This post will continue on from my posts (3/24, 3/18, and 4/14) summarizing how I incorporated ideas from from fields outside of mental health into my psychotherapy model, as well as how I tried to fit together seemingly contradictory theoretical aspects of several other psychotherapy schools, I discussed how families operate by rules mostly set by the prevailing culture, and how those rules change and how families may not be able to keep up, leading members to share intrapsychic conflicts.
But
how does this all manifest itself inside the brains and minds of individuals,
and why they do they feel they have to sacrifice aspects of themselves in order
to stabilize the family? Why can’t they just go ahead and do whatever they
really want to? I mean, if we’d like to believe in free will (and I do), why do
they make this choice?
The
answer boils down to how the rules of interpersonal engagement are laid down in
the brain during childhood, and how individuals
generally feel when they ignore the rules.
Babies
come into the universe knowing absolutely nothing about how the universe works
and how they can best adjust to their circumstances. They literally do not even
know their own body parts can be controlled. We are programmed to learn about our
universe through interactions with primary attachment figures. As children spontaneously
emit various behaviors (including expressing thoughts that occur to them) that
parent find acceptable, the attachment figures do something called mirroring (first described psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut) - they
validate, affirm, and reflect back to the child creating sense of value,
grandiosity, and self-worth. That allows a person to build healthy
self-esteem and a stable internal identity.
The rate
of the creation of synaptic pathways in the brain through this process, particularly in infancy, is phenomenal
(less useful pathways are later “pruned” through a process called neural
plasticity).
When babies grow older, and throughout
much of their lives, they continue to emit new self-generated behavior. When that
behavior is grossly at odds with their self image and for which they had not
received validation, the evolutionary process that created kin selection kicks
in, and they get very uncomfortable. If they are actively invalidated by
parents and the rest of the family system when they do or experience something,
it creates a sense of existential terror that psychotherapists called groundlessness or anomie. It’s like they don’t know who they are any more. The worse
that attachment figures attack ideas and behaviors that don’t jibe with the
family homeostasis (as are many efforts at self-actualization), the worse a
person’s terror.
People do have the ability to persist in new thought and
behavior patterns despite this feeling, and if they stick to them, the feeling
of groundlessness eventually dissipates. It’s also often the case that the
attachment figures are themselves ambivalent about the behavior in question,
but refuse to talk about this for fear of being invalidated by their own
attachment figures. They then give children mixed messages about what is
expected of them. How I believe children read these contradictory messages will
be summarized in the last post in this series.
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