Framed for Life

The "official portrait" of noxious family systems

Imagine for a moment a child growing up in an abusive or abandoning system, where his or her reality is continually invalidated for the sake of protecting the caregivers (or caregiving system).  Perhaps the child is the “little caregiver” of alcoholic, depressed, or otherwise impaired adults who cannot or will not seek help.  This describes many of us in the helping professions, as George Atwood outlined.

The child feels compelled to be impossibly “good,” as close to perfect as possible, caretake the caretakers, lest the system destabilize, all eyes on the “uncooperative” child.  What remains most dangerous is needing provision from those above them.

Such a shattering reversal of the caregiving order, the estrangement of the child’s emotionality (now stigmatized), occurs in institutions also: understaffed schools and untreated disorders in students of lesser means; judicial and penal abuse of minorities; historical denial or minimization of institutional violence; abuse and disregard of the climate (deemed an “exaggeration” by deniers), and other instances. 

We can keep this in mind as we return to the family situation.

Here in this too-common scenario, the child is coerced to memorize a family portrait, which may resemble a collage, single image, a copper engraving, or series of rotating (photoshopped) pictures, presented in any number of styles, from Norman Rockwell to Rembrandt to Basquiat, or perhaps a still from a goofy sitcom.  This is the safe and sanctioned view of “the way things are,” versus how the child experiences them, as trust in their own perception is corroded.

The portrait could also be unyieldingly tragic or pensive, if a caregiver was depressed, angry, or overwhelmed and insisted everyone feel the same. The variations are endless.

Many patients drink, smoke, or inject to relieve the pain of having to endlessly remember the official portrait, now stubbornly a backdrop for all experience; of course the high wears off, the official version reasserts itself. There is a scalding shame at trying to “escape” the truth.

Of course this happens to some degree in all caregiving systems—“Oh come on,” even mildly mischievous children are told, “that’s not what happened”—but what I describe here is acutely alienating, in lieu of the frame hanging in the “living room” or forefront of the psyche. 

It is akin to Soviet propaganda, a signifier signifying itself (de-symbolizing, inert), denying a child’s psychological reality. Here it is always morning (never mourning) in America.

This inflexible airbrushing of history fractures the child’s true self into compartmentalized aspects that become unreal, unseen, perhaps even dangerous to explore or express, into adulthood and of course psychotherapy.  In this way, the child’s derailment becomes normalized. 

In some scenarios, if a child develops severe OCD for instance, he or she has long been compelled to memorize and consistently recall every detail, nuance, and shading of the portrait, upon punishment of exile or death.  Hands must remain clean, door locked, housecleaning and laundry spotless, and so on, lest the messiness of reality contradict the portrait to even a small degree. Such contradiction courts disaster.

I think Freud understood this well.  He was brilliantly compelling in his clinical observations of obsession in men and “hysteria” in women.  Freud well understood the anxiety of contradicting the picture patients were historically compelled to maintain as psychic wallpaper.

But then Freud attempted to substitute his own picture, insisting on a mechanized why of the maintenance, a one-size-fits-all, rather than facilitate a space for the patient to discover or devise their own story (a stance more in line with Winnicott.) 

If a patient presented a picture Freud disagreed with, they were essentially told “that’s false”. Freud then expected his disciples (and readers) to more or less replicate this picture as faithfully as possible.  Freud was, as Ludwig Wittgenstein warned, bewitched by his own powerful language.

What intersubjective-systems authors Stolorow and Atwood highlight is the framing of the picture Freud created, in line with Freud’s subjectivity and his idealization of his mother, which impacted what he saw.  

Ludwig Wittgenstein felt language seduces all of us into making this mistake, as words and language—including the language of images—offer a convincing truth. Look for instance at how radically the given facts of reality are constantly disputed in our sociopolitical media-spheres.  We continue to argue over the truth of this or that picture without consideration of the framing, as in noxious caregiving systems. (Linguist George Lakoff has written about the framing issue, sociopolitically.)  

Most caregivers do not want to harm children intentionally.  But inter-generational trauma, the lack of adequate mental health treatment, unacknowledged societal and class oppression, and plain old pride and ego…can serve as the hair-trigger of intensive self-protections, a fear or shame of appearing inadequate, when a child threatens to reflect a caregiver’s failings, leading to wholesale denial, which itself prompts denial, as the cover-up is covered up, the tableau painted into permanence.

Here is where newer patients insist, regarding the invalidation of their own emotionality, the severity of the problems that have led them to my office, “hey, my folks did the best they could with what they had” (end of discussion) or “at least I had a roof over my head and enough to eat” (what Saul Bellow called “potato love.”)

I cannot tell you how many younger patients of all colors and creeds insist that sharing their pain with me is “self-indulgent” or privileged. Social movements too, while potentially invaluable, can foreground inflexible imagery. (Life is messy.)

The point is not that caregivers or any human being must be perfect.  As a parent I know the opposite is true.  The point is to recognize and course correct when systemic failures of attunement occur, especially in treatment. 

This includes therapists too. I can overlook how frightening or impossible it is to set aside those portraits burnished into memory. Patients can and will, when they are ready and able to do so.

One of the many challenges of such engravings is that nothing about it, including its so-called framing, is open to debate: a delusion impossible to surrender.

So what are we to do when a patient must not, cannot deviate from the smiles or otherwise frozen visages within the frame, even as the framing itself—the emotional climate or psychological state of those in control—remains unyieldingly camouflaged?

And don’t therapists, too, have their own portrait of sorts, of what therapy is supposed to look like?

No one is immune from the seduction of their favored phrases and portraits. No one likes their foundations rocked via images presenting a contradictory window. One of the great ongoing discussions of therapy is what therapy is or can be for this specific pairing. What kind of picture are we aiming for, and who or what holds the brush?

I will say more about this in my next column.