or would happen.6
You’re More Trouble Than You’re Worth
Subtle and Not So Subtle Messages
Since taking things personally is usually connected to rejection messages, it’s important to learn to recognize these messages. Rejection is a type of psychological maltreatment and can take a myriad of forms, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. Physical, sexual, severe verbal abuse, and neglect of children are observable, obvious acts. But it is not only the obvious acts that cause lifelong damage. Underneath each of these acts is a message of rejection to a child. Keep in mind that the forms of psychological maltreatment may not be as obvious as physical or sexual abuse, but it is still abuse and can be just as devastating. Some of the subtle behaviors described in this chapter may seem inconsequential and indeed they might be if they just happened once. But rejection, hurts, and disappointments usually don’t just happen once. They repeat over time, each incident becoming superimposed on another. Children are so imprintable, so impressionable, that acts repeated again and again can cause long-term damage to adult behavior. These early experiences influence how people respond to life events.
Fear, Anxiety, and Rejection
Abused and neglected children see the world differently from other children. It’s as if they are looking through a wavy lens resulting in some distortion and confusion. Occurrences that seem insignificant to others can take on huge and frightening magnitudes. Children may feel in danger where there appears to be no provocation, yet to these children the situation takes on life-or-death proportions. As one woman said, “When I was growing up, if I made a misstep it could mean my life.”
Abused children see the world differently and are exquisitely tuned to danger.
Dr. Bruce Perry of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston describes how abuse affects children’s brains, where neural circuitry helps regulate responses to stress. Since these children are exquisitely tuned to danger, at the slightest threat their hearts race, their stress hormones surge, and their brains anxiously track the nonverbal cues that might signal the next attack.
Fear and anxiety are constant companions to abused children. They live on edge, just waiting for the abuse to come again. It’s not a matter of if it comes, but when it comes. So they’re always holding their breath, waiting for the next blow to fall, trying to protect themselves at any cost. Children learn to live with this ever-present anxiety. It becomes a part of their identity and follows them into adult relationships.
“It’s as if I’m addicted to anxiety,” said one woman. “It’s like a high, it gets my energy going. I get obsessed with thoughts of each new romantic involvement. I think about how the contact will go, what they’ll say, what I’ll say. But the anticipation is more of anxiety than of joy.”
Another woman put it this way: “A little bit of anxiety actually leads to more discomfort for me than a lot of anxiety. When I was little, I lived and breathed massive amounts of anxiety all the time. So when a small problem comes along, I get all revved up and build it into a large problem with lots of tension. This kind of drama actually makes me less anxious because it’s more familiar.”
Waiting for a partner or child to come home when he or she is very late and hasn’t phoned can lead to big-time anxiety. And the minute the person walks through the door, it can be a dramatic moment. I remember when I was little and a friend and I would walk home from dance class together. It was a long walk on a busy street, so, looking back, I can imagine how uneasy my mother might have been. However, I didn’t consider her state of mind when my friend urged me to stop at her church with her and light candles. She even taught me some prayers. We were there quite a while. When I arrived home, my mother began screaming at me, but she never once told me she was worried. Only angry. Real angry.
I hear similar stories from couples I know. It’s hard not to take it personally if, when you walk through the door, your partner is angry at you because you’re late and didn’t call. It’s hard not to get defensively angry right back. Try to remember that underneath the anger is most likely concern and worry—for you.
Dramatic moments seem to be necessary in the lives of some people. “I’m an invent-a-crisis kind of person,” said one man I know. “I like the rush of adrenaline—it makes me feel more alive!” And so he creates one crisis after another in his life. Unfortunately he often does this by picking fights with his partner, who overreacts to these provocations, taking them as a personal attack.
Another man is a nervous wreck whenever he has to sit with some anxiety. The anxiety sometimes crescendos into a panic. He recognizes the feeling from his past, “It’s like waiting for my dad to come home to beat me. So whenever I’m anxious I do everything possible to control it. I do this by trying to control the people in my life.”
So now, when fear or anxiety gets triggered, it’s as if we put on those wavy glasses again. Situations seem inflated, even gargantuan. Sometimes we find ourselves overreacting to subtle actions of others and we ask ourselves why. The answer is: Rejection.
Acceptance
To better understand rejection, let’s talk about its opposite: Acceptance. Growing up with acceptance means growing up feeling that all’s right with the world—feeling loved and cared about, safe and secure, knowing early on that needs are going to be met. Acceptance is feeling validated for who you are and what you think. Acceptance means receiving verbal and nonverbal messages that say: “I accept your separateness, your differentness, your uniqueness. It’s okay to be yourself. I don’t expect you to think, feel, or see things the same as I do.”
Acceptance means parents recognize and respect the differences between their own needs and the needs of their children. They don’t confuse their own thoughts or feelings with those of their children. They respect the physical and emotional space of their children, enabling children to develop a well-defined sense of themselves—with good personal boundaries and adequate self-esteem—that can be carried into adulthood.
In an optimal parent-child relationship, the parent recognizes and meets the child’s physical and emotional needs by
• Offering love, patience, understanding, empathy, praise, acceptance, and a sense of self-worth
• Participating in the child’s experience
• Responding to the child and providing encouragement and direction
• Giving the child opportunities for learning and mastering skills
• Providing a sense of security and safety
• Supplying warmth, cleanliness, and nourishment, and care when the child is sick
• Offering stability and continuity of care
• Providing an adequate standard of reality
• Teaching the child appropriate behavior, limits, and inner controls
• Establishing consequences for inappropriate behavior
• Supplying social experiences outside the family
• Accepting who the child is as an individual and encouraging the child’s expanding independence
• Preparing the child for life, instead of protecting the child from life
In this optimal relationship, children flourish, developing a realistic sense of themselves and learning to trust and feel safe. Children develop the capacity to love and be loved, cope with frustration, experience a range of emotions, and communicate these feelings. Through feeling accepted by others, children learn to accept themselves, they learn to take themselves seriously. From self-acceptance springs self-confidence, self-reliance, self-assurance, self-esteem, self-respect, and self-satisfaction.
What happens when children grow up with a lack of acceptance? They learn to invalidate themselves, to reject themselves. When children’s sense of self is diminished, they feel more and more like nonpeople. Self-worth, self-assurance, self-confidence, self-respect, self-esteem, self-regard, and self-acceptance all become nonexistent. They begin to feel they have little control over their environment and see the world as rejecting and inhospitable. Sometimes they may begin to see themselves as the target of outside forces and they may start to take things personally.
In discussing acceptance it’s helpful to look at early attachment behavior. Much has been made of the importance of a sustained gaze between parent and infant. In Intimate Worlds, Maggie Scarf refers to this sustained gaze as “eye-love.” Many observers have commented on how a newborn appears to be fascinated with the face of the caretaker, and there are various speculations as to why. Allan Schore’s Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self discusses these various theories. One theory is that objects about ten inches away from the infant are most clearly in focus, and this is the distance between parent’s and infant’s faces. Another fascinating speculation is how the source of the infant’s attraction might very well be due to a flash of light processed by and reflected off the parent’s eye onto the eyes of the infant. This sparkle in the parent’s eyes stimulates the baby to gaze into the parent’s face, and hopefully the parent reciprocates the gazing.
“The human soul feeds on light,” states A. H. Almaas, in The Point of Existence. “This light is awareness …” and in order to grow, the baby must be seen with “love, value, openness, compassion, strength, intelligence, joy, satisfaction, peacefulness.…” Does the parent “see” the baby and return the gaze? Or is the parent preoccupied or looking away? What happens when the baby becomes excited and averts his or her eyes to avoid overstimulation during these intense periods of interaction? Is the parent attuned to the child’s alternating need for attention and withdrawal? Or does the parent take it personally if eyes are averted? (I once heard a story that illuminates the power of this gaze: A local wildlife refuge instructs volunteers not to make eye contact with rescued baby birds because the birds might become attached to humans and have trouble returning to the wild.) It seems as though some of us are always seeking out that light in the eyes of others but don’t always find it. In fact, there may be times in our perpetual search to bask in “the gleam,” that we stumble over “the look” instead. You know the look I mean—the raised eyebrow or the narrowed eyes signifying criticism or judgment, impatience or indifference.
It’s not uncommon for infants or children who are sensitive to their parents’ actions to feel rejected and turn away. They become unwilling to again risk the parents’ coldness or inattention. So they may turn their heads or push their parents away, refusing a bottle or food. An insecure parent may be convinced a child is purposefully avoiding him or her, when in fact, the child is really avoiding the pain of another rejection as we saw in chapter 5. And so rejection begets rejection, becoming a protective maneuver to avoid getting hurt again in a world that has become unsafe and untrustworthy.
Sometimes we look for “the gleam” in someone’s eye only to find “the look” instead.
How do we learn at all costs to avoid putting ourselves in the position of being rejected again? This reciprocal nature of rejection was researched by University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Mary Main and anthropologist Ruth Goldwyn. In a study of attachment behavior, infants of twelve months were briefly separated from their mothers in a laboratory situation in order to study their responses at reunion. Most infants responded by being glad to see their mothers, actively greeted them, and wanted to reestablish contact. However, a few infants didn’t seem glad to see their mothers at all, and responded with distress at the reunions. These infants avoided the mothers by moving away from them, turning their heads or their bodies away, or ignoring them.
Why did some of the infants avoid their mothers upon reunion? The researcher believe the answer lies the the degree to which the mother accepts or rejects the child’s attachment to her. The mothers of these avoidant infants had repeatedly rejected their children’s attempts at physical and emotional contact. So when the mothers were separated from their infants in the laboratory setting, the children appeared to perceive these absences as another rejection by their mothers. The researchers hypothesized that the avoidance behaviors were an attempt by the infants to try to avoid the further emotional pain of rejection. If this is true, then avoidant behavior could be a stance children take in order to avoid a repeat of painful rejection feelings—a way of protecting themselves.
How do children come to see the world as so treacherous? What goes wrong? Let’s look first at how healthy, enduring attachment develops. Children have basic dependency needs for food, comfort, and protection. This includes predictable feedings, relatively dry diapers, and a safe environment. They depend on parents or other adults who they see as better able to cope with the world. Children need to feel connected to their parents and develop a feeling of safety. When these basic needs are met, it promotes attachment, a sense of well-being, a secure feeling that all’s right with the world. According to British psychiatrist John Bowlby, the child comes to trust that the parent can provide “a secure base from which the child or adolescent can make forays into the outside world … [and can] return knowing for sure that he [or she] will be welcomed … nourished physically … emotionally comforted if distressed, reassured if frightened.” In other words, the child feels encouraged and validated for being inquisitive because the parent is supportively giving permission for the child to wander off, explore the world, and then return to the security of the parent.
Researchers find that whether children feel secure or insecure depends on how responsive their parents are to them—whether the parents are sensitive to their children’s signals, or whether they block or reject attachment behavior. Children who feel secure in their attachment to parents, generally grow up to be secure adults. They learn to risk asking for what they want and need from others. They learn to accept themselves, as they have felt accepted by their parents.
Suppose however these needs are not met or are met only now and then. Depending on how responsive their caregivers are to their needs, infants develop three basic attachment styles: secure, avoidant, and anxious/ambivalent. If parents are responsive and emotionally available, children feel trusting and secure and this continues into adult relationships. If parents are nonresponsive and unavailable, children also become non-responsive and avoid emotional connection in relationships. If parents are sometimes responsive and sometimes not, children become both anxious and ambivalent in relationships. The anxiety comes from not knowing what to expect at any given moment from a parent, and the ambivalence comes from not daring to care for fear of being disappointed. These early attachment styles are similar to styles of adult interactions, although most certainly adult relationships can be more complex. A fourth attachment style, insecure-disorganized/disoriented, is described by psychologists Mary Main, Nancy Kaplan, and Jude Cassidy. The child shows strong avoidance behavior and acts confused, dazed, and apprehensive. For more information on recent studies of how adult attachment is similar to infant attachment, see chapter notes.
Sometimes certain attachment behaviors are not what they seem. Bowlby makes a distinction between enduring attachment and attachment behavior. Attachment behavior can be various forms of behavior the child may use to obtain a desired closeness with a parent. Although the attachment behavior may be heightened or intensified in certain situations it doesn’t necessarily mean that the attachment becomes stronger. Is a child who clings to his or her parent necessarily more attached than a child who clings less? Or simply more insecure? Parents often misjudge this dependent behavior. When children are sick or anxious and exhibit clingy behavior, parents may reward the children’s overdependency and mistakenly encourage more clinging. This kind of behavior may be anxious attachment, resulting when young children don’t develop trust that a secure base exists. They’re afraid that parent or other caretaker might become inaccessible or unavailable, or disappear altogether—abandoning them. There it is, that A word that so many of us dread.
Abandonment is certainly one of the most powerful fears of rejection we can have. The anxiety that surrounds it is familiar to many of us. We lose confidence that significant people can be accessible to us. We are afraid they will not be here for us when we need them, they might disappear from our lives, they might stop loving us. This childhood anxiety stays with us into adulthood and can dominate our relationships, leading to anxious, clingy behavior with people who are important to us.
Psychologist/anthropologist Dr. Ronald P. Rohner has studied acceptance and rejection in over one hundred cultures. He defines acceptance as the expression of parental “warmth and affection, indicating support and approval” and rejection as “the absence or significant withdrawal of warmth, affection, or love.” He suggests “the warmth and affection each of us received as a child can be placed on a continuum from a great deal to virtually none.” This “warmth dimension” of parenting is marked at one end by parental acceptance and at the other end by rejection.
What kind of experience did you have growing up? Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a continuum with acceptance at one end and rejection at the other. Now visualize along this continuum the many subtle and not-so-subtle hues of parental words and actions. Add to this the many shades of parental indifference or emotional unavailability. Picture yourself with all the important people in your life. What was your experience with your mother? Your father? Siblings? Grandparents? Teachers? Neighbors? Did you experience a solid connection with them? Did you feel valued and loved? Were your experiences closer to the “great deal”—the acceptance—end of the continuum? Or were they on the “virtually none” end—where you consistently felt invalidated and discounted?
It doesn’t matter whether words or actions are active or passive, direct or indirect, latent or blatant, intentional or not. Parents might be emotionally unavailable and ignore a child, or they might tease or blame and belittle, or throw things, or threaten abandonment or harm. Either way, the child perceives the message as: “Nobody cares about you, nobody loves you.” This perception then gets carried into adulthood, affecting all areas of life.
For instance, take the example we discussed in the Introduction of an infant left unattended in the crib. A woman I know had this experience. She’d cry for hours, but no one would come to feed or change her. A message was imprinted from that time and has colored most of her adult relationships: “No one will be there when I need them.”
So, what happens if we believe we can’t depend on the important people in our lives? How can we ever trust that anyone will be there for us? When we feel rejected or neglected by the people we depend on to meet our needs, it’s so confusing—how can people who are supposed to love us be so neglectful or hurtful? In fact, sometimes the people we want to love and trust, the people we want to protect us, are the ones that we most need to be protected from. So we try to make some sense of the confusion and give ourselves reasons for it. We may tell ourselves something like, “If our parents don’t care enough about us to take care of us, we must not be worth loving or being taken care of—therefore, we must be bad.” This kind of thinking is natural for small children, who see the world in terms of “good and bad” and “black and white” because their thinking hasn’t developed enough to see shades of gray.
So for the children it comes down to making a decision about who’s good and who’s bad—themselves or their caretakers. Because they depend on their parents and need them to be “good,” they’ll usually designate themselves as “bad.” They’re not big enough to take care of themselves, and they depend on their parents, even if the parents are not very dependable. The children may not get fed when they’re hungry, but if parents don’t provide the food, who else will? Even though they may not get their diapers changed often enough, who else is there to change them?
Some children learn to fend for themselves, however. One woman recalls how she’d often get a fresh diaper from the container in her bedroom and carry it to one of her parents when she couldn’t stand being wet any longer. What a brave little girl! At two years old she had the presence of mind to know to get her own diaper. She somehow knew in order to survive she had to look out after her own basic needs because no one else would. And as she was experiencing this painful rejection, she was learning a dangerous lesson. Because her parents were treating her needs as unimportant, she learned to reject herself as worthless and insignificant as well.
If you’ve ever taken an introductory psychology class, you might remember Dr. Harlow and his experiments with monkeys and attachment behavior. The most well-known of these experiments involved cloth and wire mesh “dummy” mothers. Infant rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers at birth and placed with replicas of mother monkeys. Some were fashioned from terry cloth and some from only wire mesh. The terry cloth monkeys provided a source of “contact comfort” to the baby monkeys, but they could not provide nourishment. The wire mesh monkeys could mechanically squirt milk, and this was the only nourishment the infants could receive. Most of the babies would forego their milk, choosing instead to cling for hours to the terry cloth monkeys for comfort.
The more creative infants managed the best of both worlds. They would hold on desperately to the cloth monkey “mother.” At the same time they would stretch their bodies backwards toward the wire mesh monkey, grasping for the mechanical bottle of milk. Can you imagine the desperation and frustration these babies felt?
Karen knows that feeling well. “When I was little I’d cling to my father, but like the cloth monkey, he couldn’t return my hugs. He didn’t know how. But my mother was another story. She was cruel. She wasn’t just a wire monkey, she was a barbed-wire monkey.” Karen perceives her mother’s belittling as a purposeful action. She sees her father’s unresponsiveness as an unintentional inaction. Yet, she feels equally rejected by both parents. The intent doesn’t have to be purposeful for children to feel unloved and unappreciated. At issue here is the long-term effects of the message, even if the action seemed inconsequential at the time and even if there did not seem to be any damage to the child at the time.
Some people were lucky enough to begin to learn self-acceptance in childhood, but things didn’t go quite that well for many of us. What happened that made us experience rejection as a way of life? Let’s take a look at the kinds of rejection messages that touched us when we were children. Especially the subtle ones, because they’re the most insidious.
Parental Inaction
I want to emphasize again that many messages or acts of rejection or other abuse are more subtle than obvious. In fact, many are not acts at all, but rather inaction, inattention, or inaccessibility. Many are not intended to hurt, but the hurt can last a lifetime. For example, let’s look at the parent who treats the child as a second-class family member. One woman recalled how her mother only had time for her when her father wasn’t around. “She couldn’t even comfort me when he was around. She was always warning me, ‘Don’t disturb your father because he’s in bed, sick.’ (He was in bed alright—not sick, but very drunk.) I had to be so quiet that I learned to contract into a pinpoint, withdrawing from everybody and everything. I went invisible. I still do.”
Then there’s the parent who “turns off” to the child. Andrea tells about how her earliest memories of clothes shopping with her mother affected her for years. “We’d wander through the aisles, and Mom would pick out clothes for me to try on. If I didn’t agree with her choice of clothes for me, her face would turn off. She’d withdraw and turn her back to me. After a few very long minutes she’d say, ‘I don’t know why I even bother taking you shopping.’ Now I can see she was taking it personally, but back then I didn’t know that and I blamed myself. I wanted to say, ‘Mom, what’s wrong? What did I do wrong?’ It was like she thought I’d crossed her somehow. Now I’m afraid to disagree with people that I depend on for love. They might turn their backs on me. They might leave me. And I guess because I expect it to happen, it usually does.”
Sometimes parents emotionally “vacate the premises.” When they’re not there, children feel discounted—so they tell themselves they don’t count. When parents emotionally “disappear,” there is little or no emotional contact. They might disappear behind a newspaper or into slicing onions when a child is trying to talk to them. Or the disappearance can be into the fog of alcohol or drugs. Subtle rejection is extremely difficult for children to deal with. This lack of connection can cause as much or more psychological damage as verbal abuse. When a parent screams insults at a child it’s most certainly hurtful, but at least it is contact. When a parent emotionally “disappears,” the connection is severed.
There are a number of reasons why parents are “not there.” Frequently it’s because of substance abuse, depression, or emotional illness. Maybe they don’t know how to be “with” their children because their own parents weren’t very good models and rather than try and fail, they simply retreat into silence. Perhaps their own childhood fears of abandonment prompt the distance they create from their children. Fear keeps them from caring too much, investing too much love in the child. What if something happened to the child—like sickness or even death? They may be worrying so much that they are afraid to get close to the child. If something should happen, the loss would be too unbearable. By keeping emotional distance, they avoid these feelings and the possibility of pain. As Judith Viorst writes in Necessary Losses, “We cannot lose someone we care for if we don’t care.”
Children don’t understand any of this, they only know they need something from a father or mother who just isn’t there. When these children grow up, they are often attracted to people who can’t be there for them either. They re-create the same rejection scenario again and again. However, they can change this behavior by identifying its source.
The Psychological Effects of Abuse
Experts consider rejection messages especially abusive because they have potentially damaging long-term effects. Rejection is the common thread in every type of abuse—psychological, physical, and sexual. Physical and sexual abuse are easier to define because they are observable, concrete, and dramatic. Psychological maltreatment is more difficult to define because it seems so elusive.
It is difficult to determine where one type of abuse ends and another begins. Psychological maltreatment is embedded in all other forms of child maltreatment, and conveys “the message that the child is worthless, flawed, unloved, endangered, or only valuable in meeting someone else’s needs.”
Psychiatrist John Bowlby describes some detrimental patterns of parenting that he sees as contrary to the process of attachment. They include the following:
• One of both parents being persistently unresponsive to the child’s care—eliciting behavior or actively disparaging and rejecting
• Frequent discontinuities of parenting
• Persistent threats by parent not to love the child
• Threats by parent to abandon the family
• Threats by one or both parents to desert or kill the other or to commit suicide
• Inducing a child to feel guilty by claiming that his or her behavior is or will be responsible for the parent’s illness or death
Now let’s take an in-depth look at what constitutes psychological maltreatment.
Based on the work of Dr. Stuart N. Hart of the Office for the Study of the Psychological Rights of the Child and his task force, of which I was a member, the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children has categorized psychological maltreatment in the following ways:
• Spurning (hostile rejecting/degrading)—includes public humiliation, belittling, ridiculing, shaming, and consistently singling the child out for punishment or criticism
• Terrorizing—behavior that threatens to physically hurt, kill, abandon, or place the child or child’s loved ones in recognizably dangerous situations
• Isolating—consistently denying the child opportunities for interacting inside or outside the home (This includes confining the child or placing unreasonable limitations on the child’s freedom of movement)
• Exploiting/corrupting—encouraging child to develop self-destructive, antisocial, criminal, deviant, or other maladaptive behaviors (This includes micromanaging the child’s life, encouraging developmentally inappropriate drug-related or sexual behavior, or interfering with appropriate autonomy or cognitive development. It also includes using the child as a pawn in divorce proceedings.)
• Denying emotional responsiveness (ignoring)—includes ignoring a child’s attempts and needs to interact
• Unwarranted denial of mental health care, medical care, and education (neglect)—acts that ignore, refuse to allow, or fail to provide necessary treatment for the needs of the child
One or two isolated incidents are generally not considered psychological maltreatment. Rather it is extreme incidents or repeated patterns of psychological maltreatment that usually lead to long-term effects.
You may notice that rejection messages are represented by each category, and cover a vast range, from ignoring and invalidating the child to physical or sexual mistreatment. Teasing, cynicism, and sarcasm often have undertones of anger, and, whether intended or not, are heard as rejecting. Then there is verbal battering such as belittling, shaming, criticizing, or publicly humiliating the child. But rejection does not only spring from harsh words or actions. It is also present in demeaning looks or tones of voice.
Rejection messages are embedded in all types of abuse—physical, sexual, and psychological.
Rejection messages are difficult to lasso and define because they are often subtle and can’t be seen. For example, if we witness a child being beaten with a belt or spoon, we can imagine the pain the child experiences, maybe we can even see the welts. However, it is not so easy to envision what the child feels when he or she is being beaten with a psychological spoon. Unless, of course, you’ve been there yourself.
Acts of physical or sexual abuse are more obvious, so children find them easier to explain to themselves. Because emotional hurts are more insidious, it is harder to make sense out of them. It’s not the beating or the sexual abuse alone that causes long-term damage. It is the accompanying messages of rejection and betrayal that potentially travel with a child into adulthood. Physical bruises most often will heal; emotional bruises frequently do not.
So, in addition to experiencing physical or sexual abuse, the child also feels rejected, disregarded, and unprotected. Long-term emotional damage results when the child looks to someone for love and protection, and that person hurts and betrays them. As one woman who was sexually abused by her grandfather puts it, “If my own grandfather found me so expendable, won’t others? Now I understand why I’m so afraid of relationships: I’d rather be alone than discarded. At work I find myself being ultraresponsible so they can’t possibly think I’m expendable.”
My own research involved looking at the effects of perceived childhood rejection on the capacity for adult intimacy. Fifty-two couples reported whether or not they felt accepted or rejected by their primary caretaker between the ages of seven and twelve.
Interestingly, feeling rejected in the family did not necessarily lead to a lower capacity for intimacy. The mediating factor was what the children told themselves about the rejection and whether they developed low self-esteem and self-confidence, dependency, hostility, inability to express feelings, low tolerance for stress, and difficulty trusting the world as a secure and safe place. Some individuals seemed to be more resilient and didn’t develop these belief systems or long-term psychological effects. You’ll read more about how resiliency affects a child’s development in chapter 10.
Recognizing the messages of rejection and their possible consequences is an important first step when you are taking something personally. It allows you to begin to separate the “now” of the moment from the “then” of your early childhood experiences and to gain some objectivity about it. By getting down to the origins, by recognizing your core issues, by immersing yourself in those feelings for a while, you can learn from your experiences and begin to change old patterns. Sometimes we’re destined to repeat things until we get them right.
Learning to recognize early rejection messages allows you to separate the “then” from the “now” and to gain some perspective.
Hugh has been upset since the new owners took over at work. Now the rules have changed and there seem to be two sets, spoken and unspoken. It is especially confusing to him because that’s how it used to be in his family when he was a child. He had to keep guessing what people wanted from him, always worrying he would make a mistake or make the wrong choice. For example, he’d spend hours trying to figure out which chair to sit in. Just as he thought he had it figured out, his dad decided it was the wrong chair. Hugh’s punishment for guessing wrong was a fist to his face. If his dad forgot to take off his ring there would be a big gash next to Hugh’s eye.
Hugh recently made a mistake at work that a customer caught. The mistake could have been costly for the company and Hugh was distraught about screwing up. “I went into a complete panic mode. I made a mistake, I wasn’t good enough. What if I’m found out? I had a split second to see what the panic was about. There it was staring me in the face: ‘I’m alone here. I could be abandoned.’ Then I practiced what we talk about in sessions. I knew I had to get some distance from it, had to ‘walk alongside it’ and not drown in it.” In other words, Hugh was able to separate the “then” from the “now,” maintaining some objectivity.
Hugh and I explored together what the “then” was like—all the times he felt so overwhelmed as a child. Where did those feelings come from? He remembered, “If I did something my mom and dad didn’t like, I was afraid they would leave me; they wouldn’t come back home. If I made a mistake it meant I wasn’t good enough for them to come home to me.”
Hugh’s face took on a frightened look as he was remembering being seven years old. It was the fear of a seven year old, not an adult. He remembers how his parents went with his sister to run errands and left him to fend for himself. He was never sure if they planned to return. This memory is an important piece of information for Hugh. Now he can give himself some distance from such enormous feelings. He can “walk along beside himself.” He can ask himself, “How old am I feeling right now? What is familiar about this?” There may be just a split second of recognition but that’s all it takes to get some clarity and some distance. Observing gets the flow going and opens up space for choices.
Once he had begun to separate the “then” from the “now,” Hugh freed himself up from the usual overwhelming feelings. Now he can remind himself that he no longer has to feel the seven-year-old’s fear. A choice exists for him now, and he can put this childhood memory in perspective so it won’t take over with such force. He can be more in control of his feelings, instead of allowing his feelings to be in control of him. Hugh says, “I keep trying to find the magic switch that will turn off these old responses. But now I realize they will always be with me—except now I can be more in control of them.”
Walk alongside yourself. Observing gets the flow going and opens up the space to make choices.
The underlying rejection message that accompanies any abuse is powerful: “You are not valued, you are not respected, you are not loved.” Here are some of the all-too-frequent rejection messages heard in childhood. And these experiences can have considerable long-term effects, as this first example demonstrates.
“You’re Imagining It!” (Spurning)
The young black man on the TV talk show screamed in rage, “Are you trying to tell me I didn’t see what I saw or hear what I heard?” His words were directed at Los Angeles police officer Stacy Koons, after the trial in which Koons and three other Los Angeles policemen were acquitted of using excessive force in the infamous beating of Rodney King.
This man’s words offer a key to understanding why rioting occurred after this first trial but calm prevailed following the second. The first verdict discounted our perceptions of the beatings. The second jury looked at reality and validated it.
By acquitting the four policemen in the first trial, the jury was, in effect, saying, “You really didn’t see the beatings. It didn’t happen, you were imagining it.”
I began to realize the powerful effect of this invalidation when several of my private psychotherapy clients expressed shock and outrage when they learned of the acquittals. They reacted with the same intensity as the young black man on the TV talk show. This wasn’t just anger—this was rage. Remember that anger is related to “now” feelings, but rage usually comes from old feelings—childhood experiences that get triggered in the present.
I began to explore what experiences these economically comfortable clients shared with the rioters in South Central Los Angeles. What I concluded was that the jury’s “you’re imagining it” message felt like a slap in the face to my clients, reawakening feelings of injustice and betrayal.
The media pointed out how poverty, racism, and lack of opportunity contributed to the South Central rioting. For too long the people who rioted felt neglected, ignored, and forgotten by authorities. But this didn’t tell the whole story. What if these feelings reminded them of childhood experiences? Abusive messages from childhood, rekindled by the jury’s verdict, may have fueled the rage.
Similar rage was in evidence following the opening of the movie Boyz N the Hood, which was filmed in South Central L.A. It sparked disturbances there and other parts of the country. Some speculated that participants were identifying with the social and political conditions depicted on the screen. But there was another explanation: angry reaction to the graphic family scenes of psychological and physical abuse. As people watched the frustration of their lives on the big screen, rage took over and rioting occurred.
What if similar rageful feelings from childhood indignities were rekindled by the verdict of the jury? For my psychotherapy clients, the “not guilty” verdict felt like another betrayal by those in authority. A slap in the face. One more message of invalidation. In South Central Los Angeles the “not guilty” verdict led to rioting. Fifty-three people were killed; thousands of businesses were destroyed.
Parents frequently discount children’s feelings, telling them they are imagining something. “It didn’t happen.” “It wasn’t all that bad.” This can occur in benign situations when a parent responds to a child feeling upset by saying, “Don’t be silly,” or to a child’s bad dream by declaring, “You’re really not afraid.” Such messages are even more of a problem in secretive families.
Secrets are all too common in alcoholic or abusive families. Sometimes children become expendable to protect the family secret. If they try to tell someone, hoping for support, that person might respond, “You’re crazy! It really didn’t happen like that.” Someone might even blame the child: “It’s your fault, you could have stopped it.”
When children feel no one believes them they get confused. Is their perception real or are they are imagining it?
Many of my clients are still struggling with whether to believe their childhood abuse really happened. They tell themselves they must be imagining it, because that’s what someone once told them to believe. Abuse is a betrayal of trust. An abused child feels betrayed both by the abuser and by the parent who fails to provide protection. It’s baffling and frustrating when we want to trust the people who are telling us to distrust our own perceptions. This confusion affects the way we view the world and the people in it.
Then we begin to lose the ability to trust. Someone may “beat us up” in some way and then say he or she didn’t do it. We reel from the injustice. This is what happened after the acquittals in the first trial. The jury told us our perceptions didn’t count. We felt ignored, diminished, dismissed, invalidated. Some of us began to believe we didn’t count. Then we got angry, maybe even enraged.
Adults who feel helpless, disappointed, or betrayed may find the abused child within them acting out in a childlike way. When children can’t express pain or anger in words, they handle their anxiety in other ways. Some remain silent and withdrawn. Some act out their frustration and rage by calling attention to themselves. Some throw tantrums. Others trash their rooms. Some hurt smaller, weaker children or animals. Others light fires.
It was unsettling for many of us when the jury’s verdict questioned our perception of reality. In some, rage ignited and exploded. New feelings of helplessness and betrayal piled on old injustices. The man on the TV talk show screamed out his rage; it was more than he could bear. Maybe it was more than other residents of South Central could bear, as well. The fires and riots may have been their way of saying, “You want real? We’ll give you a good dose of reality!”
Feeling Discounted
Stephanie is tall and statuesque, giving an air of being in command of any situation. It is important to her that people see her this way. She recently confided to fellow students in her masters’ program that she was worried about passing a course. They were incredulous—“How can you of all people be worried?” Stephanie’s reaction surprised her—she was close to tears. They seemed to be discounting her feelings.
As we talked about it she began to understand how classmates had come to see her as the competent one, the one they could look up to. If Stephanie, “of all people,” worried about the exams, where does that leave the classmates? They needed her to be the competent one. That was supposed to be her role in class.
So what were those tears about? Stephanie’s role in her family of origin was to be the “little mother.” Her own mother felt overwhelmed with five small children to care for. So the family needed Stephanie to be the competent one. There was never any room for her to worry out loud. “I would lie in bed at night and worry secretly and silently about how I would deal with my huge responsibilities.”
“When I heard fellow students say, ‘How can you of all people be worried,’ I wanted to cry. But that’s hard for me to do; I was always told, ‘Big girls don’t cry.’ Crying out loud was never permissible for me.” When a few tears began to come she kept apologizing for crying in front of me. “No one knows how much effort I put into looking competent. How dare they say that I don’t have to worry. I worry all the time.”
If our impressions are discounted often, we learn to discount ourselves as well. Sometimes we begin to doubt our own perceptions and stop trusting ourselves. I was recently invited to a fifties party and started reminiscing about a felt circle skirt I had owned in junior high school. Back then I couldn’t afford a poodle skirt, so I went to several stores to get ideas. Then I bought an inexpensive, plain felt skirt (pink, of course) and made a wonderful fluffy gray poodle to stitch onto it. I made little individual loops of gray yarn for the ears, chest, and tail. Then I made a rhinestone collar and gold leash. I was really proud of that skirt—it looked as good as the ones in the stores.
I wasn’t prepared for what happened next. My aunt asked me where I bought the poodle skirt because she wanted to buy one for my cousin. When I told her I made the poodle, she told me I was lying, that I couldn’t possibly have made it. I got really confused. I actually began to doubt if I did indeed make the poodle. After all, she spoke with so much authority when she told me I was lying that I believed her.
Over the years, I’d continue to distrust my impressions of things. There were times I was at a play I didn’t especially like, and I’d overhear someone during intermission talk about how terrific the play was. I’d immediately figure I was wrong and they were right.
Do you ever remember when you were little, going up to your mother or father when they looked upset, and asking, “Are you sad?” Did your mother or father quickly tell you, “No, I’m just thinking about something.” You’re pretty sure you saw a sad look on their face, but they were telling you, “You’re imagining it.”
I grew up getting confused about things like that. I began not to trust my intuition. I began not to trust my feelings. I began to regard my own senses as unreliable guides. I no longer could trust myself. I didn’t know what was real; I hardly dared to ask. If I risked stating how I felt, my father would respond, “You must be kidding.” I perceived the underlying message to be, “Are you crazy?”
Sometimes when I asked questions I was given whatever information was handy at the time, whether it was true or not. I felt I was a bother for being inquisitive. (Years later, I had a supervisor who would give me misinformation when he didn’t know the answer to something because he didn’t want to ask his superior. I overreacted and blew up at him. Yes, I took it personally.)
When your feelings and perceptions are being discounted in so many ways, it is hard to be true to yourself, so in effect you abandon yourself. Some children not only abandon themselves, but they grow up fearing abandonment as well.
“I’m Disappointed in You” (Spurning)
Disappointed is such a loaded word. When children hear it, they most likely interpret it to mean that they are disappointing to someone. Especially if they have grown up hearing messages like “You’re no good,” or “You’re not good enough.”
In chapter 3 you read about expectations and disappointments. Often if we feel disappointed by someone’s actions it is because our expectations are too unrealistic. And when we get our feelings hurt because we are disappointed, we often turn around and hurt the other person’s feelings by letting them know we’re disappointed in them.
When parents are overly critical or push for perfectionism, they frequently get disappointed. How can they not be? Their expectations are so high. So their children come to think of themselves as big disappointments. They do a perfect job at thinking of themselves as imperfect.
What about the dyslexic child or one with attention problems—especially those who went through school without being identified or offered help? Think of the amount of criticism and disdain they had to endure because no one bothered to find out why they were different from the other students. “Pay attention. Stop daydreaming. What’s wrong with you?” my teachers would say. The rejection messages were powerful, the damage great.
Some parents hurled words, others hurled objects. But the message was the same: “You’re worthless.” Name-calling, put-downs, and belittling are all rejecting behaviors. One client was constantly told as a child, “Talking to you is like talking to thin air.” In spite of the seemingly nonmenacing quality of this statement, there’s a devaluing underlying message here. He recalls, “Being compared to thin air made me feel like I didn’t exist. I still don’t feel like a very substantial person.”
Frequently children are told they are loved on condition they “get good grades,” “dress acceptably,” “don’t show their feelings,” “don’t rock the boat.” Conditional love robs children of who they are. One woman says, “I had to scramble to be what they wanted me to be. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I guess I rejected myself in the process.”
Another form of spurning is the “why can’t you be more like your sister?” (or brother or cousin) complaint. Comparisons like this are invalidating, and the children on the receiving end of these comments grow up expecting to come up short. They feel they don’t count. Annie realized how extreme feelings of inadequacy stem from her parents’ frequent comparisons of her to a cousin who was a math whiz or to her brother who was always a good little boy. Annie was never appreciated for Annie kinds of things—her poetry, her spunk, her energy. She loses sight of her strengths and continues to see herself as inferior, comparing herself to everyone around her.
Sometimes siblings are not just compared to each other; one child may be more or less disowned when the other comes along. For example, Patty was the firstborn child, but she happened to be born a girl when her father had his heart set on a boy. They spent a lot of time together when she was little. They went fishing, played ball, and he even bought her an electric train. Then a brother was born when she was six years old. Her father began to turn all his attention to the boy. Patty felt ignored. “I was dethroned,” she said. My brother became king. She recently rummaged through old snapshots and found many pictures of herself—they were all taken before she was six years old. From then on the camera was pointed in her brother’s direction.
“If You Don’t Behave I’m Going to Leave You in the Store” (Terrorizing)
This particular threat can be extremely frightening for a child. When you were a kid, did you have visions of roaming the aisles of a department store alone forever and ever, surrounded by rack after rack of clothing, every adult’s knees looking more or less the same from where you stood?
Equally terrorizing is threatening to send a child “to live with Aunt Sally,” or warning, “I can’t stand you anymore, so I’m leaving you home alone.” These are common threats but they can lead to fears of abandonment. Harvey’s mother threatened to leave him so many times, he began to see himself as “discardable.” In fact, he kept a little cardboard suitcase under his bed—packed with his favorite things. When his mother drank too much and threatened to leave the children, Harvey didn’t want to get left behind, so he was all packed and ready to go.
My parents used to tell me they’d send me away to stay with my strict aunt if I wasn’t good. “She’ll teach you some manners,” they often said. Then one summer it wasn’t just a threat anymore—they did just that. I remember spending what seemed like a month at her house, but my cousins tell me it was more like a week. Well, it was a very long week for me. I didn’t know when, or if, I would see my parents again. I felt abandoned.
Another form of threatening abandonment is telling a child, “That would kill your mother,” or “You’ll be the death of me yet.” I used to hear these words all the time. Then, as my mother was leaving to go to the airport, I screamed, “I hate you, I wish you were dead.” The plane crashed, and I never saw her again. Many other people have had a similar experience of feeling their words or “bad” behavior led to a loved one’s death. I used to think I was the only one with that kind of awful power. A child who has had this experience comes to believe he or she is so wrong or so bad as to be able to destroy the very people he or she loves and depends on. Some parents may even threaten to kill themselves. Suicide is the ultimate abandonment, don’t you think? How do children explain that to themselves?
When children are hospitalized, they often feel abandoned by their parents. Since small children have a different perception of time than adults, their stay in the hospital may seem never ending. Days may seem like weeks and weeks like months. Forty years ago, Ronald went into the hospital for a hernia operation. His parents didn’t explain anything about his stay there. The days seemed to go on forever and he only saw his parents a couple of times. It felt as if his parents had left him there, maybe never to return. Fears of abandonment have been with him his whole life. He recently asked his mother for the story about his hospitalization. It turns out he was only there a few days—not the weeks and weeks he remembered. The doctors had advised his parents not to visit very often because he cried so much when they were about to leave. And what did Ronald take home with him? Forty years worth of abandonment fears.
“Go to Your Room—You Don’t Deserve to Eat Dinner with Us” (Isolating, Terrorizing)
Sending children to their rooms for long periods of time as punishment is another form of rejection. This is isolation. The message might be interpreted to mean, “You’re not fit to spend time with the rest of the family.”
Did you get ever sent to your room? Do you remember how you felt when you sat alone in your room for long periods of time? Do you remember how it felt to not be part of your family?
When children are sent to their rooms, they often go in shame. They said or did something “badly” and feel “badly” about themselves. Their room becomes a place of shameful memories, and this feeling can follow them into their adult years. Punishments can be even more isolating and take on a terrorizing effect when children are sent to bathrooms or to closets for long periods of time. Many of my clients recall the long hours spent shut up in those small spaces.
But some children manage to derive some comfort from these experiences, which follows them into their adult lives. One women was locked for hours at a time in the small upstairs bathroom. She remembers climbing up on the toilet seat, looking out the window, studying the trees, shrubs, plants on the property. Later, she would try to identify them from books. She would wander the neighborhood, making friends with the gardeners. Ever since she was a child, plants have been a source of comfort to her; she even married a landscape architect.
Many children who were confined in closets or other small spaces often develop troublesome fears as adults, fears that limit their daily functioning. In addition, these confinements sometimes meant urinating or defecating on themselves, which added to the shame. But some clients report closet memories that also include small comforts as well—the smell of leather, the feel of fur. Now, as adults, many of these people choose to return to closets when they are upset. But when they do this, they often experience a confusing combination of shame and comfort.
This confusion can lead them to seek out convoluted relationships. They may come to expect that a comforting relationship isn’t complete unless it’s accompanied by shame. So they choose unsuitable, often abusive partners or friends. They may not trust the intentions of a caring person who provides comfort to them. After all, where’s the shame that’s supposed to accompany the comfort? Then they might even sabotage the caring and comfort because they’re uncomfortable with it and end up tossing away a pretty decent relationship. If enough relationships get tossed away, they might find themselves isolated from other people, perpetuating the familiar feelings of childhood.
Another form of isolating is to prevent a child from having contact with other children or adults outside the home. This frequently happens in alcoholic or abusive homes to protect the family secret. In Ruthie’s case her parents were so afraid of what others would think about how they lived, that they cut off all social contacts. Ruthie’s only contact with other children was at school. She wasn’t allowed to ask friends over, nor was she allowed to go to the homes of schoolmates. She was refused permission to take Saturday art classes or to go swimming at the local pool. Ruthie was a lonely little girl.
“Hit a Home Run for Me!” (Exploiting)
When parents try to live their lives vicariously through their children, it is a form of exploitation. These parents have some confusion about personal boundaries, they don’t know where they stop and where someone else begins. (More about boundaries in chapter 11.) Vicariousness is often a form of coercion. Children often feel pushed beyond their comfortable limits, but are afraid to say “no” to a parent.
Vicarious parents encourage their children to meet their own unmet goals—vocationally, religiously, or romantically. Or they urge the children to live out their own unfulfilled dreams by being the “performer” the parents never quite became—in school, on the stage, on the playing field.
These parents see their children’s performance in life as a reflection of their own competence. If the children do well, the parents feel like good parents, successful parents. If the children fall below expectations, the parents feel inadequate and shamed. Then the children are often made to feel inadequate and shamed. The children may lose their sense of self, trading “self” for service to the parents.
The children may discover that being in the spotlight is a very lonely place. Bruce recalls how he used to do okay at baseball practice, but he would freeze at bat when his dad showed up at games and yelled out, “Hit a home run for me!” Bruce shudders at remembering the humiliation he felt knowing his dad was up there in the stands, feeling embarrassed that his son would freeze.
What about when parents don’t even show up at games or meets? One man recalls, “Dad kept reminding me what an expensive glove he bought for me, but never once came to see me play.” One client was a championship high-school swimmer whose parents never came to see her compete. The only adult support she got was from her coach. She was so desperate for his attention that she responded to his sexual attention too.
Jay North, the actor who played Dennis in the TV series, Dennis the Menace, described how his aunt behaved when she would accompany him to the set. “She demanded perfection. Everything had to be perfect, and the harder I tried, the more she’d expect of me. It was just such a pressure cooker. Everybody else would congratulate me, and say, ‘Good job, good job,’ and she’d shout, ‘You didn’t play the scene right,’ and slap me across the face.”
I’m familiar with stage moms, too. My mom wanted each of her children to be the star she never became, so she put my brother, Lee, and me in the spotlight from the time we were young. There was always pressure to do poems or skits in front of relatives. My first memory of big-time stardom was when I got a phone call from the Washington Post on my fifth or sixth birthday. The caller informed me that I had just won a contest for writing a poem about a new comic strip, “The Saint.” You’d think I would have been excited, except for one thing—I didn’t write the poem. My mother wrote it without telling me. I wonder how hard it was for her to write like a six year old. I remember night after night having to rehearse that poem because I was going to be lucky enough to get to read it over the radio. It will be committed to my memory forever:
I like to read the Post each day
To see what The Saint has to say.
His deeds and actions thrill me most,
That’s why I like to read the Post.
How could I ever forget those words? They were drilled into my head. Day after day. Some serious drilling took place during the long streetcar ride across town to the radio station. But I did forget them. Unfortunately I was on the air at the time. I got nervous at the radio station surrounded by all the equipment and microphones. There I was, scared to death, pretending I wrote the poem and I messed up of course. My parents were embarrassed. I felt like I’d let them down. This same scenario replayed many times following dance recitals and plays. Each time I’d see that disappointed look on my mother’s face. I came to believe that no matter how hard I tried, it would never be good enough. The critical voice would be waiting in the wings, “You made a mistake, you can do better.”
I can remember the first time I felt differently about performing. I was on a plane to New York, on my way to tape my first network talk show. I decided during the flight that even though there would be a lot of other TV opportunities, this would be a special experience. Anything that followed would never be quite the same again. I said to myself, “Just enjoy it.” And I did. There was no critical voice this time. I think I banished it, expelled it, ousted it. In fact, I rejected it!
“I Know I Can Count on You to be Mama’s Little Helper” (Exploiting)
Another form of exploiting is robbing children of their childhood by expecting them to care for younger siblings, take over household tasks, or take care of the parents’ needs. These children are parentified—there is no room to be children because they are expected to function as adults. Their childhood is invalidated. Their sense of importance hinges on their ability to anticipate the needs of others. This is often the only positive self-concept they develop. Because this is where they get their validation, they continue to take care of others in their adult relationships. “I’ve always been an over-giver,” says one woman. “It feels like caring run amok.” You may recognize this behavior as codependency.
Some children get validation by filling specific roles in their families. For example, the role of the “go-between.” Sometimes the child acts as an intermediary between the parents and the outside world or between the parents and the other siblings. Sometimes the child runs messages between both of the parents. Molly was one of these children. Her parents were constantly complaining to each other and using Molly to carry the messages. Recalling the expectations of her role, she used clay in therapy to make a form representing her image of herself as a child. She formed the green clay into a smooth, perfect ball. She recounts, “I felt I was a ball, rolling from one family member to another. There was no room for my own needs to get met. I just got lost.” Now she sees how these experiences affect two areas of her life: She has a great fear of losing her sense of self if she lets herself get too involved in a romantic relationship, so she keeps her distance. And she frequently finds herself in trouble with her friends by carrying messages from one to the other. Not only does she feel used and exploited, but later they blame her for the consequences.
A more subtle form of exploitation is making a child feel incompetent so the parent can feel more useful. “My mom seemed to be waiting for me to mess up so she could step in and rescue me,” remembers Georgia. “Sometimes she’d ask me to do chores around the house that were too difficult for me. Then she’d step in and show me ‘how to do it better.” The mother told herself she was being a good role model for Georgia, but in fact, what she was modeling was how to step in and take over. Georgia did the same when she grew up, taking over for her husband, then chiding him for being “helpless.”
“Don’t Bother Me, Can’t You See I’m Busy?” (Ignoring)
Sometimes parents are emotionally unavailable. They are there but not there. Often the parent is either too busy with work or too involved with their addiction, whatever it might be. For example, there is the alcoholic parent who disappears by pulling down the emotional shade—vanishing behind a bottle or into intoxicated sleep. Children can’t figure out where the parent went. They don’t understand why the parent doesn’t want to be with them. They feel rejected and abandoned. One woman recalls how “the alcohol was more important than me—Dad always chose the bottle. Every night he’d pass out—and abandon me. I wish with all my heart that someone would have reassured me, ‘It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.’”
It’s hard making sense of the pain that comes from having emotionally unavailable parents. Patsy expresses the anguish she used to feel when her parents “disappeared” after dinner. “My mom would get lost in a novel. My dad evaporated into a bottle of wine. They just weren’t available to me when I needed some attention. It was as if I did not exist.” As an only child, she was on her own. So she would climb the stairs to her room and close the door. Then she would repeatedly punch herself on the arm. Hard. Why did she do that to herself? Looking back, she says, “Emotional abuse is so slippery. The pain made it seem more real.”
“You’re Not Really Sick—You Just Want Attention” (Neglecting Physical or Mental Health)
When I’m assessing whether or not neglect may have occurred, I ask, “When you were sick, did someone take care of you?” Often the answer is “no.” Sometimes taking care of a sick child interferes with parents’ other obligations such as work or school. Sometimes, a child needs medical attention or medication and doesn’t get it. Sometimes a child needs psychological support and no one pays heed. Sometimes a child needs educational help and no one responds. This is neglect.
“You Deserve to Get Hit” (Spurning, Terrorizing)
Physical abuse is painful, demeaning, and humiliating. But it is not only the physical pain that causes the damage, it is the emotional pain as well. Abuse of any kind is a message of rejection and betrayal. The pain doesn’t stop when the welts or bruises heal, it continues into adulthood. There is another aspect to beatings that deserves some attention here: Frequently there is a sexual component to administering a beating, especially if the child has to drop his or her pants or disrobe. And sometimes there may even be sexual pleasure for the person administering the beating.
“Don’t Tell Anyone I Touched You; It Has to be Our Secret” (Hostile Rejecting/Degrading, Terrorizing, Isolating, Exploiting, Corrupting)
There is no question that inappropriate sexual behavior is damaging to a child, but there is also a message of rejection that accompanies it. Forcing a child to perform adult sexual acts or not protecting the child from sexual abuse is exploitation of and emotional disregard of the child. For example, if a little girl is exploited by an adult male, her femaleness is invalidated, her childhood is invalidated, and she is invalidated as a human being on this earth. The long-term emotional scars of this abuse are not only from the sexual acts but from the rejection of the self that occurs as well.
Matters are complicated by another type of rejection: betrayal. Lack of protection by the nonabusing adult is confusing for the child. The child doesn’t know how to explain such a travesty and asks him or herself, “How could the adult not have known?” “Why didn’t he or she protect me?” “If my parents really have ‘eyes in the back of their heads’ as they always tell me, then why didn’t they see this happening?”
The feelings of powerlessness become even more overwhelming because the child feels isolated and alone in the midst of this huge secret that must be kept at any cost. All too often, children believe the cost would be their life if they tell.
Identify Your Childhood Messages
The bottom line here is that the core messages of any type of abuse are life or death messages. Yes, they really are. Consider for a moment how this can be so. Messages of invalidation are messages of nonexistence. Messages of abandonment call up fears for children that they can’t exist without the caretaking of the parent. Messages accompanying physical or sexual abuse can be especially threatening. In a child’s eyes, it’s often a very scary world out there.
If you want to try to identify old family messages you received (and may still believe) ask yourself questions like these:
In order to survive I had to or would happen.
In order to survive I had to be or would happen.
In order to survive I had to do or would happen.
In order to survive I couldn’t or would happen.
You may notice how some of these beliefs have followed you into adulthood. But they often didn’t start with you or even with your parents; some of them may go back a hundred years or more. In the next chapter we’ll take a look at how messages and beliefs are transmitted from generation to generation, and how the cycle can be stopped.