“Break open your hearts Turn around and go back across the wintry land.”
SHARON DOUBIAGO
IF YOU ARE READING this book with the double vision of a parent—thinking of the childhood you are guiding as well as the one you experienced—then it’s doubly important to remember both the strength of roots and the inevitability of storms.
So much has been blamed on parents, especially on mothers, that we need more realistic and compassionate ways to think about parenting. In the 1960s, psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott began to use a helpful phrase that is only now entering the language: the “good enough” mother,4 a relief from the “good mother” ideal that produced guilt in women who couldn’t meet its impossible standard of self-sacrifice, and guilt in the children for whom those mothers sacrificed themselves. (Of course, Winnicott perpetuated a big part of the problem by leaving fathers out of the equation, but at least he recognized the limits of mothering and the durability of children.) When used for both parents, his “good enough” concept helps us to realize that, if we love and respect our children as unique individuals, do not neglect them or use them to satisfy our personal hungers, and treat them at least as well as we treat ourselves (something that children, with their innate sense of fairness, are quick to recognize), then we are probably “good enough” parents. There are still the biases and cruelties of the outside world to deal with, but we have probably helped our children to flourish, as it is within their natures to do, and thus to feel angered by bias instead of defeated, and to fight cruelties instead of looking for approval by becoming cruel, too.
But too few childrearing theories start with the parents’ childhoods. “Treating our children as well as we treat ourselves” is a reversible syllogism: we have to treat ourselves as well as we want to treat our children. For those with a damaged inner child whose needs are not recognized, however, “as well as” may get disastrously confused with “the same as.” Think of these three common errors of childrearing:
Giving our children what we wanted and didn’t have. This means children get treated like the parent instead of like themselves. No matter what their wants and needs may be, they are given what the parent wanted years ago. Furthermore, the still-deprived inner child of the parent may feel jealous of this present child and demand compensation in the form of obedience or gratitude.
Using children to live out our unlived adult lives. The father who raises a son to have the profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols—all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child’s authentic self to a parent’s needs.
Justifying and normalizing our own childhoods by doing to our children what was done to us. Without a chance to go back, confront, examine, and heal—and without a consciousness that what was done was wrong, undeserved, or not “for your own good”—as parents we tend to continue some version of abuse we ourselves experienced.
In all the above cases, the needy child of yesterday inside the parent is dominating a child of today. In the case of intergenerational abuse especially, we’re just beginning to see the dimensions of suffering. In the United States, for instance, about one in three women has been subjected to physical, sexual, or psychological abuse before the age of eighteen, and at least one in seven men. If these cycles are to be stopped, parents or others who contemplate raising a child owe it to themselves and those unique, individual children in their care to become aware of past damage. W. D. Wall, an English expert in early childhood education, puts it simply, “Children grow well when their parents are growing well.”5
In Strong at the Broken Places, a helpful book for those who have suffered childhood abuse, especially sexual abuse, Linda Sanford offers a useful corollary to the concept of the “good enough” parent: the “bad enough” childhood. If our upbringing was bad enough to cause us to do things that are unchosen or not dictated by the circumstances of our adulthood, it was probably “bad enough” to be taken seriously and confronted as part of a process of self-healing.
The instances of abuse or neglect don’t have to be spectacular. Being a very small person in a very big world, but left unprotected by the grown-ups who are supposed to protect us, is quite enough to make us feel that we are not worth protecting. As Sanford explains, “A ‘bad enough’ parent’s love is conditional and his protection is in short supply. The ‘bad enough’ parent does not always injure the child in dramatic or obvious ways.”6
Nor should we have to win a competition of suffering in order to take our damage seriously. There can be no “competition of tears,” in the phrase of Letty Cottin Pogrebin, an expert in nonsexist education. Tears are tears, suffering is suffering, and our feelings are to be trusted. Neglect and abuse suffered in fine surroundings can be just as painful as those in poor ones, and some studies show there may be more sexual abuse of girls in very well-to-do families than at lower economic levels.7 Furthermore, the workaholic father who constantly looks at his watch while he is with us, or the romance-aholic mother whose lover competes with us for her attention, can be just as damaging to our sense of being worthwhile as a parent who explicitly punishes us.
The more serious the abuse, however, the more difficult it may be to confront. We think: My mother or father couldn’t possibly have done that to me—I must be imagining it. Or perhaps the memory has been pushed out of our consciousness completely. But those images and feelings remain alive in our unconscious—and they can be uncovered. Even abuse so long-term and severe that a child survived only by dissociating from it while it was happening still leaves markers above its burial ground. Periods of growing up about which we have little or no memory are among the most common such markers. So is self-injury: having learned a form of self-hypnosis to numb ourselves to physical abuse, and still believing we are “bad people” because we must have deserved the bad things done to us, we can grow up with a compulsion to cut, burn, or otherwise damage ourselves. Other frequent signs are childhood convulsions for which there are no medical reasons, a total inability to express anger, parents whom we remember as both terrifying and perfect, the conviction that one either humiliates other people or is humiliated, a sense of observing oneself without emotion, and flashes of images in which we hurt our children, animals, and others less powerful than we are—as we were once hurt ourselves.
Especially when judging criminals, destructive leaders, or even the parents who made us suffer, I know that tracing these roots to childhood strikes some people as “soft,” an evasion of personal responsibility. I’m sure sometimes it has been misused in that way. But if we want to diminish violence, not just punish it, we have to take seriously the overwhelming evidence that those whose minds and actions are controlled and whose bodies are invaded and treated with violence in childhood are the most likely to continue wounding others, themselves, or both. The violence may be extreme and obvious, or it may be much subtler and even implicit in traditional childrearing techniques. In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller, a pioneer in tracing the origins of destructiveness to childrearing, writes about what she calls “poisonous pedagogy,” the process of breaking a child’s spirit so that the adult can have easy control—all done supposedly out of love, to save the child from later sufferings due to lack of discipline, and thus, as parents so often say, “for your own good.” She sums up the central tenets of childrearing manuals that were popular in Europe—especially Germany—and much admired in this country as well through the first decades of this century. Some are still alarmingly familiar.
She also sums up the beliefs that underlie these practices:
Such beliefs were certainly popular in the past. Thanks to well-meaning German nannies who were in demand among upper-class families in the United States for their ability to produce discipline, they had a special influence on children of the powerful who were likely to become world leaders.* Nor are such theories all in the past. The popularity of Alice Miller’s books in sixteen languages testifies to the durability of these techniques of childrearing. But Miller argues that they produce citizens who are likely to obey the “always right” leader, that they produced a critical mass of such willingness in Germany and thus were key to electing Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist agenda. Certainly, the imagery of the Nazis appealed to the need for a traditional family, from restoring the Fatherland to sending women back to Kinder, Küche, Kirche (“Children, Kitchen, Church”). Hitler constantly appealed to the myth of a pure and healthy Aryan family, one whose return was threatened only by Jews, socialists, feminists, homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally ill, and other unhealthy outsiders.9 He himself was to be the supreme father. “In my fortresses of the Teutonic Order,” he promised a nation still feeling humiliated by defeat in World War I,
a young generation will grow up before which the world will tremble. I want the young to be violent, domineering, undismayed, cruel. … They must be able to bear pain. There must be nothing weak or gentle about them. The free splendid beast of prey must again flash from their eyes. I want my young people strong and beautiful.10
In one controversial chapter in For Your Own Good, Alice Miller analyzed Hitler’s own childhood as the source of the cruelty he then glorified and imposed on others. In so doing, she took on the many analysts who preferred to think of Hitler as an isolated monster whose background was irrelevant, an accident that is unlikely to happen again, and in any case, one about which we can do little except identify, isolate, and punish. On the contrary, she believes, Hitler was not an inexplicable monster, but a product of an extreme version of “poisonous pedagogy.” He had a sadistic father who himself had been regularly beaten with a whip until unconscious by his stepfather, and who in turn beat young Adolf so viciously that his sisters later remembered trying to restrain their father by holding on to his coat. A neighbor also remembered this father whistling for Adolf, as if he were a dog. And in Mein Kampf, Hitler presented a picture of himself as a six-year-old growing up with his parents and four siblings in two basement rooms, watching his father beat his mother and seeing “things which can fill even an adult with nothing but horror.”11 By eleven, he had been beaten almost to death for trying to run away.12 Later, the only thing he would remember with pride from that childhood was being able to deaden himself so thoroughly that he could take thirty-two whiplashes from his father without making a sound.13
Though Alice Miller made clear that not everyone with a sadistic childhood becomes a monster, and that she was trying not to lessen one man’s culpability but simply to see the world through the eyes of one tortured boy in order to keep other mass murderers from happening, she still aroused the ire of those whose argument is simple: If anyone has survived a sadistic childhood, then the childhood cannot be at fault.
But recently, another firsthand account of a famous “monster” has come along to support Miller’s thesis. After thirty years of silence, Peter Z. Malkin, one of a team of Israeli agents who captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, has offered his own evidence of a destroyed person who then destroyed others; a conclusion made all the more powerful by the fact that Malkin’s own family members were among the millions murdered at Eichmann’s orders.
In 1959, Malkin intercepted on a Buenos Aires street this man who had invented the term “the final solution,” commissioned the design of the first gas chambers, and directed the murder of more Jews than any other Nazi officer. As his personal captor for several days in a safe house, Malkin talked with Eichmann, in spite of orders not to. His curiosity about this “monster” was too great. What he found was a man cut off from emotion: a man who talked about his mother’s death when he was ten, the murdering of millions of Jews (whom he insisted he had nothing against personally, even rather liked), pleasant memories of having traveled to Jerusalem in order to better understand the Jewish culture he was trying to eradicate, and also of a Jewish boy who had been his best friend growing up—all without any emotion at all. Indeed, Eichmann still seemed to believe he deserved praise for having done his job of extermination so ingeniously and followed orders with such carefulness. In turn, he congratulated Malkin on the professionalism with which the Israeli team had carried out Eichmann’s own abduction. The only time he ever seems to have disobeyed an order, as Malkin observed, was later when he refused to swear on the Bible at his trial in Israel; apparently because it was a reminder of his father, a cold, remote, devout figure who had been an accountant and an elder in the Evangelical church. The only clue to a buried self in his conversation was an undercurrent of hostility toward and fear of his father, though Eichmann’s words remained as matter-of-fact and impersonal as they had been about everything else.
But Malkin’s most chilling remembrances are those of Eichmann as a man who could only give or follow orders, be dominant or subservient—nothing else. Though he had been living a “normal” life for fourteen years, for instance, he reverted to this behavior the moment he reentered a hierarchy as a prisoner, and at first he would not eat, drink, or defecate. It took Malkin several days to realize that Eichmann was waiting to be ordered, that he had been suppressing the needs of his own body. Even after Malkin had ordered him to seat himself on the toilet, at a time when his bodily excretions had been stored up for so long that he must have been in agony, Eichmann asked Malkin politely, “May I begin?” Then he apologized abjectly for every noise his body made and finally asked permission to wipe himself. This routine continued daily.
In fact, like Hitler, Eichmann in his life as a successful Nazi official had bragged about his ability to cut off pain and proudly showed scars on his knees and elbows from crawling over barbed wire during training as an SS officer. Once imprisoned by the Israelis, he put himself—or the body in which a self must once have lived—under enemy control, almost as if it were as familiar as home. “I was a good son,” was the only thing Eichmann would say about his response to his father. “It was not my place to question him.” Asked about Hitler, he instantly replied, “The Führer was infallible.”
“Why is it,” Malkin wrote, “that one person comes of age profoundly humane while someone else, of the same culture and social background, is seemingly impervious to the needs of others?”
The conclusion I reached, though hardly original, nonetheless still seems far too little appreciated. It has everything to do with how one is regarded as a child. Those who as children are valued and nurtured, loved without expectation and listened to and heard, are likely to become passionate adults who think for themselves and make moral choices. Those many others around whom regimentation is the norm and unconventionality is taken as aberrant are quickly made to understand—by parents, by teachers, by almost everyone in their universe—that they are of worth only as part of the larger whole. As second nature, they learn passivity and obedience, not conscience.
Such an insight would prove useful in my work, helping me to understand those whose behavior sometimes seemed unfathomable. It would come in even handier later, in my own life, when I became a father.14
It may happen only occasionally in history that such leaders are elected, but the destruction brought about by tortured children who grow into torturing adults can be read about in our newspapers every day. We know what miracles of courage millions of such children will have to perform in adulthood if they are to stop this sadism in one generation.
And we must remember: any form of abuse that comes from the very people who are supposed to protect us, to whom we have no choice but to make ourselves vulnerable, is the most destructive of self. Until the last decade or so, sexual abuse especially was compounded by the disbelief and blindness of psychiatrists, teachers, law-enforcement officials, social workers, and other parent surrogates to whom children are supposed to be able to turn when the parents themselves are the problem. Imbued with such well-meaning but still “poisonous pedagogy” as the Freudian doctrine that child victims desired and therefore fantasized having sex with adults—perhaps also with many professionals’ own need to keep their childhood pain buried—they refused to believe children, who were developmentally incapable of having imagined such adult acts. This unwillingness to take children’s testimony seriously still characterizes a court system where young witnesses are refused the right to testify, broken down by lawyers on the stand, and discredited. In fact, studies show they are more likely to be telling the truth than are adults.15 Nonetheless, children are even less likely to be believed when their stories involve extremes of sadism, collusion among families and communities (sometimes extending over several generations), and so-called ritual or cult abuse—including the torture and killing of animals to frighten children into silence—that are so terrible that authorities decide these things just can’t be true. Yet many instances of such “incredible” crimes are documented, sometimes by adults after years of suppressed memory, sometimes by authorities who are now beginning to believe children enough to investigate their stories.
Now that women have begun to speak out about past abuse and to believe each other, we have a better idea of the dimensions of the sexual abuse of girls. But sexual abuse of boys is still shrouded in silence when it involves other boys or men, and misinformation when it involves women. Homophobia makes many boys fear being stigmatized if they reveal their abuse, even years later; yet current statistics indicate that about 90 percent of abusers of children in general are men. At the same time, the relatively few cases of adult women who sexually abuse male children get disproportionate attention—especially in films, novels, and plays that sexualize such abuse and downplay its real damage, just as they sexualize young girls with much older men. The cost of this silence is high for both the individuals who suffer it and society. Since men are more likely to respond to past abuse by abusing others, our prisons are full of those who continued doing to others what was done to them.
With so much disbelief around them from so many adult quarters, it’s no wonder that children begin to bury and dissociate their own reality—especially when people on whom they are totally dependent say things like:
“This is what all fathers and daughters do.”
“I wouldn’t want you to learn about sex from a stranger.”
“If you say once more that you’re going to tell, I’m sending that cat of yours to the pound for gassing.”16
“You’re a slut, you’re no good, you asked for it.”
“If you tell, it will kill your mother.”
Those are real words of real sexual abusers, all of them fathers who abused their own children. But such obvious invasions of a child’s self are not isolated events. They are one end of a continuum. “The most common pathogenic parental attitude in America,” reports Dr. Hugh Missildine in Your Inner Child of the Past, is “overcoercion,” a tendency that is
typically expressed by the parent who constantly directs, supervises, redirects the child with an endless stream of anxious reminders and directions. Because the child’s need to initiate and pursue his [sic] own interests as part of his own development is ignored by this coerciveness, the child may learn to rely excessively on outside direction. Often, because he must assert his independence as an individual some way, he reacts to this constant coercion by dawdling, daydreaming, forgetting, procrastination and other forms of resistance.17
In everyday life, the overcoercion and consequent weakening and shaming of self may be as mundane as being constantly encouraged or forced to imitate, follow, and obey; to always “color inside the lines.” It can be as approved as being made to feel intrinsically sinful by one’s upbringing, religious and otherwise. It can be as cruel as hearing from one’s parent what a burden one is (as in, “If I hadn’t had you, I could have been …”). Or as damaging as being a little girl whose family wishes she were a boy. It can be as internalized as the bias that causes some Jewish families to be disappointed when children look “too Jewish,” and even to urge them toward cosmetic surgery, or that causes some African-American families to favor the child with lighter skin and “good” hair, consciously or not.
But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child—a true self who is waiting.