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Ron was an unwanted child! Though his mother and father were fairly stable, they did not want and couldn't afford a fourth child; so every attempt had been made to end this pregnancy, without success.

Butch, as they nicknamed him when they saw his size, was born in his parent's attic. He was a ten-and-a-half-pound bouncer at birth, and the difficult delivery took a devastating toll on his mother. Immediately she was rushed off to the hospital, as the birth had torn internal organs; and without repair she would have died.

Her hospital stay was lengthy, and for some time there was talk amongst family members that she would never return home, as the birth experience had forced her near to death. No one was left to care for Butch except his older siblings. His nine-year-old sister, Phyllis, took on the responsibility of mothering him as best a nine-year-old could. His father was working a job four hours away from home. It was wartime, and Stanley was doing the heating and air-conditioning for ships that were destined for the battle overseas. During the day, while Phyllis and the two other siblings were in school, a 16-year-old neighbor was Butch's babysitter.

When Renata was finally released from the hospital, Stanley took her to be with him while he worked in the shipyards. Occasionally they would come home for a few days, and little Butch became acquainted with his parents briefly, until they left again.

The world-famous British psychologist Dr. John Bowlby, with the help of a man named James Robertson, identified three stages of separation response amongst children:

Protest to the mother figure for re-attachment (related to separation anxiety). This is when the child cries, screams, rattles the crib sides, jumps up and down, repeatedly calls "Mommy." This demonstrates the child's anger at being left behind and the attempt to get the mother to return for him. Finally when the cries do not gain the desired response, the child will go to Stage 2.

Despair and pain at the loss of the mother figure despite repeated protests for re-establishment for relationship (related to grief and mourning). During this period the child pouts, whimpers quietly, seems distant, is inclined to not eat or drink nor play. Again this period can last from a day to weeks, depending on the child.

Detachment or denial of affection to the mother figure.

These phases are universally seen in children who go through separation, either by loss of parent/s due to death, divorce or through boarding school. Bowlby identified that infants need one special relationship for internal development.

No variables have more far-reaching effects on personality development than a child's experiences within the family. Starting during his first months in his relation to both parents, he builds up working models of how attachment figures are likely to behave towards him in any of a variety of situations, and on all those models are based all his expectations, and therefore all his plans, for the rest of his life.

Maternal Care and Mental Health, New York: Scocken Books, 1966. Page 369.

Being an unwanted child, having had attempts made on his life while in the womb, having an absent and angry father, and being raised during the most important years of his life (the first two) by children—all these things gave Butch not only the sense but also the knowledge that he did not belong. He lived and felt like an orphan in his own family, even when the war was over and his parents finally returned home. As far as he was concerned, his sister Phyllis was the closest to him and a substitute mother.

When he was four, his birth mother would give him a quarter and send him off by himself to the movies. That quarter would buy him two full-length movies and the cartoon and news reels in between. He could even squeeze out a bag of popcorn with that money. Those twenty-five-cent pieces meant, to Butch, "Be gone a long time!" And so he quickly became a loner. The two friends he did have during those early years (from birth to seven) both died—one of hemophilia and the other of complications from polio.

One day, when he was about six years old, he came home from the movies to find a baby in a cradle in his parents' bedroom. This was a new brother, Bobby. His mother's attitude and behavior toward Bobby were totally foreign to him. "What is with all this hugging, kissing and rocking?" he wondered. As the months went by, he felt further distanced from Renata and detected his mother's preference for and adoration of his little brother. Butch chose to be absent from the house as much as possible. The feelings he had been experiencing all his life had been confirmed: "I am not wanted, I am not loved, I might as well cut myself off from these people and just take care of myself."

Meanwhile, his brother George, who was eight years older than him, had become the family scapegoat. George was beaten regularly down in the basement furnace room with Dad's leather strap. His mother would sit on the cellar steps and egg Daddy on to beat George harder and longer for the misdoings of all the kids and for things for which he'd already been beaten. Butch shared a room with George, and his brother would often come to bed beaten, bruised, blistered and bleeding, and would rock in his bunk trying to comfort himself from the injustice he had received. His older sisters would come and beat George on the head with their high-heeled shoes in an endeavor to shut him up. Ron got a strong message from those experiences: "Trust no one, especially women, 'cuz they will betray you!" And George, well, his life is quite another story!!

By the time Ron was sixteen, he had endured unjust punishments too, but not the beatings like George. When asked about it, Dad said he was just trying to beat good sense into George, and it wasn't working. So with Butch, he did the opposite—no touch, no connection, no inclusion and no love. Discouraged and struggling with learning at school, he quit high school after the ninth grade and went to work.

On Halloween night, Stanley went out with an old sheet over his head to play ghost for the neighborhood kids as they came across the bridge that crossed over a little brook. He came home rather late and was pretty tired, and Butch was already asleep. Soon Butch was shaken out of a sound sleep. "Come now—Dad is dying!" his sisters screamed. You see, Butch had joined the Boy Scouts and had worked his way up to an Eagle Scout. It was there that he learned mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and cardiac massage. With Dad in his arms, he struggled to do both, but to no avail. His Dad died in his arms. At that moment the message was imprinted: "No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, it's never good enough. I will never get it right enough to be accepted."

The next morning, Ron bought a newspaper and went to the bridge that spanned the Arkansas River. In his hiding place under the bridge, he read his father's obituary. That day he made what he called "a deal with God." He said, "God, you take my Dad to heaven, and I'll take his place in hell." And, as he tells it, he came out from beneath that bridge with the determination to go straight to hell, whatever it took.

Of course, it was not that he hadn't already done some illegal and mischievous things. By that time he had already determined that if the world, including his family, wouldn't give him what he needed, then he would just take what he wanted, regardless of who owned it. He had been sexually abused numerous times by older boys and men, and the rage that came from those experiences added to his need to take what he wanted became the formula for a downward spiral to prison.

At seventeen he finally landed in juvenile court and was given the option: join the armed forces or face juvenile detention. Ron joined the Navy. He soon discovered that no one was cuddling and loving him there, so he continued his crime spree, taking what he wanted. Mostly he wanted liquor, because it helped to dull the pain in his heart from years of not belonging or being loved. After two years in the Navy and a devastating fall from a high point on a ship, he was honorably discharged from the service, narrowly escaping a general court-martial.

As is often the case, one thing led to another; habits are formed easily and hard to break, especially when they are fueled by perceived injustice and boiling anger. So his crime continued landing him in one prison after another, one from which he escaped. He later paid the time for that in Tennessee's Big House in Nashville. The movies The Green Mile and The Last Castle were both filmed at that prison. Angry and still alone, he felt that life was really not worth living, especially considering that his future at that hellish prison was bleak.

Rejection, which is what he felt from his family, is extremely difficult for those who have experienced it. It gives the victim the idea that their worth and value are minimal at best, and anger seethes within. Especially hard for a boy is rejection experienced from his mother, as it sets in place a mindset that all women are suspect. While he grows up longing to be in intimate relationships with women, those relationships are often unsuccessful. Actually believing that he is loved by a woman, any woman, is difficult because of the original non-acceptance by his mother. Everything the woman does is scrutinized, every action she takes is questioned, and every phone call she makes is a reason to accuse her of betraying him. Often this is the beginning of domestic violence.

The God-given software, already programmed in the human brain, is that we are to honor our mothers and fathers. When a fellow, for whatever reason, has built up resentment toward his mother, he often takes out that anger and frustration on his wife. The rage that comes from not being able to alter his relationship with his mother is dumped onto his unsuspecting wife. He may restrain, pinch, beat, or otherwise physically or sexually abuse his wife, not because of real anger at her but rather out of frustration with his mother. Ron lived with that negative mindset for years during his nearly-50-year marriage with Nancy, and of course it was a cause of great marital difficulty! By the grace of God, physical abuse never occurred, but it is still possible to do significant damage with spoken words. It took a determined plan for him to recover from his original childhood wounds and to begin erasing the pain that he carried. He feared that at some point Nancy would leave him—either for another man, or in sickness or death. "After all, if my mother who bore me didn't love me, why should a strange woman who comes into my life?" He asked that question of himself repeatedly.

From his childhood onward, Ron took with him everywhere he went the feeling that he was unloved and unwanted, and didn't belong. The story of his prison years is written in a book entitled Chosen, which is unfortunately now out of print. (It is occasionally available on Amazon.com) That feeling showed up in every relationship and in every endeavor of his life. Sheer determination, along with the gift of direction from God, helped him to overcome. We will look at what became of him and his life later in this book.

The view that maternal deprivation has dire effects on personality gained support from case histories documenting maternal rejection in the backgrounds of aggressive youngsters and from studies of children reared in orphanages, many of whom became delinquents. Indeed, John Bowlby suggested that the discovery of a need for maternal affection during early childhood paralleled the discovery of the role of vitamins in physical health.

John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health. Page 59.

Just as the physical body lacking the proper nutrients for health will develop disease, so the child's brain lacking physical affection, especially from the mother, will develop tendencies toward criminality.

Using multiple sources for information about parent-child relations, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck found that parental rejection was a strong predictor of criminality. After coding case records based on home observations for a period of approximately five years, Joan McCord retraced 235 members of the Cambridge Somerville Youth Study. She found that those who had mothers who were self-confident, provided leadership, were consistently non-punitive, and affectionate were unlikely to commit crimes. Thus, studies on emotional climate in the home present consistent results. Like parental conflict, negative parent-child relations enhance the probability of delinquency. Parental affection appears to reduce the probability of crime. Not surprisingly, parental affection and close family ties tend to be linked with other features of family interaction.

Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor T. Glueck, Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency. New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1950.

Most of the responses to rejection are self-destructive. The torture of keeping a mental list of abuses only piles on the resentment and bitterness as the list increases in length. Emotional paralysis seems to take over, but eventually an explosion of catastrophic dimensions will occur, with the fallout landing either on oneself or on those with whom the victim is closest. Retaining slights or purposeful rejections, which one cannot help but do because they are emotionally charged, constructs a set of grey, cloudy glasses worn every day by the victim and used to predict and prevent reactions from all they meet. Why should this be? It is because the brain has a method of working, a design to help us protect ourselves and have the ammunition to combat further rejections. The only issue here is that those attacks keep piling up and eventually can cause volcanic-type eruptions when we least expect them. Furthermore, those reactions and eruptions bring to us the very rejection that we fear.

Alice Miller, a widely-published and well-known author, has achieved worldwide recognition for her work on the causes and effects of child abuse and its cost to society. In her book entitled The Drama of Being a Child, first published in 1987 and revised in 1995, she states:

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.

She continues:

The truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness. In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual "wisdom," we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception.

Pages 1-2.

Powerful words, aren't they? But oh so true! There is always a precipitating event producing inhibitions and fear, but it is possible to break through the shadow of the past and into the light of accomplishment, success and emotional growth. Interest in the subject of rejection is, therefore, a path of wisdom. Physical, emotional and spiritual health will greatly benefit from the decision to honestly face one's feelings head on. The ways that we connect or plug in to each other are greatly influenced by the shadows created from our early experiences of attaching to primary caregivers in childhood. That attachment is determined by how those parents or primary caregivers were equipped to bond with us. Because our need to survive is so strong, it has determined how or if we will attach to others in our lives in a secure manner. Our ability to attach or to plug in has also been impacted by the wounds we received while we were in the process of determining our worth and value. (The first two years of life are the most impactful, but up to age seven is when our thoughts and feelings are formed.) Let's face it, the bottom line is this: Wounded people wound people. Rejected people look for rejection under every rock, and nearly always find it. If they do not find it, they create it by behaving in such a manner that others will reject them. Their shadow enlarges in the process.

After half a century of studying parental rejection and acceptance, Dr. Ronald Rohner of the University of Connecticut's Family Studies Department has concluded that if a person perceives he is rejected, he has received it. One's perception is one's reality.

So, if during your character-forming years (conception through age seven) you felt like you did not belong among your family or friends, or if you currently find yourself being sensitive to the slights of others and predicting that your friends or family will reject you, you will find your answers here! Be careful in scrutinizing yourself, because it is easy to fool ourselves with cover-ups that we have devised in an attempt to look strong. There is so much more to learn and apply to yourself about the influence of rejection on a life.