Book Review: Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

In 2019, I wrote a review of a book by Amber Scorah titled Leaving the Witness about a woman growing up as a member of a cult-like religion. People in that group were taught to avoid talking to anyone or looking at any source of information that might call into question its belief system. As with most cults, people who broke the rules or questioned orthodoxy were completely shunned by family and friends.

My interest was how people routinely convince themselves of the most outrageous beliefs - ones that could easily be seen as preposterous even if thought about briefly - and hang on to them for dear life in order to avoid an almost unbearable feeling of groundlessness (also called existential groundlessness or anomie). The roots of this are from the biological effects of an evolutionary process called kin selection. In my review I said I thought the author had written the most elegant descriptions of that experience I’d ever read.

Well, Ms. Scorah has met her match in Tara Westover. Furthermore, Westover’s book talks about what happens in a case in which the “cult” consists ONLY of the members of someone’s family of origin. They were ostensibly Mormons, but the vast majority of practitioners of that religion did not subscribe to many of the clearly bizarre ideas of this particular family, especially those of the author’s father.

Westover writes that he may have had bipolar disorder. Of course I have no way of knowing for sure, but the consistency of her descriptions of him argues against this. In true bipolar, the person thinks normally when not in a manic or depressed state, which is usually most of the time. Some of the father’s strange ideas did not seem to be delusions per se but were based on conspiracy theories that are now widely believed. Included were dramatic ideas about the “Illuminati” and an anti-Semitic tirade called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Other of his beliefs were even more far out: the public schools were all agents of Satin, so none of the seven children in the family attended public schools. All doctors were all part of this conspiracy, so no one was taken to a hospital. 

Mother always went along with whatever ideas were expressed by the Father, but when alone with the author, she would sometimes seem to indicate that indeed she knew better.

One of the biggest issues for the author was her relationship with her older brother Shawn, who was sometimes hyper-involved with her but at other times physically abusive to her. If she mentioned this to her parents, they did not seem to believe her, so she quickly learned to keep it to herself –sometimes even by telling herself that maybe she had dreamed it or that she was crazy so what had clearly happened was a figment of her imagination.

Strangely, Westover was able to get into BYU despite a paucity of education by studying for the college entrance exams, through books and other recommended sources from people she knew at her church. Most of this reading presumably would have been highly disapproved of by her father. It took her two tries at the test to get the requisite score, but she somehow kept at it. Her father has always said he thought that women should just get married and run a household, but as I will mention later, some of his behavior was inconsistent with that idea.

Once she got to BYU, a Mormon school, almost none of the students had the same belief system she did. They could hardly believe she had never even been to high school. She did not share anything about her unique family experiences. She frequently told herself she was not qualified to be there. Nonetheless, she was able to persist with the encouragement of some of her advisors who saw how bright she was. And she was bright enough to eventually get into highly competitive and prestigious graduate programs at Cambridge University in England, and at Harvard!

She frequently returned home and usually fell back into old family patterns, but something pushed her leave again and again to continue with her “satanic” education.

At school, the feelings and thoughts produced by her sense of groundlessness almost tore her apart, despite her ongoing successes. The way she experienced groundlessness was brilliantly described in a variety of amazing (and rather horrifying) ways throughout the book. Examples: she writes, “It was not that I had done something wrong, but I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.” 

When she started to experience her clique at Cambridge as a sort of family, she felt damned by those feelings: “No natural sister prefers a stranger to a brother…and what sort of daughter prefers a stranger to her own father? That feeling became a physical part of me.” Later she had the thought, “It seemed like I made a thousand mistakes, driven a thousand knives into the heart of my own family.”

The blow that stopped her from making frequent return home visits was after, in private e-mails, her mother admitted she should have protected her daughter from Shawn. And then her older sister admitted to her that she had been through many of the same things with Shawn that the author had. Even Shawn’s ex-girlfriend confirmed how he was. Surely now her Dad would believe her. Except in his presence, her mother and her sister started lying again, denying that they had said anything of the sort!

So how was the author able to break through the powerful effects of family dynamics and achieve her educational accomplishments? Again, I have no way of knowing for sure, so I'll speculate based on the available descriptions as well as my psychotherapy experience with other families. I could of course be completely wrong..

I suspect that her parents, despite any insistence otherwise, were both secretly highly conflicted about education, family roles, and religion, so she was getting a mixed message. The author does not tell us anything about her grandparents that might clue us in to where this confusion came from originally, but some of the parents' behavior seemed to scream it out. 

Some examples: as mentioned, father preached about traditional gender roles, and his only other daughter followed them. But somehow, when he had been injured and couldn’t run his business as before, he allowed his wife to develop her own business selling alternative medicines that brought in more money than he’d ever made, and he was supportive of her doing this. Also, when Tara started singing in local shows as a teen, he would always come to hear her sing, and appeared to be as proud as punch.

Mother, while not overtly telling the author to get educated, would often subtly push her into getting on with it – as long as Dad was not around. 

But the mind-blowing fact that seems most in line with my speculation is this: of seven siblings in the author’s family, three kids left the “homestead” and four stayed. The three who left got Ph.D.’s, while the four who stayed didn’t even have high school diplomas! The possible acting out of the ambivalence of this family thusly described in one sentence.

Contact with Toxic Parents: Ambivalence Reigns

 

There are a plethora of self-help books out, including the one I wrote (pictured above), advising adult children of toxic parents on what to do. Some recommend cutting them off, some recommend keeping them at a distance, some recommend trying to set better boundaries, some talk about whether reconciliation is possible or not, and a few of them say it depends on the nature of the problems.

My own view, as most of my readers know, is to solve the problem of ongoing toxic parental behavior by researching the family history to identify shared internal conflicts, the reasons for them, and the effect of ambivalent double messages throughout at least three generations on everyone involved. Then, the object is to confront the issue head on by developing various strategies to empathically get past parents’ formidable defenses and come to some mutual understanding of why everyone is so miserable and what can be done to stop repetitive dysfunctional interactions. The goal is not reconciliation  per se but problem solving. Reconciliation and forgiveness is, however, however, a typical byproduct.

The psychotherapy research literature has had very little to say about this. It does come up in opinion pieces in such magazines as Psychology Today or The Psychotherapy Networker.

I think this whole question is a much bigger issue than it appears to be, and is a major cause of self-destructive or self defeating behavior, anxiety and unhappiness. How do I know? Well, a few years ago I started reading newspaper advice columns on the internet from four different advisors: Carolyn Hax, Amy Dickerson, Annie Lane, and Dear Abby. In order to maintain their readership, these columnists have to identify which letters are going to lead to a lot of public interest. If subjects pop up a lot, one might conclude that the problems discussed are very common.

And letters about this issue are exceeding common. People are constantly asking how to solve ongoing behavior from parents that is driving them crazy, whether they should reconcile with parents that have been already been cut off, whether to cut off toxic parents, guilt over a decision already made regarding a cut off, how to set boundaries, whether to reveal a history of child abuse to siblings and children, and how to stand up to parents without being disowned. My count of letters like this in the four columns was 28 in 2021 and 12 through April of this year. And I’m not even counting all the letters from parents who have been cut off by their children for “mysterious” reasons as I described in two previous posts.

Some writers are writing to justify their decisions on this matter, but their ambivalence about whatever decision they have made is just blaring. If they think their decision was so good, why are they writing about it? Some even want to warn people to watch out for therapists who recommend reconciliation, shouting the benefits of cut-offs from the rooftops. Do they think every situation is the same? And why do they feel the need to shout this out by writing to an advice columnist.

As I have said many times, cutting off an abusive parent is better than continued abuse, but those are not the only two options. My book discusses the third option for cases that do not involve significant physical or sexual abuse, and my psychotherapy model is for therapists to help all kinds of cases no matter how severe. The methods are not quick fixes, and the therapy is long term and often either not paid for by insurance or just flat out unavailable, since this therapy model has unfortunately not caught on. So the best solution can be very out of reach.

However, the danger of ongoing cut offs AND continuing abuse and toxicity is that the interpersonal and intrapsychic (in the mind) issues are not resolved but continuously reinforced by ANY family contact and consequently are seldom sufficiently repaired. Not to mention that the risks of passing them on to your own kids is quite high. 

The high degree of ambivalence about making or having made these decisions regarding ongoing contact shows how important family really is to just about everyone

Family Communication: Countering Relatives Who Go Off on Tangents

In my blogposts about family metacommunication, one issue I discussed is the tendency of people to change the subject when discussing anything touchy. When a person is afraid to or does not want to go into depth in discussing a particular repetitive interactional pattern with a family member, for whatever reason, a subtle switch from the issue under discussion to some other matter is often a successful strategy for avoiding further dialogue about it.

This is particularly easy to do if there are a whole bunch of similar issues that are all inter-related and intertwined with one another. As I wrote in the previous post: 

Another related misdirection strategy is to mix several separate but highly interconnected issues so that none of them is ever completely discussed. For example, one woman was in a complex family system in which her husband would find ways to distract her from her anger at her parents and vice versa. Whenever she expressed anger at one of her parents, the husband would do annoying things to draw away her anger from her parents towards him Similarly, when she was ready for war with hubby, one of her parents would act out and draw her wrath towards them.


The woman's genogram revealed that the problems in this system were related to gender issues (whether men should take care of women or women should pursue independence), concerns regarding the adequacy of males in the family to take care of their women (her husband felt that he was supposed to protect his wife but felt inadequate to do so and angry about "having" to shoulder the responsibility) and even class (how much money was being brought in).

The discussion would change from one of these aspects of the problem to another at the drop of a hat. Because the aspects were all so interconnected it was indeed difficult to talk about any one of them without talking about the others. For example, when the issue of the husband's adequacy came up, the issue of why he was like that would also arise. Because the subject of any conversation jumped around, however, any conversations about the issue would end up going in circles with nothing being resolved.

In this post, I want to discuss another useful strategy under these circumstances for keeping family metacommunication on track in order to get to the bottom of a single issue. Another way to look at the problem of subject changes is that the mix-up of issues allows people to go off on a tangent that is related to - yet different from - the main theme the metacommunicator is trying to clarify.

The trick here is to remember the definition of a tangent from your old geometry class in high school. Tangents are related to circles, and look like this:

If you go to the tangent line and trace it backwards, it always goes right back to the circle. Analogously in metacommunication, the "circle" is the main theme that ties all the different tangents together.

Any tangent someone goes off on can be thought of as just another example of the main theme - the circle in the diagram.

As an example, let us take a hypothetical situation in which there is a highly conflicted relationship between a mother and a daughter who come from a typical highly dysfunctional family - one characterized by many examples of major gender issues common to many members: the females getting involved with men who are drunk, abusive, and/or cheating; whether or not they should leave relationships with such men; expressing anger at such men; mothers who do not protect their children from abusive men or from witnessing domestic violence; conflicts over being tied down by children leading to neglect and invalidation of them; enabling children who don't take care of themselves; depending financially on either unreliable men or good providers who mistreat women, and so on and so forth.

There are indeed families characterized by all of the above conflicts- over several generations. If there are several sisters, aunts, great aunts and female cousins acting out several of these themes, one can see how easy it would be to subtly avoid focusing in depth on any one theme, or for that matter, on any one relationship.

So what might tie all of these gender-related themes together as they play out in metacommunication about problematic behavior patterns between a mother and her adult daughter who has children of her own?

Here we can make use of the concept described in a previous post: intrapsychic conflict leading to ambivalence leading to mixed and/or contradictory messages. Anything the mother says to her daughter regarding any of the above behaviors can be translated into a message to the daughter to either "act (or relate to the issues) like me" or "do not act (or relate to the issues) like me." Usually both within the very same conversation!

In this case, a good strategy might be for the daughter to express confusion about what the mother is trying to tell her in terms of following or not following mom's example no matter which aspect of the gender dysfunction is brought up. She might say something like, "Gee Mom, sometimes it sounds like you are criticizing me for doing the same things you do, while at other times it sounds like you are criticizing me for not doing them. I'm confused about what you think is the right strategy when, for example, my ex-husband keeps calling me on the phone several times a day."

A typical dysfunctional conversation might go something like this:

Mother: "I told you to block his phone number and stop talking to him."

Daughter: "But you let Dad keep bugging you all the time."

Mom: "Well, I do that for your sake 'cause I know you still care a lot about him, so it's better if we are civil to each other."

Daughter: "But wouldn't that also apply to my sons from my ex?"

Mother: "Well you don't seem to want to be bothered with your kids' feelings half the time anyway."

In this example, the mother has subtly changed the subject from how to handle an ex-husband to the daughter's parenting practices. If the daughter were to engage the mother on that issue, the mother might then talk about how the daughter is still financially dependent on her ex and needs to support herself better so she can get rid of him. Nothing would ever be resolved.

The counter-strategy is to take each tangent the mother goes off on and reconnect it to the circle or main theme. Any criticism the mother makes of the daughter on any of these inter-related subjects can be used as yet another example of how the mothers statements confuse the daughter in regards to whether or not she should follow her mother's example.

If the daughter starts with the statement above describing her confusion about whether or not mother thinks the daughter should emulate her, and the issue of the stalking ex comes up, the daughter would not say, "But you let Dad keep bugging you all the time." She would instead say, "I'm confused when you say that, cause that sounds like you are saying I shouldn't let my ex keep bugging me like you put up with Dad."

If mother then brings up her having put up with Dad for the patient's sake, that of course contradicts mom's initial advise for the daughter to cut off her ex when there's a child involved there. The daughter might then bring up that seemingly contradictory advice as a way to get back to the circle once again. 

The daughter would be ill-advised to come right out and accuse her mother of being hypocritical, as that would usually lead to the mother becoming defensive. Instead, she could blame her own confusion about what the mother is trying to say:

"Well I'm again kinda confused now. Are you saying I should handle it like you did for the sake of my sons, or that I should do the opposite of what you did and cut off my ex?"

Of course, this strategy could have good results, but it could also backfire.

The mother might at that point be struck by how she is giving the daughter double messages, which might then allow her to take pause and start to discuss why she herself might be confused on these issues - a good result. On the other hand, the strategy might also make her feel guilty and want to change the subject yet again. 

Mom might try the strategy of saying that her situation with the daughter's father is somehow different than the daughter's situation with her ex. Naturally, in some ways every situation is somewhat different, but in doing this she would be ignoring all the ways in which their situations are similar.

Figuring out the next move on the daughter's part would probably require the services and advice of a knowledgeable therapist. A therapist can tailor a counter-move for the daughter, using his or her knowledge of several different things: 

Knowledge of the mother and daughter's prior interactions; the therapist's own experience successfully countering the daughter's having done the very same thing to the therapist as her mother does to her within the context of psychotherapy; and information from the genogram about the source of the mother's ambivalence that can be use to empathically advance their conversations toward problem resolution.