That "Blaming Your Parents" Bullshit

There is something singularly gutless about rejecting therapy as a tool to improve one’s life and something singularly contemptible about sneering at those with the courage to undertake it.

A common and particularly idiotic libel is that therapy is all about blaming one’s parents.

To begin with, with regard to many issues that merit therapy, upbringing doesn’t enter into it. If you have problems with procrastination, productivity, organization or even free-floating anxiety, a cognitive behavioral approach is almost certainly the best, and it has the advantage of being empirically based. Which is to say these approaches were developed after experimentation, the results of which are replicable and reasonably robust. A good introduction to this subject is Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It (2012). McGonigal is a professor of psychology at Stanford who created a wildly popular Continuing Education course entitled “The Science of Willpower.” It routinely maxed out in terms of enrollment—we’re talking a course that had to be moved to bigger classrooms four times until McGonigal had to teach it in one of Stanford’s largest lecture halls.

McGonigal has gone to town on this, writing a number of other books, including The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It (2016). More recently she has gotten into the psychology of movement; for an introduction to this, see The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage (2019).

However, many problems are relationally-based, and then it does become necessary to look at one’s upbringing. Not to blame one’s parents—that is self-defeating—but to understand the ways in which their parenting mistakes generated distorted thinking, mistaken beliefs, low self-esteem, and any number of other problems that play out primarily in relationships: with friends, family members, co-workers and, usually most prominently, intimate relationships (or at least relationships that ought to be intimate). The dominant means by which these issues are addressed is classic “talk therapy,” which essentially tracks back to psychologist Carl Rogers’ conviction that people have an innate bias in favor of healing, and that if given a supportive space in which to heal, that is what they will do.

It is futile to blame one’s parents, but common sense to hold one’s parents responsible for the basic ways in which one was taught to see the world and oneself. I myself am a parent, and I ask you: between myself and my daughter, which of us holds nearly all the power and who exerts an out-sized influence upon the other? The answer is obvious: I do. I hold the power; I therefore bear the responsibility. And there is no doubt in my mind that as hard as I work at being a father, I am making mistakes. I don’t know what mistakes I’m making—if I did I would take corrective action—but I’m making them nonetheless. And I can tell you where these mistakes basically occur: in the realm between the messages I think I am conveying to my daughter and the messages she actually receives.

I do have an advantage over certain other parents—my own, for example—in that I’m self-aware about my limitations, willing to question my parenting choices, and above all, willing to ask for advice from people who know what they’re talking about. (I have an additional advantage in that my daughter has a terrific mom and I have a terrific co-parent.)

I will talk another time about the problematic aspects of the way in which I was raised. For now I want to move on to the second necessary step: to be able to see one’s parents as fallible human beings with their own struggles and their own imperfect childhoods. In the case of my mother and father, both survived personal tragedies that would have destroyed most people. And if they made some serious mistakes as parents, they did remarkably well in others. I will instance only the importance they placed on learning and the way they modeled it in their own behavior. My siblings and I lived in a house filled with books. All three of us learned to love to read, and all three of us have turned out to be pretty bright people. And as far as this project is concerned: were it not for the example of my father’s commitment to realism, my mother’s extraordinary compassion for others, and the courage that both of them displayed, I would simply be unequal to the challenge of writing this book.

Then there’s a third step, which is ultimately the most important. Insight will only get me so far. The crucial question is: Now that I know what I know, what am I going to do about it? The way I generally phrase this to myself is, Where am I in all of this?

There is not a rigid sequencing from assessing the lessons one imbibed in childhood; to viewing one’s parents realistically and with empathy; to making new choices about how to live in this world. After a while there is a kind of working back and forth among these three steps. But there is no doubt in my mind that I am far more emotionally healthy than I was when I first embarked on therapy, not because I have transcended my core issues—that just ain’t gonna happen—but because I have learned to face them squarely. Consequently I have the ability to manage them. They no longer own me.

In May 1977, however, they came within a few minutes of killing me.

Love's Lonely Offices

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

By Robert Hayden (1913 - 1980)

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

How Do We Forgive Our Fathers?

A few weeks before her birth I began keeping a journal for my daughter Chloe, intended for her to read when she turns 18. This is a portion of the entry for October 15, 2012, the day after she had her first birthday party:

When I met your mother, the film that until recently had meant the most to her was “Smoke Signals,” about two young Native Americans who go in search of the father of one of them, an alcoholic with a terrible secret that had caused him to abandon his family years before. At the end of the film one of the character speaks, voiceover, a poem by Dick Lourie:

How do we forgive our Fathers?
Maybe in a dream
Do we forgive our Fathers for leaving us too often or forever
when we were little?
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.
Do we forgive our Fathers for marrying or not marrying our Mothers?
For Divorcing or not divorcing our Mothers?
And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning
for shutting doors
for speaking through walls
or never speaking
or never being silent?
Do we forgive our Fathers in our age or in theirs
or in their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it?
If we forgive our Fathers what is left?

I am sobbing as I write this because the poem is heart-breaking. I think of the troubled relationship I had with my own father but mostly I think of you. What will you need to forgive me for? Whatever it is, please know that I am sorry. I love you so much. I wish I could be perfect for you, and I know that, as hard as I try, I can’t.

Bullied - Part 2

I went to my Dad about it—sort of. I was ashamed to tell him the full extent of the hazing Stephen gave me—it would have been an impossible confession of weakness—but I do remember asking him if anyone had ever teased him and how he’d handled it. He mentioned that in the Navy some guy had hassled him until Dad had learned the guy’s embarrassing middle name and began calling the guy by that, which shut the guy up. Stephen’s middle name was Lynn, so I tried calling him that. He failed to see the point. He just kept razzing me.

I went to a school counselor one day, practically in tears, going there on some pretext or other simply to avoid math class, when Stephen sat next to me and the teasing was at its worst. The counselor vaguely supposed that my upset stemmed from being in a middle school rather than an elementary school. I couldn’t volunteer the real reason and waited for her to drag it out of me through some adroit series of questions which, of course, she never did.

My grades got steadily worse. By this time other kids had begun jumping on the bandwagon and I became fair game for anyone who wanted to acquire some inexpensive status. I couldn’t concentrate in class and when I got home I wouldn’t even glance at my schoolbooks—they reminded me too oppressively of school. Nobody did anything but scold me: students, teachers, parents. Nobody made a move to help. I felt completely alone, completely useless, completely worthless.

By the time Stephen’s incessant teasing had slackened, or at least so it seems in memory, and my chief problem shifted to grades. It’s hard to relate to this episode on either count—I’ve long since grown indifferent to teasing and grades alike—but it was far from being so back then. Plummeting grades were horrible by definition. In memory every day seems gray clad, gusty, bleak, and my stomach feels like lead. Happiness is a myth; my life is one huge gob of humiliation and bile.

Eventually this reign of misery subsided, primarily because it finally dawned on Mom and Dad that my lousy grades demanded something more than a scolding. One day Mom went to my teachers for a private conference and returned, vaguely scandalized. It had surprised her when they told her that I would probably flunk the next grading period and it had appalled her that she had the sense they relished the prospect. She told me what they said and both she and Dad began helping me with special projects—it became a sort of family conspiracy to show those teachers up.

Bullied - Part 1

“The sense of being unwanted has always been for me acutely painful. The sensation is reverberative and seems to attach itself to the last link in a chain made up of all similar experiences. The voices in the cast were loud and scornful, and there I was, buck naked, somewhere in the middle of the city and unwanted, remembering missed football tackles, lost fights, the contempt of strangers, the sound of laughter from behind shut doors.”

-- John Cheever, “The Fourth Alarm”

[Upon discharge from the hospital after my manic episode in September 1986, I was directed to go to Concord Counseling Services in Westerville, Ohio. I had no money or insurance but Concord operated on a sliding fee scale, which was, in my case, three dollars per session. I was assigned a psychiatrist and a therapist. Among the first things they noticed about me was that, when asked to give my family and personal history, I described the most horrible episodes in a flat, matter of fact tone bereft of emotional content. The therapist, an LISW named Linda (who was just two years older than me), spent most of our sessions trying to get me to open up emotionally—or more precisely, to access my emotions in the first place. She gave me an assignment….]

My job in this essay is to describe pain, personal pain: what it felt like, when it happened, why it happened, how I reflect on it after the passage of time; in effect, to relive those moments (or, in most cases, epochs) of pain: an intrinsically unpleasant task. I suppose that almost all the pain I’ve felt in my lifetime has occurred within the context of relationships. I can’t help but think that this marks me out as fortunate. I’ve known almost nothing of the pain that comes from bad health, a lost job, or the failure to achieve some desperately desired goal. When I think of some of the suffering I’ve witnessed secondhand—of Laverne J., for instance, a 62-year old woman slipping toward dementia, living alone in one room of a decrepit frame house with a coffee warmer to cook one, no bath or shower, and only cardboard boxes for furniture; or of a five-day old baby I saw in Zaire, shaking like a poisoned mouse, dying of umbilical tetanus because his mother had swaddled him in a cloth contaminated with goat dung; or the beggars in Kenya who showed me mangled limbs and endlessly repeated, “Saidia” [Help]—well, the suffering of a 26-year old writer who thinks himself unlovable seems rather thin tea.

On the other hand, pain is pain, and although it comes in many patterns and degrees of intensity it is surely fruitless to argue that one man’s pain is legitimate while another’s is self-indulgent or trivial. The labels are irrelevant. Trying to be objective about pain is like trying to see a planet from all sides at once: you can only view it from your personal angle of vision. The task is inherently subjective.

[NB. Notice the reflexive effort to intellectualize the issue rather than grapple with the emotions that attach to pain, which is the point of the assignment.]

Broken Arrow!

I will not hold you in suspense. Room 101 is a therapist’s office.

It is the last place many people will go. Sometimes they misunderstand what to expect—they think it’s just a place where you learn to blame your parents. Sometimes they think of therapists as touchy-feely creeps. If faith-based, they may assume that all therapists are secular and anti-religious (they aren’t). These objections extend to the persons who enter therapy, who are often regarded with contempt by those who reject therapy.

But I sometimes think it’s because the objectors intuitively know what’s in Room 101. The worst thing in the world is in Room 101. And the worst thing in the world is indeed in Room 101—in the therapist’s office.

But there is also the therapist, who serves as guide and protector as their client gradually confronts the problems they have shoved out of conscious awareness and which therefore own them.

Sometimes people—this is especially true of men—think that entering therapy would be a confession of weakness.

Just the opposite.

In their 1990 book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine,” Robert L. Moore, a professor of psychology and religion; and Douglas Gillette, a mythologist, draw upon Carl Jung’s concept of mythical archetypes to create an introduction to the psychological foundations of a mature, authentic, and revitalized masculinity. I teach Moore/Gillette in my “History of War” course.

I first introduce students to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who pioneered many basic psychological concepts relevant to the warrior ethos. The first key concept: we possess all human potentialities, but we choose—or usually our families and society choose for us—which potentialities to embrace and which to reject or hide. The parts we consciously accept are what Jung termed the Persona. Those we reject he called the Shadow. Jung argued that we repress—push outside our conscious awareness—what we regard as being the darker sides of ourselves.

Jungian psychologists have a simple but powerful way to identify a person’s Shadow: ask them what kind of person they most dislike. In my case, it’s bullies. To my chagrin, I have come to see that I myself can behave in a bullying fashion, and never more so than when I fail to see that I have that potentiality. A self-aware person can manage if not master their Shadow. If they cannot, their Shadow owns them.

A second fundamental Jungian concept is the collective unconscious. One of Jung’s students, Joseph Campbell, explored this idea throughout his life, and discovered that all societies basically possess the same mythic stories. The characters and stories are different, but the structure and significance of these stories are strikingly similar. Campbell’s most influential book was “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” (1948), which examined the myths concerning heroes from all around the world. He found that these myths had a common structure and common archetypal characters within them.

The basic structure of the Hero’s adventure is the journey from one place to another, an adventure involving a kind of death and resurrection into a new form of being. Every one of us took such a journey at the beginning of our lives: from a fetus, living in a water world that was enclosed and protected; to emergence into a wholly different world as a newborn.

The Best They Had On the Ranch

You keep telling me I've got everything
You say I've got everything I want
You keep telling me you're gonna help me
You're gonna help me, but you don't

-- “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight,” written by Michael Rutherford, Phil Collins, and Tony Banks, performed by “Genesis” on the album “Invisible Touch” (1986)

["Senator" is me: I have found it helpful to distinguish myself at 17 from myself at 60. The names used in the essay are not the real names of the persons involved.]

After the fact they will say it was because a girl broke up with him. Failing that, they will say that, because the half-finished composition paper on the table dealt with the Kent State shootings, that he was morbidly obsessed with the shootings. Failing that: well, they will find something.

They certainly will not find it in the 80 percent of the one-page suicide note that emphasizes being worn out and washed up, because that suggests that possibly he didn’t get the emotional support he needed, and fuck that.

They will never know that it isn’t the girl friend or Kent State that pushes him over the edge. It is the fact that he realizes he will not be able to finish the paper by the time it is due in the morning.

And they will never ask the obvious question: Why was Senator unable to navigate the stresses and challenges common to a teenager his age?

Time rolls back not quite a year. It is 3 p.m. on Monday, May 31, 1976, and Senator cracks open Notebook Eight. At the top of the first blank page—page 226, he numbers it—Senator notes the day and time and writes, “Christ am I ever depressed. Last night I cried alone hysterically for about ten minutes, till I could get ahold of myself; but after that I felt so mortified & ashamed that I was worse off than when I started. . . . I hope this passes soon. I find myself continually looking around the house for ways to ‘do away with myself.’ Of course I’ve no real intention of suiciding myself, but it’s a reflection of my general attitude. Man I must be crazy.”