Tag Archives: Dysfunctional family

Being Tyrannized into Sexual Abstinence

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Here is a powerful report of a young woman who as a ten-year old girl was subjected to a fundamentalist Christian ceremony in which she vowed to maintain her sexual maturity until her wedding night.  This report demonstrates how her parents, and the culture of her faith, tyrannized her regarding her sexuality at at time where, per her report, she didn’t even know what sex was, thought boys were “icky”, and loved having tea parties with imaginary friends.  Her parents, because of their own fears about sexuality, intruded into her innocence and the violation really crippled her when she did get married.

H. L. Mencken once cryptically noted, “The problem with abstinence is its over emphasis of sex.” Mencken acerbically noted that often an innocent dimension of life is over laden with fears of culture and problems that are certainly present to begin with in this important dimension of life are compounded by the “over emphasis.”

THE FOLLOWING IS THE REPORT OF THE YOUNG WOMAN:  http://www.alternet.org/i-took-christian-virginity-pledge-child-and-it-nearly-destroyed-my-life

Donald Trump’s “Dysfunctional Family”

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When our unconsciousness begins to speak to us, the messages are sometimes subtle over a period of time until we finally “get it” and start paying attention.  But then other times the unconsciousness strikes us abruptly, like a thunderbolt from the blue and then we are sometimes stunned or even devastated.  But in either case the human tendency is to deny this irruption into our safe little world of delusion…and “delusional” describes all of us…and to shore up our defenses and shout more loudly the soothing self-talk that comforts us daily.  As W. H. Auden put it, “And Truth met him, and held out her hand; and he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

Donald Trump represents a voice from the Republican Party’s unconsciousness.  He is behaving and speaking with reckless abandonment, fulfilling the role of the identified patient in a dysfunctional family who “acts out” and announces the conflicted dynamics of the family that is trapped in its Ozzie and Harriet world.  In my clinical practice, my task was twofold: a) stop the “acting out” of the identified patient and b)get the family to own its own role in a dynamic that was often overtly pathological.  Needless to say, often one or both of the parents did not appreciate this approach to their child’s treatment.  For the unacknowledged anguish of the family had forced the identified patient to articulate its pain with word and deed and the parents  were not willing to admit that.

Donald Trump offers the Grand Old Party an opportunity to get real, to get honest with itself.  For example, one of the things that Trump is currently admired for by the base of the party is that, “He tells the truth!”  Well, yes he often does but without the decorum and respect which would make him more palatable to the upper hierarchy of the party.  But if this hierarchy would learn from this unconscious gift they have before them, they could start being such “politicians” and be less blatantly dishonest.

My favorite example…and there are many…is the climate science/global warming issue.  The base of this party is proudly skeptical of science and therefore of the overwhelming evidence that global warming is a critical issue.  But realizing that their base would disapprove if they acknowledged this, the Republican leadership and current candidates for their Presidential nomination glibly shrug their shoulders and report when questioned on the issue, “Well, I’m not a scientist.”  They could easily just simply answer the question but it would be politically inexpedient so they humiliate themselves and their party with this lame response.  And the same dishonesty has often been demonstrated on the issue of whether or not President Obama is a Muslim or was born in Kenya.

Paying attention to the unconscious is often just gut-wrenchingly painful.  But listening to this dimension of our experience, to a gut-level intuition, parallels with closely with  what Christians like to call heeding, “the Spirit of God.”  But  heeding the “Spirit of God” is not just listening to the whims of our heart that we are comfortable with, those  that confirm our pet theories and belief systems. It requires us to pay attention to those that rattle our cage.

Confined to the “Pauser Reason”

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I do occasionally “practice what I preach.” Last week I shared my thoughts re the “judgment of God” being a label that we have applied to the terror of suddenly being stabbed with self-awareness after having said or done something ill-advised or even stupid. Though the “self-reflection” I’m going to share here does not merit such a harsh description, it does illustrate the value of mulling over one’s speech and, in the case, writing.   Specifically, I was musing earlier this morning over my frequent use in this venue of Shakespeare’s phrase, “the pauser reason.”

My penchant for this expression reveals just how important this “pauser” has been and still is with me. And it is a gift but like most gifts it carries a price tag. I’m sure I first acquired this skill in my early youth and must have been like a kid with a hammer—“everything’s a nail!” For learning to be hyper-vigilant in my dysfunctional family I must have quickly learned the wisdom of taking pause and learning what was likely to transpire as a result of my words and actions. I learned to be an “observer.” This detached stance to life is described in the Jungian typology terminology as a “thinking type” and I have erred too much in that direction. Yes, I “think too much” and have learned, like Hamlet, that if all my thinking “were quartered, (it) would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.” With this “pauser” in over-drive throughout my life I have done like T. S. Eliot and “measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

But even here I am only making an observation and not complaining. I’m increasingly happy with my life even as in retrospect I have not lived it with the abandonment that some enjoy. I think the gods knew that I couldn’t handle “abandonment” to impulses like some can and would get into too much mischief…or worse. So they huddled together and said, we’ll “buckle this guy’s distempered cause (tightly) within the belt of rule.” (Variation of a line from King Lear)

Family dysfunction

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“There’s something wrong with me.” During my clinical practice, this observation from a client was often a turning point. This often represented a shift in perspective, a realization that the problem was not merely “the world out there” but “the world in here”. This often meant that the client was willing to recognize that he/she had a history of very poor choices and that these choices had created the morass that had led him/her into counseling in the first place. This usually involved contemplating various labels, i.e. diagnoses, clinical contrivances designed to “give shape to our anguish.”

This always involved addressing how harsh the world had been to the individual…dysfunctional family and all…but it entailed quickly realizing that choices one had made on a daily basis had perpetuated the problem. It always involved looking at the “chooser” that one had formulated early in life, a mechanism that continued relentlessly to perpetuate the maladaptive behavior pattern, aka the “shame cycle.”

This usually involved the experience of hell in some fashion. It involved realizing that one was trapped, that there was no escape (“No Exit” as Sartre put it), and the bitter anguish of hopelessness. This was the “bottoming out” phenomena, the reaching of the limit of the ego’s machinations, and subsequently the dawning of the possibility of a turn-about in life.

The client was often brought face to face with a real paradoxical dilemma. The more he/she voiced his/her anguish…particularly to the family of origin…the more he/she remained imprisoned in his/her private hell. R. D. Laing wrote decades ago about the dilemma of the individual who was caught in an “untenable position” in a dysfunctional family. The more this individual protests, the louder and more passionate be his/her protestations, the more “proof” does the family have that the individual is…for lack of a better term…nuts. So the anguish intensifies and so do the screams. And the family will often look on with bewilderment, perhaps asking, “What is wrong with Johnny or Susie…”

Often the client would have to realize that the validation he/she sought would never come from the family of origin. It just was not possible. Some families are trapped in their own pathology and any individual in that family that protests, that deigns to confront the systemic poison that consumes them all, will not find a ready ear within that family. That “ready ear”, that validation, is going to have to be found elsewhere. Note here what Leonardo da Vinci noted on this issue:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them. (from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.)

Validation is powerful medicine. As Conrad Aiken said, “And this is peace to know our thoughts known.”

Family Dysfunction and Sin

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A wit noted years ago, when systems theory was in the vanguard in clinical culture, that “families are to be from.” He was addressing the need of “cutting the cord” from the family of origin which has been an issue from eons past in our history. And I don’t think we ever do it perfectly but most of us accomplish the task to some degree. In my clinical work, however, I often came across gross examples of family dysfunction where the “cutting” of that cord was difficult to impossible and the problem was often multi-generational.

T. S. Eliot wrote a very interesting play that is relevant to this issue, “The Family Reunion.” Eliot’s lead character, Harry, is deeply enmeshed with his family of origin, especially his mother…of course…and the play is about his emotional anguish as he sought to free himself from familial bondage. He also used the concept of sin to describe the emotional baggage that families breed and perpetuate, identifying it as “instinctual energy.”

He declared that “sin may strain and struggle in its dark instinctual birth to come to consciousness and find expurgation.” He noted that one basic prerequisite for this expurgation to take place is for the struggle to be made conscious, to find the light of day. He suggested that often a particular individual in a family will be the “consciousness of your unhappy family” and described it as a “bird sent flying through the purgatorial fire.”

Just as with individuals, no family is perfect. Families are always flawed as they are comprised of flawed individuals. And, as system theory teaches us, the family usually appears quite devoted to perpetuating the “flaw.” It is our task as adults to wrestle with the “demons” that have been dealt us, to seek “expurgation”, and try to not pass our particular allotment of poison on to those around us.