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.”

60 Minutes on Grandparents Raising Grandchildren: Reading Between the Lines

On Sunday, 5/13/18, the news magazine show Sixty Minutes aired a new story about grandparents raising grandchildren which focused entirely on the epidemic of opioid addiction as the primary cause of the middle generation taking such poor care of their kids that the grandparents had to “take over.” 

The show reported that there are now over one million grandparents raising grandchildren because of their own kids’ failings

This hearkens back to my very first post on my Psychology Today blog, back on June 22, 2011, in which I discussed the already skyrocketing incidence of grandparents raising their grandchildren because of their dysfunctional children’s abdication of the parental role (rather than in those cases of temporary needs like a military deployment). Note that this post was written well before the current brouhaha about the opioid epidemic.

I discussed the idea that the children were, in a sense, being “gifted” to the grandparents, who seemed to the children to have a pathological need to raise children despite continually complaining about it.

I wrote that the major apparent (pardon the pun) reasons were because the children:

1. Carry the psychiatric diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and neglect, abuse or otherwise endanger their children. 

2. Have antisocial traits and end up in jail (antisocial personality disorder is also a Cluster B personality disorder just like BPD). 

3. Are addicts or alcoholics. Many of those folks may also exhibit significant Cluster B personality traits at one time or another, although in addicts the traits may disappear if and when the addict cleans up.

As most of my readers will know, I believe that the parents’ intrapsychic conflicts over the role of raising children is by far the most important cause of cluster B symptoms and acting out by their children and adult children. 

Furthermore, the grandchildren in these cases are also being subjected to its manifestations and might later develop the same disorders themselves.

In a previous newsmagazine show from around the time of the earlier post, grandparents raising their grand kids were heard to say how much they loved taking care of the grand kids, but how chasing after them made them soooooo tired! And clearly if we heard that, so did the grand kids. So the grandparents end up doing to the grandchildren the same problematic things that they did to their own children.

Some of these grandparents were interviewed on the Sixty Minutes segment, and the reporter discussed how they were plowing through their retirement savings, having to downsize and not go on previously planned vacation trips, arguing more between themselves, and even worrying about how they would find the money to treat their own illnesses like, in one case, cancer.  Again, if we heard this, so do the grand kids. In fact, one child was asked what the grandparents were giving up in order to take care of them, and replied, “Grandma had to give up dating. She says it all the time.”

Two grandparents protested, “We can’t not do it [take care of the grand kids]; they’re our family!”

When it described what went on before the grand kids were “rescued” by their grandparents, the story did a good job of describing how older siblings would have to become so-called “parentified children” for their younger siblings, and how they felt they had to grow up too fast. I described what can happen in that situation in a previous post.

So was there any evidence that these grandparents may have engaged in problematic relationships with the absent parents that affected the middle generation’s irresponsible behavior with their own kids? Well, no direct evidence, but a couple of things were mentioned in passing that might suggest that this was the case.

In two of the described cases, the grandparents spoke of keeping track of what was going on with their kids and grand kids as the parents became homeless and crashed at various shady dives and crack houses along with their children. Rather than simply calling protective services to investigate, one set of parents bought their child a van and put a tracking device on it, while another set said they camped out across the street from one of said crash pads to make sure that their grandchildren were not being abused. Apparently all night long!

We don’t know for certain how long this sort of “tracking” was going on, but my guess is: a long, long time. As readers recall from my previous posts, the parents’ conflicts over their parental role in many (but not all) of these cases leads them to vacillate between severe over-involvement and severe under-involvement with their kids. One of these two poles often predominates much (but not all) of the time. This creates the double message to the children, “I need you-I hate you.” Constant tracking is one manifestation of the over-involved polarity.

So am I dismissing all of the so-called evidence that opioid addiction is a biogenetic disease over which these parents have no control, and that it has nothing at all to do with family dynamics? Well, yes. If you believe these people have absolutely no control over their drug use, you would also have to believe that:

1.     12 Step Programs like AA and NA could never work. Especially when the addict has "hit bottom" (that is, when the addiction is at its worst).   

2.  The way the drugs makes them feel is so all-encompassing that they lose all ability to reason and the ability to appreciate the harm they are doing to themselves and their own children, or lose the ability to care about that at all.     

3.  If you pointed a gun at them and told them that if they picked up the drug or drink in front of them you would shoot them the moment they did, assuming they believed you and were not overtly suicidal at the time, then they would have to go ahead and let themselves die.

Do you really believe those things?

Performance versus Ability: Another Issue Frequently Ignored in Psychiatry Research

In previous posts, I have discussed some bizarre assumptions made in psychiatry research papers when the data is analyzed. I wrote about how, for example, differences in brain area size and functioning between different groups on fMRI scans are automatically interpreted as abnormalities.

Nassir Ghaemi, a blogger on Medscape with whom I have had some strong disagreements about borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, nonetheless had a great quote on this with which I wholeheartedly agree:
             

"All things biological are not disease, even though we can define disease in such a way that all diseases are biological. This matter is obvious once pointed out. A few assumptions,  which seem either patently true or very likely: all human psychological experience is mediated by the brain; each person only has one brain; therefore the brain will always be biologically changing as we have psychological experiences. Reading a blog post about the brain is a psychological experience. Having delusions from schizophrenia is a psychological experience. The first brain change does not reflect disease; the second does. So showing MRI changes with adult ADHD or borderline personality does nothing to demonstrate that those conditions are diseases. If you watch TV and play video games inordinately, you will have changes in your brain, and you might also develop clinical symptoms of ADHD. If you are repeatedly sexually abused, you will have changes in the brain, and you might also develop clinical symptoms of borderline personality. But those changes in the brain do not have the same causal role as the neuronal atrophy that happens with trisomy 21, or with schizophrenia, or bipolar illness..."

Another major nonsensical assumption that litters the psychiatric literature (the literature littering alliteration?) is that one can totally disregard the motivations of research subjects as well their past experiences and the environmental context in which they live when evaluating their performance on psychological tests. 

I mentioned an example of how this is utter nonsense in a previous post: The performance of African-Americans on IQ tests just might be related to the fact that for several generations Blacks who looked too smart were at high risk of being lynched. Do you think they are just as motivated as other folks to want to look smart on an IQ test which is being administered by White researchers?

What I have seen more and more lately, particular in the personality disorders literature, are studies that look at differences between various diagnostic groups on such issues as how much "impulsive aggression" they show, or how and how well they read the emotional state of ambiguous faces of strangers in photographs. When differences are found, once again the "lower" performing groups are just assumed to be "impaired" or "abnormal."

This, of course, confuses performance with ability. Without knowing anything about what the subjects in the experiments are motivated to do in their daily lives on any particular dimension for whatever reason, or what environmental contingencies they are worried about that may relate to the task at hand, it is literally impossible to say for sure whether any difference in their performance is related to what they would be able to do if those other issues were not operative.

Patients with borderline personality disorder, for example, grow up in families in which double messages are flying in all directions, and with parents who can switch from being over-involved to neglectful at the drop of hat. They are bound to have a higher index of suspicion about what facial expressions on strangers might mean than someone who grew up in a more consistent and predictable environment. If they did not, they would be morons.

Another major issue ignored in the literature is the difference between a research subject's real self versus their persona or false self in certain social situations. We all present different "faces" to the outside world depending on social context. Researchers who do not consider this must think that men, for example, present themselves exactly the same way around their children, their bosses, and their mistresses. Really?

With personality disorders, as I described in several previous posts, people play social roles designed to stabilize family homeostasis. These roles are merely a much more pervasive version of the different roles played by the above "normal" man interacting with different people. So someone with antisocial tendencies, for example, which are part of the role of avenger, are motivated to show more impulsive aggression than other people - on purpose - and have literally trained themselves to be like that. They do so habitually, automatically, and without thinking. Of course they will show more impulsive aggression in the experiment! Why wouldn't they? 

In fact, showing a lot of impulsive aggression might be considered to be part of the definition of antisocial behavior. The experiments therefore do nothing more than prove that anti-social people act habitually in an anti-social manner. Like, duh!

These types of results in no way indicate any "deficits," "deficiencies," or "abnormalities." One wonders how people who make these ludicrous assumptions ever manage to get through medical or graduate school.

Corporal Punishment: What Exactly are We Talking About Here?

The intriguing headline Physical Punishment Tied to Aggression, Hyperactivity headed a report by Reuters Health Information dated January 17, 2014.  The report summarized a study done in the African nation of Tanzania, where, it said, “physical punishment is considered normal.” The conclusion of the study was summarized as: “Regardless of the culture a child lives in, corporal punishment may do lasting psychological harm” and “primary school students who were beaten by teachers or family members in the name of discipline tended to show more behavior problems, not fewer.”

The article went on to summarize the findings:

Some people still believe, despite an overwhelming body of evidence, that corporal punishment in some cultures won't result in as many negative effects," George Holden told Reuters Health. "But, as this study shows, it's difficult to find support for that argument," said Holden, a professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who was not involved in the study. Past research, mainly in industrialized countries, has found that children and teens who experience corporal punishment may "externalize" their negative experiences in the form of bad behavior and emotional problems, Hecker and his colleagues write in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.

To test whether the same is true in a culture where physical punishment is the norm and the law allows teachers to use it, the researchers interviewed 409 children between grades 2 and 7 at one private school in Tanzania, on the east coast of Africa. Participants averaged 10.5 years old. Ninety-five percent of the boys and girls said they had been physically punished at least once in their lifetime by a teacher. The same percentage reported physical punishment from parents or caregivers.

Nine percent of children had higher-than-normal levels of hyperactivity. About 11 percent of the kids showed less empathetic behavior than peers who had not experienced physical punishment.

Of course, as James Penston argues in his book Stats.con, correlational studies like this can be problematic. Still, as someone who argues that acting out, antisocial behavior, and hyperactivity are primarily responses to environmental family-of-origin issues - not the result of being a kid being born a genetically “bad seed” - I thought this study might be supporting evidence for my opinion.

But something about that story bothered me. "Corporal punishment?" Is that the right term the authors should have used?

I say no, because it is too vague. When the topic of corporal punishment for children comes up, there is a tendency of a lot of people to mix apples and oranges. In fact, in just about any controversial issue about almost anything, there is a generic tendency for a lot of people to fallaciously argue by conflating a variety of different factors, and then acting as if they are all talking about the same thing.  In particular, they ignore important qualitative and quantitative differences such as frequency and severity of certain phenomena. Arguments of this sort are yet another example of the art of misleading others.

Allow me to illustrate with this study. A little further down the article it spelled out what types of corporal punishment were being included in the study:

The majority of children, 82%, had been beaten with sticks, belts or other objects …Nearly a quarter of the kids had experienced punishment so severe that they were injured.

Corporal punishment? Well, yes. But the type of corporal punishment they describe is not exactly comparable to a swat on the rear administered by a parent to a toddler who just darted out dangerously into the street.  What is being described in this article is frank physical child abuse.

And yet I have seen the argument advanced that children should never ever be spanked, because spanking just teaches people to be violent or to use violence as their go-to problem solving skill.  Gee, I know an awful lot of people who had been spanked as children who are about as non-violent as they come.  Maybe I just hang out with wierdos or something.

While there are indeed some people who argue in print that no rod should ever be spared in not spoiling the child, no one I know is arguing the merits of beating the crud out of children. 

Apples and oranges. It’s really not all that hard to tell the difference between a spanking and a beating. 

It may very well be that mild spanking is ineffective as a form of punishment, or that there are better ways to accomplish the same disciplinary goal, or that it should be used only sparingly.  But causing kids to become violent in and by itself?  That’s just plain nonsense.

Whether you are for spanking or against it, equating light spanking with child abuse trivializes the latter. This then has a rather unfortunate side effect: People who read that spanking is included in the definition of child abuse often come to the conclusion that child abuse statistics must therefore be hopelessly inflated, so it cannot be nearly as big a problem as we know it actually is. So they lose interest. Losing the support of these people not only does not help the noble cause of reducing child abuse, it actively undermines it.