If You Deny Your True Feelings, Your Children Might Just Express Them for You

A Dialectic Perspective On Defense Mechanisms.

In my post of February 11, 2011 on dysfunctional family roles, I described the roles of the savior and the avenger.  In families in which children play these roles, a parent is suppressing and/or denying strong impulses or desires which were unacceptable within the family in which the parent grew up. The parent tries, more or less, to ignore these impulses or even to pretend that they never existed.

In the case of the savior, the child acts out the parent’s repressed ambitions. In the case of the avenger, the child acts out the parent’s repressed anger and hostility. 

The above picture is a skit from the comedy duo Key and Peele doing an impression of President Obama. The President gets to act all cool and collected while his “anger translator” goes off the deep end.  This symbolizes exactly what such kids are actually trying to accomplish.

Why and how do children end up doing this?

To start with, trying to deny or ignore one’s strong emotions or urges unfortunately does not make them go away. This just plain does not work. This fact sets up what psychoanalysts call an intrapsychic conflict. The repressed urges and feelings press for expression, while the person who has them attempts to fight them off in one way or another. 

The analysts focused mostly on the individual’s mental gyrations, called defense mechanisms, by which people with intrapsychic conflicts compulsively attempt to ward off the undesired aspects of themselves while still covertly allowing themselves some hidden expression of those very aspects.

Although the analysts were wrong about a lot of things, they were certainly on the right track with the concepts of intrapsychic conflict and defense mechanisms. Those are quite real, and are universally recognized by people in our culture in their everyday lives - even by those psychologists who claim they do not exist!  

Even cognitive behaviorists have been known to shout at someone, “Don’t take your frustration out on me!”  That means the frustrated person is relieving himself of the feeling of frustration by redirecting it to someone that the person is not afraid of. This is the defense mechanism called displacement.

What the analysts missed are some of the interpersonal effects of defense mechanisms and their ramifications. It took a whole different school of therapy, family systems, to point out that repressed and warded off feelings in a parent can directly induce their children to act out those unacknowledged feelings. 

Of course, family systems therapists had to distance themselves from the psychoanalytic therapy that was the predominant paradigm when they started out. So they repaid the analyst’s favor by not acknowledging the role of the parent’s intrapsychic conflict and its aspects within the individual.

The dialectic perspective tells us that a mental phenomenon is neither exclusively an intrapsychic phenomenon nor  an interpersonal phenomenon, but both simultaneously. In fact, in general the dialectic perspective consists of the concept of both/and as usually being preferable to either/or. To fully understand psychology, we have to look at phenomena from a variety of perspectives and try to integrate them into a unified viewpoint. In today’s fragmented field of clinical psychology, an integrated, unified viewpoint is what is often sorely lacking. 

There are some of us trying to work on that (See the Unified Psychotherapy Project for more information).

So let’s get back to our repressed parent. The denial of strong feelings or urges leads people, in response to certain aspects of their family environment, to behave in a somewhat unstable way. They may appear to other family members to be highly emotionally disturbed. This affects the other family members and often leads to highly charged, dysfunctional interpersonal reactions by the whole family group.

Since group survival depends most on the functioning of the group leaders – the parents - having unstable parents frightens children. They consequently are induced to try to find ways to behave that seem to make the family interactions at least somewhat smoother. This does not mean that the interactions will become truly smooth by any means. Just more predictable and somewhat more stable. The process by which all family members strive to keep the behavior of its members within certain bounds is called family homeostasis by family systems therapists.

If the child acts out or expresses the parents’ repressed urges, the parent often calms down.  

As I explained in the earlier post, parents frequently live vicariously through identification with their children. When their children do what they themselves are afraid to do, it allows for some expression of their repressed urges. The parents may even subtly encourage these behaviors from their children without actually asking them to do anything. A parent might, for instance, grin like a Cheshire Cat as they describe their little darling’s exploits to others in the child's presence.

Of course, they cannot actually praise the behavior of the child without admitting that they think what the child is doing is a grand idea, so they have to deny that that they are subtly pushing the child in these directions. In fact, they will turn around and criticize the child for exhibiting the very behavior they are pushing the child to perform. This is the most common and typical type of double message seen in dysfunctional families. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

This general pattern of acting out is not limited to repressed ambitions and repressed hostility. A whole range of repressed feelings, urges, and even beliefs can be acted out by children. Let me give one more example.

Let’s say Mom was brought up in a severely and strictly religious family that preached that women must and should be totally subservient to their husbands. On the surface, Mom may claim to really believe that this is the way things ought to be, and join in with friends and fellow church members in loudly condemning more assertive women.

Underneath this almost smug sense of being satisfied with this allegedly morally superior way of  relating to their husbands, the women may actually be seething and chomping at the bit to decide for themselves how to behave, even if their husbands disapprove. In such a situation, they are actually jealous of the assertive women they criticize. They also covertly hate these other women, because the other women serve as a constant reminder to them that they are not really happy being on a leash. If they lived in a cave and didn’t get cable, as comedian Bill Maher used to say, they would not see that there were other options, so these hidden dissatisfactions might be easier to ignore. But alas, they do not.

Children are very perceptive and try to find ways to make Mom feel better. They look for ways to allow their mothers to vicariously live through them as they behave in a somewhat assertive way with the men in their lives. On the other hand, they cannot be too successful at being assertive in this manner, because that too would remind Mom of how unhappy she is when perhaps she does not have to be.

This bizarre situation can lead a child in this position to devise ways to walk this tightrope. Actually, there are a whole host of different strategies than can be employed to accomplish this seemingly impossible feat. For example, a daughter in this situation may marry a series of domineering and possessive men, put up with them for a while, and then go all ballistic on them in a wild and ultimately self-defeating form of rebellion that may adversely affect their own children. They then leave each men and go on to another one just like him.

Their mothers and other interested parties then get to tell them how insane they are, and also get to remain smug in the knowledge that they themselves would never act in such a manner. Being a "wildwoman" may even become a label by which other people tend to refer to them.

This is of course is just one example of ways in which children may develop a false self or persona. While the intrapsychic conflicts of the parents affect every other member of the family to a greater or lesser degree, one sibling out of many may become “it” while the others escape relatively unscathed.

How to Disarm a Borderline, Part II

In my Part I post of October 6, I described how a lot of the difficult behavior of patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) in their intimate relationships is designed to elicit in the observer one of three reactions: anxious helplessness, anxious guilt, and overt hostility.  Furthermore I expressed the view that, even though they will make herculean efforts to induce these reactions, and are very good and finding other folk's vulnerabilities in order to do so, they secretly hope they will fail in their efforts. 

Every time they succeed, they will do more of whatever it was that worked; every time they fail, they will do less of whatever did not work.  They will not give up easily, and if they've known you for a while, if one trick does not work, they will have a whole repertoire of other behaviors from which to choose. They will know how to push all of  your buttons in the most effective way possible.

Last, because of the variable intermittent reinforcent schedule, if you only occasionally react in the "wrong" way to them, that is worse than reacting badly to them all the time, because they will try that much harder and longer to elicit the "desired" response.  I said that in my next post I would start by saying what not to do. 

Here it is.  It's fairly simple, so this will be a relatively short post.  In future posts I will suggest counterstrategies for the most typical BPD strategies for eliciting the three responses, and then finally advise readers about what to do in the inevitable event that they slip up - so that the variable intermittent reinforcement schedule does not kick in.

IMPORTANT CAUTIONS:  Please be advised that sticking to this program is extremely difficult, so the services of a therapist who knows about these patterns are usually necessary.  Also, this section is designed for adults dealing with BPD adults - over 23 years old, actually.  This is not necessarily what you should do if you happen to be raising a teenager with BPD traits.

Without further ado, what not to do:

A. Try to please the unpleasable.  If they put you in a damned if you do, damned if you don't position (a double bind), try to do something to please them anyway.  If they "yes-but" all of your suggestions for solving any problem they present to you (that is, if they reject any and all offered solutions with a sentence that has the structure, "Yes, I could do that, but...), keep offering more solutions.  If they ask you to do something that is clearly impossible, try your best to do it anyway.

They never forget you have a choice

B. Make sacrifices for them.  Stay up all night talking with them and trying to reassure them about their latest emotional debacle when you have to go to work the next day.  Give them thousands of dollars to help get them out of a financial bind that they had put themselves in with profligate spending and irresponsible behavior.  Drop everything you are doing and rearrange your schedule for the entire day so you can do something for them like right now, even though the chances are 50/50 they will not even be there when you get to their abode - and be sure to cancel any planned activity that you've been looking forward to forever.  Drive a hundred miles out of your way to take them somewhere.

C. Get defensive.  Say, in frustrated tones, "You know, I'm only trying to help you" or "Don't you understand that I have other things to do?"

D. Act hostile.

E. Act guilty.  Because you know down deep you should be able to solve impossible dilemmas, and that their behavior is probably all your fault anyway.

F.  Stand there and take it like a (foolish) man.  Are they slapping you around?  Verbally abusing you will a barage of invective?  Impugning everything you stand for?  Screaming at you?  Just stand there and let them.  Maybe they'll stop.
 
G. Return in kind.  I knew a psychiatrist who got so upset with the verbal nastiness of his patient that he told her she was a dog and that she should have consulted a veterinarian.   See if you can stop the BPD person's pain-seeking behavior by inflicting more pain.

H. Lecture them.  Tell them all about how cocaine is harmful, that they should leave an abusive relationship, or that they should not ride their bicycles at midnight through crime-ridden parts of town in a bikini with hundred dollar bills hanging out their bras.  After all, they are just too stupid to figure these things out for themselves.  They'll tell you they think cocaine is good for them.  Argue the point.

I. Try to rescue the help-rejecting complainer.  Go to their house to try to take them away from an abusive romantic partner.  Let them move in with you rent free.  Loan them money that they will never pay back.  Try to mediate their disputes with others (trying to physically get in between two fighting adults is particularly important - maybe they'll both start in on you).  Cuss out the people who they claim have mistreated them.  Go ahead, I dare you.