Читать книгу Some Assembly Required - Dan Mager - Страница 12
Оглавление“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal
with the intent of throwing it at someone else;
you are the one who gets burned.”
THE BUDDHA
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Past experiences, especially those from childhood, are legacies that can leave lasting imprints upon us. The messages we receive growing up in our family of origin, neighborhood, and community cast long shadows over how we learned to relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world. As a result, my fundamental patterns of thinking, expressing emotion, decision-making, and behaving were established long before the onset of my active addiction.
The images are seared into my memory with crystal clarity, though everything floats in shades of gray. Even beyond the black-and-white television broadcast, the entire tableau was monochromatic like the all too common metropolitan New York day where the overcast is so thick you can feel the gloominess and the weight of the air on your skin. Although I was focused on the screen, I was also intently watching my mother watching and reacting in real time as the horse-drawn caisson bearing the body of the thirty-fifth president of the United States made its excruciatingly slow march as the centerpiece of the funeral procession.
The clip-clop of the horses’ hooves on the street surface seemed to echo off the walls of our living room. Although I could figure out from the overall aesthetic that this was a somber occasion, through observing my mother I began to sense how immense and tragic an event this was. Her sobbing filled the entire house, filling my small world. I hesitantly asked questions in an attempt to better understand what I was witnessing on TV and in the room, but even though she was there, she really wasn’t. Under her crying, she just kept repeating to no one in particular, “He was such a great man,” over and over like some sort of mantra. Indeed, as I would come to learn, John F. Kennedy (for all of the flaws and self-indulgences that would be revealed many years later) was a figure of remarkable promise and possibility.
My mother’s sadness engulfed me as my attention shifted back and forth between the pictures on the TV screen and her responses to them. I don’t know how long the television coverage of the funeral lasted, but it seemed to go on for days. Everything else faded away and I became so present-centered that I entered a state of trance, a state that would later become very familiar to me. If I listen closely, I can still hear the sound of horse hooves on concrete.
The assassination of JFK was a national trauma that became fused into the emotional DNA of America. His death would come to represent, not only a loss of national innocence, but also the death of a collective sense of unlimited potential. Of course I had no real sense of any of this at the time, but somehow, at least as far as the weight of the moment, I got it. Another aspect of my experience of that dreary yet mesmerizing day that would become familiar to me was that, emotionally, I was on my own.
It was late November 1963, and I was four-and-a-half years old. By this time, my younger brother was nearly three, and the older of my two younger sisters was almost eight months old. My youngest sister would be born four months later, just 360 days separating the two of them. Doing the math reveals that I am the oldest of four children born to my parents in less than six years. As my father would delight in saying to anyone who expressed interest in this peculiar form of family planning, “We held at two pair and yielded to a full house!”
My parents didn’t believe in wasting time. When they announced to their own families that they were getting married all of six weeks after they first met, my maternal grandmother asked the obvious question, “Do they have to?” As the family narrative has it, they weren’t pregnant, it was simply a love-at-first-sight whirlwind courtship that enveloped them in its inevitability: they knew. My parents have always insisted that all of their children were fully planned. Every family has its mythology.
The very first indication that I had a potential predisposition to using drugs came when I was two years old. When my father returned home from work each evening, his ritual included a glass of Scotch. As the story goes, according to both my parents, even at this tender age, I displayed an obvious attraction to the alcohol—reaching for his Scotch and wanting to taste it myself.
This occurred on a nightly basis for some time and became increasingly annoying. My father was impressed by my persistence, and ultimately determined that one taste would be aversive enough to cure me of my interest. So, with my mother’s reluctant consent, he allowed me a sip. To their complete astonishment, as they both report it (it has always been a rare occurrence—kind of like a solar eclipse—when the two of them remember the same incident exactly the same way), my verbatim response was as follows: “Hot . . . burn . . . good . . . more!” That might have been a clue.
My father was a workaholic who regularly got home long after the rest of the family had eaten dinner. As a manufacturer’s representative in the furniture industry, he worked on commission and was effectively self-employed. His work days were spent driving throughout the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area to see customers, and when he wasn’t on the road, he was often in his office at our home in Oyster Bay on the north shore of Nassau County about thirty miles east of Manhattan. Even in the mid-1960s, we had two phone lines; one was the regular home phone and the other was for my father’s business. When the business phone rang, answering it became the highest priority; everything else took a backseat until whatever business needed to be conducted was complete. Early on, my siblings and I were instructed how to take proper professional business messages in my father’s absence.
Growing up during the Great Depression had left an indelible mark on my father’s persona. He was a successful self-made man who did everything he could to outrun the memories of the relative poverty he experienced in his family of origin, living in an apartment over a movie theatre in Cedarhurst on Long Island’s south shore. His father had died when my father was seventeen and he saw it as his responsibility to drill the importance of personal responsibility into his children.
Materially, we always had what we needed, but anything we wanted beyond my father’s definition of “necessary” involved doing extra chores to make the money to pay for it. When I was eleven and wanted my first pair of high quality leather basketball sneakers, I had to earn the money to pay the difference between the $9.00 cost of canvas Converse and the $16.00 Adidas Superstars that I coveted (at the time, only Adidas and Puma made high-end hoops shoes).
My mother grew up in the itty-bitty town of Oxford in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania, about ninety minutes southwest of Philadelphia and in close proximity to Kennett Square, the self-titled “mushroom capital of the world.” It was the epitome of small town life in Middle America where everyone knew everyone, and the Police Department, as my father described it, was a “hellava nice guy.” My mother’s otherwise typical upbringing contained the bizarre experience of sleeping in a crib from the time she was an infant until the age of seven. As she would joke, who knows how long she might have been stuck in that crib if her younger sister hadn’t come along seven years to the day after my mother was born to supplant her.
Stay-at-home moms were the norm, and with the four of us my mother had a very full-time gig. She was a combination homemaker and chauffeur, shuttling us around to a wide array of activities in the family station wagon. Still, during my childhood it wasn’t unusual for my mother to spend hours at a time in bed grappling with her own chronic pain and/or resting, with the aid of prescription painkillers and tranquillizers.
Ours was a liberal, progressive Jewish family, where great trust was placed in the omniscience of the medical establishment, education was prized, expectations for academic achievement and athletic performance were sky-high and without respite, and guilt was wielded like a weapon. My father routinely drilled me and my brother and sisters in various forms of mental gymnastics. When we were all together, these experiences often resembled group interviews and included all manner of subjects. The ability to respond intelligently and articulately was applauded, with extra credit given for the clever deployment of puns and double entendres. These exercises proved an excellent and occasionally ego-deflating training ground for cognitive quickness and verbal alacrity. Often they contained elements of fun, but they were nonetheless competitions and we all played to win.
Regardless of what’s presented to the outside world, every family has challenges; its own gestalt of craziness and dysfunction on a continuum that can range from the stuff of nightmares and flashbacks to normative hurts that can still cut deeply and leave nasty scars. To paraphrase a comedian I’ve known personally since my adolescence: normal families are families we simply don’t know that well.
Mine was a normal dysfunctional family. The too-close-for-comfort birth sequencing among my siblings and I made for limited psychological space to accommodate competing developmental needs, creating an extremely intense and emotionally crowded environment. There was nothing approximating the sorts of horrific, post-traumatic stress-inducing abuse that children in too many families are subjected to. Just the more usual wounds to the spirit so common in many families where parents are doing the best they can with what they have at any given moment.
Corporal punishment was a primary parenting option when I was growing up, and it was employed intermittently in our family. After getting slapped across the face for one willful indiscretion or another I found it hard to not cry. Sometimes there was a time delay after I got hit, and it was only after I thought about being smacked in the face that tears appeared. From a very young age I had a rudimentary awareness that I wasn’t crying because it hurt physically; it was about the emotional injury. Those slaps to the face somehow represented a diminution of me as a person—it was a serrated affront to my psyche, and that hurt seemed bottomless.
By early elementary school, unconsciously, I had already begun to practice the art of living a double life. At home I was an oppositional-defiant hellion. Fueled by a reservoir of anger, I broke or just ignored most of the rules my parents tried to establish. And yet, whenever I went to a friend’s house to visit or for a sleepover, the hosting parents would report what a polite and well-behaved child I was, leaving my own parents wondering, “Who the hell are they talking about? They must have Danny confused with someone else!” This occurred time and again. Occasionally my parents would express their frustration and confusion aloud to me, though neither they nor I had any answers.
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Family systems theory views families in their entirety as an organism. Families form systems or entities that are much more than the individuals who comprise them. Every family has its own rhythm and flow, and family members develop particular ways of acting and reacting with each other and with the outside world. These specific patterns of interaction between family members give each family system a particular equilibrium and style related to such areas as expectations (spoken and unspoken); how feelings are expressed (or not); how conflict is managed (or avoided); how family issues are communicated in the world outside the family system; and what roles and responsibilities family members are assigned—consciously and unconsciously. These dynamics shape the personality styles and behaviors of each family member.
Change in any part of the system creates ripple-effect changes in all parts of the system. Think of a mobile hanging from the ceiling in a child’s room: when one part moves, all of the other parts move in response to it. When one family member is overly responsible and controlling, this shapes the behaviors of other family members. They typically respond by becoming somewhat less responsible. The equilibrium of the family system shifts as each member changes and adjusts accordingly. When a parent struggles with chronic pain (or addiction or any other serious chronic condition), his or her parenting is affected.
Virgina Satir was a social worker and psychotherapist who was a seminal figure in the developing field of family therapy in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her original work regarding family roles was adapted by Claudia Black and Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse in the 1980s to describe the roles taken on by children in dysfunctional family systems. The framework they developed applies to many families, but especially those wrestling with momentous challenges such as addiction, trauma, physical and/or emotional violence, depression and other forms of psychiatric illness, physical and developmental disabilities, and chronic pain or serious physical illness.
These roles and their related behaviors represent unconscious psychological survival strategies that children use in order to cope with the stresses within their family. While each child in the family generally assumes a primary role, the roles themselves are far from set in cement. Family members can take on aspects of different roles, or migrate from one role to another over time and psychosocial stage of development. These roles are attempts to bring greater consistency, structure, and emotional safety into family systems that are experienced as unpredictable, chaotic, or frightening. They include, Hero, Lost Child, Mascot, and Scapegoat.
The Hero is the hyper-responsible child present in virtually every dysfunctional family. Usually, though not always, the hero is the oldest child. Children who assume this role are high achievers, getting excellent grades in school and excelling in sports and/or other extracurricular activities. Their behavior is exemplary—they comply with the rules and provide a model that parents, teachers, and coaches wish others would follow. Accordingly, the Hero elicits outsized approval and praise from both parents and outsiders. The family Hero reduces tension in the family simply by doing everything “right” and deflecting attention away from the family’s challenges.
The Lost Child generally comes from the middle of the birth order, surrounded by older and younger siblings. This role is defined by the absence of a distinct role within the family system. Lost children avoid bringing attention to themselves, preferring to stay below the family radar. They often isolate, withdrawing from family and social activities to escape, and tend to distance themselves emotionally through immersion in television, computers, video games, or reading. Family members tend not to worry much about this child because he or she is quiet and appears content. As a result, it’s not unusual for family members not to notice that the child isn’t participating and seems withdrawn or even depressed.
The Mascot is almost always one of the youngest children in the family, and most frequently is the youngest. The Mascot’s function is to be cute and humorous. By being cute, adorable, and/or funny they protect themselves from negative attention and distract others from the stress and dysfunction in the family. Since the Mascot tends to be the youngest, the family usually views the child with that role as the most fragile and vulnerable, and tends to be especially protective toward him or her.
The Scapegoat role is usually adopted by a middle child, often the second oldest. The Scapegoat is the antithesis of the Hero; the designated black sheep of the family. Who did it (whatever “it” is)? Chances are, it was the family Scapegoat. And chances are even better that the Scapegoat will be blamed for it, even if he or she didn’t do it. The Scapegoat’s role is to divert attention away from family’s systemic dysfunction by acting out in ways that draw significant negative attention to him or her individually. In doing so, the Scapegoat unconsciously concretizes the family’s problems and accepts the blame for them, while simultaneously giving expression to the family’s frustration and upset.
The Scapegoat’s acting out can take manifold forms, such as marked oppositionalism and rebelliousness against authority at home, in school, and/or in the community; poor academic performance; aggressive or violent behavior; and involvement in thrill-seeking or other high-risk and potentially self-destructive activities. Not surprisingly, the Scapegoat is the child most likely to have problems related to truancy, school suspensions or expulsions, arrests, sexual promiscuity, teen pregnancy, and substance use/abuse. Usually, the Scapegoat’s angry, defiant, “Fuck you, I don’t give a shit” outward appearance masks considerable pain. This child is frequently the most emotional and sensitive, though he or she has learned to fend off inadequacy, hurt, and rejection by employing defense mechanisms that keep these feelings of vulnerability at a safer distance.
There was never any competition for the role of Scapegoat in my family—I monopolized that designation. I was the “bad” kid. The two literal messages from my parents that resonated the loudest throughout my childhood were, “You’re not living up to your potential,” and “It’s your responsibility to be a good role model for your brother and sisters.” On their face, these messages were neither problematic nor unhealthy. They reflected my parents’ concern and sincere desire for me to excel and to be the best person I could be. But they also reinforced the pressure of certain unrelenting expectations and the assessment that I was failing to meet them.
The impact of words is always influenced by the accompanying nonverbal cues of facial expression, tone of voice, and body language. The emotional tone with which such messages are communicated makes a massive difference in the meanings they convey. The emotional tone of the above messages to me was sometimes of frustration or anger, but always of disappointment. The effect was shaming, and the embedded meanings I internalized were that I wasn’t good enough and that I wasn’t enough.
From an early age, I exhibited a hyper-sensitivity to emotions. I experienced feelings such as hurt, sadness, guilt, shame, and anger with heightened acuity, seemingly more rapidly and deeply than most other people. This set off a tuning-fork-like reactivity and a long-term affair with anger. Anger was like an ever-present low-lying fog limiting my visibility. From the time I began to experience that the world sometimes ignored my desires and perceived needs, anger was always there for me—convincing me that I was getting screwed, fueling my self-righteous emotional escalation and acting out. During my MSW program I would learn that in children and adolescents, pervasive anger is often a symptom of depression.
In sixth grade CYO basketball (though Jewish, I played in a Catholic Youth Organization league because that’s where the best competition was), my coach put into words something that I already knew well: “The best defense is a good offense; if we have the ball, they cannot score!” This described the essence of my approach, not only to basketball and other sports, but also to coping with all manner of uncomfortable emotions and situations. In terms of emotions and their expression, anger is the most potent embodiment of “the best defense is a good offense.”
In the vast majority of circumstances, anger is a secondary emotion, forming almost immediately and automatically in response to someone or something that brings up feelings of hurt, fear, shame, and inadequacy or of not being good-enough. These primary emotions made me feel weak and vulnerable—self-perceptions that were intolerable to me as a child. I used anger as a defense against them, a shield that deflected them and gave me power. Anger like this serves two important psychological purposes: it provides a sense of control when one is desperately needed, and it directs our focus outward, providing identifiable, external others, indeed, scapegoats, to blame.
Displacement is a defense mechanism that unconsciously transfers unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or desires from a psychologically unsafe object to a more acceptable, less threatening substitute. A classic example is the man who is angry at his boss and cannot express it directly so he comes home and kicks the family dog or yells at his wife and kids. When we cannot confront the real sources of our anger, hurt, fear, and pain because they hold power over us, we tend to take it out on someone who is weaker and effectively “safer.” Children engage in displacement when it is too anxiety-provoking to consciously acknowledge and express upset at parents and other caregivers they are dependent upon for their survival needs. Instead, they tease the cat, bully someone at school, or lash out at younger siblings.
Although there were many times when we had fun and played together, my brother and sisters were safe objects onto which my anger was regularly displaced. I treated them so badly. I could be mean to the point of cruelty. I’d call them names and put them down verbally. Occasionally I’d hit them, usually in the big muscles of the biceps and thighs, giving them “dead” arms and legs. While the physical abuse I perpetrated was sporadic, to them the implied threat of it was constant, and the emotional abuse ongoing. I’ve come to learn that when we were left alone at home they consistently felt unsafe, because of me. It wasn’t unusual for them to lock themselves behind closed doors, hoping I wouldn’t find a way to break in, though often I did.
My anger was generalized and free-floating, always searching for concrete targets to latch onto. Most of the time I wasn’t consciously aware of how angry I was, or even what it was that I was angry about. And during our formative years, my siblings bore the brunt of it as I terrorized them. A vicious circle ensued wherein my parents would get angry at my behavior and punish me, and I’d feel that much more rejected and angry, taking it out on my brother and sisters, which only elicited more anger from my parents. As absorbed as I was in acting out my anger, there was no space left for me to appreciate that my siblings were being traumatized.
I lied like a rug, though sometimes it was blended with degrees of denial and a child’s magical thinking that if I didn’t admit to it, the reality would just go away. I shaded the truth and told half-lies or lies of omission, and sometimes I was straight up dishonest. I lied to make myself look better. I lied to try to feel better about myself. At times I lied for reasons outside my conscious awareness. Most often I lied to evade the consequences of my behavior. I became so used to lying that I lied even when it would have been just as easy to tell the truth.
I lied so frequently that I lost credibility for telling the truth and became like the boy who cried wolf. My parents were so accustomed to me lying that they assumed I was, even when I was telling the truth. Of course, this only exacerbated my feelings of rejection and emotional abandonment, and provided another source for my anger. My younger brother (the family Hero) learned that he could do something wrong and lie about it, confident I would catch the blame and that our parents would believe him rather than me.
As practiced as I was, I never perfected the art of lying. I was basically a shitty liar, unable to separate my internal responses from my external presentation. Inside, I knew it was wrong and part of me felt guilty. This discomfort expressed itself through my body language, and those who knew me best usually could identify my prevarications.
Anger triggered my ardent oppositionalism and rebelliousness. Overt at home, it was more subtle and indirect at school. I was an inveterate wise-ass and unrepentant class-clown. In third grade my class-clowning incited the teacher to try to hit me (this was an era that allowed public school teachers to discipline students physically with relative impunity; one teacher who some of my friends had the misfortune of having was renowned for picking kids up by their hair). I ducked and she missed, striking her hand hard on my desk before sending me to the principal’s office where I was well acquainted with the office staff. Most of the office staff wondered how a student as polite and well-mannered as me could get in as much trouble as I seemed to. My parents only wanted to know what I had done to provoke the teacher, assuming that I had deserved her wrath. Fourth grade marked the first of many times when I got in trouble for using profanity in school.
My acting out brought me to Dr. Seymour Gruber, a child psychiatrist in Great Neck, NY (actually, it was my mother who brought me to the good doctor). By this time, my parents figured there was a real problem, and it was me. Appointments with Dr. Gruber got me out of school early and sessions were painless enough, spent making model ships and airplanes while talking about whatever. Still, it reinforced the feelings I had of being different and damaged. He diagnosed some sort of nonspecific chemical imbalance and put me on Dilantin, a medication typically used to manage epilepsy and other seizure disorders. Though not FDA-approved for it, there are indications that Dilantin can be helpful in stabilizing mood and managing anxiety, and it’s sometimes prescribed “off label” for those purposes.
Interestingly, Dilantin was used both as an anticonvulsant and as a chemical restraint to control patient behavior in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey’s acclaimed novel about a locked psychiatric facility and the interactions between the milieu and its unfortunate inhabitants. Of course, Kesey’s main character was a recalcitrant rebel rather than someone suffering from severe mental illness, but that didn’t keep him from being lobotomized.
Throughout elementary school my grades were mostly “A”s with a small smattering of “B”s. “B”s were cause for questions and concerns at home. In fifth grade, I got a “C” in math one marking period and based on my parents’ reactions, a casual observer might have thought there was a death in the family. My siblings routinely produced straight “A”s. They did their schoolwork with dedication and consistency, whereas my approach gravitated toward getting the best grades I could while doing as little actual work as possible.
Thank god for sports. Sports were my safe haven and my saving grace. It was the one area of life where I felt whole and good enough. The athletic arena—whether a baseball diamond, football field, basketball court, or lacrosse field—provided an environment where I had a coherent sense of self and a clear sense of self-worth. It didn’t matter whether it was a school yard pickup game or formal league play, I was given freedom from the feeling that I was a fuck-up. There was something transcendent in how sports integrated my body and mind. The hand-eye coordination required to track and catch a deep pass in football, to time and hit a baseball on the fat part of the bat, or to gauge the distance to the rim and execute the proper trajectory to make an outside shot in basketball had a present-centered life-affirming melody all its own. To me, these were majestic pursuits, and when I was immersed in them, the disease that followed me wherever I went for as long as I could remember melted away.
Although I was always drawn toward team sports, I busted my ass to hone my individual skills, practicing constantly, pushing myself to get better: shooting baskets on an outdoor court covered in snow and ice in the dead of winter; playing catch until it was too dark to see even the outline of the baseball or football against the evening sky; coming early to team practices and staying late. When I was nine, I remember committing to myself to continue playing after basketball practice until I had made 100 additional baskets. It didn’t matter how long it was going to take; I was staying until I accomplished that goal or they kicked me out of the gym.
In spite of the occasional intrusion of interpersonal politics in the form of favoritism, nepotism, or cliques, sports represented a meritocracy where you got what you earned. Schoolyard pickup games (regardless of sport) had a well-defined social order. The acknowledged two best players were designated captains who took turns choosing players for their respective teams from among the assembled kids. There was a direct correlation between your skills and when you were selected—the better you were, the sooner you were picked. I could count on one hand the number of times I wasn’t either a captain or among the first players picked. This selection process was fraught with emotion. As it progressed, with each successive selection, I watched the facial expressions of many kids fall as their hope to be picked earlier faded. If there were more kids than available places on the teams, some didn’t get to play at all. I always felt the anguish of those who were picked toward the end or not at all; of those who were not good enough.
Sports provided an ideal sublimation for my anger. Sublimation is a more “healthy” defense mechanism that channels or redirects unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and urges, into socially acceptable pursuits. It takes the energy of something potentially harmful and turns it to a constructive and useful activity. Athletic competition was a socially acceptable and emotionally safe outlet to discharge my energy and emotion, especially anger. Instead of criticism, feelings of inadequacy, and punitive consequences, as long as I could convert my anger and other heated emotions into sports-related competitive fervor, I experienced feelings of achievement and received positive recognition and high praise. In this context, I knew who I was and that I was worthy.
The only downside of this passion for sports was its ignition of a white-hot competitiveness that combined with rapacious perfectionism to drive me to be too hard on teammates, oppressive to referees and umpires (I set a record for technical fouls in Oyster Bay youth basketball in the early 1970s that probably still stands), and merciless toward myself. However, were it not for competitive sports and the cathartic release they provided, I have little doubt that I would have become part of the juvenile justice and/or youth psychiatric systems at a tender age.
My involvement in sports was also a sanctuary from much of the tension and conflict between my parents and me. In this special sphere, my parents were consistently available for me. They were models of emotional and practical support. Despite his nonstop work schedule, my father somehow still made time to play catch with me; throw pitches to me so I could practice batting and learn how to switch-hit; throw passes to me on the run until being able to touch the football meant I would catch it; and shoot hoops and play one-on-one with me on the court in our driveway—for what seemed like hours at a time. My mother drove me to and picked me up from hundreds of practices, often giving rides to my friends and teammates who didn’t have parents willing or able to be there like that for them. When I earned the money to get those $16.00 Adidas, she drove me across the width of Long Island to Wolf’s Sporting Goods in Rockeville Centre, the only store on Long Island that carried them.
My parents were a constant presence in the bleachers and on the sidelines at my games from little league to high school, regardless of the sport. My father’s expectations for performance were evident in his urgent and high-volume exhortations to me and his vehement critiques of the officiating, which could always easily be heard above the din of the game and other crowd noise. At times it was so obtrusive and embarrassing that in the midst of playing I’d yell at him to stop. On at least one occasion the referees kicked him out of the gym altogether. My father offered to coach my teams in youth sports, but given how conflicted our relationship often was, I didn’t want him to. When he later coached some of my younger brother’s teams, I remember feeling a mix of relief, envy, and sadness.
That ambivalence hit the heart of the relationship I had with my parents. There were many instances when they were available and nurturing, and yet, overall, I felt emotionally rejected and abandoned. Although I had an abstract cognizance that they loved me, the impression that they didn’t like me was tangible.
Besides carting my siblings and I around like a car service, my mother spent many hours helping me with school projects in elementary school. She was also my very first writing teacher. I’ve been calling her by her first name since I was in seventh grade. One day I started doing it and she allowed it so I kept doing it, and it became normal. Though my friends always thought this was strange, I never gave it much thought until I was thirty-one years old and happened to mention it during an individual therapy session with Bob, an exceptionally wise and skillful psychotherapist. He was struck by the dynamics inherent in my calling my mother by her first name from such an unusually young age and offered an interpretation: beneath the surface of my conscious awareness I had concluded that in order to feel safer psychologically I needed to put more emotional distance between my mother and me, and calling her by her first name served that purpose. As I reflected in silence on Bob’s hypothesis, its ring of truth grew louder.
There is no way to know whether my incipient acting out precipitated my parents’ judgment of me as the “problem” child, or whether my early unconscious perceptions that I wasn’t good enough for them spurred my anger and acting out. These family dynamics evolved dialectically, each influencing the other directly and indirectly, until both of them became “true.” Like all self-fulfilling prophesies, this scenario was the product of an interaction between beliefs and behaviors, wherein how a situation or person is characterized evokes attitudes and actions, which bring that characterization to fruition. Like a snowball rolling downhill, as the process continues, it gathers speed and momentum, going faster and becoming harder to stop.
