Why Aren't You Horrified?

I asked my T this in session yesterday. It wasn't a rhetorical question and it wasn't a question related to my history directly. Rather, I was describing how I see some of the ways that my son reacts to hurt and closes himself off from people that remind me of some of the direct effects from the abuse that was done to me as a child. I feel like the effects of my history hang like a polluted cloud over my child, poisoning him and changing him in the same ways I was changed. And that feels like I am . . . abusing him in some way. I might have suggested T pick up the phone and call child protective services.

But instead, he sat there in his typical calm and collected way, letting me know that he heard me.

"Why aren't you reacting to what I said?" I snarl at him.

"I am giving you a reaction, it's just not the one that you want."

I look around for objects sharp enough to plunge between his eyes. Smart guy, there's nothing.

"Why aren't you horrified, that I am doing this?"

Blah, blah, blah, insert a whole bunch of lame philosophic chatter about the importance of not being judgmental, probably the same speech he gives when clients tell him that they hoard cats, have affairs, or sniff other people's shoes at parties. He adds something that sounds like, the only way to change this is to decide to heal.

I'm not exactly sure why I'm writing this post. Except for the usual-- I'm desperate for attention. I guess I'm looking for some kind of feedback. I actually left this session in a really good place with him, although I wouldn't mind if you wanted to vent with me about what a b@stard he was for refusing to give me the reaction that I wanted. I yammered on for bit after this about feeling frustrated that I had made very deliberate choices about doing things differently than my parents had, and of giving my child some of the things I never had as a child, and feeling pained that this "pollution" of mine is something that I can't control.

Anne

You have the heart of a writer from the way this all sounds!
And silence to our words can be felt as the largest insult!!!

Hi, I too notice things with my son - his shyness, his deepness, his fury and sadness and how he can remember hurt and pain for a long time.

I questioned myself - I didn't want him to have the same experiences as I had, I wanted it to be different for him. But then I realised the things that happened to me as a child, did just that - happen to "me" - those things did not give me the ability to feel pain deeply, I had that capacity anyway.

My emotions were denied as a child and this is what I can do differently for my son. When he cries, when he is angry, when he is feeling shy, I can be there for him, empathise and give him what I did not have - validation, warmth, love, a hug.

Your T sounds great actually - what a difficult challenge to hear though - that he was reacting but not in the way you wanted - sounds like there is much to learn from that.

Take care - Soup

Soup, that is exactly it. In the moment, part of me snorted with laughter, but there was definitely a reaction there that was like, WTF, you're not going to give me what I want? I thought that therapy was supposed to be able getting what you want, or what you need.

He also said something to me earlier, referring to hearing me "being too hard on myself" in my journal. He said he had to stop himself from trying to make me feel better about that.

So, @#$%, (said to T in my imagination), you're not going to join me in being horrified by me, and then you're not going to make me feel better, what the !@#$ are you good for, exactly! What actually WILL you do for me?

Anne

I remember some of being a child and how some things meant so very much to me? Things that I could care less about now, wouldn't blip my radar? When we're children, we have so much less experience, so many fewer days to connect with other days; think about how "long" summer seemed as a child; that was because you'd only seen 6-8, total! It was still a novelty.

Now think of getting your meals "delivered" and your diaper changed when you cried and picked up when you cried a different cry and people being attuned to you pretty much and a year or two goes by and you get "No!" a lot and there are interesting looking things you're not allowed to touch/explore and you actually have thoughts but more word pictures and not quite the wherewithal to ask questions or express yourself clearly for the adults to understand; extremely frustrating!

So, you arrive at your son's age, with his very individual thoughts and background and ideas of how things work and come up against your parents' also very individual thoughts and background and ideas of how things work and there's a will clash. You want things to work a certain way and the adult wants things to work a different way; whose way gets followed? Probably the adults'. Now, before you decide the adults' way gets followed because they're "bigger", remember that the child still does not have as much information as the adult, as much of an idea of how things can/do/"should" work. From a child's point of view things can look unfair and hurtful that may be for their own good; yes, being hit or jerked around is still physical abuse, being called names or yelled at when the adult has a problem of their own, or ignored when one truly needs help is still mental or emotional abuse but not all the child's problems are caused by their significant other adults.

Which leads me to, where do you get off deciding that, "I see some of the ways that my son reacts to hurt and closes himself off from people that remind me of some of the direct effects from the abuse that was done to me as a child" is what is happening? Your son is not you! He's got his own problems. You are not your abusing parent(s), you have your own problems!

The purpose of "seeing some of the ways that my son reacts to hurt and closes himself off from people" is so you can see if you can help your son learn to respond better when he feels hurt. It's all learning. You and I may not have been taught well, may have been left in the bitter dregs of our hurt but we are adults now and can learn differently in therapy and we can learn to respond to and teach our children differently.

what would his horrified reaction have given you?

First, what we want and what we need tend to be two entirely different things when it comes to healing, from my experience. If our T's give us what we "want", most of the time we won't make any progress because they will just be enabling our old patterns of thinking and behavior. In fact, I'd pretty much say my T almost never tells me what I "want" to hear.

As far as the effect all this has had on your son, I can totally relate. I have three sons, and my husband and I both come from backgrounds of extensive abuse, severe depressions, and bipolar disorder. Remarkably, the boys have turned out quite well although they all have their quirks that probably result from their parents' "stuff". That's pretty inevitable really. No one has more impact on our children than we do, for good or for bad. Two of our sons have actually had sessions with our T to work through some of the spill over. But all in all, they've come through being our kids really well. They are resilient beings and delightful individuals. The good wins out in the long run. Try not to spend to much time blaming yourself; rather, just see to it that your son gets whatever he needs to move through the difficult times. That's really all we can do as parents--our best at the time, sometimes under very difficult circumstances.

Well, not a bad insight, I could have done without the hostile preface, "where do you get off?" It had not actually occurred to me, despite the similarity of his responses, that I might *not* have actually done this to him.

However, I live within a community where even though none of my family members were survivors of the Holocaust, you see what parents who are survivors implicitly communicate to their children, which is "be afraid, people will try to kill you because you're a Jew." And then events like 9/11 happen which makes Jews feel particularly attacked. Children of Holocaust survivors and even those of us who are Jewish develop this sense of fear even though nobody has ever tried to kill us personally.

It is this transmission of experience that I am concerned about, and I do think there's a legitimacy to it that you perhaps don't see. I do appreciate acknowledging the other possibilities and the general reminder to not blur the boundaries between myself and my child, and to see his experience for what it really is, not just through my eyes, and to help him cope with it as his parent.

Anne

Oh, I can relate to this. When my T starts spouting what I call psychological cliches and psycho-babble, I tell her that I could say the same things, probably better than her. In fact, I could probably present a excellent dissertation that would blow her away how well I can present the same 'lame' ideas. I guess my sarcasm gets out of hand when she does that with me.

I guess I also want more than a calm soothing reaction. Maybe it doesn't feel 'real' when they do that. Maybe we're thinking it's a well-rehearsed act that they have down pat. Why can't they join us in our rage, our horror and validate it somewhat? Why do we want that validation? Maybe because it's how we feel now and when they don't express some kind of emotional reaction, it's like they don't 'get' it.

But like others have posted, that's probably not what we need. idk

That's a pretty good question. I think a piece of it is what Perna said, which rings true, at least if I"m interpreting her correctly. Kind of a basic infantile response that you're not giving me what I want [insert foot stomping and purple face here], how dare you not. Adult says, isn't that what I pay you for? I can get what I don't want from anybody else in my life. And the tone my T was using in saying "I'm not giving you what you want" is pretty much how a firm parent would decline to give a child something that they shouldn't have. No matter how legitimate I can intellectually know that this was, I still feel anger creeping in even while I am typing this. I still want what I want.

Another piece of it is that I do like to beat myself up and he consistently refuses to join me in that process. Totally maddening-- the translation here of being "horrified" and what I was probably looking for is the equivalent of him confirming, "yes, you are very bad." And then I know for sure that there's a reason for all this shame that lives within me, like I'm not crazy, and I feel more confident in him because he finally realizes that. He's not as dumb as I think.

Anne

I do grasp this at an intellectual level. I think at an emotional level, I feel that I "deserve" to get what I want. "You know how I have suffered," I want to remind him, "and how there is so much in my life where I have not gotten what I want." And besides, how freaking hard would it be to just agree that you are horrified?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts about your sons. They sounds like great people and you sound proud in the knowledge that you have done right by them. My son is a great little guy and amazes me with his strengths every day, and I hope that one day I can have the more confident perspective that you have.

Anne

There's a lot there in that paragraph you wrote. I didn't really feel soothed by what he said, even though he was calm. He didn't indicate, like he usually does when I'm distressed, that what's lying underneath my reaction is something to be distressed about. It was more like yeah, that can happen.

But yes, what you said about he didn't get it, I think that is what I reacted to in asking "why aren't you horrified?" Don't you get how awful this really is?

IDK, the more I try to wrap my head around it, the more confused I feel.

Anne

I do not believe that our T's role is to collude in our self hatred, nor do things for us, but to sit with us and help us unravel.

We desire to be punished, to absolve our guilt?

Hi, Anne, I have difficulty with things being "automatic" so I don't notice them after awhile is why I used the "where do you get off" phrase, so it would be deliberately provocative and arresting and get your attention.

There always has to be transmission of experience between parent and child; the child doesn't have any experiences of their own and all the parent says and does for, with, around the child for twenty-some odd years are bound to influence. But, and why I used the "where do you get off," it's up to the adult to recognize what has been transmitted to them and check it out, see how "true" it is; I was almost offended when you implied 9/11 was worse for Jews than for others because somehow it was "about" them and their experiences.

That's what I'm saying needs to be observed; I get that Jews are going to be anxious, around murdering Arabs (or, perhaps, Germans) but each situation we are in needs to be assessed for its actual danger; not all Arabs are murdering bastards trying to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth; that Jews have been harried here and there around Europe since before medieval times, I'm too familiar with Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and it's background, thank you. And how do you know I'm not Jewish, do not come from Jewish roots?

I think your assumptions (and I'm not saying this angrily or provocatively, just letting you know what I think; making an observation, not a criticism) about how others view things, including your son, are based on your own "acceptance" of what you feel has been passed down to you that you feel is not worthy of your looking at and being horrified at, that you were passed down an "incorrect" point of view? It's not your T that should be horrified but yourself that you have to live with all this unnecessary fear?

Perna,

I think it is clear from my post that I was talking about myself within the Jewish community, and how I felt. I was not making assumptions or guesses about anyone else's ethnic, spiritual, or religious roots, including yours. I was using the Holocaust issue as an analogy to what I am experiencing and trying to explain better how I felt.

Anne

Coming in from left field here (Kevin Youkilis, Jewish sometime 3rd-baseman for BoSox), no kids of my own, but it is weirdly validating for me to see how my brother has effed up his kid in so many of the same ways that we were messed up, if not worse. Because these were bizarre double-message-y castrating (REALLY tough on the girls!) mind games - and for what it's worth, MY T's are/were horrified - one even had me calling social services. Current T still gets upset if I mention the kid, sometimes the subject just comes up - I've had to put it all out of my mind, because it was one of the main reasons I said if I started screaming, I'd never stop.

So your awareness of this "heredity", your returning to therapy, your openmindedness, your willingness to engage here and with your children, I think will help protect your children from unconsciously SELF-inflicting harm, which is the most insidious?

A very interesting point. There are certainly harms that we can protect our kids from, in the sense that we can ensure that the schools that they go to are right for them, that they are properly supervised if they go on playdates or sleepovers, etc etc. Obviously we cannot protect them from bad things in the outside world, and to some extent we cannot protect them from us (although that is certainly a large part of my motivation to continue in therapy). Can we protect them from themselves, which as you say is the most insidious?

I think if I get what you're saying, the harm that we do to ourselves (the vast majority of the harm we suffer through) is from the neglect and abuse our parents perpetrated on us. Although I have not been abused in any way for many decades, it is like I have internalized that experience and pick up, so to speak, where the abuse left off. And it is insidious, especially because you can't "see" anyone doing the continued harm to me and because at this point, it's my personal responsibility to stop the harm from occurring. It reminds me of how my older brother used to be an expert at pinching or something similar where by the time I complained about it, he was innocently pretending to be asleep in the car or had a book in his hands or whatever. "I didn't see anything", my Mom would say, which always sort of sounded like "therefore nothing happened."

So you can't really "see" me doing it to myself, although if you read this post (which you obviously did) then you can tell that I still do. And whatever else I've done wrong as a parent, I don't think I've planted the seed of self destruction.

Thank you, hankster.

Anne

Anne, I just wanted to commend you for recognizing the subtle ways in which the issues of the parent end up getting handed down to the child if they aren't dealt with. That happened very much with my mother and me -- her own abuse, which she hadn't dealt with, permeated our relationship. The way she would get furious at my perceived timidity. The way accusations seemed to be constantly flying about my obsession with boys, when I had zero interest in dating (even more bizarre, when I wanted to paint my nails pink at the age of 9... apparently I was trying attract male attention?). The message was clear: if someone overpowered me, it was my fault for not standing up for myself; if someone was sexually inappropriate with me, it was because I was asking for it. I got all the messages that abused kids give themselves -- except, thankfully, without the abuse.

Actually, for a lot of reasons that would take a long time to explain, I was in real danger of being sexually abused as a kid, and thinking back to the way it was then... she always SAID to tell her if anything ever happened to me, but she always ACTED as if anything like that would be my fault -- because she hadn't yet stopped blaming herself for her own abuse. I would never have told her. Thank heaven it never happened.

Sadly, this also meant that some of the screamingly obvious signs of emotional troubles with me went totally unnoticed (or were attributed to my "shyness" or "unassertiveness", or insert whatever adjective my mom didn't like about herself here). I looked back at old report cards all the way back to preschool, and there were red flags EVERYWHERE for depression, as it manifests itself in childhood. Thing was, I was a great student... so no one did anything. A couple decades of untreated depression later, and I'm still digging myself out of the hole.

So I wanted to say, thank you for trying to handle this. Some healing has taken place between me and my mom... as she finally dealt with her own abuse, she was able to deal with me for the real me, not the projection of herself she placed on me. It's never too late, of course... but the earlier the better.

SallyBrown - you make such a good point on how parents having suffered abuse from their own parents can intentionally or more likely not intentionally pass down the effects of that abuse to their children.

My mother was terribly abused as a child - both physically and emotionally by her alcoholic parents. I had always believed that I was raised in a safe home and I still believe that. But I have almost no memory of my childhood and it is there that my fear of getting into trouble must have been planted. I do remember though that anger was the one and only emotion that she displayed. She was also very controlling. She tried very hard to offer a stable home but she obviously never was able to process healthily the abuse she suffered from.

I wonder how all of that has affected my own children. I've told T that once I understand myself better then I want to re-visit how I raised my children. They seem like emotionally healthy adults but when I look closer at them I can see that there are probably scars left by any kind of poor parenting I may have done. IDK. I hope I gain enough insight so that I can make some kind of effectual amends.

SallyBrown and Skysblue,

I really appreciate the support around this. SallyBrown, I think you really helped crystalize for me some of what hankster said and helped me recognize the difference between what I thought may be happening to him. What you went through, and the way that your mother transmitted her issues to you-- it must have been difficult to cope with. I am sorry that you had to go through that. But that's clearly not what I'm doing to my son, so I guess I have not done at least that thing wrong.

Skysblue, I'm not at the place you are, where you can look back on your healthy grown children, and think about how you wish you might have done things differently. But I know that everyone I've known whose kids are grown feels tormented by at least a few mistakes they feel they've made. It's inevitable when you love your kids as much as you do and when you care about doing the right thing by them. That is a good thing.

Anne

what happens if he does confirm that you're this horrible person? i mean, where do you go from there? if you're just horrible and horrifying, then what's the point of going to therapy? what's the point of trying to change?

that's what shame does....it corrodes that part of yourself the believes you can do better. and i hope everyone in your life stops joining you in your shame. as much as it may piss you off

Well, the good (or the bad) thing, depending on the timing of my different perspectives, is that I can't get *anyone* in my life to collude with me, except the occasional attorney on the other side of my cases. And, honestly, the vast majority of the time, I have a reasonably good sense of myself as a likeable, even loveable person. Unfortunately, I can't get all of myself on board with that.

Anne

(((((((((((((((((((((((((((Anne)))))))))))))))))))))))))))
you pay someone $$ by the hour just so he can give you the reaction you wanted? you don't really believe that do you?

Lot of good insights here, and since your original post you seem to have come around to some of the same, which is good work. The " b@stard " (!) will be pleased when you see him again

Thank you for the smiles and laughter your post brought me. I will be sure to let the b@stard know that you thought he'd be pleased

Anne