Читать книгу Breaking the Bonds - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 16

Sometimes we draw conclusions slowly, amassing evidence little by little, and gradually becoming certain that something is as it is. Sometimes something sudden and dramatic happens, and we know instantly and clearly what our conclusion is.

Sometimes someone says something to us and we realize that we are not as good as we thought we were. Anna told me how, when she was a small child, her mother contracted tuberculosis and so was in hospital for much of Anna’s childhood. She said, ‘When I was sent to boarding school I used to go to chapel and pray for my mother. This was during the Second World War and there was this other little girl and her father was in the navy. So we’d go and pray. She’d pray for her father and I’d pray that my mother would get well, and her father came home on leave. So I went to one of the nuns and I said, “Mary Jane’s father’s home but my mother’s still in the hospital”, and she said, “I guess you didn’t pray enough, dear.” How can these people say such things to children! They probably think it’s good for your character. I just had a double worry then, that my mother was sick and that I hadn’t prayed enough. I continued in that attitude, that I wasn’t good enough.’

Pat accumulated the evidence that she was bad and unacceptable slowly. She does not remember being a baby, but family photographs show her with her parents who look as though they loved her and were proud of her. Her first dear memory is of being shut out of her mother’s bedroom and later being told that she had a baby sister. Her father is not present in this memory. She cannot remember ever sitting on her father’s knee.

‘He wanted a son,’ she told me, ‘I was a great disappointment to him. In later years he was very fond of my youngest sister – she was very pretty, not like me – but I think he just felt uncomfortable in a house full of females. He spent all his time working, and when he took up golf we never saw him at weekends. Mother was affectionate to me, but she was always busy. The only way I could get any attention from her was to be useful. I’ve been doing housework for as long as I can remember.’

So Pat gradually formed the opinion that as herself she was valueless. Only what she could do for people had some value.

‘I never consciously thought, “I am valueless”,’ she said. ‘It was just something I knew, like I knew the sun would rise each morning. It was a fact of the universe. What I did think about was how I could please my mother and father. I thought that if I tried really hard to please them then they would be proud of me. I knew they loved me, but it was in a distant sort of way, like I loved my great aunt. She was a relative, so you were supposed to love her. I wanted to make them notice me and be proud of me. That’s why I wanted to be a doctor.’

‘Your father stopped you from being a doctor?’ I said.

‘Not stopped, like saying, “You can’t”. He just let me know in different ways that he didn’t think that medicine was a suitable profession for a woman. And he told all of us that he couldn’t afford to put us through university.’

‘Were you angry with him?’

‘Angry? Oh, no, I wouldn’t dream of being angry with him. I was sure he was doing what he thought was best for me.’

Dan remembers very clearly the day he concluded that he was bad. It was the day his father died. Dan had just turned seven.

Dan said, ‘My father was a great believer in “Spare the rod and spoil the child”, and he was always taking a stick to me. My mother would get upset, and she and my grandmother especially would always try and make it up to me with some sort of treat. They usually made me feel I wasn’t as bad as he said. Of course there were times when I deserved a beating – as a kid I was always getting into mischief – but sometimes I didn’t. He had a quick temper and he’d just hit out. And you couldn’t reason with him. Once he’d made up his mind he was going to give you a thrashing nothing you could say would make him change his mind.

‘Well, it was just a week before my seventh birthday, and he came home on the Saturday evening and found a whole bed of young tomato plants all trampled down. He decided I’d done it. I hadn’t. I’d been at a neighbour’s house all afternoon because my mother and grandmother had gone to visit an aunt who’d had a baby. When he saw me coming in the front gate he just grabbed me by the collar and dragged me inside. Then he got his razor strop – do you remember those heavy leather straps that men used to use to sharpen their cut-throat razors on? – well, he just started in on me. I thought he was never going to stop. I was sure he was going to kill me. When he did stop, he shoved me in my bedroom and locked the door. I was crying and hurt, and I was so mad at him. When I knew he couldn’t hear me I said out loud, “I hope you die. God, make him die.” A week later he did. Had a heart attack and keeled over, dead. I knew I’d done it. I knew I was wicked. After that I just had to make up for being so wicked. That’s why I’ve always worked so hard and why the place burning down really got to me. I thought that at long last I was being punished for my wickedness.’

When Dan had first come to see me, many months before he told me this story, his wife had said to me that she thought Dan had been too strict with their son Danny when he was a child. ‘Nonsense,’ Dan had said, ‘children, especially boys, need a firm hand. My father often took the stick to me and it never did me any harm.’

We all, like Dan, have very convenient memories, or, rather, forgetories. We all can forget something that is too painful to remember. Thus many of us who concluded from one traumatic incident that we were bad have forgotten all about the incident.

Lisa had done this. When she first came to see me she described her childhood as idyllic and her parents as perfect. Months went by before she could tell me about her parents’ quarrels, and many more months before she could allow herself to remember a terrible incident when she was five and her grandfather had undressed her, explored her genitals with his fingers, and then put his erect penis in her mouth. Lisa found it impossible to describe this clearly, but when she said, ‘I thought I was going to choke to death’, I guessed what had been done to her.

She told me that her grandfather was a minister and that her parents were very proud of him. He lived in another state, so a visit from him was a special occasion. On that particular day, her parents had to go out and her grandfather had offered to mind her. Her parents had instructed her that she had to be very obedient and do whatever her grandfather wanted her to do.

‘I was very confused,’ Lisa told me. ‘I knew it was wrong to take your clothes off like that, but I didn’t dare be disobedient. I thought that perhaps this was something ministers did and that I was stupid, that I wasn’t doing it right.’

‘Did you tell your parents?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t dare. I thought they’d blame me. I hated him, but I wanted him to like me so he wouldn’t turn my parents against me. I already knew they thought more of him than of me. He took over my bedroom when he came to stay and I slept on a couch on the back verandah, and they always served him first at meals and gave him second helpings. So I just kept it to myself and tried to forget it.’

My friend Jill had a similar experience and, like Lisa, did not tell her parents.

‘I kept my mouth shut, until I was about nineteen or twenty. It was my mother’s father. Everybody was reminiscing about him and deifying him. I’m not sure when it started, I might have been eight, it certainly was between when I was ten and twelve. It was just sick. I kept saying to my mother, “I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to go there.” I finally got him caught by my grandmother, but then, of course, my grandmother would have nothing to do with me.’

These experiences left both Jill and Lisa extremely frightened and disgusted with themselves, but they each expressed this fear and disgust in different ways.

Lisa, being an extravert, ‘ran away’ from what was happening in her internal reality into her more real external reality. She always kept herself very, very busy. She had a full time job, kept her house perfect, and was a superb cook and dressmaker. She sought and made friends, and was a popular, sociable woman. The fear inside her could not be denied, however, and she located the source of her fear as being in the world around her. Lisa feared spiders and all creepy crawlies, she feared ugly people and anyone who was deformed in any way, she feared crowds and open spaces, and, most of all, she feared that everyone she loved and needed would reject her. She believed that no matter how hard she worked to make people love and need her, sooner or later they would discover that ‘inside I’m foul and disgusting’.

Jill, being an introvert, was always concerned with achieving, and this she managed to do, even though from her earliest childhood she was always afraid.

She told me, ‘I think I could be scared pretty easily as kid. If someone strange came to the door, I would hide under the bed.’

‘What did your parents think about this?’

‘They weren’t picking it up. School was just hair-raising. I’d vomit every morning before I went to school. I was frightened about my ability to achieve.’

Jill did achieve. She took two degrees, became a university administrator, and married. But she was always anxious, always somewhat defensive with other people. She said, ‘I was going all right until I was thirty-seven and then the bottom just dropped out. I remember being awakened at night. I knew something horrible was going to happen. I made the mistake of going to work that day and things got all out of proportion. People were looking at me, and I don’t think I was acting too well. That night I came home and I couldn’t sleep. There were cars coming round and I could see their lights and I thought they were checking on me. After that I went into hospital, altogether five times, and each time I was just given drugs. I’d get into these panic states and I’d go back in. I’d be running up and down the hall. I couldn’t sleep. I’d get more and more frightened. I’d be thinking a lot of different things very fast, interactions I’ve had with my brothers and with my dad, a lot of different things, all frightening things. Then I’d get even more frightened. In hospital they’d have four, five, six people dragging me down in order to shoot me with something. And they put me in isolation. That was the worst experience. Suddenly people were following me and I was put into a locked ward. I don’t know how long I was in there. I haven’t been in hospital now for eight years or so. But it’s terrible, I just stay in bed. I’m immobilized. I don’t know what the drugs are doing for me. I guess I’m suicidal because not a day goes past but I think of ending it. The psychiatrist sees me about once every three months for a change of the pills. He just asks me how I am. It’s terrible being at home day in and day out, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s terrible enough for me to try to get out of it.’

When terrible things happen to us we can find ways of coping with them and coming to terms with the results of them if the people around us acknowledge what is happening to us, allow us to talk about what is happening and how we feel about it, and confirm our value by giving us love and support. When bad things happen to introverts they need the people around them to help them sort out the confusion and to maintain the sense that external reality is real. Once external reality seems unreal, it becomes more and more difficult for introverts to distinguish between the thoughts in their internal reality and the events in their external reality.

All of us can have difficulty in distinguishing the enemies we actually have from our feelings of being persecuted. Introverts, when they find themselves in danger, can feel themselves persecuted by strangers or people with whom they have little connection. After all, it is better to see a stranger as an enemy that to see yourself as betrayed by those who should have cared for you.

Jill’s experience was of parents who did not see what was happening to her, of a grandfather who exploited and despoiled her, of a grandmother who rejected her, of a mother who, though loving, says. That was long ago. You should be over it by now,’ and a psychiatrist who has never listened to her story but who says, ‘Keep taking your tablets. Psychotherapy is not appropriate for you.’

Although Jill and I had been friends for nearly ten years and had had some good times together, it was only on my last visit when her inactivity was impossible to hide that she told me about her childhood and her time in hospital. I had met a psychotherapist in Jill’s home town who I knew would understand very readily what Jill had gone through, and I urged Jill to talk to her. But Jill refused. She expected, as she had always done, that once someone knew about her past that person would reject her. She risked telling me because I lived far away, but she would not reveal what she saw as her intrinsic badness to someone in her home town.

To talk about how Jill and Lisa felt about themselves and, similarly, how all of us, to some greater or lesser degree, feel about ourselves, I have to use words like ‘bad’, ‘evil’, ‘worthless’, ‘unacceptable’, but these do not convey what the experience of badness actually entails.

These words are simply outward signs of a very powerful internal experience. We each give this experience a structure by turning it into an image which we locate somewhere inside ourselves. There are, I guess, as many images for badness and unacceptability as there are people to hold them. The kinds of images I have come across are of:

a pit or swamp of utter foulness and blackness;

a translucent centre of purity, besmirched and befouled with black filth;

a small child, naked and alone, consumed by shame, encircled by contemptuous eyes;

a raging torrent of crimson and black fire which will devour all it touches, or a wild, primitive, raging beast which, when loosed, will hack, slice, smash, lay waste, and devour.

I have found that people who have no memory of ever being accepted and valued and whose depression is profound and long lasting have an image of their badness and unacceptability like the first kind, a foul pit or swamp.

People who have brought from childhood some sense of being valuable and acceptable but to whom hurtful, ugly things have happened have images of badness and unacceptability like the second kind, a besmirched pure centre.

People who in childhood have suffered intense shame and humiliation have an image of their badness and unacceptability like the third kind, a humiliated child.

People who in childhood have suffered the kind of experiences which aroused in them murderous hatred but which gave them no opportunity to discharge and resolve this murderous hatred in non-destructive ways (for instance, being punished for shouting, ‘I hate you Mummy!’) have an image of the fourth kind, a raging torrent or a wild beast.

No doubt there are many other kinds of images, just as there are many different kinds of conclusions we can draw about our childhood experience, and certainly our images can change. The first kind of image, so powerfully present in the immobility of deep depression, could, under provocation, change to the fourth kind, and the second kind, with a further series of crushing events, could change to the first kind.

Equally, the images change as we discover that what we saw as undiluted badness and unacceptability was nothing more than the conclusions we drew about ourselves in childhood and which no longer apply, and that those forces inside us which we were told were wicked are actually among our most valuable possessions, for they are the source of our strength, courage, creativity and our joy at being alive. The black swamp becomes a cavern filled with riches, the translucent centre is washed clean, the child is comforted and admired, the fire becomes a flame of purity and hope, and the beast a cuddly pet – or perhaps the images change in ways as many and various as the stars in the sky.

(D 4) To change your image of your badness and unacceptability into an image of your worth and acceptability, it is helpful if you make the badness and unacceptability image clear. You might like to bring it clearly into your mind, or, going beyond that, describe it in words, or in a poem, a picture, a sculpture, or music. Whenever we bring something clearly into consciousness and then put it outside ourselves in words or in something we make, we take control of it and thus reduce its power.

Now it is much easier to ask, ‘How did I acquire this image?’

What Pat, Anna, Dan, Lisa and Jill described of their early childhood is something which, to some greater or lesser extent, happened to all of us.

As small babies we were pleased with ourselves and we pleased ourselves. We slept when we were tired, were active when we felt active, emptied our bladder and bowels as soon as they were full, and, when we felt hunger or any discomfort, we voiced our displeasure and demanded that the world make us comfortable again. If we felt angry with our mother we bit her, and if we did not want to engage in conversation we turned our head away.

Some of us were lucky enough to have mothers who let us go on being ourselves for many months, but some of us were unlucky enough to have mothers who very soon stopped us from being ourselves. However, sooner or later, all of us as babies were shown that we could not go on pleasing ourselves and being pleased with ourselves. We had to conform to what society expected of us.

For some of us the first lesson came when we cried in hunger and were not fed. Perhaps we were not fed because our mother had no food, or perhaps because our mother had been told by people who considered themselves to be child care experts that babies should be fed according to a clock and not according to the baby’s need. As we lay there, our little body creasing with hunger pangs, we drew the conclusion, in images if not in words, ‘If I ask for something the world will not give it to me’.

Some of us were lucky enough to have mothers who met our need for food, but even we, sooner or later, encountered society’s demands that we empty our bladder and bowels at special times and places. Some of us were lucky enough to have mothers who knew that we could not achieve this until our sphincter muscles were strong enough, and so they let us discover at our own pace that society’s rules about cleanliness have some sense to them and can yield a feeling of achievement. However, some of us found that when we could not learn these rules quickly enough to please our mother we were called ‘dirty and disgusting’ and we were punished and humiliated. Whatever experiences we had, we all drew the conclusion that, ‘No matter how I feel, I must make my bowels and bladder conform to what society expects’. For many of us ‘what society expects’ dominates our life, making us carry out rituals of cleanliness and trapping us in a sorry round of constipation and diarrhoea, all of which adds to our worry about how acceptable we are.

By showing us that we cannot expect to be fed just because we are hungry and that our bowels and bladder must conform to society’s rules, our families force us to draw the conclusion that other people’s wishes and needs must be met before our own. If we want something for ourselves we find ourselves being called ‘selfish’, and if we want what others have we are called ‘greedy and envious’. Anyone who is selfish, greedy and envious is bad. If we observe that our families are expecting us to be unselfish in order that they can be selfish, we must keep that thought to ourselves, for if we do not we are punished and humiliated.

Rebecca said, ‘I always felt manipulated. My father would want me to do something and I wouldn’t want to do it, and he’d say, “You’re thinking only of yourself”. I’d think who do you think you’re thinking of? There was one time when I was at college and I was at home and I had an argument with my brother and my mother would not intervene and I went to stay with my grandmother for several weeks because I was having a hard time at home. Then my mother called up and said, “I want you to come home. I feel abandoned. You’re just thinking of yourself.” I thought who the hell are you thinking of? I’m unhappy there. I’m happy here. What right do you have to ask me to be miserable so that you can be happy? I think that was pulled a lot on me as a child. Everything is justified by saying that your parents love you, your parents know best. If your parents love you, does that mean that they’re asking you to do what is best for you? I wanted to be an anthropologist and my father thought that that was ridiculous. He would say I wouldn’t get a job, I should go to medical school, or do accountancy, or something practical, and when I’d ask why he’d say, “I’m only thinking of you”. I don’t think he was thinking of me at all, but so many things were justified by him with “I’m thinking of you”, “I’m doing it for you”, “It’s for your own good”, “After all I’ve done for you”.’

We all learn, too, quite early in life that we have something else bad inside us. This is anger and aggression. As a toddler we live in a world of giants who act in unpredictable ways, who continually put us in new and often frightening situations, who say things which we cannot understand, and who expect us to do things which we cannot do. Sometimes all of this overwhelms us and we can do nothing but fling ourselves down in despairing rage. If we are lucky the adults with us remember what it is like to be only two and they treat us kindly, but if we are unlucky (and many of us are) we get punished. We are hit, or locked up alone in a room. As well as frightening us, this puzzles us, for while the adult is saying, It is wicked to be angry’, the adult is angry, and while the adult is saying, ‘It is wicked to be violent’, the adult is violent.

Adults may believe that they are teaching small children to be clean, considerate of others, unaggressive, and not to be selfish, greedy, envious or angry, but what children are actually doing is drawing the conclusion, ‘I am not acceptable’. The child’s birthright of self-confidence has begun to dwindle.

Sometimes parents, seeing one of their children in need, fail to see the conclusion another of their children is drawing.

Rebecca said, ‘I have two brothers younger than me. I think my father valued Jimmy, the older of the two. He was like my father. My father never got along with my younger brother, Nick. He was an accident and he was ten days old when my father went to Vietnam for a year. They never seemed to bond and my father has never got along with him, but my mother has always defended him and paid a lot of attention to him, so I always felt that Jimmy was Dad’s favourite and Nick was Mother’s favourite, because he was persecuted, and that left me out, although I know that as I’m a girl my mother feels close to me, but I never felt like anyone’s favourite.’

One of the tasks of parents is to define aspects of the world for the child. They say, ‘Don’t eat that dirt.’ ‘That’s hot. Don’t touch it.’ ‘That dog might bite you.’ They also define aspects of each child, like, “You’re a boy.’ ‘That’s your bum.’ ‘As you get older you get taller.’ Often in this defining they go beyond factual information and add their own value judgements, like, ‘You’re a bad boy.’ ‘Be careful how you touch your bum. It’s dirty.’ ‘Big boys don’t cry.’ When, like Candida’s mother (pp. 38–9), they define the child in ways which the child finds do not fit with her own experience of herself, the child, unable to reject what a powerful parent says, feels inadequate and unacceptable, just as Candida did when she could not be the outgoing, centre-of-attention person her mother insisted she was.

Many children find themselves being defined by adults in negative, rejecting ways. Pat, like many girls, found herself being defined as ‘not valuable like a boy’. Dan found himself being defined as an object on which his father could take out his rage. Lisa and Jill found themselves being defined by their parents as being of less value than their grandfathers, and by their grandfathers as objects they could use to satisfy their sexual needs. Out of these experiences of humiliation the child draws the conclusion, ‘I am of little value’.

These conclusions, ‘I am not acceptable’ and ‘I am of little value’, prepare the way for the conclusion ‘I am bad’, which we drew when we found ourselves trapped in a dangerous situation from which there was no escape.

The dangerous situation was one where we were helpless and in the power of strong adults who were inflicting pain on us and on whom we depended.

Perhaps, like Dan, we were being beaten, or, like Lisa and Jill, we were being sexually abused, or perhaps, like Pat, we were neglected and used. For some of us the adults were deliberately inflicting pain and humiliation on us for their own ends, although for others the adults could do nothing else, for they were starving, or in mortal danger, as in a war, or they were ill, or overburdened with their own troubles. Or perhaps they had died, or left, and we needed them desperately and they did not come.

For those of us who were born to parents who loved us and wanted to do the best for us, the situations where we were helpless and in the power of adults who inflicted pain on us were those where our loving parents were beating us to make us good.

Over the years I have met many people whose parents beat them to make them good, and many parents who believed that the only way to make children good was to beat them. The most vivid description I have ever come across of what it is like to be so beaten and the conclusions a child draws from such beatings is in Anna Mitgutsch’s book Punishment.¹⁸ She calls this book a novel, but she writes, it seems, from her own experience.

A beating: it never meant a spontaneous burst of anger, which might be followed by awkwardness and reconciliation. It began with a look which transformed me into vermin. And then there was a silence in which nothing had been decided yet and which nevertheless was past escape. The offence was swallowed up by the silence; it was never discussed. There were no alibis, explanations, excuses. There stood the misdeed, whether it was a banana stain on a dress or food refused – unatonable – and suddenly the misdeed was only a symbol for such an enormous wickedness that no amount of punishment sufficed. ‘Get me the carpet beater,’ she commanded; ‘get me the cudgel.’ This was a wooden stick the thickness of an arm, which split in two in the course of my education. The broken cudgel was itself significant evidence of a culpability so great that it could never be punished fully. Had she been completely just, she would have had to beat me to death. I owed the fact that she continued to let me live to her sacrificial mother love, which, like the Grace of God, was not earned and could never be repaid.

Even when I had learned that it was a senseless gesture, I threw myself down in front of her each time, my arms clasping her knees, begging, Please, please dear Mama, my dearest Mama, I’ll never do it again, I promise, I swear, you can take everything away from me, only please, don’t hit me.

She never bent down to me; her face remained remote, as if she were carrying out the work of a higher power. I never dared disobey her command; I always went whimpering behind the curtain to the side of the stairs, where the cudgel and the carpet beater were hung from hand-crocheted loops; they had their special hooks. What happened when I handed her the instrument of chastisement I don’t remember; I only know that all hell broke loose. This is what hell must be like: pain and pain and pain in a rhythm that the body recognized almost instantly and against which it could not protect itself, neither by turning aside or by running off, because the pain simply struck another part each time.

Blind, I never saw her or the cudgel during the beating, only the smacks of wood on flesh, of metal-reinforced rubber on flesh, could be heard. Could it really be heard? Do I believe now that I heard it? How could I have heard it when I screamed, screamed as loudly as I could, from the first blow to the last? For sooner or later there was a last blow. Why this or that blow should be the last, I could not guess. It was God’s will, it was her will: she didn’t beat me in anger, after all; she beat me for my own good and to drive out my abysmal wickedness. The last blow was a well-considered temporary end of an atonement that would never end.

And then she would let herself fall to the floor, breathing heavily and stretching out full-length, exhausted as from the completion of hard labour, and I stood there terrified, with my heart racing and the pain suddenly gone numb. Was she about the die of exhaustion, had she fainted, all because of my guilt, the hard work I had caused her? She had told me so often that I would be the death of her. Take the cudgel away,’ she said weakly, almost gently, and her slack voice gave me hope that she would survive …

My sense of my own worth depends on my defence of her honour. I cannot betray her, because if it should turn out that she never loved me, then I am a monster, something that should not be permitted to exist.

Therefore I don’t say what I know and have known for a long time: that she is one of those who make our skin crawl and stop our imagination cold when we read about them in history books and documents, one of those who are expert in all branches of torture. She had the talent, though she was limited in scope; she had the tools, stored in an orderly fashion and always at hand; she had her mute sacrificial lamb, helpless and willing; and she had her secret, voluptuous pleasure, which released itself into a state of unconscious exhaustion after the execution of her task. She rarely allowed herself to be overcome by anger. She gave her victim notice – ‘Just wait until tonight’– but in the meantime I had to go to bed, where my fear would escalate into suicidal fantasies. Where did she learn that? What handbooks had she read? When the punishment began she expected self-control; crying and pleading just made it that much worse; self-humiliation set her off. Beating was a ritual surrounded by other rituals. Even her inspection of the red welts and bloodshot bruises, after the work was done, was part of it. Was she, in other words, one of those people whose careers are made in torture chambers and concentration camps? How shall I answer that question about her who was also my mother? The word Mama also meant the broad lap on which I was allowed to sit, the soft face you could kiss if you were good and brought home all A’s. Mama meant the pet names I never heard again in later life: ‘bunny rabbit’ and ‘sugarplum‘; it was the smell of Christmas cookies when I got home from school, out of darkness into the warm, bright living room in December. Mama meant safety and peril; she could protect me from just about everything except herself.

Many of us had parents who would not think of beating us to make us good. Instead, the situations where we were helpless and in the power of adults who inflicted pain on us were when our parents gave us just a few sharp slaps, or were locking us up, or threatening never to love us again, or saying that we had caused them terrible pain or were making them ill, or were criticizing us in contemptuous and degrading terms.

Whatever the circumstances of the situation, we were small, helpless, trapped and in pain.

We may not have had the words to describe that situation but we knew that the meaning of the situation was, in essence:

‘I am being punished by my bad parent.’

We were, for a while, angry with our bad parent, but then a most terrible realization dawned on us. We were little and weak and dependent upon the parent who was inflicting pain on us. We realized that we were in double jeopardy.

What could we do?

We could do what all people do when we cannot change what is happening. We redefine it.

It is dangerous to suffer pain, but it is even more dangerous to be in the total power of someone who is bad. We could not stop the pain, but we could redefine our parent.

Our parent was not bad, but good.

Why do good parents inflict pain on their children?

Because the child is bad.

So we redefined the situation. It was not, ‘I am being punished by my bad parent’, but:

‘I am bad and being punished by my good parent.’

(D 5) Now we were safe. We were still in pain, suffering, feeling guilty, but at least safe in the hands of a good parent. Just like Feiffer’s little girl,¹⁹

Why did we feel we had to make this sacrifice of our sense of goodness and worth? What was there in that situation which threatened us so much?