parents when attempting to present criteria for loving responses to children. Our criteria include genuine expressions of warmth—a smile or a friendly look that communicates empathy and good humor; physical affection; respectful, considerate treatment; tenderness; sensitivity to children's wants and needs; companionship; and a willingness to be a real person with the child rather than simply act the role of "mother" or "father." Much of what we see around us does not fit these criteria. When we observe family interactions in everyday situations, we see parents behave in ways that are largely detrimental to their offspring. These abuses range in intensity from minor irritability and disrespect to sadism and brutality. For example, we witness scenes like this:
As she prepared to leave the plane, my associate watched as a couple roughly woke up their four-year-old girl, yelling at her to "Get up now!. Or we're going to leave you here!" In the rush of people leaving the plane, the little girl awoke in a panic and burst into tears; the terrified expression on her face showed that she believed her parents' threat of abandonment.*
Apparently, these parents were more sensitive to their fellow passengers' than to their daughter's feelings—a not uncommon practice. Parents often speak for their children in a way that is insensitive and disrespectful, acting as though the child were mindless, mute, or invisible. The child in that situation feels like a nonperson. Some people even believe that children, and especially infants, have no feelings. Children suffer from being overly defined and categorized. They are classified as "the smart one," "the angry one," or "the sensitive one" in a way that restricts their personal identity or conception of themselves.
Frequently, children are teased unmercifully, despite their protests, by parents who are aware of their sensitive areas. For example, a woman recalled that when she was 5 years old, her father took great delight in bursting balloons close to her face just so he could hear her scream. All of us have seen parents reacting with annoyance, literally dragging children through shopping centers, while loudly reprimanding them for lagging behind.
These incidents are not unusual. Manifestations of disturbed parenting can affect every aspect of child-rearing. A baby may be handled roughly in being dressed or bathed; he may be fed insensitively—the food may be literally shoveled into his mouth by an indifferent mother preoccupied with other concerns. Older children may be spoken to with nastiness, sarcasm, and ridiculed by fathers and mothers who are unaware of their tone of voice or their choice of words. Many of these behaviors, verbal and nonverbal, exist on the periphery of parents' consciousness. Consequently, parents themselves do not have a true picture of their child's experience in the family. In each of these interactions, behaviors that clearly contradict generally acceptable definitions of love are being expressed by people who believe they love their children.
Of course, parents vary in their responses to their children and express both aspects of conflicting attitudes toward them. Sometimes they are warm and affectionate; at other times, they can be cruel or unfeeling. Children, however, tend to be especially sensitive to painful experiences as compared with positive ones and form their defenses at these times of undue stress. Further, when parents are inconsistent or erratic in their responses, children learn to expect punishment in the midst of, or immediately following, pleasurable events and tend to withdraw before they can be hurt. This expectation of hurt, rejection, or punishment persists into adulthood, influencing our responses in interpersonal relations. As a result, we frequently avoid closeness and intimacy because we anticipate future rejection, loss, or other negative consequences.
One explanation for the discrepancy between parental feelings and behaviors is related to the mistaken notions that many men and women have about love. Almost everyone takes for granted that parents, especially mothers, have an innate ability to love their children, and to form positive attachments. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Many parents confuse intense feelings of need and anxious attachment with feelings of genuine affection and inadvertently take from their children, rather than give to them.
Very often, parents assume that their inner thoughts and feelings about loving their children are comparable with outward expressions of warmth and tenderness and think that their children can read their minds and somehow know that they are loved. These mothers and fathers imagine that they care deeply, while in fact they may have very few personal interactions with their children. It is surprising how infrequently parents make meaningful contact with their young children. Questioning, lecturing, and nagging one's children are attempts at dutiful parenting, but they do not necessarily constitute meaningful personal communications. Genuine contact can be said to occur only when a parent expresses feelings honestly as a real person—a rare event in our modern society. In fact, a survey (Szalai, 1972) found that the average parent spends only 5.4 minutes per day talking with his child.
The long-lasting effects of the painful experiences we all endured as children can be seen in later interactions within the family. Why do so many parents need to play on the guilt of their adult children in order to persuade them to call or visit? Why are so many family reunions marred by disharmony and disillusionment? What really happened between the time the infant gazed with innocent love and trust into mother's eyes, and the time this now grown child looks at his parents with suspicion or discomfort and fear? What transpired in the intervening years to erase the bright smile from the face of the toddler who once leaped joyfully into his father's arms?
In the following pages, I will develop a theoretical structure to explain how incidental abuses to children lead eventually to psychological ills and emotional distress. This exploration challenges illusions and exposes hidden aspects of our personalities we wish to conceal. However, this painful undertaking can be very rewarding for personal growth and development. Parents and professionals alike can utilize the narratives and case histories of the individuals described here, who questioned their accustomed ways of thinking, revealed the truth of their experience, and developed an openness in relation to the basic issues involved in child-rearing.
The findings that support my thesis on child-rearing were derived from three principal sources: (1) historical data gathered from adult patients, ranging from hospitalized schizophrenic patients to neurotic and "normal" clients in an office setting; (2) the sincere revelations of parents in individual and group psychotherapy about their reactions to their children; and (3) individuals in an experimental social milieu who were motivated by a deep, abiding interest in psychology and a special interest in their own development. This unusual psychological laboratory began some 15 years ago, formed out of a small group of professional associates and long-standing friends, and it has expanded to include over 100 persons. These people meet in small and large group settings to explore important aspects of their personal lives. They have devoted themselves to minimizing or eliminating toxic influences in their important personal interactions, and were particularly focused on their couple and family relationships. This social milieu is perhaps unique and it is the most important source of Our hypotheses.2
Early in our observations of family interactions, we noted a recurring phenomenon indicating an intolerance on the part of many parents for sustained, close, personal contact with their children. As we listened to the accounts of these parents, we began to conjecture that their difficulties were in some way related to a defensive, self-protective need to deaden their children psychologically, emotionally, cognitively, and somatically. Parents report that when they see their children looking at them with love, this makes them feel uneasy and discomforted, particularly when their children express love.
One striking example of this disturbance is evidenced by Susan, a mother active in our parents' group since its inception. Her irritability and impatience with children in general and her problems in relating to her own children had long been a source of deep concern.
SUSAN: The last time I talked about feeling uncomfortable with children, I had the thought that I don't like to look at children's faces, at their eyes, especially my own children. I don't know why—I don't know what I'm afraid I would see. The second I started to say something right now, I started to feel sad.
DR. F.: If you picture yourself looking at your children, what do you see? What do you feel?
SUSAN: I know it makes me so pained. I don't know what I see because I don't really look at them most of the time.
DR. F.: What do you imagine you are going to see if you picture looking at them now?
SUSAN: If I picture Tamara [Susan's 3-year-old daughter], I think I would see myself. I don't know why that is so hard, but I know that I don't want to see her.
DR. F.: Somehow you see yourself.
SUSAN: But not happy, not a happy self, (sad)
It was clear to others in the meeting that Susan's relationship with her daughter caused her pain. Several people identified with the feelings she described. Marilyn, another participant in the group, indicated that for the most part she had avoided having close personal interactions with her son when he was a baby because she had not wanted to be aware of his helplessness and vulnerability.
MARILYN: I felt mostly sad, because he was so vulnerable; you can't avoid seeing it, and you might see it in yourself—and you don't want to.
SUSAN: I think that's what I feel. I see children's vulnerability and then I get angry. I'm afraid of taking advantage of that vulnerability in a child, and then it makes me angry. My own feelings get stirred up. I feel really embarrassed by these feelings.
Such parents don't want these primitive longings to be stirred up. In a later group meeting, Susan recognized that she warded off direct eye contact and close moments with her children to avoid painful realizations about her own mother's coldness and indifference. For the first time, Marilyn understood why she distanced herself from her young son; more personal relating aroused feelings of sadness and anxiety in her and brought back feelings of helplessness she had experienced as a child.
In closing off aspects of their personalities to protect themselves and to avoid feelings of pain and vulnerability, parents like Susan and Marilyn must dull these same emotional responses in their children. They cannot avoid but teach their children their own defenses and self-protective life-styles, both implicitly and by direct instruction. Many parents stifle their children's natural spontaneity and enthusiasm by such statements as "Don't make a fool of yourself." "Why get so excited?" "Don't wear your emotions on your sleeve." Parents caution children about feeling too good about themselves, saying: "Don't be so proud or conceited." They warn adolescents not to get too attached to persons or things to "protect" them against rejection and loss. The methods of transmitting parental defenses to children are extensive and extremely effective in perpetuating self-limiting life-styles from one generation to the next.
There are three major reasons why parents unconsciously resent their children, limit their development, and cause them pain. (1) Children threaten the parents' defense system by reawakening painful feelings from the past; (2) parents unknowingly project or extend critical, negative feelings and attitudes they have toward themselves onto their children; (3) the negative traits and behaviors internalized by parents when they were children now intrude into their ongoing behavior in interactions with their offspring.
Parental defenses are threatened by live, spontaneous children. Their innocence reminds the parents of the hurts in their childhoods. The child threatens to reactivate these past hurts. In this situation, parents direct their hostility toward the child. The child is usually expendable, whereas the defense system of the parent is preserved.
All of us have been caused pain in growing up, and to the extent that we have insulated ourselves from this emotional distress and our feelings of sadness, we have become removed and alienated from our "child selves," from parts of ourselves that are vital and alive. We spend the rest of our lives protecting and defending ourselves against reexperiencing these painful feelings.
In our clinical work over a 4-year period (1973-1976) with patients and normal subjects in an intense feeling release therapy, we found that, without exception, every individual expressed deep, primitive feelings of sadness, desperation, and rage associated with traumatic events in childhood. Once one is defended against these feelings, one continually manipulates the environment so that this repressed pain does not surface, that is, one attempts to avoid any experience that reminds one of the emptiness and fears one suffered as a child (Janov, 1970).
To some extent, all parents are inward and defensive because of the frustrations they encountered in their