D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February 2012
Surviving Childhood Neglect
Even if you lost the battle, you won the war.
Bina Breitner
Since Rebecca had been taking better care of herself, I was surprised to see her puffy from crying. She said she'd stayed home all week eating gallons of ice cream and sleeping most of the time. She was not only miserable; she was ashamed that she had crumpled.
"I'm 56 years old," she groaned, wiping her eyes and face. "I thought I was done with this — why am I falling apart after so many years?"
The trigger had been a brief conversation with her mother, during which Rebecca mentioned that she was worried about her nephew. He was starting to fail in school, probably because his mother (Rebecca's sister) was addicted to meth and barely functioning. To Rebecca's astonishment, the mother became enraged at Rebecca and spoke highly of the sister.
Rebecca was hurt, not only by the attack on her but by the injustice. She knew the boy was in trouble. Her sister didn't seem to care about anything beyond her next fix. Why would the mother lash out at Rebecca, when she should be grateful that Rebecca wanted to help?
The sense of injustice was amplified by the many times Rebecca had rescued her mother. She'd sent money, she'd gone to help during health crises, she'd stayed courteous and responsible — all this, even though her mother treated Rebecca badly. She'd been a generous, dutiful daughter. This is what she got in return?
Then she was furious with herself. How could she be so fragile? Rebecca was a smart, experienced, professional woman. She knew her mother was untrustworthy. A woman of Rebecca's maturity had no business falling into despair because her mother behaved the way she'd always behaved.
Of course there was a larger picture, which emerged as we talked.
Since early childhood, Rebecca had never felt safe. Her mother was angry and her father was alcoholic; no one cared what Rebecca really needed. Being emotionally alone had created a deep anxiety. The world was huge, she was little, and who knew what might happen at any turn?
To reassure herself, she'd worked on getting closer to her mother. She started reading her mother's cues, responding to every nuance of her moods. When these efforts to be a good girl didn't make much difference, Rebecca tried harder. And harder. This went on for many years — to no avail. By the time Rebecca left for college, she'd accepted that she and her mother were effectively unrelated and vowed to get on with her life.
Then why was she devastated by the recent attack? Because it touched her childhood terrors. Despite many achievements and pep talks to herself, Rebecca still carried her early anxiety. All the years of living in an emotional vacuum with two self-involved, angry and drunken parents had created habitual fearfulness.
Her mother's approval had felt like the key to her safety, to such an extent that the two became synonymous: her mother's approval equaled safety. Emotional connection, or "attachment," became her overriding priority. Until she was in high school, every day's value was measured by how her mother treated her.
I called this struggle to woo her mother Rebecca's private "war." Like any war, it required determination, extreme vigilance, strategizing, suppression of her own emotional needs, and total focus. She made pitiless demands of herself, no matter how tired, hurt or confused she felt. She lived with the tension, the uncertainties and the fears. It wasn't a big war; it wasn't even a war anyone else knew about. But in her subjective world everything else was subsumed by the effort to get her mother's recognition and, thus, to survive.
In her therapy, Rebecca came to see that the goal was not really her mother's love. However desperately she'd longed for that, the real payoff was her survival. Her mother's love felt like the means to her safety, but it wasn't actually the safety itself. (A lot of children whose parents love them are not necessarily safe.)
In fact, the effort to reach her mother had been only one of many battles in Rebecca's war to survive. She'd just taken all the others for granted. Her body had grown. She'd learned language and started communicating with other people of all ages. She'd learned social rules and, gradually, the discipline and discernment required to stay within them. She had accommodated schooling, adding new knowledge all the time and developing her mind. Later on, she had established herself professionally and built friendships.
She met all these, and other, developmental challenges. Maybe she put all her emotional attention into the relationship with her mother, but that was only one area of her survival and growth. Her "allies" (whom she'd ignored) had all won their battles to meet developmental challenges. She'd grown up, and here she was.
There's an old cynical joke: "The surgery was a success, but the patient died." Or, similarly, "He won the battle, but he lost the war." This was the other way around: Rebecca lost the battle, but she won the war.
She'd actually won every fair fight. School, growing physically, language, coordination, social interactions — everything except the awful relationship with her parents had turned out all right.
That relationship had not been a fair fight. The immense effort to get what she needed from her mother was doomed from the beginning. Her mother was carrying generations of dysfunction within her, and Rebecca never stood a chance of upending all that. Of course she lost that battle.
Rebecca had made three common childhood miscalculations. The first was believing she could reach her mother. (We all know you can't make someone else love you, even though a lot of us keep trying.) The second was seeing her mother only as her mother and not as a person with her own thorny history. The third was believing that only through reaching her mother could she survive. In fact, she hadn't ever reached her mother — yet she had survived. The danger was over, and she was in charge of her own life. She could stop fighting.
Gestalt thinkers wrote about the "figure" and the "ground" of our perception. We usually focus on the figure — whatever is demanding our attention or happening right now. The rest is the ground, or background, what we sometimes call the larger view or context. In Rebecca's early life, limited as she was by a youngster's perception and by her anxiety, her mother's approval was the figure, her focus, her everything.
The ground was the rest of her life as she grew and evolved. When she and I talked about the "battle" and the "war," we were moving her perceptual attention from the figure (the efforts to win her mother's love) to the ground (her development and actual success in life). The failure to achieve her mother's attachment was only part of her total story. Her mother still didn't love her as she deserved, but in the larger context of her survival (the ground) that failure became less devastating. Unless she continued to fixate on that "figure," it no longer defined her.
It's easy for us get caught up in our battles. Think of all the normal life processes that demand our attention. Time passes and people move away, lose their health, or die. Grieving creates a locked-in relationship with the person(s) we've lost and what their absence means in our lives. Likewise, aging brings changes that can narrow our point of view and lead us gradually to withdraw from the world. Illness demands attention to our pain and reduced function. A divorce, a job loss, a move, children leaving home... any big change becomes the "figure" that grabs our awareness. We have to consciously open up our vista when the crisis diminishes, or we stay in the narrow life we adopted while we were dealing with it.
Then there are the myriad unnecessary early-life battles young people encounter. There's a smothering parent against whom the child has to defend himself in order to have a separate self. There's the chaotic family in which the child struggles to form a coherent narrative. The demanding parent for whom the child works to be good enough. The rigid and repressed family in which the child fights to feel less, or not to feel at all. The insecure parents whom the child tries to please by being perfect and, therefore, acceptable. The overwhelmed parent who didn't really want children, for whose love the child tries to be invisible.
It's a challenge for us to realize when these private wars are over. The same actually holds true for happy events as well. An important new love relationship, the birth of a child, or a big promotion can draw us away from supportive, normal parts of our lives. We not only get excited and involved in the happy developments; we also gear up for all the adaptive shifts required by such a big change. Next thing we know, we've lost some friends and neglected other nourishing relationships. We only notice it when we climb down from our excitement and see the "ground" again.
One of the benefits of meditation or any other practice of discipline is that it clears the mind, helps us re-establish a larger context. I remember having a big fight with my high school boyfriend, which ended with my storming off to practice the violin. I think it took only five minutes of fully concentrated practice for me to look up and notice I'd completely forgotten the fight. It was somewhere over there on the horizon, and it no longer seemed important. I could barely recall what we'd fought about.
I felt as if I'd just discovered the world's best drug. What I'd discovered was a way to shift from the figure to the ground. As they say, it's all in how you look at it.
Bina Breitner is a licensed marriage & family therapist (LMFT) in private practice
at 808 W. 8th St. in Silver City. She can be reached at (575) 538-4380.
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