* Answer: Tonya put off making a reservation until only nosebleed singles were available.
Tonya loved the Seattle Men’s Chorus Christmas concert. For her it kicked off the holiday season each year. There was never any question in her mind that she and her best friend would go.
Yet every year, when the announcement came in the mail, she’d put off reserving her seat. One year she waited so late that no seats were available. She missed it and mourned it. The next year, when the announcement came, she ____________________. (You fill in the blank. Your clue: Tonya is a misery addict.)*
Sanderson hoped to be picked to head up the new software project. He knew he’d increase his chances if he took a course in the new programming language. He had the money. He had the time. He kept waffling about whether or not to take the course.
Elise would be leaving her job soon. Her insurance coverage would end one month after she walked out the door. She needed carpal tunnel surgery. She had the sick leave required and her work could be covered by her colleagues. She couldn’t decide whether to do it or not.
Elise, Sanderson, and Tonya all received notices that a program for misery addiction was being held in their city. As each of them read the flyer, lights went on in their heads. Suddenly they had an explanation for why they kept messing up their own lives. They took the little test on the back of the flyer and realized this program was exactly what they needed, designed for a condition they hadn’t even realized they had.
They couldn’t decide whether to sign up for it or not.
Elise took the problem to her best friend. She sat in Akua’s kitchen and said, “I don’t know what to do.”
“About the surgery?”
“I don’t know what to do about that either.”
Akua plunked teacups onto the table and sat opposite her friend. “Elise, I don’t get it. You need the surgery. You have the insurance now. If you wait till later, it’ll only get worse, you risk damage to your nerves, and you will have to pay for it yourself.”
“Read this flyer. It fits me to a T.”
Akua scanned it and tossed it on the table. “It’s you, girl. Makes more sense than anything I’ve ever seen. Have you sent in your money?”
“I can’t decide whether to do it.”
“What’s to decide? This explains a condition that has kept you stuck your whole life. Now here’s a way out of it going on right here in town.”
“It’s months long.”
“So put off your trip. Besides, what’s months compared to the years you’ve lost following your tail in a circle?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll do it next year.”
Akua blew out a breath of air and shook her head. “You don’t even know if it’ll be offered here next year. Maybe next year it’s in Timbuktu and airfare would cost a mint. Besides which, you don’t like to fly. Timing’s perfect, and you’d miss it?”
Elise shrugged.
Akua tried once more to hold on to her calm. “It seems so logical to me. You have a problem. The answer is right in front of you. The cost for accepting the answer is a whole lot cheaper in time, health, and money than rejecting the answer. This is true whether we’re talking about the program or the surgery.”
“I can’t decide,” said Elise plaintively. “I don’t know what to do.”
Akua jumped to her feet and strode from the kitchen. “I can’t stand this. I’m going shopping.”
In this brief conversation, two things happened: Elise showed a classic symptom of misery addiction, and Akua absorbed Elise’s conflicted energy and couldn’t tolerate it.
Perhaps the most difficult thing about being a friend of a misery addict is watching the indecision. It’s understandable that it takes a while to make a decision when a choice has equal amounts of good and bad, or if two perfectly desirable options are in conflict. What’s more difficult to comprehend is indecision around an option that has mostly an upside—especially if saying no has mostly a downside.
If we could travel back to Elise’s childhood, we’d see scenes like this:
“Elise, what do you have on? You look ugly in that shirt. I don’t know why you insist on wearing so much blue. Wear pink. Little girls wear pink.”
“I don’t like pink. I like blue.”
“Blue is stupid. Blue is for boys. You will wear pink.”
“Why do you hang out with her? She’s from the wrong side of town.”
“All you do is ski. I want you home on Saturdays.”
“No, you can’t take a music class. No, you can’t play the flute. No, you can’t join marching band. These won’t put food on your table when you grow up.”
“What do you mean you didn’t know that? Everyone knows that.”
“That can’t be your major in college—not if you want us to pay for it.”
Most misery addicts endured childhoods crammed with criticism and harsh judgment. Most were systematically separated from their own impulses, preferences, feelings, likes, and interests. Most were pressured to move toward their dislikes, which were often a parent’s or family’s likes.
As children, misery addicts had natural preferences that typically led to disdain, ridicule, or punishment. Thus it was a lot safer to conform and make themselves do, eat, wear, or study the things they weren’t drawn to. They learned to move toward the things they weren’t drawn to and to avoid the things they preferred. Their wires got crossed.
Look at this definition of memory, from The Developing Mind by Daniel Siegel:
Memory is more than what we can consciously recall about events from the past. A broader definition is that memory is the way past events affect future function. Memory is thus the way the brain is affected by experience and then subsequently alters its future responses. In this view, the brain experiences the world and encodes this interaction in a manner that alters future ways of responding…. past events can directly shape how and what we learn, even though we may have no conscious recollection of those events. Our earliest experiences shape our ways of behaving, including patterns of relating to others, without our ability to recall consciously when these first learning experiences occurred.1
Siegel then describes the mental encoding process, which involves a neural net that creates a particular firing pattern throughout the brain.
If a certain pattern has been stimulated in the past, the probability of activating a similar profile in the future is enhanced. If the pattern is fired repeatedly, the probability of future activation is further increased. The increased probability is created by changes in the synaptic connections within the network of neurons.2
A synapse is the gap that occurs between the end of one nerve fiber and the beginning of the next one. Infants are born with lots of neurons and relatively few synapses. The placement and creation of a synapse is determined by an individual’s experience and genetic information.3
It turns out that the physical structure of the brain is unique to each person and is a result of experiences.4 Changes in synaptic connections alter the ways in which the brain functions.5 Then these alterations influence a person’s subsequent behavior, perceptions, and thoughts.
An easy way to remember this is Hebb’s axiom: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”6
Once a brain is wired in a certain pattern, it can create automatic behavior. Elise demonstrated this in her indecision. As a child she was criticized for virtually everything that originated from her own inner self—her taste in clothing, her choice of friends, even her food preferences. She wasn’t just encouraged to toe the family line. She was punished if she didn’t.
She became a product of classical conditioning. She was rewarded with safety and inclusion if she did just what her parents wanted. She was punished anytime she followed her own heart.
How then, as an adult, could she be expected to honor her heart? When she had an interest or a preference, she was a deer in the headlights. She froze. She could not make herself take a step toward something that in the past had always netted pain. She could only safely choose options that didn’t appeal to her.
Tonya’s pain and punishment were of a different variety, but they resulted in a similar pattern. Tonya was the child who wasn’t liked. Two girls and a boy were born in that family. The boy was treated like a prince; the other daughter was fawned over and protected. Tonya, for some reason, was not what the family was looking for when they had another child. Emotionally, they dropped her.
She tried all sorts of ways of getting in. Some worked; some didn’t. By the age of six, she had figured out that if she served the other members of her family, did things for them, and immediately let go of any interest of hers that fell outside the family line, they sort of included her. Otherwise, she was wallpaper.
This made her afraid of her own interests. It also made her fear expulsion if she did something she wanted to do.
Not a lot is said about an unfavored child, but I find a high proportion of them among misery addicts. Sometimes the dislike is subtle, demonstrated through preferential behavior toward other children. Sometimes it’s stated outright, with comparative statements that designate one child as treasure and the other as trinket.
A favored child’s behavior tends to be interpreted in a positive light. He’s talked of glowingly and given favors and privileges. The rejected child is given dregs, hounded, compared negatively to others, or handled irritably and impatiently. His behavior is cast as selfish, mean, lazy, or stupid.
Growing up, Tonya’s sister was held up as an example. “Why can’t you be more like Cliona?” “There’s no point taking you shopping. Cliona needs a new dress, so she and I will go by ourselves.”
Even though she was the younger child, Tonya was expected to perform at the older child’s level. “She can sit still. Why can’t you?”
Tonya was expected to know what the older child had been taught, even though Tonya hadn’t been shown. “Tonya, I left you a note to light the oven when you got home from school.”
“I didn’t know how, Mom. I was scared it would blow up.”
“That’s silly. It won’t blow up if you do it right.”
“I don’t know how to do it.”
“Of course you do. We light the oven all the time.”
“You’ve never shown me.”
“You were just too lazy to pull your nose out of a book and watch.”
In some families, abuse is laughed off. A brother is favored over the sister so that when he hits her or stands on her hair—or when he terrorizes her or molests her—the parents brush it aside. In Tonya’s case, a sister was favored. When Cliona ruined Tonya’s clothes, said nasty things, or left Tonya in dangerous situations, it was not taken seriously by their parents.
Sometimes a child is rejected because the parents didn’t want to become parents. Sanderson was resented by his parents because he was the reason they had to get married. His mother hadn’t wanted to be pregnant, didn’t like being pregnant, and didn’t like dealing with Sanderson’s bodily needs when he was a baby. It was a bad start for this mother-son relationship that neither ever got over.
His mother was always standoffish with him. His father was distant. They never realized that they were dumping issues onto him that were theirs alone to deal with.
Later children were exempt because by then the marriage was a fact.
Sanderson felt the rejection for thirty years before he began to understand what it was about. That was way too late to save his self-esteem. At an early age he believed himself to be a person who would be resented and rejected.
A baby is never responsible for being born; the parents caused that to happen. Yet an amazing number of children are resented and rejected because they are seen as the reason a parent got trapped.
Sometimes a mother will reject a daughter because of her body. A thin, possibly anorexic mother with her own phobia about fat may perceive her daughter’s natural pudginess and bone structure as a weight problem and ride her mercilessly about her eating and her body. A large mother, hating her own body, may reject the daughter whose body type is similar. Either situation can cause a child to hate and mistrust her body and lead to an eating disorder.
A child will feel even more hopeless if there’s a “perfect” sibling who gets all the attention and compliments. “Look at what your sister is eating. She’s happy with that lettuce leaf and radish.” “I’d get clothes for you too, if you lost twenty pounds.”
When a child hates her body, it doesn’t stop at the skin. Her dislike for herself spreads out into wariness of her thoughts and ideas and into distrust of her own interests and instincts.
Parental neglect can also be passive—not deliberately directed at a particular child and not due to a conflict in personalities, but the result of some other situation in the parent’s life. In comparison to the other siblings, one child may thus seem neglected or singled out.
In some cases, parents may have unknowingly used themselves up before their last child is born. At this point they have no more energy for guiding a child, listening to babble, or going to PTA meetings. Other common possibilities: One child can be sick for an extended time, and a parent’s time is taken up in nursing duties leaving no energy for the other child. A financial crisis may direct parental attention to long working hours. Parental addiction or illness may eliminate one parent from the scene and siphon energy and attention from the other.
When all children in a family are treated meanly and harshly, it’s damaging, of course. But if one child is singled out for rejection or is the lone recipient of neglect, it feels more personal. It puts that one child on the outside and seeds the belief that she is irredeemably different, destined for separateness, unlovable at a cellular level.
Unfortunately, it’s easy in such situations to cross a child’s emotional wiring and turn him against himself. These crossed wires often lead to an adult who has difficulty making choices for his own benefit.
* Answer: Tonya put off making a reservation until only nosebleed singles were available.