Bad Child Psychology in Schools – How to Make Kids Feel like a Big Burden to Resentful Parents

 

Why aren’t many kids seemingly growing up as maturely as they used to any more? Why are mental health problems and suicidal ideation as well as actually suicides increasing? Why are more and more children losing self confidence and feeling defective? 

In a new book by Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing up, the author blames the mental health establishment. So does the parenting guru I’ve been reading for years, John Rosemond. And psychologists are indeed a big part of the problem. But both miss an important aspect of the phenomenon.

 

The definition of “traumatized” in children has been expanded beyond all recognition by the profession. In the mental health field, consideration of the effects of adverse childhood experiences have gone back and forth from one extreme to the other: the serious ones at times are almost completely ignored. At other times child abuse was thought to be everywhere. And now trauma is seen as almost any occurrence that makes a kid in the least bit unhappy or stressed. 

I described what has been going on at the college level in my review of the book, The Coddling of the American Mind, with students' reactions to “microaggressions,” and political incorrectnesss being equated with PTSD caused by a terrifying combat experience. 

Nowadays, according to Shrier, kids are seen as being unable to put aside even hurt feelings in order to concentrate on the school work in front of them. Resilience is now seen as “accepting” these “traumas” rather than dealing with them in a potent manner. Personal agency has seemed to have “snuck out the back door.”

 

And 40% of the current, rising generation has received psych treatment versus 26% of gen-X’ers when they were younger. More and more phony psych diagnoses are put on kids, often at the suggestion of teachers. More and more children are afraid to be wrong in school laboratories or to test new ideas for fear of making a mistake. Bullies are being suspended less and less frequently for fear of damaging their self esteem. American children are more likely than others to exaggerate all kinds of risks.

 

For those mental health professionals who do recognize all this as a problem, the usual explanation for why it is happening is that when parents and teachers over-protect and over-pathologize their children, they are preventing them from learning social skills which, it is believed, cannot be “taught” in most cases but must be learned through trial and error. 

If a parent always steps in, or even when parents don’t let their children go out to play or walk to school because they believe that something bad will happen to them, the kids are said to never get the chance to learn those things. As the author also points out, sometimes feeling mildly to moderately anxious or moody can be a good thing since it can motivate kids to evaluate their situation and lead them to take action.

 

Now don’t get me wrong. There is much truth to these assertions. What’s missing, however, is the way this sort of treatment by parents and teachers is interpreted by the children themselves. The children start to see themselves as a big burden to their over-anxious, worrying parents. Not only that, but the parents seem angry about it. I believe that if a child feels like too big a burden to their parents, they may start to think their parents would be better off without them. This could increase their risk of suicide.

 

Why? Because, as I have been arguing for years, children are willing to sacrifice their own best interests in order to stabilize their parents. This is due to the evolutionary force called kin selection. It is not just that kids don’t experiment with new behavior in order to figure out how to, say, respond to a bully. Hell, there are TV shows, YouTube channels, and many other sources for suggestions that they could try out at school. But as long as they feel the need to let their parents take care of them, they are not motivated to become independent. "Enabling" parents lead to co-dependent children.

 

Schrier does allude to this aspect of the process involved here, but it is not clear to me that she truly appreciates the extent of the issue. She does say that kids often feel responsible for their parents, and may feel like a “constant burden to their stricken parents.” She also says that there is nothing scarier to them than parents “overmatched and afraid.” She has also noticed that people who make parenting look exhausting do not seem all that fond of the kids they raised. If an untrained observer like the author can see this, then guess what? So can the children. And they will be induced to make any necessary sacrifice.

Family Dysfunction and BPD Behavior: A Chicken And Egg Situation

 

A new article in a nursing journal discusses the experience of Swedish families of people with members who have borderline personality disorder (BPD), and who have access to something they call “Brief Admission” to the hospital because of recent self-injurious behavior (SIB). In their study, 12 patients, whose age range is not specified in the article, have picked out one of their family-of-origin relatives or spouses for the researchers to interview. The relative is then interviewed by phone by two of the authors and asked to describe their experiences as the parents or spouse of someone with disorder. The two authors basically coordinate with each other so they are basically covering the same types of questions.

The authors mention almost in passing that the interviewers had to remind the relatives repeatedly not to focus their discussion on the patient, but rather talk about their own experiences. Not only that, but they also make the claim that “the burden experienced by families of someone diagnosed with BPD involves greater suffering than those with other mental disorders."

Now of course, if a loved one is acting in ways like SIB that reminds everyone that suicide is an issue, they are going to worry more about that person than they may have before. But how are we to know whether the obsession with the patient that is described by the family members over and over again was not what triggered the self-injurious behavior in the first place? After all, some people with BPD hide the self injury from their families (or at least the families are ignoring the evidence for it), while these research subjects obviously did not.

What distinguishes one from the other? Well, in my clinical experience, there are two reasons for this. When SIB is hidden, it’s sole purpose is to stop the panic attacks that occur when a patient feels helpless to alleviate a family problem. When it is not, the behavior does that and also feeds into the parent’s preoccupation with the patient’s mental health.

Of course, the parents will all claim that it was the patient’s behavior that created their preoccupation. This is the basic reasoning espoused by two support groups for parents of offspring that have BPD (TARA4BPD and NEA-BPD). They say such parents are sick and tired of being blamed by the psychiatric profession for their child’s condition. 

As my readers know, I agree that blaming parents is counterproductive because it sidetracks any and all attempts at actually solving problems that are shared by all members of the family and which were caused by events that took place over at least three generations.

So how do we know which came first: the parents’ preoccupation with the patient, or the patient’s self injurious behavior? A true chicken-and-egg type question. My readers already know my answer: the parents’ anxious and guilty preoccupation comes first, which then leads to their child developing the role of spoiler designed to somewhat control both the guilt and anger they see in their parents. The family members then all continue to simultaneously feed into and make worse one another’s problem behavior, especially over the long run.

The parents’ overblown preoccupation, albeit after the SIB has started, can be seen in comments the authors make throughout the study, starting with the above-mentioned statement comparing it to the parents of people with other psychiatric disorders. 

Other examples: the family members’ fear about the children makes “it difficult for them to prioritize their own well being.” The family members have “a hard time allowing themselves to have fun” – due to their feelings of “guilt and shame,” – not fear for their child’s life. “Constantly prioritizing their loved one and ignoring their own well being meant that many of the families suffered from their own mental illness and fatigue diagnoses…” “In this study, feelings of helplessness and anger and a constant need to monitoring their loved ones...”

It seems doubtful that the interviewers asked certain questions about the parent’s pre-occupation having perhaps pre-existed before their child’s SIB began. At least in their article, there is no mention by the authors about the possibility that this was the case, despite their making the following points: “…children can see if someone is unwell and can withdraw and try to make themselves invisible” (that’s only one of many other possible “helpful” responses). “When a parent suffers from mental illness, the children can become carriers of their anxiety.” “Children of parents with mental illness can take a great responsibility for their ill parents.” “…the families and their loved ones’ lived experiences are considered to be linked and interaction with each other.”

The other big problem with this study was that this was a highly biased set of subjects. As mentioned, the SIB of the subjects was known to their families. Also, recall that the patients had to pick a relative for the authors to interview, and the relative had to agree to it. Parents that were sexually or physically abusive would probably not be suggested by the patients, who often go to great lengths to hide the family’s secrets because of dire consequences. 

They know what will happen if they spill the beans. In the family, such revelations are responded to with denial, or alternatively, with an accusation that the patient was at fault for, say, being molested because of being seductive. Usually, everyone in the family including the victim just pretends it never happened – as illustrated by mothers who had been sexually abused by their father letting that man baby sit their own small children when rest of the family suggests it.

And even if the subjects picked the abusive parent, and the abusive parent agreed to be interviewed, it would be highly unlikely that such abuse would be divulged. After all, if it were indulged, the interviewers might have to turn them in!

Book Review: The Shattered Oak by Sherry Genga

 

This involving book, based on a true story but with some facts altered, is written as a first person account (although it is not the author's story) from a woman involved in a severely physically and emotionally abusive marriage. The author takes the reader on a fascinating tour inside her mind and thought processes.

The book strongly implies that she made no effort to leave for many years, and says that her parents refused to help her do so, under the rationalization that they were too afraid of her husband. She finally does leave and files for divorce. The narrative does not discuss the husband’s behavior during the divorce, but it appears that it went fairly uneventfully and without any stalking by her ex. She received the house and custody of their three daughters in the settlement, and her ex seems to have made alimony payments regularly.

Three years later she has a “nervous breakdown,” and describes in vivid terms her overwhelming sense of doom due to her depression. She makes three serious suicide attempts, and describes her ambivalence over abandoning her children and leaving her eldest daughter to take care of the other two, while all the while also feeling tremendous guilt over her daughter having had to take care of her in a parent-child role reversal.

She finally gets committed to a horrible mental hospital and given ECT against her will. Although she does not say she was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, her disturbing descriptions of her thoughts and feelings while in the depressed state are impressive, and give the reader a sense of what it might be like to have been in her shoes. It later turns out that she did not have a typical major depressive disorder, but one caused by a medical disorder, Cushing’s disease, which leads to very high level of the stress hormone cortisol, a steroid. A major depressive syndrome is seen in 50%–70% of the cases of Cushing’s syndrome. 

She opines that the high levels of cortisol may have come from high levels of stress, which, she implies, seems to have increased rather than decreased after she got out of the marriage. As it turns out, however, that was not the case at all. Her disorder was caused by a tumor of the pituitary gland.

It does not mean that anyone is “blaming” her for the severe abuse she suffered, but it is extremely important in the mental health field's attempts to prevent others from following in her footsteps, to pose the question of why she stayed with her husband for so long, and why she felt more stressed out after the divorce than during the time she was with her husband. There is no way we can know the answers to this question for certain just from the descriptions in this book, but there are several tantalizing clues.

The usual excuses offered up to justify the behavior of women who repeatedly return to an abusive relationship often do not hold water, but especially so in this case. As per her own description, she was in far more danger of being killed by him over the long run if she stayed than if she left. While they were together, he constantly threatened to kill her and even fired gunshots at her, narrowly missing her head on purpose. There were literally bullet holes in the walls.

She also knew very well that he was violent before they were married, because there were episodes of it back then.

And why would she be more stressed out after she left if, as it seems, her ex was not stalking her? The narrator admits that she still loves her husband even after the divorce despite all the pain he put her through. She offers a very interesting hypothesis about why he abused her: he came from a highly abusive family himself, and was taking his anger out at them on her. The question she keeps asking herself is how she could have helped this man to become less bitter. Presumably, how else. What she had been doing clearly did not work. Her question is consistent with my hypothesis about  this case

Readers of this blog can probably guess what that hypothesis is: the odds are pretty good that she was sacrificing herself so that her husband, whom she loved, could continue to channel his destabilizing anger away from his own parents, and that her doing something like this might have also been her role in her own family of origin. You know, the family that refused to help her leave her husband. At the end of the book we find reasons that this hypothesis would certainly necessitate further exploration. 

She was treated like a servant by her own parents growing up, especially compared to her two siblings, who could seem to do no wrong in her parents' eyes. Her older brother finally tells her that she was the result of an affair that her mother had had with a neighbor, and she was not her father’s biological daughter. Might the father have taken his anger at her mother out on her, with her mother going along with the program in order to keep the family together? You be the judge.

I wonder what her parents' upbringing might have been like.

Alfred Adler's Magical Question

Alfred Adler

In unified psychotherapy (my model for the psychotherapeutic treatment of chronic anxiety mixed with depression, repetitive self-defeating/self destructive behavior patterns, and ongoing overt family discord), it is often difficult for a therapist to help patients to quit focusing just on themselves and to start thinking about the interpersonal and family context in which their problems take place.  

If they have had previous therapy in which a therapist acted as if their problems existed solely within the confines of their own heads, the major switch in frame of reference may be particularly problematic for them.

The psychoanalytic pioneer Alfred Adler devised a question that a therapist can pose to help a patient make this transition. He was the first to see the great value in asking patients the following: If somehow by magic the problem you have described were completely solved, what negative consequences might ensue? 

This question, or variations of it, have been adopted by several different psychotherapy treatment models, including family systems therapy, solution-oriented therapy (the “miracle question,” of DeShazer), and brief therapy (Gustafson’s Complex Secret of Brief Psychotherapy). 

In unified therapy, the question is designed to trace the adverse consequences within the patient’s family of origin that might occur should the patient stop self-destructive, self-defeating, or spoiling behavior patterns. 

To almost any problem a patient presents, there is a conventional solution that seems obvious - so obvious in fact that the therapist should assume that the patient has already thought of it.  This is especially true if the therapists thinks of the solution almost immediately.  If it that obvious, the patient has thought of it too, and has also no doubt been advised about it by several other people.  It still amazes me how stupid some therapists think their patients must be to not have seen it.

Presentation by the therapist of such a “solution” to a patient with a personality disorder invariably leads to a game of "Why don't you - yes but." The patient presents a series of lame excuses why they cannot employ the obvious solution, or why it will not work for them.

Rather than do that, I ask a patient "If I had a magic wand and I could magically make this problem go away, what would be the downside?"  Examples are: "If somehow you could get over your fear of asking nice women out, what additional problems would that create?"  and "Everyone is probably advising you to tell your father that your career is none of his business.  I wonder if something bad would happen if you did that?" 

If the patient is initially confused by the question, I might ask the patient to visualize having successfully overcome the problem and then ask, "What's wrong with this picture?"  Alternatively, I may ask the patient directly who might be affected negatively if the patient were better adjusted.

Readers of this blog can begin to change their own recurring maladaptive behavior by asking themselves this question. Ask yourself:  “If I had a magic wand that allowed me to successfully solve my major problem, who in my family might have a negative reaction or be adversely affected?” 

If you try this, you obviously have to be honest with yourself and try not to be defensive, and think about the answer for a while. Do not let your mind drift off.

The answer will reveal which family relationships you need to change, and if you are seeing a therapist, where your focus should be in your treatment.

There are some answers you might think of which do not really answer the question. Do not let yourself stop yourself from problem solving with them.  Examples of same:

1.    "I'd just find some way to mess things up." The magic wand won't let you do that.

2.     "It would just affect me, and I'd be a nervous wreck!" The reason you would be nervous is because of the consequences to other people. What are those consequences?

3.     "I can't even imagine it." Really? You can imagine anything. You can picture yourself flapping your arms and flying.  If you “cannot” picture something, that just means you are afraid to think about it.  What is your fear? Be courageous and think about it anyway.  It won’t kill you, I promise.

4.    "That would never happen." Remember, it's a magic wand, so it already has happened.

To illustrate subtle variations of these non-answers: My patients sometimes tell me that the negative consequences of solving the problem would be an alteration or escalation of their self-destructive or self-defeating behavior.  An example is "If I got up the nerve to ask a nice girl for a date, I would probably end up making a fool of myself over dinner."  

All this means is that the patient, if deprived of his or her usual ways of playing out a family role, would merely find another way to act it out. It avoids the question of why the patient is playing the role in the first place. I would counter with, "What would be the downside if you were able to have a totally successful relationship with a nice woman?"

Another example of an unacceptable answer is, "If I started dating really nice women, I'd start picking at my skin until I bled". Again, what might be creating the anxiety that leads to this in the first place? 

In cases in which the negative reaction the patient fears comes primarily from a spouse or partner, and the patient seems to be avoiding an obvious solution to the couple’s problem, then I want to know about the downside of solving that problem. I would wonder who in the patient's family of origin might be negatively affected if the patient were somehow magically able to have a happy marriage.

Sometimes the Adlerian question brings an immediate answer that sheds profound light on a patient’s family dilemma.  One patient told her therapist about how she made herself miserable every day at work by constantly thinking up and worrying about catastrophic occurrences that could take place that day. (Of course none of them ever came to pass). She did this knowing full well that the scenarios she thought up and feared were extremely unlikely, so cognitive therapy would be useless in getting her to stop.  

The therapist instead asked her, “What would happen if you were able to stop yourself from doing that and enjoyed your work?”  The patient’s immediate response was, “My mother would not know what to do with herself, and she would stop sending me money!”

In asking yourself this question, it is helpful to understand what the real answer to the question might look like. These feared consequences should be plausible, probable and serious. For example, your mother might get seriously depressed and suicidal, or your parents might divorce. 

Sometimes my patients respond with the notion that they really do not care what happens to their families, and that their motivation for maladaptive behavior is really selfish.  Unfortunately, there is an obvious logical contradiction between self-destructive behavior and selfishness. Some behaviors such as destructive rages or over-eating can be made to look gratifying if you don't think about them too much, but the experience of them, not to mention their consequences, is anything but. 

You are too intelligent to be unaware of this. The only "selfish" motive behind self-destructive behavior is your wish to avoid the anxiety associated with watching your family members suffer.

Another counterproductive response is to flagelate yourself for being a patsy. I personally believe strongly that caring and concern are good things. Perhaps there is a better way to express them than sacrificing yourself on the family altar.  

Of Hormones and Ethnic Conflict

In my new book, I pose the following question: "If people are basically selfish and our biological imperative is to survive in order to pass down our genes to future generations, how do we explain the willingness of so many people to die for their country or their clan in a war? Throughout history, hundreds of thousands of men have marched headlong and almost without flinching into enemy spears, arrows, gunfire, and bombs, all the while watching their friends and comrades killed or maimed right beside them...

Mothers who send their sons off to war are also honored. In the United States, women whose sons die in war are hailed as 'Gold Star Mothers'... The idea that maybe one should not always be willing to do that was rarely questioned on a large scale anywhere in the world until wide-scale opposition developed to the Vietnam War in the United States in the mid-1960’s."

I go on to explore a theory which may explain the paradox of humankind's willingness towards self sacrifice and the sacrifice of their own children (for example, honor killings in the Middle East, and female infanticide in China) through an evolutionary biological concept called kin selection: "Darwin actually addressed this issue. At first the characteristic of altruism, the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the seeming good of one’s ethnic or kin group, seemed to him to be at odds with his theory of natural selection.

He then realized that this paradox would disappear if he changed his focus from the individual with a good genetic adaptation to the group to which the individual belonged. A single individual with a genetic mutation that is highly desirable and adaptive may still die before reproducing. If a group such as a family, a herd, or a tribe has many individuals who share the adaptation, then the propagation of that gene becomes far more likely."

This could lead to a situation in which genes that predispose individuals to be willing to sacrifice themselves for the kin group, and which cause the kin group to be willing to sacrifice individuals, would be more likely to survive and be passed down from one generation to the next and therefore selected for.

So a tendency towards self sacrifice for the good of the tribe may be in our genetic loading. A lot of evolutionary biologists do not accept the concept of kin selection primarily because they worry it might be used much like the concept of eugenics was in the last century - as an excuse for killing off the weakest members of society. (Some of today's legislators do not seem to need such an excuse). Nonetheless, the potential misuse of a scientific concept is not proof that the concept is invalid.

Now comes some new data which might lend further creedence to the concept of kin selection: (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11hormone.html?_r=2&emc=eta1).

Oxytocin is a hormone which does a number of things, such as helping cause the contractions of the uterus which expel a fetus during birth. It is also commonly found in the brain, where it has been found to be central to the process of attachment between a new mother and her new baby. As the New York Times article explains, "This tiny chemical, released from the hypothalamus region of the brain, gives rat mothers the urge to nurse their pups, keeps male prairie voles monogamous and, even more remarkable, makes people trust each other more."

Oxytocin

Well, not trust everyone, as it turns out: "The love and trust it promotes are not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood. Psychologists trying to specify its role have now concluded it is the agent of ethnocentrism." In an ingenious series of experiments, Dutch psychologist Dr. Carsten K. W. De Dreu found that Oxytocin may "...create intergroup bias primarily because it motivates in-group favoritism and because it motivates out-group derogation.”

The author of the New York Times article describing the experiments raises another interesting question, and gives Dr. De Dreu’s answer: “Early religions were also involved in establishing group cohesion and penalizing offenders. Could oxytocin be involved in the social aspects of the religious experience?” Dr. De Dreu sees oxytocin’s effects as being very general, and no more likely to be associated with the religious experience than with soccer hooliganism. ‘When people get together with others who share their values, that drives up the level of oxytocin,’ he said.”

Still, I often wonder why so many people are so ready to profess to believe transparently and obviously preposterous religious dogma. Perhaps that is a price they are willing to pay in order to maintain in-group status and group togetherness.