Leaving Home: The Art of Separating from Your Difficult Family

The wounded self’s eagerness to assign blame can maintain the angry attachment between this wounded part of our personality and our failed parents, either through the desire to reform them or to seek revenge. Getting beyond this point is essential, because after we succeed in renouncing blame, the role played by our wounded self is reduced, as is our fascination with the “badness” of others. This frees us to develop relationships with others who truly appreciate our qualities. Sadly, many developmentally deprived adults are so intent on assigning blame that they end up behaving like psychological policemen, intent on pursuing those that have failed to live up to their childlike ideals. As I have noted in the “responsibility” section of chapter 2, it is true that our parents were responsible for the failures we experienced in childhood. However, unlike traffic court, where there are assigned fines for a variety of irresponsible behaviors, parents often “violate” the rules of acceptable parenting with no censure from society. They fail as parents because of their own childhoods, which may have filled their personalities with unconscious motives that they blindly reenact. Secondly, their “crimes” against the healthy development of their children were committed when they were somewhat different people, in different situations. And perhaps the most difficult point of all to accept, even when we have reached adulthood, is that our parents were limited, either by their intelligence, their primitive emotions, their poverty of either money or love, or by other circumstances beyond their control. My patients find this concept hardest to grasp because it shatters the illusion in the hopeful self that their parents’ love was somehow available to them, if only they through some behavior of their own could access it. Often, it simply was not available and no amount of arguing, cajoling, teaching, or begging would have changed their impaired parents.

One of the dangers of our wounded self is that it was created during our early development, and it contains both memories of events and the emotional attitudes we had in that stage. The memories are invaluable—however, bringing the attitudes of a young child into an adult life can be dangerous. That is, as children, we all carried an inflated view of our parents’ importance. In adulthood it is crucial to know who is truly important and who is not. The mature adult will accept the reality that his or her random birth into an unloving family was simply a stroke of bad luck and move on, without seeking revenge or compensation. The psychologist Sheldon Kopp recognized that many of his adult patients could not give up their anger at being “cheated” out of a good childhood. In the following quote from An End to Innocence, he comments on his patients’ wounded selves, which are invariably filled with the desire for revenge:

This strong, but absolutely true statement reflects what I have encountered with many of my patients. Many develop a sense of inflated self-importance in reaction to overwhelming feelings of inferiority and abandonment. Many of us cannot accept our bad luck as simply a random event in a random universe, but instead experience our emotional pain as if it is the single most important issue in our life. In reality, this exaggeration of our importance, along with our wounded self’s hope to reform or to get revenge, are fantasies that protect us from the even more frightening possibility that there is no justice when it comes to our families. In reality, there is no one to come in and clean up the family mess, and the longer we remain home, waiting for salvation or enmeshed in the daily dramas, the less able we will be to begin life anew. Every day spent trapped in a unloving family erodes our confidence in ourselves. After many years of waiting for the miracle that never happens, we may become too convinced of our own weakness to even try to escape.

Often, patients who view the world through the eyes of their wounded selves assume that all potential sources of support have secret vulnerabilities (just like their parents had) that will disappoint them and ultimately destroy any relationship that develops. This eagerness to blame others keeps our attention fixed on the outside world and away from our role in choosing to remain in frustrating relationships with others, either with our parents or in new, equally difficult adult friendships. The concept of repetition compulsion, discussed in chapter 3, described how we unconsciously choreograph one disappointing adult relationship after another. Thus blaming others is a futile proposition, since the real solution is for us to pull away from those we complain about and involve ourselves in more satisfying relationships with healthier “others.”

In many of my older patients, the relationship between the hopeful self and the wounded self changes, with the wounded self's view of the world becoming dominant. This is understandable, given the large number of failed interpersonal relationships that their unconscious repetition compulsion led them into during their adulthood. As their wounded selves became more and more dominant, many developed an increasingly large “chip on the shoulder” about the possibility of a successful relationship in the future. The following patient history of Charlie illustrates this common emotional trap.

Charlie came for his first appointment wanting to know what I thought of his difficulties with women. He was a member of a recovery group and dated women exclusively from this subculture, which brought him into contact with women who had very difficult developmental histories. He had brought a notebook that contained a list he had made of the women he had dated, and he began with the first woman on his list. He described, in minute detail, her every shortcoming, from her childlike tantrums to her frequent and humiliating struggles with depression. When he was finished, I began to make a comment, but he waved his hand imperiously indicating he had more material and could not be interrupted. I was somewhat put off by his gesture, but remained silent and heard the failings of the next person on his list, a well-known real estate salesperson. He eagerly reported that she was secretly still drinking and took “business trips” to Las Vegas where she gambled until she was deeply in debt. Charlie presented his wounded self’s condemnations with an edge of moral outrage that prevented me from trying to soften his position. I had much to say by the time he finished exposing the deceptive realtor, but I was not given the chance. Charlie immediately moved on to his third example of a failed relationship, which was slightly different in that it was a professional one: a physician who had failed to note his symptoms of drug abuse. This type of statement is often considered to be a disguised criticism of the therapist and is called a “derivative.” However, it was our first session and we were not ready to explore this avenue. When Charlie finished his expose, I assumed that I would finally be able to get a word in, but he seamlessly shifted to a remarkably inaccurate self-assessment in which he described himself to be a philosopher and an astute student of the human condition.

I am usually optimistic when I meet a patient for the first time, but in this case I was concerned that Charlie was going to be a very difficult patient. This pattern continued for the next two sessions. Charlie continued to dominate our conversations, expounding at length on his girlfriends’ shortcomings, rarely listening to me, when indeed he did give me an opportunity to speak. During our fourth session, I finally began to get some specific details of Charlie’s childhood, which he defensively described as “perfect,” but to my ear was filled with parental failures. Within a day of that session, he had left a message on my answering machine canceling therapy because I struck him as a “fly-by-night psychologist.” It was obvious to me that the moment we shifted our focus to his developmental history and were no longer looking at the failings of the women in his current or past romantic relationships, he sensed danger. He could not tolerate the possibility of tarnishing his hopeful self’s illusory view of his parents. Charlie’s fragile identity required the support of “good parents” and in order to keep them pure, he directed all of the anger in his wounded self toward his current relationships. The hostility in his wounded self was always directed at expendable women, thus insuring that it never damaged the fantasies that he had about his family of origin. All of his contempt was directed at safe (non-family) targets.

This extreme use of the splitting defense allowed Charlie’s wounded self to freely discharge his childhood disappointment at current or past lovers or professionals who failed him, while his parents remained frozen in the illusory gaze of his hopeful self. Charlie was so defensive at this time in his life that he felt he was not an appropriate candidate for psychotherapy, and his fear of the truth caused him to terminate. This does not mean that all hope is lost. Over time, he may return to another therapist and venture another look at his history and parents. The lesson for all of us provided by Charlie is to be wary of an overly powerful and self-righteous wounded self, particularly when it is solely focused on condemning others. As noted previously, the wounded self can be a valuable tool when it is properly understood, because it contains important memories that are crucial in the unraveling of our personal histories. However, when the wounded self dominates us and we ignore the effect of our own role in creating our current relationships, we face the possibility that our entire personality can become embittered and vengeful. Carefully and accurately assessing our wounded self can allow us to make use of its valuable material without getting carried away by its anger and its desire for revenge.

I am not pretending for a moment that the world at large does not cause us problems. There are the absolute realities of economic problems, the possibility of random physical injuries, illnesses, and all sorts of other catastrophes that can afflict us. However, relationship problems, particularly repeated patterns of struggles with others or long lists of disappointments in others, do not come out of “nowhere.” They are the product of careful unconscious engineering, as dramatically illustrated by Tim and Carrie from the previous chapter, who found each other through an act of arson.

There exists another defense that must be conquered before we can escape from our family: the illusions we have about ourselves. Sadly, it is as hard to give up our illusions about ourselves as it is to give up on the illusions we create about the goodness of our parents. Self-centeredness is one of the more destructive consequences of a neglectful childhood; a childhood that required the use of extreme defenses to survive from day to day. Self-centeredness is a consequence of the continued deprivation of our needs, to the point that our internal deprivation becomes the focus of our life. Many children are so focused on getting their reasonable needs met that their identity develops around the emotional traumas that they suffered, like a tree that grows around a wire fence. The resulting personality often is bereft of healthy optimism, of trust in others, or even “normal” friendliness. The resulting damage to our personalities is often very unappealing to others. Equally importantly, an honest assessment of ourselves becomes more difficult because the type of negative information we have to hear and accept about ourselves seems to come from people we dislike and demean.

Thus young adults from deprived or neglectful histories are often exceedingly one-sided and selfish. The self-centeredness is part of a ongoing attempt to meet unmet childhood needs, while the aggression toward others protects the individual from the humiliations that he or she expects at every turn. One of the most common self-deceptions that I see in my practice is the single male who is seething with self-righteous hostility, but sees himself as a “nice guy.” These young men are completely unaware of their powerful wounded self, which is the most potent and obvious part of their personality. For instance, Gary, a student of mine, came for therapy after finally graduating from college. He had taken six years to finish his undergraduate degree because his wounded self targeted the authorities at the university as a symbolic family that he was determined to reform in ways that would meet his exacting needs. His career as a reformer began when he was called into the dean’s office to alter his course schedule. Gary was a biology major but he insisted on taking four different history courses during one semester, ignoring the requirements for his major. During the conference with the dean, Gary argued against the university policy that required students to take a specified number of courses every semester in their major. He found a local attorney who had a separate reason for wanting to sue the university and who agreed to work with Gary for a nominal fee. Much of Gary’s time was spent challenging the policies and procedures that had been established by the university administration, and he was so enthralled by his mission that he took time off from his schoolwork in order to work with this attorney. He and his attorney instigated a series of lawsuits challenging the various policies regarding curriculum, student life, and even tuition. These lawsuits gave Gary local notoriety and for a short time he became a student celebrity. He was so excited about his sudden importance that his ambitions became more grandiose and distorted, and he began to look at local politics as a way of maintaining his new-found status. He entered therapy a year after graduation because his life had suddenly collapsed when his wounded self no longer had the university as a target for its hostility and his political career failed to get off the ground. He began one session by saying that “all of the meaning of life seemed to drain away the moment I left school.” His struggle with the school authorities was an almost exact recreation of his childhood struggle with his parents—however, this time his struggle afforded him temporary status and importance that was denied him in childhood.

Gary initially presented himself in therapy as a relaxed “nice guy” who had chosen me because he had enjoyed the lectures in my undergraduate abnormal psychology class. He seemed interested in exploring his history and relationship dynamics, and he was so pleased at the results of our first session that he asked for another appointment for the very next day. I explained that this was not possible because other patients had regular appointments. He became very angry and accused me of being a rigid elitist who was out to exploit him for his money. This was the very first salvo of what was to become an ongoing attack on me, originating in his wounded self, which jumped from his unconscious into his awareness the moment I was unwilling to meet his needs. Gary’s fast shifts from admiration to hostility were classic signs of the splitting defense. He shifted from idealization (that is, seeing me through the eyes of his hopeful self) to denigration the moment I frustrated his needs. Frustration of his voracious needs was incompatible with idealization and it unconsciously reminded him of his unending childhood deprivation at the hands of his parents. Frustration provoked his wounded self to emerge from his unconscious and displace his hopeful self. As his hopeful self receded, the view of me as potentially helpful and good was swept away. His view of me changed from a parental substitute who promised support and love to one who offered nothing but frustration and neglect.

When Gary was dominated by his wounded self, he became a very unappealing human being. His wounded self was awash in childhood feelings of deprivation and these prevented him from seeing that he had become an arrogant, infantile adult who always wanted to be first, regardless of the needs of others. Not surprisingly, his behavior seemed to be very similar to his description of his father. Often, the extreme emotions contained in the wounded self destroy our social skills and our sensitivity to others, because the emotions we feel seem so genuine and compelling. The vividness and power of these feelings gives us the illusion that we have license to act harshly, when in reality, the intensity comes from the ancient frustrations that have been stored up for years. In order to escape from our defenses, we must develop enough trust in others to allow their views of our behavior to penetrate our awareness. In the example of Gary, my view of his personality as being self-centered and selfish was completely alien to his view of himself as a self-sacrificing hero who was trying to protect his fellow students from a brutal and callous university administration. The strength of his emotions convinced him that he was a visionary and that the world was deaf and dumb to his efforts on behalf of others. I will finish the story of my work with Gary in chapter 5.

A second caution we should heed is for us to be wary of the emotional strength of the memories buried in the wounded self. These emotions are reflections of our original reactions to painful family events. These ancient emotional reactions remain unchanged despite the time that has passed since the traumatic events took place, and consequently, the emotions can be very strong when they emerge. Just as we must recognize that our hopeful selves are unreliably optimistic, we must also accept the fact that our wounded selves are unrealistically angry and vengeful. The memories of neglect and abuse recorded in our wounded selves actually occurred, but the accompanying emotions are only appropriate for the time and place during our development when they were first experienced. We were so vulnerable and helpless when we were subjected to either neglect or abuse that we felt that our life was being threatened, and our emotional reactions match this extreme level of perceived danger. These ancient emotions tell us, for instance, how a child of six feels about being forgotten in a store. If that child could have retaliated with the strength of an adult, he or she might have severely beaten their abandoning parent.

The anger within the wounded self is the likely source of the recent rash of school murders committed by teens and preteens. Children with enraged wounded selves do not recognize that the strength of their feelings come from an earlier time. Rejection by schoolmates is not life-threatening, but to a two- or three-year-old, parental rejection feels that way. The young person simply substitutes current rejection at school for past rejections and unleashes the rage from an earlier time. The recent increase in this kind of lashing-out behavior may be due to the easy access to weapons and the universal exposure to what I call “instructional videos.” The action movie genre depicts invincible superheroes who seek revenge (usually with deadly automatic weapons) against those who have wronged them. The protagonist is always “in the right” and never suffers any negative consequences for his murderous rampage. Many preteen children are burdened by large wounded selves and loaded with early rage from emotional abandonment, and these feelings sometimes are translated into deadly action. The wounded self takes actions that seem incomprehensible to the outside observer. The lesson, once again, is that the truths stored in our wounded selves are mixed with powerful feelings of rage that no longer apply to our adult situations.

Not all patients are alike. Charlie indulged in the desire for revenge against all who offended him, all the while still protecting the fantasy that he had “good” parents. Gary was different than Charlie, in that he had no illusions about his family. However, he indulged the anger in his wounded self and created the illusion of himself as a justice-seeker. Other patients are quite different still. Many are fearful of any contact with their wounded selves. Often, these individuals are still closely connected with their families and cannot tolerate to see negative aspects of their parents.

I have detailed the dangers of acting on the worst aspects of our wounded selves, and now it is time to highlight the positive, therapeutic help that this part of our personality can provide us. The great strength of our dreams is the ability of our unconscious to tell us the truth by jumping over our normal waking defenses. Understanding our dreams can be one of the most powerful ways to get beyond our carefully constructed defenses.

When I work with a patient like Charlie who describes a whole series of failed adult relationships, I understand this material as being equivalent to an X-ray of their early failed relationships with their parents. The hidden truth the patient and I must uncover is the nature of the failings of his parents that he is unable to remember or acknowledge, so that ultimately, he can accept those failings. I approach this mystery through a careful and detailed examination of the patient’s childhood. If a patient complains of an endless series of failed love relationships, I begin by asking about his family of origin. This question often seems impertinent to the patient because his defenses keep the connection between his childhood relationships and his adulthood relational problems in completely separate categories. Very rarely will a patient reveal a pain-filled developmental history. Does this imply that I “make up” a story filled with deprivation and unrecognized hurts and then convince my patients that they were actually wounded in order to explain the inability to separate from their families? On the contrary. It is the patient who gradually reveals bits and pieces of his history that, up to now he dares not see. The powerful presence of the therapist who acts like a “substitute” parent by offering support can sometimes allow the patient to face hidden realities that were too difficult to face alone.

Luckily, even the most defensive patients have an ace in the hole: their ability to dream. Dreams are one of our greatest allies in the search for the truth about our developmental histories, because our wounded selves often speak to us directly, allowing us to “see” painful realities that we consciously deny. The following two dreams came from patients whose wounded selves knew the truth about their families but could not admit it, because they could not yet afford to live without their hopeful selves’ illusions. That is, a clear assessment of the material in the wounded self as expressed in dreams, particularly when validated by a dispassionate observer like the psychologist, would destroy the illusions in the hopeful self.

Angie came from a large working-class family of six children. Her father ran a rural hardware and farm supply store and used his children as employees long before they were able to master the tasks that they were expected to do. Angie was particularly good with numbers and she was given the job of bookkeeper when she was only eleven. She was also required to wait on customers and drive a large flatbed truck to pick up grain, hay, and feed at mills in the area, years before she had a driver’s license. She was terrified when she had to take on an adult jobs without any help, but she had no one to validate those feelings and perceptions. Driving the farm truck was particularly frightening because she was too short for her feet to touch the pedals. Every time she had to press the brake, she was forced to slide down the seat and therefore could not see out of the windshield. Her father did not pick on Angie specifically; all the children in the family were exploited in similar ways. Angie’s mother, however, did single her out as the “bad child” and physically abused her, often out of her own frustration. As a consequence, Angie spent much of her childhood hiding from her mother. She had no one to complain to, and in fact she and her siblings were told that they were enjoying wonderful childhoods. The complete lack of validation of her perceptions forced her accurate memories of callous exploitation to remain isolated in her wounded self. As a young adult, she found herself attracted to enormously difficult jobs in which there were extremely high standards of performance and in which she was given no help or direction, an exact unconscious re-creation of her childhood. She worked at a furious pace and was emotionally unavailable to others because of her frenetic work schedule. The one anomaly in her closed emotional life was her dog, upon whom she poured out all her love. One of her concerns was the extraordinarily intense feelings she had for her dog—feelings that were more intense than those for her husband or any other human in her environment. On the session before Thanksgiving, she came in completely shocked by a dream she had just the night before. Her parents, like many that I have previously described, demanded homage from their adult children, even though they had failed to nurture them during their critical developmental years. Every year, the children would each prepare part of the Thanksgiving meal, and then gather at their parents’ home to celebrate. Angie’s dream was that she was required to kill, butcher, and cook her dog, and present him as her contribution to the family Thanksgiving dinner. She was appalled and dumbfounded that her unconscious could think up such a horrible fate for the single living thing in the world that she loved the most.

Angie had been a resistant patient prior to this session. She made excuses for her continuing attachment to parents who never ceased to exploit her. I made a simple interpretation: her dream was telling us both that her wounded self knew that she had been treated badly in childhood. Her wonderful, loving, and loyal dog represented herself as a child, and her dream was saying that she recognized that her innocent trust and love for her parents had been “sacrificed” to their self-centered needs. In adulthood, her suspicion of others (including her husband) caused her to focus all her love on her dog—the only living creature to whom she dared to expose the full force of her affectionate, positive feelings. This example shows us that Angie’s repressed wounded self was able to express itself in ways that her consciousness (which was dominated by her hopeful self) was not able to prevent.

Our need for our parents, when combined with our terror at facing all of the hurt and anger stored in our wounded selves, forces many of us to keep accurate perceptions of our childhood plight limited to dreams. In Angie’s case, it was the fear of feeling intensely abandoned by her family that would follow if she accepted the reality of the rage and grief in her wounded self. In the following example of Sarah, it was her continuing financial and emotional dependency on her mother that forced her to erect reality-distorting defenses that prevented her from consciously acknowledging her pain. However, her wounded self came to her aid in therapy, and produced a dream that was a beautifully recorded and truthful snapshot of her relationship with her mother.

Sarah was a twenty-five-year-old graduate student who was the daughter of a wealthy urban real estate developer and a socialite mother. Sarah had been alternately controlled and ignored by a mother who spent most of her time and effort on the cocktail circuit, where she was admired for her physical beauty. Sarah was exceedingly bright, but the neglect that she experienced did not allow a clear sense of identity to develop. Her mother used her as a prop when her social life required a daughter, but otherwise she ignored Sarah. When she was a teenager, she tried to escape through indiscriminate drug use and once, through a failed suicide attempt. When she married, her mother took complete control of the wedding plans and made all of the decisions. In therapy with me, Sarah reported a dream about the rehearsal dinner: All of her mother’s friends were present, but none of her own. Her mother had been drinking and was holding forth at the end of the table while Sarah sat silently on display as the good daughter. Her mother began playing a campfire game, in which a utensil was placed on the table and a knife was crossed over it and struck on the end. This launched the knife into the air and it arced toward Sarah and pierced her skull. During the dream she was aware that this was a typical scene: her mother was showing off and having fun, while she remained quietly on display as the good daughter, and was injured as a result.

These two dreams are straight out of the wounded self. Neither of these young women were given enough security to separate from their families and so could not give up the illusions nursed in their hopeful selves. Their wounded selves were never allowed to express their experiences of hurt, anger, and pain to the adults in their worlds, and the truth about their childhood had to be isolated and ignored. Luckily, both were able to accept these hidden realities with support and encouragement. For a person not in therapy, the valuable truths contained in the wounded self are not seen as credible, as they frequently emerge during moments of temper, in frightening dreams, or through vague feelings of dread. As a consequence, many of us distrust, dislike, and avoid this part of ourselves because it disrupts our attachment to our needed families. Katherine Ann Porter’s essay, quoted in chapter 1, noted that many of us see the existence of our wounded selves as a “black treacherousness,” but in fact it can be a psychological gold mine if we understand it properly and allow it to speak.

As I have noted, not all patients are alike. Those patients who overuse their abused selves and condemn others are less likely to use the moral defense, which blames them while saving the “goodness” of others. Conversely, those individuals who are less aware of their wounded selves often rely on the moral defense to keep them attached to their families and accept all the blame for the failure of relationships. This defense helped them to remain unaware of the extent of the damage being done by their rejecting family while growing up and continues to undermine many patients in their adulthood.

The two groups of patients vary because one group relied on the moral defense during their childhood, while the other used the splitting defense. In adulthood, the self-blame group will admit to all sorts of real and imagined failings: perhaps they aren’t loving enough, or they are too selfish, or not intellectually sparkling enough to attract the right kind of partner. Many patients who use this defense present themselves as if they are a “bad seed”; they see themselves as the faulty offspring of healthy parents, thus sacrificing their sense of “goodness” to preserve the fantasy that they had loving and supportive parents. The use of the moral defense is particularly destructive later in life because it poisons our self-esteem, as it constantly blames us for all interpersonal failures while simultaneously exonerating the guilty parties. It’s the psychological equivalent of a jailer who frees all the criminals and jails the innocent.

An example of a person struggling to overcome his own use of the moral defense can be seen in the writings of psychologist Sheldon Kopp, whom I quoted earlier in this chapter. The following quotes come from his book, An End to Innocence:

Kopp displays the typical attitude of the patient who, at the beginning of the therapeutic process, overuses the self-blame defense to protect his attachment to his parents. At this early stage of his development, he was unable to see that his highly idealized parents were not “honest and good” but were in fact rejecting and abusive. Healthy and loving parents would have never condemned him the way his dysfunctional parents did—a truth hidden from him by the moral defense. Kopp describes his childhood as a mixture of rejection of his real needs interspersed with indulgences that did not help him mature. He was given what his parents wanted to give him but not what he needed for his development. Worse, his very being was defined as defective by his mother when she claimed that he was not a member of the family:

Kopp’s life story illustrates once again that emotional abuse can undermine the developing child’s identity as surely as physical abuse. Psychological terms are completely unnecessary in the analysis of this passage. Kopp’s mother was insulting, humiliating, and demeaning. He was blamed for something in which he had no role. Kopp boldly describes the results of this type of covertly hateful parenting on the development of his personality. He spent his youth on the edges of society in the company of misfits, since his identity was too damaged to allow him to live a normal life. Over a number of years, he struggled to rid himself of his shame and sense of defectiveness and his efforts resulted in a stunning and brutally honest conclusion about his childhood:

It is difficult to imagine an individual coming to this conclusion without therapy. Kopp’s painful but accurate assessment of his history left him dangling over the edge of a psychological cliff, because implicit in his discovery was the reality that his attachment to his family was a self-created illusion. He needed the fantasy of good parents more than his parents needed him as a child. Kopp’s revealing psychological journey illustrates that it takes enormous strength of character, plus strong attachments to a supportive network of intimates and friends, for anyone to reach this frightening (but enormously freeing) conclusion about their family. The alternative is worse—for as long as self-blame from the moral defense remains in power, we will remain attached to others who abuse or demean us.

In my discussion of George, the youthful thief, I noted that the conflict between loving a parent and feeling anger toward them constituted an almost unsolvable conflict. This conflict does not disappear over time. Many adults from unloving families were forced into the role of “parent” by their actual parents, who were incompetent, needy, and unable to face many of life’s tasks. The child often ends up feeling that his or her parents’ very life depends on their support. Many of my adult patients report that they remain home because they cannot tolerate the guilt that would engulf them if they separated from their hopeless and helpless parents. The following quote from a patient of Joan Raphael-Leff, from her chapter in the book Narcissistic Wounds, illustrates a point I made in the first chapter, which is that the inability to hold on to a single clear view of our parents will prevent us from taking any action to save ourselves:

This patient’s complex and conflicted childhood is reflected by the series of mutually incompatible views of her mother, based on the splitting defense. This defense, combined with the emotional deprivation she suffered as a child, precluded the development of a strong identity. Her lack of courage in her own perceptions left her unable to hold on to a single clear view of her childhood. The resulting confusion does not leave her with enough conviction to take any single path of action. A careful look at the quotation reveals that she speaks from both her wounded and hopeful selves as well as from a realistic adult perspective. Her wounded self is dominant when she says that she is so angry that she could murder her mother because of the intrusive, autonomy-destroying control and deprivation that she suffered. Soon after the murder statement, her adult sense of reality steps in and condemns herself for thinking of killing a pathetic and innocent woman who needs help. Then she switches to her hopeful self in her statement of her desire to rescue that same mother, who remains important to her because her hopeful self still believes that her mother contains the potential for future love. The moment her hopeful self wins this tug-of-war and she spins the fantasy that she can rescue her mother, it is immediately contradicted by her adult view that recognizes that she will have to sacrifice her own individuality in the process. What is certain here is that this continued conflict between the opposite feelings from her hopeful and wounded selves will allow confusion to prevail and prevent any assertive, positive action, while time continues to slip by.

If this patient were able to discard her two hidden selves she would be able to see that there is precious little left to her “relationship” with her mother. Our hopeful selves are masters of illusion, and they convince us that love exists in people who haven’t expressed a single bit of love toward us during their entire lives. The moral defense tells us that it is our fault that we were neglected, and it combines with the hopeful self, and convinces us that if we are good, loving, and persistent enough in our rescue efforts, our self-centered parents will finally offer us their hidden storehouse of love. Conversely, our wounded self assures us that if we fight hard enough against our rejecting parents (or adult lovers) we can either reform them or at least enjoy a measure of revenge by destroying their evilness. In essence, our defenses create a endless cascade of illusions: the illusion that we live in a rational world, the illusion that we have loving parents, and finally the illusion that if we fight against those family members who have wronged us, justice will prevail.

Given the proper support, this patient might be able to hold on to the reality of the simple observation that her mother was so grief-stricken about the loss of her older sister that she was unable to care for her, and then she could begin the process of freeing herself from this destructive attachment to a failed parent. As things stand however, the guilt she displays at the end of the quotation reduces the possibility of change. When her mother dies, she will find herself in the frightening world of adults with no experience on how to navigate.

I have noted that novelists know just as much about human psychology as members of my profession, and once again I turn to a novelist to illustrate the tragic consequence of remaining loyal to a failed parent. This quotation is from The Cunning Man, a novel by Robertson Davies. The speaker is a mature physician describing a older woman patient who has endless psychosomatic complaints:

This powerful quotation captures the fate of the adult child who remains loyal to the failed parent and who eventually will face the world with a diminished identity and undeveloped interpersonal skills. Note how the novelist demonstrates the idealization found in many such adults: despite her middle age, this character still admired and idealized her selfish mother. This is often the case with many of my patients as well. The parent remains as important, powerful, and wise to them in middle age as they appeared during childhood. Individuals like Miss Fothergill have invested too much time and given up too many of their own possibilities to face the awful reality that faces them as a consequence of their poor choices and childlike misperceptions of their parents—that they have wasted much of their lives.

Another defensive path that many of my patients take is to try to understand why they were not loved or cared for. The search for meaning behind suffering is the result of a defensive insistence that we live in a reasonable and orderly world. Many patients obsess over this question: What did or didn’t I do as a child to be treated so badly? When we are rejected by our parents, it seems so deeply personal that we assume there had to be an underlying meaning or reason. However, if we were able to truly find out what the same painful events “meant” to our parents, we would probably be dismayed to discover that the very same events are minimized, distorted, or even worse, long forgotten.

Many parents react to their children from a deep sense of insecurity and jealousy. Dysfunctional parents are not monsters from another planet—rather, they are the last generation of poorly nurtured children (now living in adult bodies) who have been given a role for which they are ill-equipped. When their own insecurity and rage from their deprived childhood histories is coupled with the enormous power and influence they can wield as parents, they can become destructive tyrants. Many use this power in the closed environment of the family to reduce their personal insecurity at the expense of their children. I have been exposed to many such people who reduce their insecurity by abusing others with their superior power, both within the family and in the broader social environment. One of the most notable examples occurred at a dinner to celebrate a scholarly presentation by a visiting professor whose contributions to the field of psychology made him world-famous. The dean of the college and his wife were the hosts for the four of us on the faculty committee who had invited the speaker. During the dinner, the dean’s wife began pointedly questioning the guest about his presentation and research. She demanded to know what “gave him the right” to make various claims, despite the fact that she only attended the final twenty minutes of his presentation and had obviously not read any of his papers. The skilled and urbane speaker attempted to defuse this uncomfortable situation with mild and general responses, but the dean’s wife persisted. The dean was obviously used to this behavior from his wife and only made one attempt to rebuke her, which she ignored. The dinner proved to be an embarrassment for all, except for the angry wife. On the way out, a colleague who had witnessed the whole painful performance asked me where this woman “got the nerve” to assault the guest speaker with so many irrelevant and hostile questions.

The answer to my colleague’s question also answers the question of why so many inept and inadequate parents feel that they have the right to abuse their children in any way they see fit. The answer is that they are so insecure and easily threatened that they strike out at anyone who reduces their moment-to-moment sense of comfort. The dean’s wife was so insecure about her own worth as a human being that she became angered by the fact that the guest speaker was being celebrated, while she was forced to honor him. Her massive sense of personal worthlessness led her to feel diminished by the public acknowledgment of the speaker’s accomplishment. Her questions revealed that she knew absolutely nothing about his research, but that made no difference to her, as she was driven by anxiety, insecurity, and extreme envy—feelings that she discharged on the visiting scholar in an attempt to reduce his stature. By doing so, she was attempting to feel less worthless. She was able to get away with her hostile and demeaning performance because, as hostess and wife of the dean, she was in a powerful position. She was also protected by the social nature of the dinner, which discouraged counteraggression. None of the faculty members were about to take her on in a public and formal situation.

Our parents were in a far more powerful relationship to us than the dean’s wife was to the speaker. Many parents are so ill at ease with their children’s accomplishments and success, and so fearful of the outside world which has defeated them, that they criticize and diminish their children in order to reduce them to their own level of insecurity. Sadly, when I explain this to my patients, they seldom find that rationale satisfactory. They don’t like the impersonal nature of the answer, because it clashes with their memories of how “personal” the attacks from their parents felt. It is difficult for patients to accept that in reality, they were often victimized simply because they happened to be present when their parents insecurity overwhelmed them.

The question as to why we were abused is a continuation of our defenses, in that it assumes there is an inherent logic in life, and that we could have done something differently to please our parents. The ultimate “answer” to the question of why we were rejected, undernurtured, or punished unfairly is simply bad luck—the same bad luck that allows innocent people to be maimed or killed by drunk drivers every year. To continue the analogy, the drunk driver involved in a crippling accident may put the whole incident out of his mind two or three months after the crash, but to the victim who is confined to a wheelchair, the accident will become the central focus of his or her life. We have a great deal of trouble accepting this explanation because it makes the world feel so dangerous, so random, and so lacking in rules.

A powerful example of the search for the “why” behind unjustified abuse is the central question of My Losing Season, an emotional and inspired memoir by Pat Conroy, author of a number of novels including The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini. Conroy’s powerful and moving memoir, which captures the torrent of feelings flowing within the abused child, describes his senior year as a college basketball player for the Citadel, a notoriously abusive military academy in Charleston, South Carolina. Conroy’s violent childhood prepared him to both tolerate and flourish under the officially sanctioned “plebe” system that encouraged upperclassmen to abuse the freshman class under the assumption that this abuse would serve as an inoculation against emotional breakdown if the cadets were ever captured and brainwashed by enemy forces during their future military careers.

Conroy’s father was both physically and psychologically abusive to the point where he would be jailed today if he were caught. Like the dean’s wife, Conroy’s father was so insecure about his own value that he became enraged whenever anyone else was in the spotlight, most notably his children. The following passage describes a physical attack that Conroy suffered at his father’s hands as he was leaving a high school father-son night in which the student athletes were awarded their “letters” for being on the athletic teams:

This type of childhood engorges both the wounded self and creates a hopeful self that will inflate little acts of support far beyond their intended meaning. Conroy’s real needs for love and support were unmet from his earliest years, so his focus and attachment to any adult who offered the slightest interest was intense. Upon entering the Citadel, Conroy shifted his dependency needs to Mel Thompson, his college coach—a man only marginally better than his father. The question that Conroy struggles with throughout the memoir is why his coach behaved so abusively toward the team, destroying the team’s confidence and ruining their entire season. The answer is repetition compulsion. Conroy, by mere happenstance, went to a school where the coach was as brutal as was his father, and Conroy’s existing defenses drew him to this coach who had no understanding of how to motivate his players. To Conroy’s enduring credit, he followed up on this difficult experience and discovered the truth about the man to whom he was so attached.

Coach Thompson’s technique was brutal and impersonal, and he often undermined his very best players. Like Conroy’s father, he never ever supported the players with praise: “Mel lacked all gifts or talents required by the language of praise” (156). Even worse, the coach was so demeaning and abusive toward his best players that the “second” team, composed of less-skilled players, would invariably beat the “first” team in scrimmages. The following passage is a quote from one of the first team players whom Conroy interviewed for the book:

Despite all the negativity and hostility from Coach Thompson, Conroy’s abusive and abandoning childhood prepared him to become attached to a man whose personality was almost wholly rejecting. The coach made a single supportive gesture during the two years at basketball camp, and that alone enabled Conroy’s hopeful self to take flight. Conroy had done a spectacular job of defending against one of the best college scorers in a counselors’ game, which his coach had happened to be watching. As Conroy was walking back after the game his coach gave him a precious sign of appreciation:

This loyalty that Conroy describes is a perfect example of Fairbairn’s concept of “attachment to bad objects,” which is, essentially, all the attachments that I have previously described. Simply stated, the concept of attachment to bad objects describes a child or young adult’s attachment to a parent or parent-like individual who frustrates his need for support far more frequently that he or she satisfies that need, while offering just enough real or imagined help to stimulate the hopeful self. The result is an intense need-based attachment that is nearly unshakable. Conroy’s hopeful self became attached because he assumed there was love contained in the coach if only he were smart enough and played hard enough to reveal it.

I have noted that the abused child has to develop a large wounded self to store and hide all the abuse he has suffered. Often it emerges in violence toward weaker individuals or in self-destructive behaviors. Rarely does the wounded self emerge in ways that are self-enhancing—however, it was Conroy’s great fortune that his ability to write allowed him to expose the pathology of his family without hurting himself in the process. He describes a scene where he is returning to college after the Christmas vacation and once again his father is peppering him with insults on the way to the airport. This time his father was demeaning him for not being aggressive enough as a basketball player and for not having “the killer instinct”:

The single most fascinating aspect of Conroy’s memoir is that he had the courage and insight to test his hypothesis, based on the moral defense, that there was some logical reason—due to a faulty characteristic of the players or of the team as a whole—that caused Mel Thompson’s coaching technique to be so demeaning and abusive. Conroy explored his use of the moral defense by visiting and interviewing his coach thirty years later. Not surprisingly, Coach Thompson was fired by the Citadel after the 1966 season and had relocated to the Midwest. Conroy interviewed his coach several times and found him completely indifferent and disinterested in everyone on the team and everything that happened:

Conroy also noted that his hated, feared, and loved coach asked him nothing about his life or of the lives of the players who played their hearts out for him. All Coach Thompson wanted to talk about were his own college playing years, “so I let him drift back to his playing days, his glory days in the ACC when he was king of all he saw” (365). After their second interview, Conroy was joined by John De Brosse, one of the stars of the 1966 team, for dinner with the coach. Afterward, Conroy asked Coach Thompson if he wanted to join them for breakfast next morning before they departed. “‘No,’ Mel Thompson said, and walked out of my life” (366).

Conroy discovered that it was his bad luck to get this particular coach, who was jealous of his own players, believed that abuse was better than praise, and was more interested in keeping himself in a dominant position by undermining his players confidence, all the while not realizing that these strategies led to the losing season. Again a paradox arises that is common to all forms of failed leadership—no one wanted to win more than Coach Thompson. Unfortunately, like so many parents who are the leaders in the family, the coach was never able to connect his team’s failures with his own behavior, just as most parents are honestly unaware that their faulty parenting lead to their children’s failures in life. The lesson for all of us is that the abuse we suffer has almost nothing to do with us personally, even if the abuser accuses us of causing the abuse, as Coach Thompson did, and it carries no hidden or special meanings. There was nothing that Conroy or his teammates “did” to his coach to cause the losing season and nothing he or the team as a whole could have done to prevent or to change Coach Thompson’s fundamental lack of understanding of his job.

When we speculate about the “why” of our abuse, we are assuming that we were more important to the abuser than we really were, and that we had power to cause events that were, in reality, completely out of our control. Many of our speculations are based on our hopes for hidden love, or the belief that our efforts will change and win over rejecting adults whom we adore. The answer contains no comfort for those looking for order, logic, and a fair and rational universe where good works and efforts are eventually rewarded. Sheldon Kopp, in his book An End to Innocence, came to the same conclusion about his experience of childhood abuse—a conclusion that can only be reached after all the defenses that comfort us have been stripped away:

Amazingly, the conclusion that Kopp reaches, that it was “nothing personal,” is the conclusion that we all must reach to free ourselves from the bondage of our illusions and defenses. The abuse he received was no more personal than the bodily damage that the victim of a drunk driver receives as a result of a head-on collision. Parents who treat children badly do so out of their own unconscious pathology, which in turn is based on their own histories, formed long before their birth. The patient of Joan Raphael-Leff’s did nothing to deserve being treated like a ghost. She “solved” her bad luck by constructing a network of rescue fantasies that gave her childhood purpose and hope. Her fantasies were life-saving for her as a child, but not for her mother. Who knows if her mother wanted to be rescued? Who knows if anyone could have rescued her mother? The rescue fantasy was never put to the test—rather, it was designed to keep her psychologically alive during her most vulnerable years. Tragically, the fantasy that comforted her in childhood now enslaves her in adulthood. Her long period of maternal deprivation undermined her identity and made her fearful and unsure of herself in the outside world, and she is left clinging to her rescue fantasies while her life ticks away.

One positive response to failed parents—one that is easier said than done—is to leave the conflicting loyalties and resentments behind and seek out new relationships with those who appreciate us in all our humanness. Finding a substitute parent to replace the failed parent often occurs in our society, but it is seldom done with full consciousness. For instance, there are many stories of wayward, angry, antisocial young men who have miraculously turned their lives around because of the influence of a stern but caring coach. This is the reverse side of the coin described by Conroy; however, the role of coach (just like the role of parent) carries enormous potential both for good or bad. A caring coach is in a position to substitute himself as a better and more appreciative parent. This common human scenario is partially dependent on the size of the wounded self in the young man. If it is too large and too disruptive even the most patient coach will give up. In many instances however, the rage in the wounded self, combined with the thwarted ambition to be loved or at least appreciated, makes the young man a spectacular performer in sports. His aggression and anger find an outlet in physical competition and his hope for love is satisfied by the pride of the coach. The very characteristics which made him “impossible” at home (characteristics that are clearly responses to poor parenting) are suddenly turned into assets on the playing field. We find this common type of story heartening, as it prevents the young man from turning his aggression against innocent people. His attachment to his coach, and the lessons he has learned in terms of sportsmanship (that is, the development of his character) are often applied to society at large.

The re-parenting that goes on between needy children and coaches, teachers, and other available surrogate parents happens largely out of our conscious awareness. However, there are rare occasions when a patient consciously chooses to find a new, better functioning surrogate parent. This happened to a patient of mine, Monica, who had such a paranoid and dangerous mother that she fled her family to save her own sanity. When she was a child, her mother would suddenly jump up and slap her without warning if she was eating too slowly. Her mother also kept the shades drawn because she feared that she was being spied on by the neighbors. Monica’s father ignored his wife’s peculiarities, as he was often so depressed that he was unable to go to work. By the time Monica came to therapy she was engaged in a dangerous re-creation of her family relationships: she had developed an attachment to a near-criminal boyfriend who was as unpredictable and aggressive as her mother. After a year or so of work in therapy she was able to free herself of the entanglement with her boyfriend. However, she felt the need for a relationship with a “good” mother, a need that I encouraged. As it turned out, she lived in an apartment building that housed both students and retired individuals. One elderly woman seemed particularly happy to visit with Monica whenever they met. They began to shop together on weekends, and then would go out to lunch. Over time they discovered that each gave the other a great deal of pleasure, and their symbolic mother-daughter relationship continued on for many years. This happy result was a consequence of a conscious decision on Monica’s part—a rarity, as most of us are too fearful to admit to ourselves that we are leaving our families.