Losing Their Mind
Psychological emancipation can feel downright psychotic
This column reminds me of an old joke about Hollywood. A screenwriter asks a film executive what they thought of the new script. The executive says, “I don’t know, I’m the only one that’s read it.”
One could make a similar joke about Washington, D.C.
Children from traumatizing early scenarios—familial, sociocultural, economical—often have trouble having their own thoughts and experiences because their minds have been so hijacked by subjugating or enslaving systems. (One could sardonically comment that Hollywood and D.C. are like this—which is true, sort of.)
It starts early.
Imagine two scenarios. In the first, a young child learning to talk finds her words met with responsiveness and enthusiasm from caregivers. This includes basic words such as “ow!” or “no!” In these instances the caregiver does a good-enough job in recognizing that the child is hurt, or sad that playtime is over.
From this the child learns her expressions matter, have value, that it is safe to express herself, that they are heard and understood. In this way the child develops confidence that her words mean something, they are a reliable vehicle for relatedness, which is often what does not happen in an addictive, narcissistic, or otherwise grossly misattuned system—again, including socioculturally or economically.
What if a young child of color cannot understand the biases that downgrade or constrict his abilities? How do children integrate the everyday injuries of massive class inequity built into our system, blasted throughout our media every waking moment?
I remember a kid in eighth grade who used to play golf with us middle-class Jewish kids at the local city course. As he approached, we would whisper amidst ourselves, “Be nice to him, he’s poor.” This kid, Muffy, was a great athlete and pretty tough, and didn’t suffer fools.
I once had a patient early in my career, Mary, who told me that as a young child she was left on her own by her mother, in summertime, at the age of three or four, sitting in the sun in the backyard under the sprinkler; if she complained of her sunburn, she got a smack.
This was a biracial child who resembled her father, of Mexican heritage; he had problems with alcohol and left the family just after Mary was born. Mary’s mother was white and resented the child who physically resembled the man who left her an overburdened single mom. (Meantime mom had depression and anxiety, and a growing dependence on medication.)
Mary learned that to speak her pain was to invite abuse; when her mother was angry at her she would say, “you sound like your father” or “Whatever you say, Hector” (her dad’s name.) Out of this resentment came occasional racist jabs towards Mexicans that hurt Mary intensely, as if she were somehow at fault for her “inferior” genetics.
To me Mary passed for Mexican or White, and she agreed, confused as to which racial group she didn’t belong to. In school she was bullied by both groups for not belonging.
And so early on she learned to keep her mouth shut, deal with her pain by ignoring it. It just went away, along with aspects of her self-development. In fact she came to doubt she was in pain to begin with. Does this hurt, is this supposed to hurt, is it normal to hurt? These were questions she often asked about her own psychological suffering. She toyed with marijuana and loved baked goods (maternal substitutes, I believe); when she gained weight, she felt herself to be lower than the curb.
This early subjugation also led to overwhelming anxiety when any intense emotion threatened to spill out of the lockbox she had mastered. It was crippling anxiety when she got mad at someone. To feel hurt was normal, but rage was destabilizing .
To have her own mind was to risk abandonment. As a result, she came to doubt her own perceptions of pain, desire, and anguish. At the same time she was charming and engaging, and I was very fond of her.
We spent the first several years of therapy confirming first that, yes, she had suffered traumatic mistreatment (was not “weak” or “whiny”), and her father’s abandonment and mother’s abuse certainly contributed to the crippling self-doubt that made it hard for her to seek a promotion or kinder treatment from her partner, to say nothing of the ongoing narcissistic clinging of her mother, even now. Yet Mary continued to believe her own pain couldn’t be “that bad.”
We can start to see how, in parallel, there was such an explosion in 2020, after George Floyd was lynched. Enough was enough!
As for Mary, it took years for her to accept her pain and suffering as real, worthy of tender attention from me or anyone. It all took years to navigate, since she was challenging a very old set of beliefs—or commandments—even by coming to therapy.
Another patient, “John,” highly neglected as a child, told me that when his mother was murdered by her drug dealer, what he remembered most was his father’s pain, and the impulse he had to cook and otherwise tend to his father. John was in seventh grade when this happened. Is it any wonder he went on to become a high-school counselor?
In this way, as often happens with parentified kids, self-identity is blurred with the “big feelings” of adults, eclipsing their own to the point that it’s not clear whose is whose. The feelings of others take precedence in a confusing way, as those emotions appear to happen “inside themselves.”
When I asked John if he felt sad or shaken when his mother was killed, he said to me, “I didn’t know what I should feel.”
But he did feel awful for his father.
One of the things that troubles me in such cases is the stubbornness of the attachment to the still-abusive parent, even as the agony of neglect or abuse is illuminated in therapy. To such patients, having their own experiences is tantamount to betrayal.
John struggled on and off with binge-drinking and compulsive use of porn, both of which only fed his shame and self-hatred. Much of this activity was to soothe or numb the pain he couldn’t name and wasn’t “allowed” to discuss, though even this rule was elusive to him.
As his father aged and suffered from encroaching dementia, John remained faithful, dedicated, as did Mary towards her aging mother, helping when she could, going well beyond the call, though her mother even her very best was brusque. Over time, though, Mary spontaneously protested. Her mother was shocked, but had to accept it if she wanted Mary’s help.
And when she courageously separated from her partner, enduring his pleading texts and calls (the tables had truly turned), she told me she felt she was literally losing her mind with worry for him. What if he fell apart? Could he survive without her?
The crippling legacy of the parentified child.
I could not soft-pedal this agony of differentiation. But she was losing the old mind, the old enslaving system. She was in fact coming alive, with agonizing labor pains. It is akin to a prisoner reintegrating into a free society, which can be overwhelming in ways easy to overlook, only increasing shame at having to do things that are “so simple” for so-called normal people.
Mary had become homeless in a sense, in claiming a life of her own, since her home had always been in the commanding, violent and intrusive mind of an other.
Often people not in therapy, lucky enough to not really need it, ask me why it’s so hard to leave abusive relationships. The women and men I see are intelligent and astute. The problem is deeply emotional and psychological. It is akin to giving up alcohol or drugs.
Key aspects of the patient’s psyche or self are held hostage, first by the parent/caregiver and later by their “stand-in,” a partner or boss bearing eerie resemblance (as well as compulsive activities involving booze, sex, food, etc.)
With the patients above, the caregivers expected the child to care for them; John didn’t know how to feel because he had also cared for his mother, before she was killed, and now felt responsible for the father, who for all his anger was actually a very brittle, fragile man. Both of these patients had yet to claim a mind of their own.
So how does a therapist help a patient give birth to their own mind?
More on this next time.
L’Shana tova to those who celebrate!