Willpower, Groupthink, and the Disease Model for Everything

Columbine School Shooting, public domain 

When addicts say, "I can quit using any time I want to," people usually laugh at them and accuse them of being "in denial." I, on the other hand, believe they are telling the truth. Since they are admitting they don't want to quit, they aren't denying anything. Of course, the big question is why they don't want to quit. It can't be because the substance is making them feel good. They are generally some of the most miserable and unhappy people around.

So maybe they have some genetic defect that causes a “disease” that impairs their self control? While it is true that genetic tendencies can make someone a bit more or less likely to engage in certain behaviors, the majority of these effects are relatively small. 

If genes were causing the problem, one wonders how 12 Step Programs, which are based on religious conversion techniques that demonize people’s ability to make good choices for themselves and ask people to surrender to group norms and do what they are told, would ever succeed. Last I heard, changing your religion does not lead to major changes in one’s genome. Or its physiological effects.

I suspect the group’s views and where their ideas come from have something to do with the addict’s problems. Before they quit, they are proving the group’s opinions about the evils of willfulness, and after they quit they are proving the group’s belief system once again, but in a different way.

And is it really true that they can’t control their urges? Does an alcoholic actively engaged in drinking and driving usually take a big swig of Jack Daniels just when a cop pulls up in the lane next to them? Well, I suppose some might, but I suspect that such individuals are again going out of their way to prove their group’s idea that their willfulness is creating their problems. But most will keep the bottle hidden. So I guess they can control their urges even while intoxicated with their favorite beverage.

And of course, as I have previously pointed out, animal models of alcoholism are generally poor because scientists can’t seem to find any rats that hide the bottles. And the bottles that people hide are almost always found eventually. Usually  by spouses and family members. Imagine that.

Another point: Non-academic people in the addiction discussion also talk a lot about how co-dependency and enabling spouses and relatives are part of the problem in someone’s addiction (see Al-Anon), but somehow today’s scientists seem to think these other folks have nothing to do with the addict's problems. Really?? In what alternate universe?

I find it impressive how today’s psychology academics seem to go to any extent to avoid looking at dysfunctional family dynamics as a major cause of behavior that is destructive to one’s self or others. For another example, look at speculation about the causes of the recent spike in students committing mass shootings at schools. If the role of the parents is looked at at all, it seems that their only role is giving their kids access to weapons and ignoring danger signs, but not in creating the environment conducive to motivating their children to act that way in the first place.

Now of course having access to assault weapon is a prerequisite for committing these crimes, but what about the literally millions of homes in the United States in which such guns are found? If the presence of guns were the only problem, these shootings would have been going on at the current frequency for the past decades and decades.  For a similar reason, even overt child abuse alone cannot explain the shootings, as the vast majority of abused children do no such things. There has to be other things going on in these families. What, for example, are the parents saying to these kids and to each other, and how are they reacting in general to kids who start to have fantasies of violence? 

One of the Columbine shooters in the above picture literally collected an arsenal of weapons in his house prior to the act. When interviewed by the press, his mother said she didn't know about it. I wonder how the shooter interpreted the fact that his mother apparently pretended to not even notice the obvious.

No one seems to be asking these essential questions. Sad.

Hidden Altruism in Repetitive Family Interactions

 

In a recent Dear Abby advice column from 10/26/21,  a mother who had been an addict when her daughter was young complains about the guilt trips the daughter always seems to lay on her. Abby’s interpretation as to the possible motives for the daughter’s behavior is the seemingly common-sense one that most people – and most psychotherapists for that matter - would come up with: that the daughter was acting out of selfish needs.

 

Being the contrarian that I am, I discovered that selfishness is often actually a cover for altruistic self-sacrifice, and that the daughter is giving mom what mom seems to need from her. The mother’s obsessive guilt and her repeatedly and nearly constantly trying to fix her daughter might very well be the reason the daughter is doing this.

 

Now of course, from just a paragraph description in a letter I can’t be certain of my interpretation in this particular case, and there might be several other issues operating simultaneously that might be making this situation far more complicated than my formulation would suggest. The daughters’ brothers being perceived as the favorites, which is mentioned in the letter, might be one of them. The mother may have gender issues which might conceivably be involved.  And we don’t know anything about Mom’s former behavior, let alone her family dynamics

But if we could get the truth out of these people – always an iffy proposition -  I’d be willing to bet that I am at the very least on the right track. I have put in italics the part of the letter that I think gives it away. My hypothesis would be my starting point as her therapist in trying to understand what exactly is going on, and why.

 

ABBY: I'm the mother of a 36-year-old daughter. She claims I treat her younger brothers better than I treat her. I am a recovering addict -- clean for 20-plus years. I was in active addiction for nine years when she was a teenager, and she has never let that go. She constantly tells me how "unfair" I am, that I never make time for her and that I don't validate her feelings. I have apologized many times and tried to show her I don't treat her siblings differently. I schedule "us" time, but this is an ongoing battle, and I'm at a loss about how to fix it. How do I show her there's no difference in the way I treat any of them? How do I reassure her that her feelings are validated? This has caused me many tearful nights. -- WANTING SERENITY BACK

 

In reply Abby says she thinks this mother “created an emptiness in her daughter “that the mom may not be able to fill,” and that the daughter is “punishing” the mom for her former behavior. I submit that the daughter is actually giving Mom what Mom's endless guilt seems to be begging for: More and more guilt! Mom’s obsessive apologies would then trigger this pattern again and again, leading to the daughter heaping on more and more guilt leading to more apologies and so on in a vicious circle.

 

Each member of the duo thinks the other one needs this interaction while discounting their own contribution to the pattern. They have to cover up their own role in order to continue playing it effectively, both for the stabilization of a parent. Mom’s history of substance abuse and neglecting children would, under this scenario, be a role she was playing for her parents.

I am Answering Reader Questions about Dealing with Difficult Parents on This Website

ASK David Allen how to cope with dysfunctional parents

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https://psychwire.com/ask/topics/102htrn/ask-david-allen-how-to-cope-with-dysfunctional-parents

Book Review: Not to People Like Us by Susan Weitzman

"If you think I support domestic abuse-- if you think my not explicitly writing, ad nauseum, "NO TOLERANCE" or "IT'S NOT THE VICTIM'S FAULT" is evidence that I think "sometimes the bitch deserves it "then I can tell you without error that [this year] is going to be way too complicated a year for you to endure, and you are seeing a psychiatrist, and it isn't helping. Stop being you. The world does not have to validate your prejudices." ~ The Last Psychiatrist.

 

Warning: Since I am writing about domestic abuse, I quote the Last Psychiatrist before people start accusing me of “victim blaming” or “excusing the abuser.” Obviously, people who injure other people are committing a crime and deserve to be in jail. But that doesn’t mean the victims have no responsibility for any self destructive behavior (which BTW is NOT a crime) they exhibit – like returning to their abusers again and again and protecting them by keeping the abuse secret. 

As Michael Kerr once said, when it comes to relationships: “It’s all my fault” and “I had nothing to do with it” are both irrational ideas. The sad part about this is that absolving the victim of any and all responsibility for their predicament often has the effect of making them feel more helpless, useless, and resigned to their fate. The people who do this to them are without a doubt harming the very people they claim to be helping.

The book being reviewed here is about upper class, affluent couples in which the men physically and mentally abuse their wives. The author believes the couple dynamics in this population are different than in those in poorer communities. Strangely, most of the women she discusses are highly-educated professionals or have high paying jobs, and some of them even earned more than their husbands.

The most interesting thing about this book for me is the author. As I read it, I kept wondering if she thinks these women are as stupid as they act, although she is clearly questioning that proposition. She spends half the book wondering about how such bright, educated woman can believe their bullcrap excuses for staying in these relationships, and blame themselves for the abuse (although some of them did admit to provoking it, to supposedly make the beatings "more predictable" as if they weren't predicable enough), and the other half buying into their rationalizations.

I find this interesting because, when I first started thinking about psychotherapy paradigms, I myself struggled with this question mightily. I called it the "question of stupidity," and resolving it led me to the concepts of mutual role functions support, the paradox of altruism, and something called dialectical causality.

Still, I wondered why the author didn’t question some of her own assumptions. For instance, she says most of these women she has interviewed did not come from families of origins in which there was significant spousal abuse. Well, maybe, but how can she know she is being told the truth about that? 

These women often lied about the abuse from their husbands to everyone for years, and even to other therapists, before coming clean. Some of them told their mothers about it, and the author admits that their mothers essentially blamed them for the abuse and told them to go back to their husbands. And in her chapter on the children from these relationships, she says, “…they too feel that they must hide the family secret.” If the abuse victim grew up in such a family, wouldn’t that characterization apply to her? So what on earth makes the author believe these women would suddenly become paragons of honesty about their parents when they come to see her?

Some of the women also claimed to think that they would be left penniless if they were to leave their successful husbands, even though many have or had successful careers themselves, and that their husbands will be able to manipulate the courts so they would never get alimony or child support. Well, rich successful men sometimes are able to do that, but in what alternate universe are there no attorneys capable of forcing otherwise reluctant men to fork over the cash? Maybe these cases where the rich men prevail are won partly because their wives hired lawyers who secretly believe that she really did deserve what she got. 

Why are they hiring such terrible lawyers? Weitzman brings up the O.J. Simpson case as an example, but apparently does not know how badly the prosecutors botched the case. (This is brilliantly described in the book Perfect Pitch by Jon Steel).

Then there is the book’s title. These women allegedly hide the abuse because they sort of think it isn’t supposed to be happening in their social circles, and they are ashamed. But if someone is beating the crap out of you, why would you care whether or not it was happening to anyone else? It’s clearly happening to you, and it’s clearly evil. If fact, if you really thought your situation was that unusual, that would highlight how unacceptable it ought to be.

And another implicit premise here seems to be that being embarrassed is worse than having your jaw broken! Really???

The stories the author relates literally reek of gender role conflicts in both the husbands and wives, but gender roles barely rate a mention. Despite the author’s psychodynamic training, the concept of intrapsychic conflict seems foreign to her, let alone her having an understanding of family systems issues and the power of groupthink and kin selection. 

For example, despite being successful career women, many of these women expected, and were expected by their husbands, to do all of the domestic chores and child rearing. One father wouldn’t even get up to feed the baby when mommy was violently ill. A lot of the couples also stopped having sex while the man was off having multiple affairs – the old Victorian whore/Madonna conflict in the flesh.

The author correctly points out that most of these men have narcissistic personality disorder, but she does not understand the family dynamics of it. (As my readers know, my views of that are different than the prevailing wisdom). She does make the accurate point that one of the DSM criteria for this disorder, lack of empathy, is incorrect. These men have very good empathy. The problem is they use it in order to more successfully manipulate other people to get what they want. Not having something is obviously not the same thing as using something one has in the service of bad intentions.

The author does acknowledge that these women did seem to ignore red flags when they first meet their husbands, but seems to downplay the significance of this, and offers no convincing explanations of why they would do this. In fact, as I like to say, there are often more red flags than at a meeting of Chinese communists.

Oh well.

Parents who Feel Both Guilty and Angry About Their Parental Performance

I recently received an e-mail from an irate reader of my blog on Psychology Today. It was in reaction to a post I wrote about parents who were cut off by their adult children acting as if they had no idea why that happened, when in fact the majority of them (but certainly not all of them) have at least a pretty good idea. She told me I was an a**hole who was automatically calling all such parents “dicks” and “a**holes.” I of course actually made no statements like that in the piece.

Of course, if a history of child abuse is involved, which it may or may not be in such cases, parents have the responsibility for that and not their children, at least before the children grow up and have minds of their own. But this was not the subject of the post.

I wrote back to her:

Sorry if the piece sounded like I was calling the parents a**holes. I don't believe that. And of course not all families that have problems like the ones I describe [in the post] are in denial about what's going on. I view everyone in the whole family as all caught within a devilishly-difficult problem to solve that is created by a variety of external factors over at least three generations. 

I never recommend cutting off parents -  even when the parents actually were (unlike you) physically or sexually abusive - and take a lot of heat for advocating that they try to work things out for everyone's eventual benefit (not that it is at all an easy thing to do this).

I of course have no way of knowing anything about particular families like yours without ongoing in-person evaluation and therapy, so what I'm about to say may or may not apply to some degree to your situation. In some families in which parents, in the estimation of the adult children, seem to be frequently beating themselves up with guilt about their worth as parents, the kids worry that they need to fix that. And what they then do is start to piss the parents off on purpose to make them feel angry at them instead of guilty. Hatefulness as a gift of love, as it were..

That last bit referred to how, in the patient with borderline personality disorder’s spoiler role, the adult child is regulating their parents’ de-stabilizing internal conflict over having children (described in this post). When the parent starts to feel too guilty, their children make them angry. When the parents start to get to angry, they lay guilt trips on them.

As I said in my reply, I don’t know if that dynamic applies to the writer and her children or not. So what made me think that it might very well apply? Well, there were certain sentences in the writer’s original inquiry that seemed to indicate a lot of guilt as well as a lot of anger:

Implying guilt:

• “I have admitted and apologized for the times I was a bad parent, naming specific incidents and listening to them to tell me other times they were hurt by me. I try as hard as I can to listen, be supportive, and not be overbearing.”
•  “I don’t know that any parent who needs to be told they’re a dick would accept that from you. It made me feel defensive and hurt, all over again. Trust me, most of us a**hole parents don’t realize we’re being a**holes.”  
• “I really do not know why my kids, especially my younger daughter, hold a grudge against me.  They have never said anything that I didn’t acknowledge, apologize for, and try to make right.”   

Implying anger/defensiveness:

 

·         Calling me an a**hole for allegedly implying she might be an awful person when I hadn’t actually said anything of the sort, and accusing me of “taking sides.”

·         “If they are mad because I turned out not to be perfect, but downright human and not always the best decision maker when it came to parenting, well, I at least know I always loved them immensely and would have, & still would, die for them.”

 

You be the judge.

 

Bringing up a Family Issue, and Parental Defensiveness Ensues

On Psychology Today, “Riles” commented on my blog post: "The Family Dynamics of Patients With Borderline Personality:"

Parents huh? This article is such bullcrap.  Its obvious this therapist does not work with BPD individuals...I am a parent to a BPD son, we have never mistreated or abused our son.  My son, as most BPD feel as though any disagreement even over trash day is emotionally or verbally abusive to them...A 5 minute question session just to ask about their day in their mind eventually gets spewed as a 2 hour session of us yelling at him.  Its such crap that you put this out there blaming parents who are doing everything in their power to understand this disorder and help their children.

This sort of reaction is representative of the fact that bringing up family issues involved in creating BPD is dangerous for their adult children - as well as a minefield for people like myself writing about the situation. Yes, it is true that many parents of BPD offspring are not overtly abusive, as I have often mentioned.

However, let’s look closer at this comment. Let’s assume for the moment that it is an accurate description of what goes on in this family (of course, I have no way of knowing whether it is or is not). I would wonder how old the son was when these two-hour yelling sessions began. Clearly, their son is provoking them, but that is part of the dynamics in families that generate BPD. Spoilers make parents angry when they are too guilty, but then have to make them feel guilty if they start to get too angry.

I would advise these parents to ask themselves, if they can calm down long enough to look at the interactional patterns with their son somewhat dispassionately and honestly, why they continue to engage with their son for two whole hours when he starts to act like this. Chances are, this signals the son to continue doing whatever it is that he had been doing. If the parents say they don’t know how to put a stop to their son’s difficult reactions and/or disengage from him, I would suggest that they watch a few episodes of Supernanny or read a book by parenting advisor John Rosemond. I would also have to warn them that if they follow the advice, their son’s behavior will get worse at first - but then get much better.

Can “How was your day” be a loaded question in these families? Damn right it can. If the parents are usually over-involved (the Buttinsky bunch) or under-involved (the Alfred E. Neuman what-me-worry bunch), or even worse, if the parents vacillate between these two extremes, their asking about their son’s day would for him be an incredibly infuriating entrance to this pattern of interactions.

Spoiling Behavior is All an Act, But a Deadly Serious One

Relationships between people are formed through interactions that are two-way and simultaneous. People learn and become different over time as this occurs, and can push one another away.

I recently received an angry letter from a mother whose child apparently has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). She told me that I must have no idea what it is like to raise a child with the disorder, or I would never say what I do about it. She added that kids with the disorder do not respond to the most positive of upbringings, so don’t blame parents!

Having been the direct recipient of the spoiling behavior of adult patients with the disorder when I started out as a therapist - and did not know then how to deal with their in-session behavior effectively - I can say that I have a really good idea about what that is like. And it ain't no picnic. And I agree that unrestrained positivity does not change it. It can even make it worse!

It is also true that not all families that produce kids with the disorder are overtly abusive either physically, sexually, or verbally, although a large and significant majority of them are in fact abusive in those ways – according to every study ever done. Even DBT therapists believe they come from an “invalidating environment,” even though they seem to scrupulously avoid identifying that specific environment as the family of origin.

I would like to suggest that the reader take a look at what the letter writer said in a different way than would be a typical interpretation. (Of course, I can’t know for sure even if her child has even been correctly diagnosed or exactly how positive the family environment is). In just a couple of sentences, she could be understood to be saying that her parenting has nothing to do with how her child turned out. In a phrase, it is only the child who is (completely) screwed up.

           

If I’m hearing this in a short letter, you can bet that the child has heard it. And guess what? If children hear this point of view a lot, they will begin to act in ways that give the parent an easy justification for making the statement so the parents don’t have to feel bad about blaming everything on the kid. But doing this is all an act to placate and stabilize the parents.

I can predict relatively confidently that if the mother continues to exhibit this same attitude much of the time, the child will continue to give her grief, and will not get better.

           

Likewise, if a parent is constantly invalidating a child, the child will begin to act in ways that practically invite invalidation. One leader of a parents of BPD kids' support group once told me that her daughter said bizarre things, such as that she had grown up poor. The family was in fact quite well off financially. The daughter was not psychotic. Her mother is quite bright, so I would have to assume that the daughter is not actually stupid enough to somehow not know that the family was affluent. If she were my patient, I would ask her specifically what she thought the family was poor in. Validating responses, perhaps? Warmth?

           

When I speak of this stuff being an act, I always have to clarify that it is specifically the spoiling behavior which is the act. The way they generally feel, their sense of a poor identity, the impulsiveness and such are all real – but all adaptive or reactive to the family dynamics that produce BPD.

Guest Post: Borderline Family Dynamics Up Close

Today's guest post is by Lin. The writer recounts her own experience growing up in a family with issues that lead to Borderline Personality Disorder 

I was born into a highly dysfunctional family, consisting of my parents, my very domineering and generally narcissistic grandmother, and my alcoholic uncle. My parents both had physical and mental health issues and, in hindsight, I can clearly see that my mother had untreated Borderline Personality Disorder.

After my mother had 7 miscarriages and one stillbirth, they had been told that they couldn't have children. Therefore, they had planned their future without children. When I came along it was a shock; they both overjoyed to have me and also shaken that they suddenly had a new responsibility that they never thought they would have. Because I was an at risk pregnancy, I was born 8 weeks early by cesarean and, due to my mother's unstable mental health, she was unable to see me for 6 weeks. Instead I was kept in hospital while they stabilized me and I only had contact with the staff and, on his occasional visits, with my father.

From the outset I was the perfect baby. I seldom cried or asked for attention and was usually compliant. I talked and walked at an early age and was reading by the time I was 3. My earliest memory is of being that age and in my pushchair. I had a pacifier in my mouth and saw my mother walking towards my father and myself.

I remember the fear and shame of her possibly seeing me using it and I quickly hid it under a blanket. I already had learned not to upset her and felt that I was bad. I learned to hide what I did and felt.

My mother sexually abused me from the earliest age I can remember until I was 16 years old. I am sure my father was aware of it because he had a separate bed in the same room that my mother and I shared. She made me pray to God afterwards and ask for forgiveness for making her do it. She told me if I told anyone she would leave me. The abuse was the only form of physical touch I had—she never hugged me or told me she loved me or was affectionate in any way. Instead, she would buy me anything I wanted. Toys every Sunday, sugary foods in a large quantity every Thursday. I just had to ask and I would get it. All the while the abuse continued every night. I learned sexual abuse meant my mother would stay with me and I learned to equate material possessions and food with love.

I was told we were family and didn't need strangers. Strangers were the enemy. This meant I was not allowed to have friends. I was never allowed out without a parent; I was dropped off at school and picked up every lunchtime and at the end of the day in order to minimize my interaction with others. My father did have a sister but my mother forbade him from seeing her. During the times my mother was in hospital, he would take me to visit her always, saying "Don't tell anyone."

My father would often do bizarre things, such as once telling me we were going to play a game with my mother and pretend that he had been mugged on the way home from work. I thought this was a great game and having secrets with my father made me feel close to him. I learned to lie for attention.

My mother would either be very weak or overbearingly strong—sometimes both at the same time. She ruled me with a rod of iron—I always had to be perfect or I would be told I was nothing to her and then physically beaten. At the same time she appeared incredibly weak. I remember a 4 year old child once swore at her and she cried like a baby. I despised her weakness and sensed she did too, so I learned to make her angry instead at these times so we would both feel better. I learned how to manipulate her as she had manipulated me.

My mother would have frequent psychotic episodes [She was diagnosed with episodes of psychotic depression]. Either me or my father would force anti-psychotics into her mouth. She would hear voices stating we were trying to kill her and fight back. The first time I witnessed that was late at night when I was 6 years old. I ran to the corner of the bedroom in terror while my father held her down as she lashed out at him. Once she was calm my father told me I could join her in bed again. I shook my head, terrified to go near her. My father turned out the lights and went to bed himself, leaving me sitting in the corner of our bedroom all night, alone. I learned that I could be abandoned without comfort from those closest to me at any time.

By the time I was 12 I had learned to give back what they gave to me. They had taught me well. I became better at constant manipulation and control than they were. My father developed congestive heart failure and became physically weak. I would fight with him constantly to make him fight back and be strong again. My mother's mental health was worsening and she blamed my father’s lack of care now that he was ill. I learned to agree with her about how bad he was and thus make her feel stronger.

My father eventually took his own life on my 13th birthday, leaving me alone with my mother. My mother became totally dependent on me. The same spoiling behaviors I had learned would continue for the next 5 years. I would attempt to strengthen her when she was weak and weaken her when she was strong. I did not understand why I was doing this, behaving in a purely instinctual way in order to provide what we both needed. Even though we fought constantly, I was still being sexually abused by her and given whatever material things I wanted. During psychotic episodes, my mother would sob and state that her baby had been replaced at birth by a changeling of the Devil. As a Devil's spawn, I was going to murder her just as I had murdered my father. I believed I was evil and hated myself.

By the time I was 18, I had been in psychotherapy for several years. It had been arranged for me after I had told other children at school that my father had died a year before he actually had. I hated him for not stopping my mother and wanted him dead—the worst punishment I could think of. I became more aware of my motivations and becoming aware that I had a choice as to how I reacted. I moved away from home, only visiting my mother sporadically. She never ever forgave me for choosing strangers over her. Our relationship continued to be very difficult, with me despising her weakness and trying to make her strong, and her despising my new found strength and trying to make me weak. I cut her off entirely when I was 20 and she took her own life a month later. I still struggle with the guilt and self-blame for both my parents suicides.

This is all that I learned and why I have Borderline Personality Disorder.

Book Review: Judas by Astrid Holleeder

Imagine what it might be like to grow up in a home in which unpredictable periods of sheer terror and physical abuse were the norm. In this book, the sister of one of the Netherland’s most notorious criminal and crime boss—Willem Holleeder—describes the consequences. In brilliant detail, she sheds light on the bizarre interrelationships between her, her infamous brother, and her sister Sonja, all of whom grew up in such a home.

“My father treated his children the same way he treated his wife. He beat us, no matter how small and defenseless we were. As with my mother, he didn’t need a reason—he made one up on the spot. That was how he justified his actions. It was always “our own fault”—we made him do it” …Our behavior at home was exemplary…We were all compliant good kids who never broke any rules…filled with the smell of booze and my father’s unpredictability, those days seemed endless. Only one thing was certain: there would be shouting and hitting.”

Yet when these children became adults, breaking rules became almost a daily occurrence.

Their father’s attitude toward women was that he was the “boss.” Every day he’d scream “Who’s the boss?” and his wife would answer, “You are the boss.” He believed that “…women were inferior beings, their husband’s property, and whores by nature.” His wife was not allowed to leave the house for fear she might encounter other men, and if he came home and she happened to be home, there was hell to pay afterwards.

Yet Astrid became a lawyer.

Willem started early in criminal activities , and the family was often intimately involved. He first became widely know when he and Sonja’s Husband Cor, along with some others, kidnapped Freddy Heineken—the heir to the Heineken Brewery fortune. Of note was that their father had worked for the brewery for most of his adult life.

The Heineken family ended up paying the ransom; Freddy was released for 35 million Dutch guilders. Most of it was eventually recovered by the authorities, but not all. Questions about what happened to the rest eventually led to a falling out between Willem and Cor. After two previous attempts, Willem eventually had Cor murdered. During the first one, Cor’s car was shot up – with Sonja and their son in it.

Astrid had been more or less pressured by Willem to serve him as a sort of consigliere. She would give him legal advice and helped him keep the rest of the family in line, while he kept her in line with various threats. As far as the attempts on the life of the brother- in-law, he at first acted all innocent and “helpful” to the family. He was an expert at manipulating family members and strangers alike by either turning on the charm or by scaring the hell out of them. 

Gradually Astrid and Sonja figured out that it was Willem who had put the contract out on Cor, and because Willem seemed willing to kill even family members, they eventually turned on him.

Although highly mistrustful of the authorities for a variety of valid reasons (assuming Astrid’s reasons were honestly described) and constantly fearful for their own lives, they began working with the Dutch Justice Department. They eventually testified against their brother and helped put him in prison. He remains there, but the trials of several charges against him drag on. Both Astrid and Sonja are at present in hiding.

The author knew that Willem has put a contract out on her and her sister and that their days are probably numbered. She never forgave him for Cor’s murder. She knows he has put out hits on a significant number of murder victims, many of whom having been his former partners in crime.

Nonetheless, she still felt guilty about putting her own brother away. Such is the power of family-of-origin bonds. The last two sentences of the book say it all:

“The only reason you’re still alive is that you want to take our lives. But despite that certainty, Wim, I still love you.”

11 Laws of Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is one of the main themes of Peter M. Senge's best-selling book, The Fifth Discipline, which I reviewed back on November 22, 2016. Family systems therapy - which is at the heart of my form of psychotherapy for personality disorders - is based on systems thinking, and looks at the role of the interactions of all family members over at least three generations in the genesis, triggering, and reinforcement of self-destructive behavior in individual members. 

Senge's book discusses eleven “laws” that apply to the behavior of individuals within groups who are engaged in trying to solve a variety of difficulties that affect the achievments of the group’s goals. The laws look at how a wide variety of different variables interact over the long term, and discuss the folly of efforts to try to reduce problems down to just simple relationships between only two or three variables over the short term.

In this post, I list the eleven laws from the book, with a few minor changes or additions I made to make them more relevant to problem solving specifically in dysfunctional families—as opposed to just any organization.

11 Laws of Systems Thinking.

#1: Today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions." In our desire to avoid conflict, we solve problems by avoiding them. Inevitably, the problem comes right back more intensely and in an even more frightening aspect. Solution: Learning to negotiate and solve problems cooperatively in a win/win manner.

#2. The law of reversed effort: the harder you push, the harder the system pushes back. Attacking the people in the system creates resistance. For example, the more you lecture children about something, the more likely they will be to keep doing whatever you are complaining about.

#3. Dysfunctional family and other problematic interpersonal group behavior gets better before it grows worse, and conversely, it grows worse before it gets better.

When we sacrifice our own needs in order to give the family or group what it seems to need, this stabilizes it over the short run, but since structural problems and ongoing shared intrapsychic conflicts are never dealt with or even addressed, this soon starts causing more problems over and over again.

Conversely, when problems are finally addressed, people often escalate their previous dysfunctional behavior in order to test whether everyone else really wants change - but if everyone sticks to their guns, the problematic behavior eventually subsides and then starts to go away altogether (except for occasional relapses which must then also be openly addressed).

#4. The easy way out usually leads back in. Quick and easy solutions often lead to weak and poorly thought out approaches that backfire. Solutions that come from a desire to avoid conflict or difficulty overlook the deep listening required to reveal the emotional core of family issues.

#5. The cure can be worse than the disease. Without thinking about ALL of the interacting variables, we often fix the wrong problem or approach the right problem inappropriately. Reactions and counter-reactions often leave us in a worse place than we where we started.

#6. Go slow to go fast. Rushing to completion leads to a lack of thoughtfulness and reversals of direction to go back and pick up missing pieces.

#7. Cause and effect are not necessarily closely related in time and space. We often assume the solution to be close to the problem, but most often, today's problems were caused by decisions made long ago but forgotten.

#8. Small changes can produce big results -- but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious. Taking the widest possible systemic view allows us to see the small changes that will have long term and beneficial outcomes.

#9. You can have your cake and eat it too -- but not at the same time. Patience is its own reward. Rushing produces compromise such as "I'll cut off my leg if you cut off yours." Taking the long view allows you to accomplish more and reap the benefits of the work.

#10. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants. One must look at groups as a whole. Simply dividing people in a family or organization into separate, smaller groups will not produce the same dynamics, nor double the value. The right hand has to know what the left hand is doing.

#11. There is no blame. Perhaps the most critical of the laws of systems thinking, stopping blame eliminates the fear that turns employees or family members against you. Don't try to change people, change systems. Discover the systems problems and you can change the entire direction of a work group or family.

Measuring the Nature of Parenting Practices in Studies

A "scientific" journal article entitled, “Which dimension of parenting predicts the change of callous unemotional traits in children with disruptive behavior disorder?” By Muratori and others in the August 2016 issue of Comprehensive Psychiatry attempted to determine whether parenting practices influenced the development of so called callous and unemotional (CU) character traits in children. Alternatively, are those traits – which are common in children with disruptive behavior –more genetic in origin? 

In the study, no significant relationship was found between "negative" parenting and CU traits; these two variables were also unrelated when "positive" parenting was considered in the same model. However, using a slightly different model, higher levels of positive parenting predicted lower levels of CU traits.

Although I would like to believe and tend to agree that “positivity” in parent-child relationships helps decrease acting out behavior in children, a huge problem with this type of study is how the hell can you precisely measure the nature of the relationship between parents and children? The biggest problems with that include the fact that these relationships are not constants but vary across time and situational contexts. Parents might be good disciplinarians when it comes to providing children with adequate curfews, for example, but terrible at allowing them to stay up all hours of the night. Furthermore, the disciplinary practices certainly change over time as the children get older.

Second, how does a study even attempt to measure the tone of parenting practices? This study used a measure called The Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ) [40] – mother report. This parent report measure has five subscales: parental involvement, positive parenting, poor monitoring/supervision, inconsistent discipline, and corporal punishment. Items are rated on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (always).

They used the mother’s own report of her own disciplinary practices! If a mother were abusive or inconsistent, how likely do these authors think she would admit to it, even if she were very self-aware, which obviously many people are not. There is no way to be sure, of course, but the odds are very good that the amount of “negative” parenting is  higher than their study results would indicate, while the amount of “positive” parenting could be overestimated. 

And which particular types of those parental behaviors listed in the instrument were the most relevant to the question at hand? There is no way to know!

When it comes to assessing the effects of family interactions, details make a huge difference. And as I have maintained over and over again, in order to get these details, you would need a camera on both the parents and the children 24 hours a day over a significant time period. This type of study using absolutely no direct observation of what is purportedly being measured is a complete waste of time.

Not Taking the Bait in Family Discussions

When adult children complain to their parents about how the parents are repetitively engaging in invalidating, hateful, critical, demanding, and or abusive behavior towards them, the elder family members have almost always developed a number of ways to get them to shut the hell up. Often these ways include dismissing the adult children's complaints by accusing their progeny of being:

A) Little snowflakes (to use the current trendy term) who are overly-sensitive, weak, selfish, unable to take a little good natured teasing, or "high maintenance."

and/or

B) Stupid - reading things into what the parents are saying that are not really there.

and/or

C) Pathological -making things up that did not even happen or twisting the meaning of everything the parents says to unfairly shift the blame for the child's problem onto the poor, put-upon parents.

Unfortunately, in many of today's psychotherapy models, many therapists seems to agree with the parents that the adult child's problems are all in their heads and are not, in fact, due to their having being traumatized or understandably upset by dysfunctional or abusive family relationships.  

And of course, as readers of my blogs know, if parents act as if they expect  their children to act in weak, stupid, or pathological ways, in response the children often do indeed start to act out exactly what they are being accused of doing. When dysfunctional family patterns include that phenomenon in addition to the problematic parental behavior mentioned at the top of the post, the situation is a bit more complicated to talk about and will not be discussed further here.

To solve the problems, the adult children have to find a way to not shut the hell up, but to constructively push the conversation forward in order to put a stop to the problematic patterns. (I'm currently under contract for and working on a self-help book for New Harbinger publishers that discusses in great detail a large number of different strategies for achieving this goal).

This post will discuss one countermove to use when you are being accused of A, B, and/or C above that is often successful in disarming the parents and pushing the conversation onward. Of course, no strategy works with all families, or even all the time within any one family. But this one increases the odds of productive conversations when adult children bring up the complaints mentioned in the first paragraph of the post.

The strategy is based on a premise that was described beautifully and concisely by my colleague Dr. Jami Woods. She said, "You can't be pulled into a game of tug-of-war if you don't pick up the rope."

In this case, the accusations by the parents are bait. They want you to take it. You are being baited into becoming angry or defensive. Once that happens, constructive conversations immediately end in fight, flight, or freeze responses. No problems get solved then. Do not take the bait!

So how to avoid doing so?

Let's say you tell your parents that their demands are getting on your nerves because no matter how much you do, it never seems to be enough for them, and that that they seem to ignore the fact that you have other things to do and cannot just drop everything at a moment's notice to do things for them. Say they respond by telling that you are grossly exaggerating how much they ask of you, and that you ought to be happy to take the time to help them out. They add that you are being ungrateful. Just think of all the sacrifices they had to make for you when you were growing up!

How not to respond:

A) Argue with them about the frequency or reasonableness of their requests, or how much they sacrificed for you as a child.

B) Attack them and tell them they are insensitive, overly-critical clods.

C) Defend yourself by pointing out that your life is busy and of course you cannot always just drop everything to come over and do something for them.

D) Explain in detail your feelings and go on and on about how those feelings are justified.

E). Scold them or lecture them about etiquette and the proper relationship between adult children and their parents.

The basic form of the recommended response:

"Well, maybe so, Dad, but I am finding this situation to be a big problem. Do you think you could help me out by checking with me first about when it would be convenient for me to come over to help you?"

This sort of response is basically a refusal to argue about the merits of your personality characteristics, but trying instead to make a relationship better. In doing this, you are neither agreeing nor disagreeing with their characterization of you. It might be accurate, partially accurate, or complete wrong. Who's to say, really? That isn't the point. The point is how you are reacting to them when they do something, not whether your reactions are justified or not. They should want to know that so that everyone can, to quote Rodney King, just get along.

Surely they'd prefer a pleasant relationships to an unpleasant one. I know that it often looks as if this is not the case, but nonetheless, I advise that you give them the benefit of the doubt.