IT'S NOT OUR FAULT

IT’S NOT OUR FAULT

Nina Danielson, MSW


I want to begin by saying that, although I believe that the relationships that we have with our children may have a profound affect on them, we are not the sole determinants of their mental health nor do we have the power to be. I am so totally “done” with parent bashing. And I am even more against the fact that we bash ourselves- which is far too common an occurrence! I believe what I am saying as a professional and also believe it as a mother. I know how hard we have all tried to be good parents. Practically all loving parents are extremely sensitive in this area and most particularly parents whose children have problems.
The psychoanalytic beliefs that were prevalent during the mid twentieth century did untold damage to many parents, particularly mothers. Mothers do not cause psychosis. Nor do they cause autism. Poor mothering is simply not responsible for every single emotional problem on the part of the child, as was then believed. Poor parenting does not create ADD any more than it is responsible for creating Cystic Fibrosis. What a terribly unfair indictment!
Many parents were targeted and made to suffer unfairly and needlessly for over half a century. Parenting a child who was “different” became a statement of our shame and failure as parents. We are still struggling with this stigma and often experience unbearable guilt and self-blame. If we continue to buy into this cruel belief, we not only do damage to ourselves, but we cannot really effectively be there for our children. We can no longer allow these beliefs to undermine the loving devotion and support that we, the parents, must give to our “at risk” children. As parents, our support and advocacy is vital because our particular level of devotion and tenacity is seldom, if ever, able to be provided by anyone else!
Parents do not have the ability to cause true mental illness at all - other than unwittingly through our genetics. A heavy burden has been placed upon mothers, particularly, in the belief that a mother’s ability to nurture is what entirely determines the ultimate wellbeing of the child. This concept totally excludes the role of the child’s individual nature and the role of the father and/or other significant people and factors in the child’s environment. I will even go as far as to say that, short of being monstrously abusive or abandoning a child to such abuse, I don’t believe that parents really have the power to cause mental illness at all. By far, the majority of true mental illness is biologically and/or genetically based.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that even very tiny infants each have their own individual personalities long before the environment has taken hold on them. When I was young- a first-time mother- some of my friends and I formed a book club in an attempt to keep our minds from melting. We would read a new book each week and then get together to discuss it. We began when our children were each three months old. Of course, they would join us at the meetings. It was amazing to observe how our children were so completely different from one another! I don’t think that we had even had enough time on earth with them as yet to have profoundly affected their personalities in any way. One was high strung, nervous and cried a great deal. One seemed laid back, easy going and demanded little. Mine was highly social and already flirtatious. How could we account for these differences? Nature. It was the nature of each child that we were witnessing.
Jerome Kagan has written a wonderful book entitled, “The Nature of the Child,” where he discusses the importance of each child’s own individual temperament. It is a ground breaking book in that it totally challenges the role of nurturing as the sole determinant of a child’s personality and debunks the beliefs of the old psychoanalytic school. Nature versus nurture continues to be an ongoing debate. We tend to swing from one belief to another and then back again. “Bad blood” becomes “bad parenting” becomes “individual temperament” and then perhaps it will be back to bad parenting once again. I sincerely hope not!
I believe in nature as strongly as I believe in nurture and I know that there are many questions that remain as yet unanswered. However, there is one thing of which I am absolutely, completely convinced! I unquestionably believe that the way in which a parent responds and connects to their own child’s individual nature and the relationship that they forge together is paramount in influencing that child’s future. You cannot have this relationship if you are in denial of your child’s problems or blame yourself. Imperfect parenting may and sometimes does profoundly influence one’s self esteem, the ability to trust others and future intimate relationships. After all, the very first and deepest love affairs are with our parents. But unrequited love seldom drives us crazy- just neurotic. So, who among us isn’t? But the neurotic child is rarely the kind of child we are dealing with and worrying about well past their childhoods and in to our old age.
D.W. Winnicott, a famous psychoanalyst who began his career as a pediatrician in the early part of the twentieth century, coined the phrase “good-enough” mother. I love him for this. Winnicott doesn’t say that mothers have to be perfect or meet their child’s every need. He simply states that they have to be “good-enough.” I have a magnet on my refrigerator that has a picture of the ideal Dick and Jane type family; a mother, father and their two children- a boy and a girl. Each are dressed immaculately in sweaters and trousers or skirts. They are all smiling lovingly at one another. The caption below reads, “They always planned to ruin their children’s lives…and by and large they succeeded.” Everyone laughs. The reason this magnet was made at all; the reason that people, like myself, buy it and enjoy it is simply because the concept is so ludicrous. No one, absolutely no one, consciously sets out to ruin their children’s lives.
The “good enough” mother ( or primary caretaker) creates an environment in which the child is ultimately able to feel “good-enough” about being themselves. This means that we must have the ability to accept them for who they are and this may mean that they will never be able to be what we would have dreamed of for them. Of course, we must go through a period of grief in order to let go of the child that we dreamed of and accept child that we have. But it is vital that we relate to the child that really exists and not our fantasy or hope for them. We need to provide a relationship that is based in reality. We must accept the child who is really there. Then, and only then, can we actually begin to meet their needs. Free from our guilt and shame, we can provide our children with the loving advocacy that they so desperately need.

OUR SHELL- SHOCKED SOLDIERS

Combat Stress Reaction, commonly known as Shell Shock, was a term that was used during World Wars I and II to categorize the long-term results of the stress suffered by those who have experienced the conditions of war. Various other terms have been used over the years to describe this condition, dating all the way back to The Civil War. The term we use today to describe this condition which affects many of our military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.

What is PTSD and what causes the symptoms of PTSD which include flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks and hypervigilence or the sense of always being "on guard"?

In order to truly understand PTSD, we have to understand what "ego defense mechanisms" are and, in particular, the defense mechanism of "dissociation." If we think of the ego as the core of one's self, this core self- not unlike a knight in armor- sometimes takes on defenses in order to protect itself when it feels threatened. In addition, just like a knight uses a helmet and a shield and armor and a spear or javelin when going into battle, the ego, too, when it feels threatened or under attack might make use of one or more of these defenses in order to protect itself when it feels under siege. Some of these ego defense mechanisms we have heard about or know about firsthand, such as denial or repression, or suppression or projection or intellectualization or dissociation.

The use of our ego defenses unnecessarily is maladaptive, but sometimes we need to use them in order to survive. Sometimes they are necessary and appropriate. For example, in the case of suddenly hearing of someone's death, we may go into a state of denial until our psyche is able to absorb the reality. We may use one or several defenses if we are presented with material that we might perceive as being too overwhelming for us and threatening to our emotional and/or physical survival. A healthy adult ego may temporarily utilize a defense as a form of protecting itself until it feels safe enough and really ready to absorb whatever the reality and feelings are. In the case of war and dissociating from it's horrors, however, the psyche may never feel safe enough or ready!

PTSD is caused by remaining in a state of dissociation long after the trauma has occurred. Dissociation is a defense whereby certain emotional material that the psyche has determined to be too overwhelming for the ego to handle, is put aside and not processed in a conscious or preconscious way. It is separated from the rest of the psyche. The memories do not disappear, however, and they then reside in some other part of our psyche- a part to which we do not have access. The trauma remains, just like unclaimed baggage that we are unaware of, which is waiting at an unknown terminal.

Our military uses dissociation as a defense against the horrors of war. In fact, long before our troops are sent to war, they are actively "taught" to use dissociation as a coping strategy. They are shown movies of the dead and dying again and again until they become "de-sensitized" to the suffering of humanity. They are sent to places like The Mojave Desert where amputees volunteer to enact scenes of mock villages filled with wounded and dead enemies. Even before they see any real "action" so to speak, the men and women in our Armed Services see some pretty horrendous things!

Still later, they may actually witness the injuries and deaths of other beings- often friends. They may have to see dismembered bodies. War, needless to say, is incredibly traumatic. What actually could be more traumatizing than the threat of being murdered, witnessing murder, or committing murder- even if it is "sanctioned"? As troops in the midst of battle, they are not able to register all that is going on or to feel all the feelings associated with their experiences. If they do, they will not be able to continue to fight and survive. They might register some of the events and feelings. Alternatively, they might register some of the events without feelings or the feelings without the memories of the events. Perhaps they hardly register anything at all in order to continue on and to survive.

The memories and feelings that are associated with seeing these horrors—the visual images and the feelings of fear, pain, and anger become dissociated and placed in some other portion of their psyches and, after they return from war, they no longer have access to these feelings and memories. If the events and feelings that they have dissociated from could simply disappear, if they could just evaporate, there would not be any subsequent problems. But they don't disappear and evaporate. They remain imbedded some place in their psyches; in a part that is separate- an un-integrated portion of their lives and experience, where they threaten to break through to the conscious mind by re-living, re-creating and re-traumatizing until it is addressed.

This un-integrated piece of life experience threatens to become known to the conscious mind by presenting our veterans with symptoms—symptoms such as nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety. depression and panic. They have no idea what these symptoms are about. They have no idea where they are coming from. For example, a veteran may come home having dissociated from much of the horror of war in an attempt to try to stay away from the feelings associated with it. He then might later walk down the street and, suddenly, a car backfires. The sound of the car backfiring then triggers the dissociated memories of gunfire and the soldier finds himself crouched in the corner; terrified but with no understanding of why. Or, perhaps he is hyper-vigilant and whenever someone walks up behind him, he startles intensely. In other words, the terror is there, but he is not connecting it to its source.

These responses, the symptoms of PTSD, must be treated by highly specialized counseling in which one must learn to bear the slow and painful process of going back to the war and to the events as they really happened, including the feelings that would have been there if they could have been borne at the time. When the dissociated thoughts and feelings are re-integrated, this new "wholeness", albeit painful, helps greatly to diminish the symptoms of PTSD. Once the feelings are re-attached to their source, they will not be triggered by cars backfiring, people approaching suddenly, nor will there be quite as many nightmares. The reality of the full extent of what they have experienced must be reintegrated into the psyche and become part of the veteran's conscious memory. Medications, such as anti-depressants and tranquilizers, are often absolutely necessary.

Our Armed Services, more often than not, fail to recognize and/or treat the phenomenon of PTSD. They refuse to fully acknowledge the nature of war and the need to resort to dissociation, when they themselves have helped to actually "induce" dissociation prior to sending our troops to war! If they created it, and they continued and controlled it., wouldn't you would think they would take more responsibility in attempting to cure it? Many of our veterans may be home physically, but they will never really be "home" again until the true extent of the trauma they have endured and the need for more adequate care is addressed. How many stories do we need to hear over and over and for how many decades before we finally acknowledge that the veterans who were "never really themselves again" were suffering-SUFFERING- from PTSD?