Personality Disorders: Researchers Continue to Make Misleading Assumptions

In this blog I have discussed several instances of researchers making unwarranted assumptions about both their study populations and in interpreting their results in a variety of ways. In this post, I’d like to focus on three recent articles about personality disorder research. The first is a possible refutation of a common presumption, while the second two assume facts not in evidence.

The difference between “cannot” and “do not:” Confusion based on lack of attention to subject motivation, and ignorance of the concept of “false self.”

Shane MS; Groat LL. “Capacity for upregulation of emotional processing in psychopathy: all you have to do is ask.” Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience. 13(11):1163-1176, 2018 11 08.

Could it be that a psychopath’s apparent lack of ability to be empathic stem from differences in motivation rather than ability? This article is certainly possible evidence that this is the case. Perhaps people who routinely engage in anti-social acts suppress empathic responses because that is their role in their family. That what has been observed results from subjects’ false selves? 

This study of course does not address that latter issue, but thinking about it certainly suggests something which could explain the results. (Of course, it would help in that endeavor if we could read minds, because the thing about a false self is that it is based on someone lying to themselves in order to fulfill a social function, so they are highly unlikely to tell experimenters the truth during a short interview).

In any event, in this study, high-psychopathy participants showed typical, significantly reduced neural responses in the brain on an fMRI to negatively-toned pictures under passive viewing conditions. However, this effect seemed to disappear when the subjects were instructed to try to maximize their naturally occurring emotional reactions to these same pictures!

The locations of these increased neural responses included several brain regions involved in the generation of basic emotional responses and which have often been shown to be reduced in psychopathic populations. Thus, despite baseline differences from non-psychopaths,  high-psychopathy participants appeared capable of deliberately manifesting emotional responses to the negatively toned pictures within several brain regions believed to underlie emotional processing. 

Of note was that the magnitude of these deliberately evoked emotional responses was comparable to levels exhibited by low-psychopathy participants’ during passive processing.

A high index of suspicion versus an “inability” to correctly read the mental states of others

Quek et. al., “Mentalization in Adolescents with Borderline Personality Disorder.: a Comparison with Health Controls.” Journal of Personality Disorders, 33 (2):145-165, April 2018.

Mentalization refers to an individual’s capacity to understand and interpret the meaning of one’s own and others’ behavior by considering underlying thoughts, feelings, intentions, and desire. As in other studies, this was “measured” in adolescent subjects with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and normal controls while interpreting the mental states of others shown in pictures, videos, and narrative vignettes of people in various social situations.

The authors of this paper mention almost in passing that the ability to mentalize  is thought to develop within the context of, and is dependent on, the quality of infant- parent interactions. In the experiment, the differences between the performance of the BPD subjects compared to the control group on the various tests became much greater when the material they interpreted suggested attachment-related stress or arousal. 

Additionally, the major differences between BPD subjects and controls seemed to primarily involve what the authors describe as hypermentalization (that is, making much more complex inferences than expected about social cues, signs, and mental states) by the BPD subjects, rather than through a loss of detail.

Despite all this, the authors don’t seem to consider the obvious possibility that attachment figures’ influence on their children’s ideas about the social behaviors of others continues unabated long after they are no longer infants.

So let’s do a mental experiment. How might you evaluate the motives of other people if you were to grow up in an family environment characterized by your being constantly invalidated and given highly confusing double messages about how you are supposed to think and behave, and even being verbally abused— if not physically or sexually abused—if you seem to have guessed wrong about that? Do you think you might have a higher index of suspicion about other people’s intentions than someone who did not grow up in that environment? Do you think you might have more difficulty making sense of other people's behavior? Ya think??

So, do kids with BPD grow up in that environment? Well, in addition to Linehan’s theory of an invalidating environment being part of the etiology of BPD, and my own paper from 2005 (Comprehensive Psychiatry, 46[5] pp. 340-352) which showed that adults with BPD reported about three times the number of double messages from their parents than non-BPD controls, consider the following paper.

Changing parent’s behavior towards BPD children can make those with BPD better—but their behavior apparently had nothing to do with their kids having developed the disorder in the first place

Grenyer et. al., “A Randomized Controlled Trial of Group Psychoeducation for Carers of Persons with Borderline Personality Disorder.” Journal of Personality Disorders 33 (2):214-228, April 2018.

As mentioned in a post on my blog on Psychology Today, researchers into BPD have of late developed an interest in the “burdens” on parents and other caretakers (almost always other relatives) of having a child or adult child with the disorder. Such “carers” are the subject of this particular study, and were recruited through flyers distributed to mental health services, local media, patient advocacy groups, and patient family and support networks. The recruits were put into groups and given a lot of “psychoeducation” about their charges.

The first thing that jumped out at me in this paper was the fact that, even though the carers were evaluated for being critical and over-involved with their BPD children, there was nothing mentioned about seeing if the parents had been guilty of physically or sexually abusing their charges when the fledgling BPD patients were children. This, despite the fact that every empirical study done on this subject in BPD patients finds a high level of significant abuse history. Of course, parents who respond to flyers and volunteer to be research subjects in this sort of study are highly unlikely to have been seriously abusive. So right away, the experiments are selecting for a somewhat atypical sample of parents of children with BPD.

The second thing that jumped out at me was that the psychoeducation provided for the subjects was supposedly based on Bowen family therapy theory, when the researchers mentioned and seem to know absolutely nothing about one of the major tenets of that theory. You know, those that involve intergenerational transfer of dysfunctional family patterns. The researchers mention nothing about the parents being somewhat responsible for the development of the disorder in their kids in the first place!

That they seem to make this assumption is even more awe-inspiring when you look at what was being taught to the parents and which apparently led to improvement in the BPD child’s behavior as well as in the parent-child relationship. They were taught to:

1.      Be non-judgmental, validating, attentive and appropriate.

2.      Reduce their reactivity and try to remain calm and “mindful.”

3.      Attend to their own needs through staying connected with friends and family, attending to their own physical and mental health, and taking breaks.

4.      Model appropriate assertiveness and setting appropriate boundaries and ground rules for the relationship.

5.      Get outside help when crises arise and having a crisis plan.

So, if they had to be taught these things, and if doing those things leads to improvements in their children, maybe the fact that they were doing the opposite of those things all the time previous to the experiment was what was creating their child’s problems in the first place. Exactly what you would expect considering the family dynamics of BPD.

Adult Children Who Cut Off Their Parents: an Interesting Variation on This Theme.

My posts on this blog (May, 27,2014) and on my Psychology Today blog (November 17, 2014), Are Parents Who are Cut Off by Their Adult Children Really That Clueless, generated more comments than almost any of my other post (37 and 163 respectively). Additionally, the post itself on this blog has had more hits than any of the others.

In the posts, I reproduced letters to newspaper advice columnists from parents who had been cut off by their adult children, and who claimed to have no idea why their adult children felt the need to do this. I also printed one letter from the adult child of one of those letter writers telling the other side of the story. Without addressing the issue of who's "fault" it was that the cutoff took place, or who was "wrong" and who was "right," I opined that the apparent cluelessness of the parents was in most instances feigned. They usually knew to a greater or lesser extent exactly why what had happened had taken place.

Well the comments from readers came fast and furiously from family members on both sides of this divide, and they were very predictable. Adult children who had cut off a parent generally wrote about all the bad things their parent had done to them and how the parent would never admit to any of it. Parents came back with a vengeance saying, in so many words, "I didn't do anything wrong," and they accused me of parent bashing.

Here's a typical exchange:

Anonymous: Yes, you are correct. Virtually all of the time, when people cut off parents, or anyone else in their immediate family, you can bet there's a damn good reason. The parents will act like the poor victims. Don't believe them. There's actually a forum on the Internet where they can all get together. At first they maintain their innocent victim stance, but you will soon see their vicious hatred expressed toward their children.

Emelu: Not so. I have done nothing wrong. I've been in counseling. Been open to understand if I did wrong. Been totally honest with myself. And there is nothing I've done wrong.

I always find it interesting that whenever I write posts - particularly on the family dynamics of borderline personality disorder - adult children with the disorder who make comments often seem to accuse me of blaming them, while the parents of such children often accuse me of exactly the opposite: blaming the parents.

In most of these cases, I think the reason for these opposite reactions has to do with selective reading of the posts. This, in turn, is triggered by guilt and defensiveness. Or, occasionally, some of these folks just hate it when I give away their secrets.

In general, both of the positions "It's all my fault" and "I had nothing whatsoever to do with this" are, equally, both irrational and cowardly for any of the involved parties. 

In cutoffs, however, can it sometimes be that the parents really are completely clueless about why their children are avoiding them? That they are absolutely at a loss to understand what has happened? Some commenters said their cut-off children even accused them of things that they know they did not in fact do. Is that always denial?

As everyone was taught in school about true-false tests, beware of any question containing the words "always" or "never." I do think that, in a very limited proportion of these cases, the letter-writing parents are indeed genuinely flabbergasted at their adult children's negative responses to them and the phony accusations. In these cases, IMO the adult children are hiding their real reasons for the cutoff.

So why would a child cut off a parent who was not guilty of any significant abuse, neglect, or invalidation?

One common reason occurs in situations in which the parents feel tremendously overburdened and overwhelmed by the responsibilities of child care, or feel that the child's needs are preventing them from doing other things that they really badly want to do. They feel guilty when they admit this, even to themselves, and they always take care of their children when they are supposed to, and do so appropriately for the most part. They do not usually take their internal frustrations over being exhausted directly out on the children to a major extent, and genuinely love them.

They think that somehow their children are not aware of how tired and frustrated they are, but they are kidding themselves. The attachment theorist John Bowlby theorized that children observe their parents very carefully, without attracting too much attention when they do, and become experts on what their parents are all about and what motivates them by the time the children are just two years old.

In videotapes of family therapy sessions with small children in the room that I have seen, as the therapist speaks with the parents, one may observe the child playing with a toy in the corner. The child seems to be oblivious to the adult conversation. But then, when something concerning them comes up in the conversation, the child suddenly makes a comment about it. Without even looking up. Clearly, they are listening the whole time.

Parents in the situation under discussion in this post do in fact give a lot of clues as to how burdened they feel. They might for instance constantly and compulsively complain to their friends and anyone else who might listen, saying something along the lines of, "I'm always there for my kids! They're my #1 priority. I respond to everything they need, even though I have to work full time. I so wish my boss would understand this better. There's just never enough time. And I'm sooooo tired. I used to have hobbies I really enjoyed, but I've had to put them aside. I sure do miss those days!"

Even after their children reach adulthood, parents like this may have a very hard time trying to not cater to their adult child's every need - or even his or her every whim. While still complaining about it to everyone else.

In such cases, children may get the impression that the parent really wants to be free of them, but just cannot admit it. In response, they sacrifice their own desires for a good relationship and make themselves scarce. They cannot tell their parent the real reason for their doing that, because they know that this will make the parent even more miserable than he or she already seems to be. 

A truthful statement would make the parent feel even guiltier for wanting to be free of any family burdens. The parent would probably deny these feelings anyway, because the parent is under the mistaken impression that admitting this would drive their children even further away.

In order to avoid causing their parent to feel this way, the adult child may in difficult cases volunteer to be the villain in the piece. They may purposely make it look like they are cutting off the parents because they are selfish or narcissistic. If that does not work, they can escalate. They up the ante by making what they know are false accusations about parental misdeeds. That way, the parent can easily maintain the belief that he or she had nothing to do with the cut off. 

As an alternate strategy, or in addition, they may influence their spouse to make it look like the spouse has taken control over them and is domineering and purposely creating trouble with the parent and enforcing the cut off. For more on this, see the post, Your Spouse's Secret Mission.

Anything to help parents avoid looking at their own conflicts!

This is a sad state of affairs because, ironically, if the parents could admit to their ambivalence and negative feelings, any problematic resultant family conflicts can in most of the cases be fairly easily resolved through metacommunication and negotiation. The children's efforts to "help" the parents to deal with their guilt backfires and prevents a solution.

I know that many readers react to these kinds of formulations by thinking I am giving people too much credit, and that most of them do not operate with this level of sophistication. When it comes to fitting in with one's kin, church, or ethnic group, I strongly believe that they not only can, but they do. 

Borderline Personality Disorder: Children Burdening Parents, Or Parents Burdening Children?

I had a telling experience while trying to get a paper published about how the parents of offspring with borderline personality disorder (BPD) give their adult children a lot of double messages (The instrument I used and the results of the study are described in a previous post). The experience indicated that the peer review process by which other practitioners review an article for scientific merit and accuracy may sometimes be more political than scientific.

At the time, I belonged to, and was the treasurer for, a research group in psychiatry in the field of personality disorders that had editorial control of a journal, the Journal of Personality Disorders (JPD).

For the purposes of gaining more financial support for their organization and its research, this group of researchers had been cultivating very close relationships with two "support groups" for the parents of people diagnosed with BPD - Treatment and Research Advances National Association for Personality Disorders (TARA), and the National Education Alliance Borderline Personality Disorder (NEA-BPD). 

As readers of this blog must know by now, my take is that the disorder is produced and maintained by certain ongoing repetitive dysfunctional interpersonal interactions with patients' families-of-origin members, particularly with primary attachment figures like parents. My paper showed that adults with the disorder reported frequent ongoing double messages from their parents and other attachment figures. The results proved to be highly, highly significant: BPD patients reported significantly more contradictory responses than did both patients with other psychiatric disorders (p=.004) and "normals" (p=.003). And this was with a small sample size that makes the results even more impressive. 

Nonetheless, the JPD turned down it down. Flat out rejected it. That the article had merit was evidenced by the fact that it was subsequently accepted for publication by a mainstream psychiatry journal, Comprehensive Psychiatry, with a broader readership. 

I cannot prove it, of course, but I suspect that the reason the paper was rejected was because the group was cultivating the relationship with the parent support groups and did not want to take any chances on alienating them.

Further evidence for my suspicion took place a short time later, when I was one of the peer reviewers for a paper for the JPD by some other authors. This paper detailed what was said when the authors interviewed the members of the parent support groups about their "burdens" in having to deal with an adult child with the disorder - as if the parents had nothing to do with the child's problems in the first place.

Research has consistently shown that a history of severe physical and/or sexual child abuse is one of the most frequently-seen risk factors for the disorder - although not all such parents of people with BPD had been physically or sexually abusive. A significant minority of them in fact exhibit a rather virulent version of highly over-involved, so called "helicopter" parenting.

Not only are these parents over-involved with their offspring, but they also feel they are burdened by them. And according to this study, by their own admission! This is the source of a borderline-ogenic double message, "I'm obsessed with you, but I feel that you are big burden." If children believe that their parents need their children to be burdensome, then that is what the children will become. Far be it for a child to deprive a parent of a cherished role.

After a while, it becomes difficult to tell who is doing what to whom to cause burdens, because the adult children and the parents feed into one another's dysfunctional behavior simultaneously. I refer to this phenomenon as dialectic causality.

My review of this other paper pointed out that the members of the support group who had been interviewed most likely fell into the over-involved rather than the abusive category of borderline-ogenic parents. After all, parents who had, for example, sexually abused their children were highly unlikely to join a parent support group (except perhaps the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which would support them in their denial). 

Therefore, I recommended that the authors should mention that the sample they interviewed was highly likely to be a somewhat biased sample.

The paper was eventually accepted and published with almost no mention of this irony at all!

Your Children Like to Give You What You Seem to Expect From Them

During the times when parents are making major parenting errors, they are often giving their children a double message in one way or another. The parents, usually because of their own ambivalence about rules they themselves learned in their own families of origin as they grew up, say one thing but seem to act in ways that contradict what is being said verbally.

In this situation, children make sense of their parents’ confusing expectations of them by taking into account the entire context of the family’s interactions. They use three rules to sort out and hierarchically rank double messages that are given on a consistent basis. These rules are described in detail in my post of March 8, 2011, How Children Respond to Double Messages From Parents, Part I.

The parents’ behavior may seem to indicate to children that the parents have certain expectations about how the children are supposed to turn out, and children will not want to disappoint the parents by defying their apparent expectations. This will happen in spite of the fact that the parents verbally instruct the children not to act in the way the parents seem to expect, and criticize and/or severely punish them when they do. Admonishments, especially verbal ones, will be disregarded. Actions speak louder than words (Principle #1 from the earlier post).

In this post, I am going to list several examples of frequently-seen problematic parenting practices, as well as the consequences that such practices frequently lead to. They may cause relatively mild problems, but often they cause major issues. These patterns have been described to me over and over again by my adult patients as they discuss their family’s behavior over time.

The problems I list all have a common theme: parents trying to micromanage their children's behavior in one way or another. Parents may protest: "I have to focus on my child's troublesome behavior because they won't stop it." They don't realize that it actually works the other way around: the child won't stop the behavior because the parent keeps focussing on it!

After one of these problems goes on for a while, the situation gets more complicated. The parents and children begin to feed into one another's anxiety and compulsive behavior simultaneously.

In order to solve such a problem, the parents have to be the ones who calm down about the issue first, or the children will be very unlikely to ever calm down and start behaving differently. When the parents do stop micromanaging, other difficult but solvable problems predictably ensue. These are discussed in the last paragraph of this post.

In discussing any problematic parenting issues, there is always a rather devilish and perplexing conundrum that makes any such conversation frought with peril. Many troublesome parenting behaviors are driven by a parent's guilt over their own thoughts and feelings concerning their role as parents, and if one discusses what they may be doing wrong, this adds to their sense of guilt. They therefore often become very defensive and, if anything, dig in their heels. Their problematic practices then get even worse than before!

On the other hand, if they do not really understand what they are doing wrong, they also continue doing it. 

A real lose-lose proposition this.

Parental guilt is often increased by negative comments about their parenting practices that come from their own parents, the children's grandparents. This in turn is caused by certain changes in western culture which have been rapidly evolving over the last few decades. I describe these cultural issues in more detail in my last book, in Chapter Two, Don't Blame Us.

Really, looking for someone to blame for family problems is a complete waste of time. The most important questions is, which would you rather do: find fault with people, or actually solve the problems? It is damn near impossible to do both. To naysayers I say, "Grow up!" 

The problems are created over several generations, so let's all just blame Adam and Eve, and be done with it.

And so I proceed.

Some additional points: Some psychologists and parenting experts intuitively understand the type of consequences that I list below, but IMO they miss the real reason why they occur. Most seem to think that the parents are somehow “gratifying” their children in a counterproductive way. However, in my experience, children who are in many of these situations are anything but gratified. 

They are almost always quite miserable, and behave in self-destructive ways to boot. Feeling good and being self destructive are for the most part mutually exclusive.

Rather than being gratified, I believe - as I have said many times in this blog - that the children are sacrificing themselves to give the parents what the parents seem, in the estimation of the child, to desperately need. 

Another frequent explanation, particularly by cognitive-behavioral therapists, is that the problematic parenting practices prevent children from acquiring certain social skills. While that explanation may at times have some truth, many of the "skills" such children are supposed to lack are not exactly rocket science. And these same children often demonstrate in other interpersonal and environmental contexts the very skills they are not supposed to have ever learned!

Critics of course will also point to examples in which the types of parental behavior described in the post do not or did not seem to be followed by the predicted negative consequences. As usual, I need to put in a disclaimer: The consequences of the parental behavior I mention do not always result in every situation in which the parenting problem is seen. They are not hard and fast. 

Kids have minds of their own. Other adults in the house or even in the community may provide a counterweight. Some parents behave more consistently, others much less so. Some are consistently inconsistent. Parents might get sick and tone down their rhetoric for extended periods. A zillion other things may come into play.

There is a chaos effect: small changes in initial conditions can lead to big changes down the line. However, if parents make the kind of errors I describe, the odds are very high that the predicted consequences will indeed occur. We’re talking probabilities here!

So, without further ado, here’s a list of common parenting errors created by parental ambivalence about their own behavior. By no means is it a complete one:

If you constantly try to fix a child, the child will find different ways to keep being broken so you can continue in your efforts.

If you continually bail children out of their own messes, they will continue to make messes for you to bail them out of.

If you give your kids money whenever they ask and almost never say no, they will continue to ask you for money, and may seem to develop problems supporting themselves when they grow up.

If you constantly try to mediate disputes between your children, they will continue to fight one another so you can continue to mediate.

If you blame yourself for your children’s failings, your children will blame you for their own woes. (In a perverse and ironic way, their problems are partly your doing. But it’s your guilt about your own behavior that creates the problem, not your basic character or intrinsic worth).

If you repeatedly tear apart your child’s room looking for drugs when there is no evidence that he or she is using, just to make sure he or she is not using, the child is more likely to use drugs so you can find what you are looking for.

If you continuously help children with their homework instead of telling then to figure it out for themselves, they will continuously need your help.

If you keep making a huge deal about something your children do or say, they will keep repeating whatever it was so you can continue to obsess about it.

If you instantly replace any items lost by your child, your child will continue to lose things.

If you do nothing when your children disrespect you, or if you just whine and scream at them about it, they won’t ever respect you.

If you look uncomfortable getting presents on holidays and birthdays, your children won’t give you any, or will give you thoughtless gifts. (If you then question them about it, they will get angry or passive aggressive, and may start giving you things, but looking as if they are only doing so because you asked, not because they care about you).

If you seem to get a kick out of a child’s misbehavior, they will continue to misbehave, no matter what else you say about it.

If you set a low bar in your expectations for your child (academically, for example), they may meet the bar, but they will not exceed it.

If you compulsively pay more attention to your children's needs than you do to those of your spouse, they will make gallant efforts to regulate the amount of intimacy you have in your marriage by inserting themselves between the two of you.

Last - and this is perhaps the most pernicious of all - if you constantly give in to your children's demands out of guilt, but then get angry at them because they are too demanding, then they will fear for your mental stability. In response, they will try to regulate your emotions like a thermostat: If you start to get too angry they will try to make you feel guilty, but if you start to feel too guilty, they will try to piss you off royally.

Whenever you try to stop doing any of these things after having done them for a long time, expect a negative reaction, because you will be confusing your children. They thought they had you all figured out, and suddenly you are not performing to their expectations. Therefore, their behavior will get even worse in order to see if you really mean what you say and are going to continue to be different. Their behavior will, however, eventually get better if you stay the course.

How Children Respond to Double Messages from Parents, Part II

In Part I of this post, I began the discussion of how children decide how to respond to consistent double messages about what is expected of them from their parents.  I mentioned that they respond according to three general principles of ranking the conflicting elements of the double message, and described the first.

Hmmm.  I find myself questioning your gesture



In this post, I will describe the other two.  Actually, the first two general principles are merely examples of the third, overaching principle.

Principle #2.: Children pay more attention to what adults say to each other, or to generalizations they make about various issues, than to any direct instructions or admonishment said to children.

For instance, a mother might verbally prod her daughter, in a compulsive repetitive manner, to get married - after having spent years telling anyone who would listen about what jerks all men are, and how unhappy she is with her own spouse (her daughter’s father). The degree of the mother's preoccupation with both the subject and her daughter's stand on the issue would quite likely lead the girl to the conclusion that her choice regarding marriage is of major concern to the mother.

Once again I will ask you to suspend your disbelief and assume that the daughter's appraisal of the mother's opinion, right or wrong though it may be, will be a major determinant of what the daughter does, regardless of the daughter's own personal preference. So what to do? The mother's negative comments about men, according to principle #2, would seem more important than the direct admonition to marry, so most likely the daughter would not marry.

However, once again, she will face criticism if she stays celibate. A possible solution is for the daughter in such a situation to end up picking a series of jerks with which to hook up, in order to satisfy both ends of the double message. That is, she follows her mother’s instructions and keeps trying to find a husband, but proves that her mother is correct about how men really are.

Whether she dates a series of jerks or actually marries and then divorces a series of jerks will usually depend on other relationship issues in her family of origin, such as what role her father plays in this family drama.

This leads us to the general principle, principle #3. When someone compulsively engages in repetitive behavior, family members will invariably conclude that this behavior is quite important to the perpetrator. In the example from principle #1, as mentioned, they conclude that mother likes to do housework AND complain about it. In the example from principle #2, they conclude they have to try to do what they are told while conforming the way they do it to the parent's apparent expectations. 

Far be it for a child to deprive a parent of a cherished role. In the first case, they will “help” their mother by making sure that she has plenty of housework to do, and plenty to complain about.

In order to do so, they may appear to be oppositional to the parent, but the oppositionality is merely an illusion. To borrow a phrase from Marshall Mcluan as co-opted by psychoanalyst Leston Havens, the medium of the total picture of the mother's behavior over the entire history of the relationship takes precedence over single element - particularly any verbal message. The mother's total spectrum of behaviors, in context, is more important that what she says on any specific occasion.



Keeping these three principles in mind, it becomes easy to see why oppositional behavior is so common in dysfunctional families. In cases where parents are ambivalent about themselves, they induce children to appear to disregard verbal messages in favor of some other factor.

This may have biological roots. Attention to non-verbal behavior preceded attention to verbal behavior in the evolution of social animals.

How Children Respond to Double Messages from Parents, Part I

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

In late 1987 and early 1988, a 9 year old girl named Sharon Batts, from an evangelical Protestant church group, got her 15 minutes of fame.  She sang on a record called Dear Mr. Jesus whose lyrics petitioned Jesus with a prayer to stop child abuse ("You cannot petition the Lord, with prayer!" - Jim Morrison, when he was a lad in seminary school).  The record, which was actually recorded three years earlier, received a lot of airplay leading to some notoriety for the girl.



She was interviewed on a news program with her mother and father.  The interviewerer asked the girl how she was handling her new-found fame.  The girl looked up at her parents before answering.  They asked her what would happen if she became too proud.  "I'll fall flat on my face," came the reply. 

In the back of the TV picture the parents sat smiling and were, as any child could see, absolutely beaming with pride. 

A bit of a double message, no?  If pride goeth before a fall, as the parents seemed to have coached the girl to say, then why were they availing themselves of it so readily? 

I believed that the girl was most likely coached to answer as she did because a short time later, on January 11, 1988, the girl was interviewed by People magazine.  In that interview she made the statement, "Sometimes whem peole get famous, they fall flat on their face."  Odd that she would make it a point to use the same words twice like that. 

Assume for the sake of argument that determining the parents' attitude towards the issue of pride was a pressing concern for this girl, and would function as an internal road map for how she would behave under a variety of circumstances. Let us further assume that a wrong determination would cause a tremendous uproar within her family. 

If this little girl were desperate to solve this problem, how would she go about making sense of her parents' behavior under these circumstances? How would she answer for herself the question of why there was such a discrepancy between their verbally expressed attitude towards the dangers of pride and their absolute pleasure in basking in it themselves? Would she think that she ought to be proud or humble?

First, could she come right out and ask them to explain the contradiction? In some families, this might be possible. However, I have reason to believe that in this family, it might not be possible. I of course could not prove it unless I had some form of verification from the family itself, but the very fact that an ambiguity exists, created by the mixed nature of the parents' behavior, might indicate that they were, unbeknownst to their daughter, highly conflicted about, and struggling over, the issue of pride themselves. 

Pride feels good, but I suspect it might be contrary to the group ethos expressed by the evangelical church to which this family belonged, where pride might be seen as hubris, an affront to God.

The rules by which the family operates might hinge on conforming to this view. It is indeed possible that family tranquility might be in part predicated on religious conformity and denying one's own specialness. On the other hand, the larger American culture, through the mass media and other methods, extols the virtues of unfettered individuality. Thus, pride might hold a bit of an allure. 

Under these circumstances, a question from the daughter concerning their apparent hypocrisy could create for the parents a state of anxiety, which could conceivably lead to a negative reaction. They might, for example, shift uncomfortably in their chairs and change the subject. Alternatively, they could get angry and deny any incongruity at all. They could become incensed that the girl would even dare question what was told to her verbally. Some parents in such a situation might even become abusive. If any of these responses were forthcoming, the girl would soon learn that direct questions are best avoided. She would need to come up with some other way to make a determination. 

Please keep in mind that a nine year old girl would be very unlikely to come up with the explanation that her parents were of two minds on the subject. Research indicates that the concept of ambivalence in human motivation does not begin to develop until the ages of 10-15, and that the practical application of such knowledge does not come into play until considerably later than that. Unfortunately, learned habits about role functioning in interpersonal relationships tend to develop far earlier in life, and tend to become almost reflexive or automatic in familiar-appearing situations.

Children and adults will tend to react to significant others as though they had only one goal or desire in each type of situation. This by no means indicates that adults function at the cognitive level of children, only that one often does not stop to think about habitual behavior.

So, how will our child decide which part of the double message to heed? I have found that the conclusions that children will reach in such a situation are rather predictable, and based on three general principles of hierarchically ranking mixed elements of a message. The first and perhaps the second of these principles may seem so obvious as to be truisms, but their axiomatic nature is belied by the ease with which they are forgotten in emotionally charged situations.

Principle #1:  As we all know, actions speak louder than words.  This is not as simple as it sounds, however, because the act of saying something is also an action itself.  Linguists talk about what they call speech acts.  If I come up to you and say, "I hear you're having a party next week," I am not only relaying to you what I heard about your plans for next week, but I am also fishing for an invitation.  So how can actions speak louder than words if words are also actions?

I will tell you. For example, say that a mother is constantly complaining about doing the housework, but faithfully and compulsively does it every single day, while consistently rejecting all offers of help. Children and other family members will draw not just one conclusion, but two conclusions: First, mother really does want to do the housework, and wants to do it all by herself. That's what she does.  Actions speak louder than words.  She also complains.  Therefore,  she must also enjoy complaining, even while doing things she likes to do. Actions speak louder than words.

No one will really think about the possibility that Mom really hates the work, but feels duty bound to perform it. Despite internal (intrapsychic) conflict being the mainstay of psychoanalysis, concepts from which are everywhere in our culture, this possibility does not seem to gain much traction in real life.

Now, having drawn these two conclusions, a problem is nonetheless created. If the children help with the housework, they may be stopped in their tracks, most usually with the verbal comment that they are not doing the housework well enough or correctly. If they do not help, they are criticized for not helping. Damned if they do; damned if they don't. What to do? 

One ingenous solutions is to not only refuse to help, but to make even more of a mess.  That way, their mother gets to do both more housework and more complaining.  Perfect! She should be so pleased. 

On the surface they may seem to be oppositional and defiant, but underneath that veneer they are actually giving their mother exactly what they think she needs from them.


I will cover Principles #2 and #3 in Part II of this series.

Distancing: Early Warning

A letter writer to the advice column Dear Abby, an adult woman, complained about her mother’s clinginess. The writer said that the mother had had “no time for me when I was growing up” and had been verbally abusive, having even told her daughter that she wished she had aborted her.

After the mother’s husband (presumably the writer’s stepfather) died, the letter writer explained, the mother would call the writer at work at 8 a.m. demanding that she drive 20 miles on her lunch break to bring the mother food. Mom would also make frantic phone calls at 2 a.m. demanding the daughter come sit with her because she was "lonely,” but when the daughter arrived, Mom would be asleep! Mom would call the daughter at least four or five times a day.

An adult male patient of mine told a somewhat analogous story. His mother was constantly calling and demanding that he come and wait on her hand and foot. She would almost always call at times that she knew were the most inconvenient for him – as if he had nothing else to do- and was incessantly criticizing him for not paying more attention to her. The things that she wanted him to do for her were tasks that she could have easily done herself, or that she could have easily afforded to pay someone else to do to.

When the son did things for her, however, the mother was never satisfied. Either the jobs were not done quite right, or there were more to do than he could finish. Oddly, the mother was also constantly criticizing herself for taking up so much of his time.

Yet another adult male patient was constantly “on call” for his hypochondriac mother. Earlier in her life, she had been able to run several businesses behind the scenes (there were male figureheads), but now she could not seem to do anything for herself. One of her favorite pastimes was getting “sick” just as the patient had packed up his family to go on vacation - her son would then dutifully cancel the whole trip.

Both of the patients described above just assumed that their mothers were absurdly dependent and too crazy or stupid to realize that their “dependent,” behavior, by being extremely noxious, was in fact very close to driving the sons away from them completely. Of course, for this to be true the mothers would have to be extremely crazy or impossibly stupid. At least with these two patients, there was no evidence that their mothers were either.

In fact, all three of these mothers were sending a very mixed message: I badly want you to be here but I’m going to drive you so batty you will never want to come see me. When parents act in an obnoxious manner like this that pushes their adult children away, this is referred to as distancing behavior. I am often impressed by how much of this crap my patients are willing to put up with before they finally say, “enough!” – if they ever get to that point at all.

So what is going on here? In families where distancing like this transpires, I usually find that the mothers’ (or in somewhat fewer cases, the fathers’) behavior can be explained by one or both of two common patterns.

In the first pattern, as seen in the case of the two male patients described above, the mothers have a dependency conflict which really stemed from a gender role conflict. The mothers were both bright, capable and ambitious women who had been raised in families that valued exactly none of those traits in females. Females were supposed to get married, raise a family, and be totally dependent on men. In today’s culture, such earlier mandates sometimes lead older females to acquiesce to male dominance while at the same time seethe with secret resentment over being infantilized.

Such a situation, depending on other factors, can lead to a variety of different behaviors between women and their children. In the cases under discussion here, after the women’s husbands died, there was no man around left to “take care” of them. They acted as if they needed someone to take care of them but really resented anyone who dared try. Their poor sons would then receive the fallout from the conflict. The mothers engaged in distancing behavior in order to appear “dependent” while really trying to discourage anyone from actually taking care of them.

The second pattern might be the one that applies to the Dear Abby letter writer. Parents who know they were abusive, even if they do not admit it, may secretly believe that their children are better off without them. Hence, they engage in distancing to push their children away, thereby protecting the children from themselves. However, the parents also secretly long to have a healthy connection with their children, so they cannot seem to bring themselves to just cut off all ties directly. Their own conflict causes them to give off the double message inherent in distancing behavior: come here but get the hell away from me. Or as the singer Pink so aptly put it, “Leave me alone, I’m lonely!”