Leaving Home: The Art of Separating from Your Difficult Family

This chapter continues the discussion of childhood dependency. It is simply impossible for us to remember just how desperately dependent we were as children, but one common scene will bring this universal human reality back into focus. I was shopping in a large store recently when I heard the distinctive wail of a toddler who had lost sight of his mother. I peeked around the corner of the aisle, and there he was—an enormously distressed two- or three-year-old little fellow yelling his heart out. Not surprisingly, several adults had come to his aid, but they seemed to make him wail even louder, as they were clearly not his mother. Finally, a harried looking woman with two other young children turned the corner and called “Tom-my!” The effect of her voice was electric; he snapped around and the moment he caught sight of her he stopped crying. Suddenly his world was complete and safe and he trotted toward her as fast as he could. No other adult in the entire store, no matter how skilled at parenting, had the power to relieve him of his panic except his all-important mother. We forget that each and every one of us was once as dependent as this little boy. Those of us (including myself and nearly all my adult friends) that were either neglected or abused in our childhoods had to find techniques to remain emotionally and psychologically attached to our parents despite the inadvertent rejection of our emotional needs.

Neglect and abuse are two different but closely related factors, both of which can delay development. Neglect can occur independently or it can occur as a by-product of abuse. When a child is abused, he is suffering from two damaging developmental events occurring at the same time. Returning to the example of the family dynamic between George and his mother, we see that during the time that George and his sister were being forced to eat (abuse), they were also being deprived of the support and emotional nurturing (neglect) that they should have been receiving at the dinner table. When George shifted into his wounded self at the dinner table, he was not only filled with anger and humiliation, but also felt extremely alone because his bond to his mother was broken. He had suddenly lost the single person in the universe upon whom he depended to make himself feel safe, secure, and wanted. He faced a critical and unsolvable conflict: he needed a close relationship with his mother in order to feel safe and secure during the day, yet his mother humiliated him at the dinner table each night. His intense anger was incompatible with seeing his mother as a supportive anchor in the uncertain sea of childhood. Thus, each dinner she was lost to him in terms of making him feel secure.

George was both abused and neglected at the dinner table. Other children are less abused than he was, but are neglected almost continuously. Neglect sounds less damaging than abuse—however, that is not always the case. Children do not experience neglect as a neutral void. Instead, neglect produces a state of need and intense longing for the emotionally missing parent. This has enormous consequences in the future development of their personality. Neglecting a child is like starving it: the longer the child goes without food, the more the child focuses on his hunger, and the more he tries to meet his needs with fantasy. The very presence of a parent who neglects a child is like showing a starving child a banquet that is sealed off by a glass wall. The food tantalizes the child to the point of distraction, as does the parent who refuses to nurture his or her desperately needy offspring.

Children in disorganized families cannot change their parents; their only option is to develop psychological defense mechanisms that keep them from becoming too anxious about the reality in which they are forced to live. George, along with all abused and neglected children, had to discover a way to psychologically reinstate his mother in his own mind as a loving parent. Part of the solution is for the child to isolate the worst memories of neglect in their wounded self and repress it in the unconscious. That process removes the relationship’s destructive anger and hurt. A second process restores hope for the child to hold onto when the reality of the family provides too little support. This second part of the defense mechanism allows the child to redeem his parent by creating the illusion that his mother (or father) will improve in the future. This comforting illusion becomes a counterweight to the mostly unconscious wounded self and it is present in all abused and neglected children to keep them from experiencing intense depression and outright psychological collapse. This second part of the same defense is called the “hopeful self.” The hopeful self that George created was an illusory belief that his mother was a good parent who would eventually support his need for autonomy and show him more affection in the future. He created this illusion by exaggerating and amplifying the rare but actual memories of support from his mother that he could recall, which involved his success as a hockey player. Every child’s continuous need for emotional support demands that he retain hope for the future, and his unmet developmental needs are the motivation for the creation of an elaborate and powerful illusion that his parents are better than they really are. The hopeful self becomes an alternative and less troubling view of his mother’s “reality” than is contained in his (mostly unconscious) wounded self. The illusion that every child creates is that his parents have the potential to love him, which allows him to feel love for himself. The hopeful self serves as a lifesaving antidote to the bitter and envious wounded self, which often becomes committed to destroying the rejecting aspects of the parents or other adults in positions of authority.

The hopeful self’s misperception of the mother or father is the reciprocal “partner” to the wounded self, and together they operate as the two halves of the primary defense mechanism of childhood. The hopeful self defends the child from confronting the intolerable reality that there is little actual hope for love or support from his parent(s), and the wounded self keeps the memories of pain and despair tightly bottled up in the unconscious.

An excellent example of the development of a hopeful self in a well-known person can be seen in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, No Ordinary Time. A typical example of parental failure suffered by Eleanor occurred when she and her charming but alcoholic father were walking together with their three dogs in New York City and passed the Knickerbocker club. Her father entered and told her that he would be out in a few minutes. Eleanor was left waiting by this well-meaning but immature and self-centered parent with the dogs for five hours and when he reappeared he was so drunk that he had to be carried home. Her father loved her when he was sober, but he bitterly disappointed her when he was drinking. These extreme and opposite experiences furnished her hopeful self with the illusion that she was loved, and simultaneously her wounded self was filling with memories of repeated and intense disappointments. Eleanor hid from the memories of her father’s parental failures in her repressed wounded self, while memories of his charm and endless promises of love were in her awareness, in her hopeful self.

Her relationship with her father was of primary importance to her and had to be preserved, because her mother was almost entirely rejecting. In fact, her beautiful mother seemed repelled by young Eleanor’s plainness, and humiliated her with the nickname “Granny.” By the time Eleanor was seven, her father was living away at sanatoriums for treatment of his alcoholism and she was satisfying her need for a loving parent by creating a hopeful self based on his romantic letters to her:

Luckily, Eleanor had powerful defense mechanisms well established by the time she faced three major losses. One month after her eighth birthday her mother, her only available parent, died. She was then sent to live with her grandmother while her father remained in treatment for alcoholism. The following year, her four-year-old brother died, and soon after, so did her beloved father:

Eleanor was faced with a series of traumatic emotional abandonments from the time of her birth that required the development of powerful defense mechanisms to keep her from psychological collapse. Her attachment to her father was much stronger than to her mother, both because her father’s larger-than-life promises served as fuel for her hopeful self and because her mother offered her so few moments of love upon which to build her hopeful self’s fantasy. She took her mother’s death in stride because by that time all of her attachment needs were focused on her father, whom she assumed would return home after treatment. Even when he did not, her hopeful self maintained her psychological stability throughout her childhood by immersing her in a dream world that was filled with the illusion of love.

All children from dysfunctional families, rich or poor, rely on the hopeful self as a defense against the collapse of their entire personality. I recently worked with a bright thirty-year-old woman who arrived at her regular psychotherapy session with a small ceramic angel that had been given to her by her father on her tenth birthday. It was obvious that she treasured this powerful symbol of love; it was the only gift her father had ever given her and it became the cornerstone upon which her hopeful self was built. She would not allow me to touch it for fear that I might harm the precious memento. She began to cry as she described the morning on which she found the gift at her place on the dining room table. Her father’s token was exceedingly important, as her mother was physically abusive and treated her like a second-class citizen.

I was soon to learn however, that there was a second, painful reality about her father that she described to me months later in our therapy sessions. It was eerily absent from her awareness while she showed me the small angel. The unavailable reality about her father was repressed in her wounded self, and it was completely hidden during the sessions when her hopeful self was dominant. This separate reality about her father was that he ignored her completely during her early childhood, and worse, his behavior changed dramatically when she matured into a sexually appealing young woman, at which point he suddenly became attentive. On several occasions, when her mother was out visiting friends, he made overt sexual advances toward her. She was enormously frightened by this turn of events, and she began to avoid her father whenever possible. The moment she became a teenager, her rebellious wounded self emerged, and she became pregnant by a boyfriend. Upon learning of her pregnancy, her father forced her to leave the family home and live in a rooming house because she had disgraced the “family name.” To this selfish man, his daughter’s welfare was less important to him than his own sexual needs, or later, than the opinion of his relatives and neighbors. None of these painful and anger-provoking memories were present when my patient showed me the little angel, as all of her negative memories about him were hidden away in her wounded self, deeply repressed in her unconscious. These painful memories of betrayal were isolated and ignored when her naive and optimistic hopeful self was dominating her sense of reality.

In adulthood, our need for the fantasy of loving parents does not disappear. Most adults are compelled to continue to hold on to the illusions that they were loved as children, because a clear view of the harsh childhood realities would cause an upwelling of grief and anger so powerful that it would seriously disrupt their lives. My patient’s hopeful self’s fantasy was constantly challenged by the memories stored in her wounded self. These two opposite views had to be kept apart or her fragile equilibrium would disintegrate. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, my patient focused most of her attachment needs on her father, and despite the fact that she was an “adult,” she still felt too needy to tolerate the possible loss of the fantasy that her now deceased father once loved her.

If the “adult” of thirty finds it difficult to face this reality, imagine how absolutely impossible it is for the child of ten! The daily support of parents is crucial to all children’s ability to continue functioning, so they create illusions as large as necessary to keep themselves going. This is the reason behind the paradoxical observation that the least loved and emotionally supported children have the most elaborate and unrealistic fantasies about their parents. These extreme hopeful selves have to be unrealistic, as they keep the hope of love alive in the child when there is little or no real love or support within the family. When a child is dominated by her hopeful self, she will refuse to believe that her parents are not interested in her plight—information that is equivalent to telling a parachute jumper that her chute is all tangled up, but she must jump anyway. The anxiety from this knowledge is simply too much to bear.

Once established, the hopeful self can destroy a young adult’s attempt to separate from his or her dysfunctional family. The following example, which I have used previously in my book The Treatment of the Borderline Personality, illustrates how destructive the hopeful self can be to the individual trying to separate from a destructive family:

Pam, a beautiful young woman of twenty-five, came for therapy because of her struggles with her family. Her father was a successful homebuilder who employed her two brothers, but Pam had been completely ignored by him both in childhood and now in her young adulthood. As part of our work, Pam spent several months getting up the courage to leave her unhappy family and successfully saved money from her salary as a secretary for a deposit on an apartment. To her amazement, the moment she moved out of the family home, her father called and begged her to return. Pam was utterly confused and conflicted by her father’s behavior because he had been completely indifferent toward her when she lived at home. Her wounded self (which was no longer repressed and was the focus of our discussions in therapy) was filled with clear memories of her father’s rejection of her legitimate needs as a daughter. His surprising new behavior did not match her well-established views. He not only called her, but sent a completely uncharacteristic emotional card “To My Loving Daughter” in which he professed a deep parental love for her. This was puzzling because Pam and her mother were treated like servants by her father and two brothers. Their job was to do all of the housework and prepare the evening meal and lunches for the next workday while remaining otherwise invisible. Pam noted that her father would not even respond to her when he was engaged in conversation with either of her two brothers. Pam’s mother self-destructively solved her problem of an insensitive and neglectful husband by drinking to the point of passing out almost nightly. One of Pam’s unspoken jobs was to take her comatose mother upstairs and put her to bed.

Despite our work, Pam’s unmet childhood needs had created a hopeful self that was stimulated by her father’s craftily aimed card and calls. She was unable to resist the promise of love that her father offered in his card, and her previously dominant wounded self’s view of him was repressed and replaced with her hopeful self’s view of him, one that was unaware of all the childhood rejection. Predictably, after one month of living alone in her new apartment, the promise of love coupled with the loneliness she felt without familiar (albeit unloving) family members around her convinced her to move back in with her family. There was absolutely nothing that I could say that would change her mind. Her mother was overjoyed and her father seemed more responsive to her than before. Pam terminated treatment with me, thinking her problems with her family were solved. About two months later she returned, saying that her father was no longer paying any attention to her and her mother was more of a burden than ever. Pam’s hopeful self, which seemed so powerful just weeks before, could not stand up to the reality of daily rejections once she resumed her role as family servant. Over time it gave way and was replaced by her wounded self once again. Once her wounded self again became the dominant reality she could remember how indifferent her father had been all during her development. With my support and encouragement, she began saving for another rent deposit and soon after moved out for the second time. I prepared Pam for her father’s now predictable manipulation, saying that she should expect another plea to return home. Within a week of her move, another flowery card arrived from her father. The struggle between her hopeful self and her wounded self was reactivated by the card, and despite my best efforts, her need-driven hopeful self won out again. She saw her father as filled with potential love, while her more accurate view of him as a manipulator and user were repressed in her once again unconscious wounded self. She gave up her apartment, moved back in with her family, and the cycle began all over again.

This example shows just how extreme and unrealistic decisions made by the hopeful self can be when it is dominant. Pam’s unmet childhood needs were not apparent when she was dominated by her wounded self, but her repressed hopeful self emerged powerfully when she was faced by the seductive promises of love offered by her father. Pam’s faulty choice was based on fantasy and need, not on reality—she fell in love with her own self-created illusions.

A number of readers have used the word “addiction” to explain Pam’s attachment to her father. Her hopeful self acted like a drug, blinding her to the reality of her father’s indifference—an indifference that she was only able to access while in therapy. “Addiction” is an overused and superficial description that is assumed to be an explanation, when in fact, it is simply an observation. The description of Pam as an “addict” tells us nothing about her underlying psychological dynamics, and it gives no hint of the role of her hopeful self nor of the unmet developmental needs that motivate this form of self-destructive defense mechanism. It does not begin to help us understand the processes that motivate this extremely odd and self-defeating attachment, and it creates the false impression that we have an explanation when in fact all we have is a surface description.

The complex defense mechanism that keeps the hopeful self and the wounded self unaware of each other, even though they coexist in the same person, is called the “splitting defense” or simply “splitting.” It allows the child (and later, the adult) to see others only in terms of the two opposite and isolated viewpoints. Persons who use the splitting defense can suddenly shift their view of the parent (or significant other) from their hopeful self’s perspective to their wounded self’s perspective (or vice versa) in a matter of seconds. In effect, the dependent and emotionally starved child has managed to psychologically separate his depriving but needed mother or father into two distinct and separate people; a anger-inspiring rejecting parent and a emotionally-longed-for loving parent. The splitting defense actively keeps the two opposite views of the parent apart in their minds. Neither my patient Pam nor young Eleanor Roosevelt could afford to allow the memories of neglect in their wounded selves to confront the unrealistic fantasies in their hopeful selves. If their wounded self memories of their fathers’ behavior met and confronted the opposite hopeful self fantasy, the wounded self memories would overwhelm and destroy the “good” fantasy father that they created. Wounded self-memories are “real” memories—the events stored in the wounded self actually happened—while hopeful self fantasies are illusions based on the child’s pressing hopes and dreams. The splitting defense protects the two opposite selves from meeting, thus saving the unrealistic optimism of the hopeful self from being destroyed by the wounded self. In Pam’s case, her wounded self knew that her father ignored her, was willing to use her as a servant, and was not truly interested in nurturing her. If this reality forcibly confronted her hopeful self, the wounded self memories would destroy the hopeful self fantasy. Once this reality was exposed, it could plunge Pam into an abandonment panic, a condition akin to the terror experienced by the lost child in a supermarket.

The splitting defense is neither a “split personality” nor a “multiple personality.” The concept of a split personality came from early work with schizophrenic patients who “split” their emotions from their verbal productions. Thus, a schizophrenic might describe a sad event while giggling. This concept has been largely dropped from mental health, though it does live on in fiction and film. A multiple personality is a rare and very serious disorder which usually results from extreme abuse in childhood. The child must develop separate selves to tolerate different feelings. Each of the subpersonalities that are developed are distinct and often do not know about the others, but each is a functional and relatively complete personality. A patient with multiple personality disorder may wake up in a strange place, or with odd clothing on (that “belongs” to one of the other personalities) and not know what happened. In contrast to the rare multiple personality disorder, the splitting defense is very common and the same personality inhabits each self—the difference is the perspective or view of others currently held. The hopeful self view of the parents is rosy and unrealistic, while the wounded self’s view is negative and filled with pain.

The splitting defense is not a new way of thinking and feeling, but rather an earlier form of emotionality that failed to mature. We are all familiar with the toddler who suddenly shifts in emotion from saying “Mommy, I love you” to “Mommy, I hate you.” These fast fluctuations in emotion occur in very young children because they cannot hold on to past images of the mother as a loving person when they are frustrated. Thus when frustration occurs, the toddler—who is perpetually caught in the moment—cannot recall the events of two minutes ago, when her mother was responding as loving parent. Her emotions can and do swing from love to anger in a second. This style of immature emotionality remains alive in unloved children throughout their lives because the mountain of painful memories contained in their wounded selves would destroy their attachment to the needed parent. Thus, the purpose of splitting is to keep the child or undernourished adult from psychological collapse by hiding the reality that he or she was not really loved or cared for as a child. As long as the illusion of a loving family persists, the individual will be able to function in life.

This defense is resistant to pressure from others, including interpretations from the “helpful” therapist. If, for instance, I insisted on reminding my patient whose father made a sexual approach toward her of this (now repressed) fact when she was dominated by her hopeful self, she would be (genuinely) offended and feel that I did not understand her at all. I would be both wasting my time and alienating my patient. The “reality” that her father tried to seduce her is so completely repressed by the splitting defense that no memory trace is available to her. Her hopeful self, when dominant, only has access to those perceptions and illusions that indicate her father loved her; it is the only “truth” that makes any sense to her.

There is a great personal cost to the individual who uses this defense. It can, as with Pam, sabotage a young adult’s attempt to separate from his or her unloving family. Second, behaviors the individual cannot control that emerge from the repressed wounded self can ruin the patient’s reputation. If we return to George, the prep school student who stole items from my office, it was clear in our sessions that the hostility in his wounded self, which was filled with memories of his combative relationship with his abusive mother, were being reenacted by him in his self-destructive game-playing with authority figures. During our sessions, George continued to view his childhood through the illusion of his hopeful self and thus his revenge-driven stealing both from the school faculty and from my office seemed to emerge from outer space.

As we have seen, the result of a childhood filled with deprivation is the development of two separate selves and the splitting mechanism which keeps them apart. The consequences of the splitting defense is a deep loyalty to our failed parents that is difficult to break. Thus Fairbairn’s concept of “attachment to bad objects” is fueled by both sides of the splitting defense. The “love,” or more accurately, the “need-driven” side of the attachment is the realm of the hopeful self, which varies in intensity from person to person. The second part of the attachment to failed parents flows through the angry and vengeful wounded self. Each wounded self is unique, because different childhood experiences of either neglect or abuse produce different intensities of memories of anger and despair. The wounded self does not want to give up on the neglectful parent, because the child knows that it cannot exchange its parents for better ones. This emotionally charged focus on the parent does not change once adulthood is reached. Rather, the wounded self first tries to reform the parent and turn him or her into a loving parent. After years of disappointment, some children give up their hopeful self fantasies, and instead focus on the memories in their wounded selves. They remain attached to their parents through the desire to punish or expose the parent to public scrutiny, much like “whistleblowers” who spend their lives exposing corruption in corporations or in government. The wounded self is as intensely attached to the rejecting parent as the hopeful self is to the illusory loving parent. It has no interest in separating from the rejecting parent any more than a deprived child of eight or nine is interested in leaving its family.

It is preferable to use the word “attachment” rather than “love” in the explanation of futile relationships to failed parents. These two words are easily confused and are both burdened with other meanings that can muddy the issue. When we use the word “attachment,” we usually mean it in positive terms. However, all neglected children remain attached to their parents despite the fact that there was very little love present during their developmental years. Emotional attachments forged under conditions of deprivation are based on a reservoir of unmet developmental needs and these attachments are not healthy, but they are very strong—even desperate—attachments nonetheless. As I have demonstrated, need-based attachments become increasingly powerful over time because the unmet needs never stop demanding satisfaction.

Fairbairn also describes a second and far less complex defense mechanism than the splitting defense. This defense is commonly used by children and is called the “moral defense.” Simply stated, the child blames himself or herself for imaginary faults and these imagined failures justify their parents’ punishments or indifference. This defense mechanism preserves the child’s attachment to his parents by placing the blame for being rejected directly on his or her shoulders. Unlike the automatic actions of the splitting defense, the moral defense is based on logic (faulty logic, but logic nonetheless) and is a conscious attempt by the child to make sense of his unfortunate lot in life.

How does a seven-year-old child accomplish this psychologically significant task? It is actually quite simple: all she has to do is blame herself for causing her parent’s neglectful or abusive behavior. If she is morally at fault, then her parents’ behavior is transformed into a reasonable reaction to her badness. That is, if the child convinces herself that she is deserving of punishment for being dirty, slow to get ready, stupid, or sassy, then she has created a reason for her parent’s behavior—behavior that in reality is inexcusable. This self-blame gets the parents “off the hook” as being bad parents, and this allows the young needy child to remain attached to her reinvented “good” parents without experiencing overwhelming levels of anxiety.

The reverse is simply impossible. If a seven-year-old child were able to clearly understand that her parent’s rejection, abuse, or neglect of her came from their indifference or out of pure meanness, then she could no longer remain securely bonded to them and would disintegrate with anxiety. Nothing is more terrifying than being hopelessly dependent on someone who either wants to hurt you or is indifferent to your needs. Thus, all children blame themselves for causing their parents’ neglect of them which effectively shifts the burden of blame to the already vulnerable self of the child.

The moral defense emerges as the child grows older, after both the development of language and after the awareness that she is being excessively punished emerges. She must develop an excuse for her parent’s rejecting behavior because no child of seven, eight, or nine can consciously accept that her parents are either malicious or indifferent to her needs. Let us not forget that children with unloving parents have no other choices available to them—they can neither find new parents, nor force the parents they have to love them. Worse, the chronically deprived child is in a worse “bargaining” position than the well-supported child because her impoverished emotional history has left her with a reservoir of unmet developmental needs that cry out for satisfaction. These pressing needs force her to focus intense hope on her parents—the very parents who have failed her. Conversely, the well-supported child can rely on her own memories of her past successes. They form the foundation of her developing personality, and allow her to stand up for herself because, paradoxically, she is not as dependent on her parents.

The moral defense is a conscious defense and the child accuses herself of having one or more moral failures, while simultaneously making logical excuses for the parent’s rejecting behavior. Once again I will use the insights of Kathryn Harrison to demonstrate how the moral defense can be used to recast and minimize the shortcomings of parents, this time from her novel Thicker than Water:

This poignant passage illustrates the endless struggle of the child to keep the parents “good” by making herself “bad.” The protagonist in the novel excuses and minimizes her mother’s rejecting behavior and then blames herself for reminding her mother of the husband that she hated. She tries to convince herself that she has a good mother, even though the reality was quite the opposite. If she did not succeed in this psychological transformation, she would face complete abandonment. The moral defense allows the child to give the parents an excuse for their inexcusable behavior, because the loss of the illusionary relationship with them (if the truth were finally accepted) would be devastating.

The following example is of a long-term patient of mine who took years to get over his defense of blaming himself for his parents’ abuse.

Richard was the oldest of three sons of a middle-class industrial engineer and schoolteacher. His family had all the trappings of suburban normalcy, yet he felt deeply alienated from them. His father, himself the son of an abusive stonemason, found fault with nearly everything Richard did. Like most parents, his father disguised his maltreatment of his son with the rationalization that he was helping Richard to become a better student. In truth, he was reenacting the same abusive relationship that he had endured with his own father, translating the physical brutality of his own childhood into intellectual and emotional brutality. It was likely that Richard’s father had forgotten the details of his own painful history, but his wounded self now found a victim on which to discharge the accumulated rage from his own childhood. At dinner, Richard was asked to report on what he had learned at school that day, and his father would then make up questions about that topic and quiz his son. For instance, if the topic was world history, his father would ask how many countries Alexander the Great had conquered. Richard was almost always unable to answer his father’s impossible and hostile questions and as a consequence he was forced to leave the table, and could only return after he had looked up the answer. His father, like many autocratic parents, coerced the rest of the family into applauding his teaching “program.” Naturally, the family’s acceptance of this procedure confused Richard, and he felt tortured and rejected. He couldn’t reconcile his angry, self-hating feelings with the family approval of his father’s methods. Over time, Richard protected his attachment to his father by using the moral defense: he considered himself to be mentally retarded, which justified the harsh treatment that he was accorded. He speculated that he had been mistakenly placed into his highly successful family, but was in fact a foreigner. He based this conclusion from reading articles in National Geographic that contained pictures of primitive peoples from New Guinea. He thought that he had a similar facial structure to one particular tribe, and thus concluded that was why he was finding his father’s questions so difficult. He believed that he had been switched in the hospital, and thus he deserved to be humiliated.

When Richard told me of his conclusion about his genetic heritage I was confronted by the moral defense at its strongest. He was absolutely convinced that he had been switched in the hospital, and that explained why he had what he considered his limited intellectual capacity. His elaborate and creative use of this defense completely exonerated his father for being cruel and abusive toward him, and conversely, it labeled him as retarded. He dismissed the contradictory reality of his high scores on his college entrance exams by saying that the testing company had made a mistake. Not surprisingly, his father (who was unaware of how abusive he had been), took credit for Richard’s high entrance exam scores, noting how successful his educational program had been. Richard’s father’s poorly controlled wounded self, which acted out sadistically toward him, was never openly acknowledged and thus both father and son were prevented from seeing how badly the father had undermined his son’s sense of self.

Predictably, Richard’s impoverished developmental history came back to haunt the entire family. During his first semester at college he experienced a complete emotional collapse as he did not have enough of an identity or internal strength to allow him to separate from his abusive (but still needed) parents or to face the demands of school. He returned home a failure and took a number of menial jobs, but his wounded self was so sensitive to criticism and actively rebellious toward his supervisors that he was frequently fired. This is a very common pattern with many dependent and angry young men as they direct the full force of the anger in their wounded selves toward “safe” authority figures on whom they can vent their frustration. An employer or boss is safer than the parent because getting fired does not endanger the tie to the family. More concretely, there was no chance that Richard would be asked to leave his home, because he was fired from his job as a meter-reader for the public utility company—a position his family considered beneath him in the first place. At home, Richard’s unmet dependency needs and resentment allowed him to take money from his parents long after he should have been supporting himself. He also took perverse satisfaction in social situations when he was regarded as a family embarrassment by his prominent parents, who made up false stories about his success. In our work together, it took Richard a year before he let go of the fantasy of his parent’s “goodness,” which was the cornerstone of his defensive attachment to them.

The moral defense works in parallel with the splitting defense to keep the child, and later the young adult, attached to parents who have continually failed to meet his or her emotional and developmental needs. The most unfortunate result of this defense is the destruction of the child’s, and later the young adult’s, confidence in him- or herself. Many children who use the moral defense get so used to taking the blame that they become easy targets for emotional exploitation when they finally get out into the world.

Unhealthy attachments can either remain focused on the original parents or they can be shifted outside of the family. When a child from a unloving family does manage to separate, his very first choice of a romantic partner will be the new focus of all of his unmet hopeful self-needs as well as his repressed wounded self-anger. One of the most common scenarios in late adolescence occurs when a neglected son or daughter, one who is unconsciously driven by these two isolated selves, brings a spectacularly unsuitable future partner home and announces that he or she is in love. I have been consulted by many anguished parents who seek help in convincing their son or daughter not to marry a partner who they see is clearly unsuitable. For example, I was consulted by a major developer in my area about his daughter who was a recent graduate of our local community college. She had begun a job as an assistant to a telephone sales company and decided to marry the star salesman, a man with a checkered personal history and career. His success consisted of badgering phone customers into opening accounts with a credit card company—and he was very good at this task. Her future husband had overcome drug addiction and had also admitted to being a past abuser of women, two characteristics which horrified her prominent and successful parents.

I began interviewing the various members of this family, and it became clear that the daughter had unconsciously chosen this particular man as her future partner because he allowed her to act out all the intense feelings contained in both of her hidden selves. Her childhood consisted of an endless merry-go-round of caretakers that were needed because the demanding professional life of her father and equally pressing social life of her mother left no time for them to care for her. When I interviewed her and asked her about the past difficulties of her future husband I was provided with her pure hopeful self’s view of him. She simply could not see her future husband’s negative characteristics consciously. However, with little prompting, the privacy of our sessions together allowed her wounded self to emerge and she clearly described the constant frustrations and endless abandonings of her childhood. She also noted, without seeming to make the connection, that her intended husband was quite self-centered and often ignored her completely. My interviews with her strongly suggested that her wounded self had played an equal role with her more available hopeful self in her decision-making process. Her wounded self recognized (unconsciously) that her new partner would be a powerful opponent: a man who would withhold love, one who she could attempt to reform, and one who would be a constant source of frustration that would allow her wounded self to pour out its ancient anger from childhood. In short, her wounded self recognized that this young man promised to be as impossible as her parents! He also served as a conscious vehicle for revenge against the rejecting aspects of her parents, who had neglected her throughout her childhood but who were now finally paying attention to her. When they condemned her future husband directly, she defended him ferociously and bonded to him more tightly, thus defeating the power that her parents once wielded.

Children from unloving families try to keep their wounded self repressed and therefore their hopeful self is the conscious part of their personalities most of the time. The parents of the young woman were faced with a daughter who could only see the potential for love and romance with this flamboyant and self-inflated young man. Her parents, who were not using the splitting defense, were able to see the total personality of the young man that their daughter had chosen. Their daughter’s optimistic and wrongheaded assessment of this young man drove them into frenzy. During her lonely childhood, this young woman’s hopeful self was developed in a world of intense fantasy, and the man she selected met her needs by posing as a larger-than-life character. Flamboyant, self-promoting, and grandiose men are the worst possible choice for long-term relationships, however, they fit perfectly into the fantasy world of this young woman’s hopeful self.

Blame, responsibility, and revenge are enormous parts of the wounded self, and consequently are of interest to adults who are attempting to break away from their difficult families. In this example, how are we to assess blame? After all, her parents were now trying to help her. During my consultation with them, it became clear that they were completely unaware that their lack of love and support during their daughter’s mostly forgotten childhood was responsible for her attraction to an obviously unsuitable man. This example also illustrates the reality that human relationships can be exceedingly complex. The same parents who damaged their child when she was young were now attempting to help her.

We might then say that the young man in this scenario is the villain, but in truth his self-destructive personality is, in all probability, a consequence of his own abandoning, abusive, or neglectful developmental history from his family of origin. Nor was this evolving relational disaster the young woman’s fault, as she was operating in the only way she knew how. Her boyfriend was intensely appealing to her because his conscious and unconscious characteristics activated both her hopeful and wounded selves. “Normal” men her age seemed boring and dull, while hostile, grandiose, and overblown men appealed to her.

A fair assessment of this typical scenario forces us to conclude that the young woman’s parents are the responsible parties, because they neglected their daughter in the first place. Looking at the lives of young adults who have grown up in unloving families, it is clear that the extent of damage done to their personalities is far greater than the damage from a robbery, a beating, or a mugging—all crimes that would put the offender in jail. However, neither the previously neglectful parents nor the defense-blinded child can identify the source of the problem. These parents had no idea why their daughter fell in love with this unsuitable young man. Their illusion that they provided their daughter with a “good” childhood hid the personality damage they did to her during her developmental years. The young woman is blinded by both the splitting and moral defenses and so she too is unable to locate the source of her problems. They are all faced with a mystery that they do not have the capacity to understand. It is a repeated human tragedy, one that reoccurs almost endlessly, and one that is completely understandable only after recognizing the power of the repressed selves within the human personality. The concept of responsibility usually carries the burden of reparation if one fails to carry out one’s responsibilities. This, sadly is not the usual case in human relationships. These parents’ earlier failures are somewhat compensated for by the fact that they are now trying to help their daughter. However, there is relatively little that they can do since this, like many human relational tragedies, was the consequence of emotional failures from the past—failures that are no longer apparent, to either the child or the parent. They are attempting to make reparations for errors that they didn’t know they were making. Despite the fact that our failed developmental history was our parents’ “fault,” each of us has the ultimate responsibility for our own life. Those of us who have been victimized by indifference, neglect, or abuse are responsible for the rest of our lives. We must work to understand our histories, to separate as best as we can from those who have hurt us, and to pursue gratifying relationships in the future.

The discussion so far has implied that all undernurtured children end up dependent upon their parents regardless of how badly they were treated. This is true up to an extreme point. However, some parents are so indifferent or abusive that even with the use of powerful defense mechanisms the child cannot remain emotionally attached, because there is so little support for a hopeful self to even begin to develop. Tragically, some children who are severely rejected over long periods of time give up all hope of love from their parents. When this happens, the child’s entire personality is composed of an enormous revenge-seeking wounded self.

Once the child gives up all emotional attachments to his parents, then his attachments to other members of society suffer as well. Such children experience a continuous internal emptiness and self-hate because they have been discarded by those who should have loved them. The loss of faith in their parents makes them emotionally “unreachable”; often the goodness of others is mocked or attacked. There is a famous story about F. Scott Fitzgerald, the alcoholic author of The Great Gatsby, who was walking in Paris with friends when they came upon an old woman who had displayed a tray of handmade pastry and delicate foods at the entrance of her shop. Fitzgerald’s friends were admiring the food when he suddenly kicked it over on to the ground. This type of deliberate destruction of another person’s best efforts is typical of the rage of the wounded self.

Children and young adults with no emotional attachments to others have nothing to give meaning to their lives, and they look to nonhuman sources for relief and fulfillment: drugs, alcohol, intense impersonal sexuality, or anything else that will blot out the emptiness and inner pain. This tragic result is illustrated in the essay titled “Starving Children,” written by Francine Du Plessix–Gray in the New Yorker, about her reaction to the movie “Kids”:

These children are living demonstrations of the consequences of emotional histories in which all hope for attachment to others has been dashed. They are left with a vast inner emptiness that demands constant distraction and discharge. Emotional starvation and desire for escape from their interior pain is translated into a quest for intense experiences, which are the only types of experiences that are powerful enough to blot out their pain. Their day-to-day reality is dominated by their enormous wounded self, which discharges violence and hate toward those weaker than themselves. Equally importantly, their total disregard for themselves (for they cannot value what their parents discarded), places them and others in repeated physical danger. Let us not forget why these young adults are empty and seething with anger. When they look at themselves they see nothing that was valued by their parents. They have been discarded, and their desire for revenge is a reaction to the treatment they received when they were most vulnerable. These unfortunate children (despite their wealth) are on the path toward self-destruction.

Many readers might find it difficult to feel any pity for these young people. I suspect most would want to punish them, not understanding that they have been enormously punished (if not completely destroyed as human beings) already. Our culture seems incapable of connecting cause and effect when the two events do not occur within easy recall of each other. The parents of these young adults have failed them totally, yet we as a culture refuse to connect cause and effect because we have no stomach for punishing the innocent-appearing parents. The time that has passed between the early years of neglect and the child’s outpouring of random hostility in adolescence protects the parents from censure—they can claim their child became involved in “bad company.”

Sadly, the young adult is lost in the same cause and effect framework. He or she cannot clearly remember what happened when they were two, three, or four years of age. Worse, the reality of their developmental history has been clouded and denied by the effects of both the splitting and moral defenses. The result of this psychological conspiracy leaves one and only one recourse open for the victim: to unconsciously act out the same destructive pattern with the next generation of child-victims.