ESSAYS ON PARENTING, FAMILIES, PROCREATION, AND WANTING TO BECOME A PARENT
The Good-Enough Mother: NOT GOOD ENOUGH!
Why Do People Really Have Children?
The Spiritual Rights of the Child
Adoption Is Not the Enlightened Way to Have Children
The Gravity of the Family System
Father’s Day: Another Sick Holiday
Everyone Is His Own Hated Minority
Cults are manifestations of the worst of the family system. They adhere to the same underlying dynamics of families but replace familial depression with an alluring, grandiose face, which is why so many underdeveloped souls seeking love swim in and get ensnared in their tentacles. And uncomfortable as it is to get swallowed by the beast, it’s an old and familiar tale – an adult recreation of the child’s dilemma of needing to fit into his family at all costs in order to survive.
In the family, parents are the cult leaders. To the child their word is law, their perceptions reality, and their definition of truth, however twisted, absolute. Parents have a power relatively greater than any the child will ever come to meet in the rest of his life. Their behavior sketches his basic template of God, and he bows before it with the passion of the devoted. And if he doesn’t bow, he gets forced to bow, and learns to accept his bondage as normal. To satisfy his needs he must bend the zeal of his personality to their limitations – that or face their rejection, which causes him a fear so basic and crippling and annihilating he cannot dare risk it. He is at their mercy, and ultimately the mercy of their maturity. If they are relatively mature he is fortunate; if not he is in serious trouble. Either way, beyond the borders of their maturity he is trapped, and they, like Jim Jones, can put whatever they want in his Kool-Aid.
He is theirs to manipulate, and they must to the degree that their unconscious needs demand. He is born lacking a respect for their buried trauma and their desperation to heal it, and every time his honest expression of life force unknowingly triggers it he threatens them terribly. In protection of their false selves they make it their mission to break his spirit of its desire to roam free. They train him on where he is forbidden to go and they use methods employing a degree of force tailored to the extent of their denial and the extent of his passion for remaining true to his instincts. The most emotionally damaged parents manipulate and traumatize him the most, often completely brainwashing him into an emotional numbness that paves the way for extreme future exploitation.
Unlike organized cults that have to instill some degree of psychological dependence in their followers through cruel and clever tactics, parents have it far easier, because their children are born psychologically dependent. They’re more malleable than the most needy and troubled of adults. Jim Jones, whose charisma and savvy won him heavy support from major California politicians – quite a feat! – at least had to be brilliant, persuasive, and creative to lead his followers astray. Any old fool can become a parent and manipulate his kid to kingdom come. The kid may rebel later on, but for a few good years he’s hooked through the gills.
As the saying goes, power corrupts. Everyone not fully enlightened (myself included) is bound to act out some degree of cult leader dynamics with those over whom he wields power. This becomes especially dangerous in relationships where a greater dependency is inherent. This goes for many therapists, who cull bevies of blind devotees who progressively lose their autonomy, as well as for teachers, religious leaders, partners, bosses, 12-step sponsors, writers, and even friends. The not-fully-reflective simply cannot resist the temptation to act out when offered the chance.
But the reflective have no choice but to resist. As their inner light leads them out of the maze of their traumas they access a long-buried spiritual kernel for a new interactive blueprint, one in which manipulating others disgusts their ethical sense. That kernel holds the essence of their honest self, a complete genetic code for a new species and new world. As they make headway toward autonomy they find themselves increasingly vaccinated against falling prey to cult leaders, because the only leader they need is the one living in their own breast. Emotional autonomy is the basic consequence of individuation from the family. Once that cult is rejected, all others are sure to follow.
•••
The Good-Enough Mother: NOT GOOD ENOUGH!
“The good-enough mother…starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure...” [D. W. Winnicott, from “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 1951]
There are few psychology concepts that repulse me more than Winnicott’s ever-popular “good-enough mother.” This concept bothers me so much because it looks so good, sounds so sweet and gentle and humane, and yet is so false – and only rationalizes abuse. Mothers do not have to reject their child to help him break away. On the contrary, children naturally and progressively break away when they get all their needs met, just as the umbilical cord dries up and falls off on its own in the days or weeks after birth. Independence is a consequence of nurturing.
If the goal of life is to become an average, mildly neurotic, mildly addicted, mildly split-off, mildly depressed, basically functional but spiritually lost person who doesn’t self-reflect too much to realize just how troubled and false he is below the surface of his personality, then the concept of the “good-enough mother” is true, because that’s what a good-enough mother produces. No wonder the norm loves the concept.
It is true that the “good-enough mother” does not drive her child into schizophrenia or other forms of overt insanity (though of course many of the worst psychosis-causing mothers – and fathers – disguise their extreme rejections and violations of their child to the degree that the world still labels them “good-enough”). Instead she abuses him mildly enough so that her abuse slips under the radar of what is societally unacceptable and she only rejects him (that is, “fails” him, to use Winnicott’s word) to the degree that she and society can rationalize her failure as being for his own good. How convenient for all the failing, rejecting, mildly disturbed, narcissistic, imperfect parents out there!
If the goal of life is to help your child leave childhood behind as a non-neurotic person, fully connected with his depths, to leave childhood behind with no depression and no split-off self-hatred and no unresolved childhood trauma, as an adult with the potential to procreate someday without replicating his own denied childhood abuses on his future innocent children, then the good-enough mother is a farce.
This said, I know very few mothers who believe they are not good-enough. And most think they’re even better than good-enough. Some even think they’re perfect. All this is convenient, because it prevents them from having to feel guilty – a guilt they should legitimately feel because of the very real damage they are causing their children. And their children know this. Deep down in their psyches they know just how not-good-enough their mothers are.
•••
•••
Why Do People Really Have Children?
People procreate in an attempt to have their children rescue them from their own unresolved pain. They may couch their desire to procreate in concepts like biological drive, societal and familial expectation, and love for mothering, and these may all be partially true, but underneath these surface motives people who have not resolved all of their childhood traumas have children because they really just want to be loved. And this is not fair to the child, because no child asks to be born, and no child has the capacity to rescue his parents. Only deep healing – through the resolution of one’s own childhood traumas – can rescue people from their own buried horrors.
The journey to healing, however, is so painful and so laden with horror and sorrow that few dare even take the first step. To make matters worse, people emboldened to heal must face the limits and cruelties of their own parents, and parents never support children, even grown children, who go this route. Instead they reject them, hate them, and want them to become unconscious drones once again.
Thus many avoid the whole healing process and instead have children as a compromise. They block their rage at their parents for failing them and transform it into hope for rescue from their offspring – all the while acting out this rage in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways on their very offspring. This is why parents so deeply love it when their own children have children. The instant they become grandparents they become immune from blame, because their children are now equally as culpable. The guilty have no emotional leg to stand on when it comes to blaming others for the same crimes, and unconsciously parents know this.
Also, when people become parents it becomes far harder for them to feel their legitimate rage at their own traumatizing parents, because simple logic tells them that what comes around sooner or later goes around. You can’t confront your parents without giving your children a green light to be able someday to confront you for the very same things, even if you dress up your replicated perpetrations in different garb. Thus so many unconscious people put all their hopes into raising children who themselves will someday become parents and carry on the tradition of deception. This largely explains why parents often become disturbed when their own children turn out to be gay. Gay children have a great opportunity to break out of the system and break some of the intergenerational cycles of trauma – even if so few gay people actually put their potential to this great use.
But none of this is the fault of the child. The child is born pure, and has a full right to be loved and to have nothing expected of him in return. He owes his parents nothing for having created him and raised him, though as he unconsciously absorbs his parents’ deeper purposes for his creation he quickly loses his naïveté about his inherent rights. He may not be born knowing how to love, but if he’s to survive in the world he learns quickly.
•••
The Spiritual Rights Of The Child
1) The child has the right to expect his parents to meet all of his needs – and it is their responsibility to live up to his expectations.
2) The child has the right to feel that he is the center of the universe – and most importantly, his parents’ universe. This is what allows him to grow optimally.
3) The child has the right to be angry, hurt, sad, even rageful when his parents fail to meet any of his needs. It is his parents’ responsibility to seek to understand exactly what they did wrong to produce this reaction in his, and to modify their behavior to meet his needs.
4) The child has the right to have parents who have healed all of their own traumas from their own childhoods before they created children, and thus not to replicate their traumas with him.
5) The child has the right to have parents who have resolved all of their ancient unmet childhood needs before they had him – and to not use him to meet their needs, which is to some degree inevitable wherever they have not healed their own wounds.
6) The child has a right to have parents who, once they become parents, make the nurturance of his growth and development their primary priority in life, and make all other priorities in their lives, including their own careers, pleasures, and goals, come second to the child’s needs.
7) The child has a right to have full and massive respect from all those who come into contact with him, starting with his parents. We live in a world where many people and situations beyond parents can traumatize the child, and it is the parents’ responsibility to buffer the child from any and all potentially traumatizing influences.
8) The child has the right to confront his parents as he sees fit, in order to grow, explore his world, and express himself. His parents are there for him, and he does not owe them anything – and this right continues throughout his life. Where his parents do their job well, however, he will be grateful to them and will have no desire to confront them.
9) The child has the right to parents who are incredibly self-reflective, flexible, and growth-oriented themselves. Through this they can relate optimally to him, which is their responsibility.
•••
•••
Children Own Their Parents
Unconsciously most parents believe they own their children. Parents believe that because they have created their child this child is parental property. In reality, however, parents have it backwards: It is children who own their parents.
To grow strong, healthy, and fully emotionally mature, a child needs parents who are completely devoted to him. This is a parent’s primary responsibility in life. A child needs parents who care for him to the radical degree that they become essentially selfless – and yet, at the same time, have such strong and unwavering senses of who they are as individual adults that their connection with their emotional center is unwavering.
This is an almost impossible task for a parent, which is why few have any rightful business having children. Most parents have so many unresolved issues from their own semi-neglect-ridden childhoods that they themselves have failed to become anywhere near emotional adults. Secretly they want their own children to parent them. This directly contradicts their child’s needs, and their child suffers as a result.
But for a child to become a healthy adult, he cannot accept ownership of his parents for his whole life. At some point, he must free them from their psychic bondage and walk off on his own. He has to accept – and then declare – his own autonomy, and through his own newfound consciousness embody the role of parent for himself. Until he does he will always remain an emotional child, and unconsciously seek parental substitutes in all who come his way, including those children he himself creates.
But if his parents do their proper job, this struggle for autonomy will not be difficult. It will be organic and natural. No child wants to stay a child forever – and all the more so if he is nurtured properly. Adult autonomy is the goal of every child, and if his parents meet their responsibilities he will achieve it.
•••
•••
Spoiling A Child Is Not Love
A spoiled child is an enraged child. Children become enraged when their deepest emotional needs get neglected. Most parent advocates argue that firm limit-setting – and even punishment – is the antidote to spoiling. This is untrue, and only ignores the depth of the problem. The real antidote to spoiling is that parents find ways to meet their children’s needs. Children who get their deepest needs met never become enraged – and would never put up with being spoiled. Such children have nothing to be enraged about. And yet, most parents lack the capacity to meet their children’s deepest needs. And figuring out how to gain this capacity is simply too hard for most parents.
Gaining this capacity requires that parents enter realms within themselves that are terribly painful: the realms of their own unresolved childhood needs which lie dormant and split-off in their own unconsciouses. This depth of the unconscious is so off-limits to most parents that it is even hard for them to conceive that it might exist. But it does exist, and their raging child is a externalized manifestation of it. Thus, the sooner the parents squelch their child’s rage the quicker they can return to their state of blissful denial of just how disturbed they themselves are beneath the surface.
Healthier parents try to appease their children’s rage through whatever compensatory means they have at their disposal – primarily through spoiling. Less healthy parents simply try to kill their child’s rage – by burying it.
If it were easier for parents to have accessed their own ancient, unresolved wounds they wouldn’t have had children in the first place. They would have instead gone within and reflected on their own painful truth, blamed and even confronted their own perpetrators, grieved, and ultimately healed through integration. But instead they had children to try to bypass these wounds and this healing process. They had children to rescue them from their history of pain.
This is a recipe for failure. And the souls of their children know this.
•••
•••
Is Adoption The Enlightened Way To Have Children?
People who are not fully enlightened have children to be rescued by them. This goes for parents who adopt as well as for those who procreate. Those who adopt at least are not responsible for the creation of a new perfect existence to be twisted, which is good, but this does not change the illness in the motive. And often it makes the illness more virulent, because many adoptive parents feel more justified acting out their unconscious needs in exchange for the service they’ve done.
An adopted child has suffered the primal loss. His biological parents failed him, and in his deepest soul he knows it. There may be a beauty in adoption, but underneath it there is a hell. People drawn to adopt have not dealt fully with the hell of their own abandonment, and think they can undo their own denied childhood truths by becoming saviors. They cannot. They may help the adopted child, and may enhance his chances in life, but they cannot inoculate him from receiving their own denied wounds.
Truth seekers must first take full responsibility for the inner child orphaned within their own breast. They must nurture him, guide him, and let him grieve the losses of his own tragedy. This is the only way to achieve enlightenment. Until then, whenever they are given full responsibility for a child’s life, be he their biological child or not, they will not be able to provide him with the full emotional nourishment he needs to become enlightened himself. Thus they will fail him at the parents’ greatest mission, and with full justification his soul will read this failure as yet another parental abandonment.
(If you want to read a critique on this adoption essay that I saved from the site's now-defunct bulletin board, try this: Adoption Essay Critique.)
•••
•••
The Gravity of the Family System
The family system has the intense gravitational pull of a planet. It sucks everything into its orbit and shears off all rough and radical edges. If it has its way it never spits anything back into the universe. All it does is take and remold in its own image.
Those who escape the family orbit begin to form a gravitational pull all their own. Their force of character increases and their convictions grow firm. They no longer have to view the universe through the refracted lens of family distortion – and unresolved childhood trauma.
But when they return to the family home for even the shortest visit they are surprised to find their self-determination replaced by the clouds of self-doubt and ancient behavior. Kudos to the anonymous genius who created the following line: “Of course your parents can press your buttons – they installed them.” Never underestimate the toxic power of the family system.
Breaking away from the family is a rough journey, and at times not unlike hurtling in dark isolation through outer space. Millions of false solar systems call you in with their flickering lights, but they are only cold and dead. The only true light lies in your heart, in your true self. You were taught that you had no light within. But you did. They buried it, because your genius and perfection frightened them – and reminded them of how much they were lying to themselves. Now you have your own gravity, and if it is allowed to manifest fully you will become more powerful than they. Healing is always more powerful than disease.
That is why our species, and deranged as it is, still has hope.
•••
•••
Father’s Day: Another Sick Holiday
Our culture celebrates fatherhood because our culture celebrates denial. Our culture does not celebrate the individual knowing himself, nor in any way knowing the truth of his father. Our culture celebrates honoring his false self. People who study their parents’ full selves are on shaky ground in this culture. If they step too far out of line the culture treats them as enemies. And with good reason: they are enemies.
People motivated to learn greater truths have given up on the culture. They have long since sought peace through its acceptable avenues and it has failed them. They have honored their fathers’ images and have learned the misery inherent in this process. Their pain has taught them that their only hope lies in separating their fathers’ fact and fiction and seeking the deepest why. They are the few who sense the true direction for healing, and as they grow stronger they sacrifice more to travel farther. The new way is dangerous, but they are willing, because there is no other way.
The true road to heaven leads straight through hell. Heaven is here on earth. Heaven is differentiating from one’s parents. Heaven is becoming an individual and honoring oneself. Heaven is knowing the truth about who we are and where we came from. The heaven after death is just a fantasy for people who have lost hope of ever becoming happy while alive, and thus live only to die.
This is what their fathers taught them. This is not to be celebrated.
•••
•••
Everyone is His Own Hated Minority
Everyone is a hated minority in his family of origin. Families that are not fully enlightened cannot tolerate a child being his own full, true self, which is how every child is born, and thus they must crush his most honest and radical parts. Parents were themselves crushed by their own parents, and in accordance with their own lack of healing must similarly crush each child they produce. For this reason each successive child rightly feels like a hated alien minority, despised by all until he gives up his truth and joins the ranks of the numb. Then he feels loved – though this is not a nurturing love at all.
Children go through hell to withstand the horror and tragedy of childhood. No one escapes this, though the majority are able to deny it. They blot out their pain of today and yesterday through the tools handed them. They create families which offer decades of diversion, build anti-spiritual careers which drain tens of thousands of their best hours, disappear into addictions which chill their souls on ice, nurture physical illnesses which sponge their repressed emotions, and take medication of unlimited variety to neutralize every erupting bottled message from the soul.
To become enlightened the child, now adult, must feel his pain. He must grieve his past horrors. He must side with his hated inner minority and battle the violence and cruelty in his now-internalized parents for his soul’s right to be. He must trust the justice in his inner voice and hold it close to his breast as he journeys forward. God lies in his breast, and always did. In the full light of truth, no child is a minority.
•••
•••
Jesus: A Man Who Rejected His Mother
Jesus was a warrior, and his prime enemy was the family. He advocates open rebellion of children against their parents. Take Matthew 10:34:
“Think not that I have come to bring peace to the earth; it is not peace I bring but a sword. I have come to set son against father, daughter against mother, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law; a person’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”
Jesus says reject your parents, reject the lies they raised you on, and find the honest truth within yourself. That’s why they killed him, Jews and Romans, and even one of his own disciples. Jesus threatened their way of life, and created a new mold.
Take his celibacy. This gave him the opportunity to avoid externalizing his internal conflicts. Few can handle the frustrations of conscious celibacy, and most who are celibate simply do so through unconscious defense, by splitting off and repressing their sex drive. This death-celibacy does not lead to enlightenment. It leads to disease.
And take his lack of having children. He never recreated the cycle of bringing others into the world to rescue him. It is difficult, if not impossible, to attain enlightenment when one becomes a parent. Projection, that most basic defense mechanism underlying acting out, becomes too easy and comfortable when one has offspring. They’re like magnets for parental projection of denied material, for one’s own unresolved childhood traumas, and are a time-tested vaccination against healing.
And take Jesus’s forty days and nights in the desert: his time of profound introspection – and temptation. Before Jesus could move forward cleanly he had to know who he truly was, where he was heading, and what was tempting him back. And his temptation was his family, their perks, and their ways. And once he’d figured this out he no longer had to mince his words.
Take his line to his own biological mother and brothers when addressing a crowd of his followers, from Matthew 12: 48-50:
“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
Or this, from Luke 14: 26-27:
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
Jesus hated his family because they betrayed his soul, and he made a new true family for himself – a family of true soulful companions, people open to his new, true, honest self. He had to reject his old self as well, the false self that he created to survive amidst them, and hate all that went with it, all the parts of himself that were just like them. However, as to his line about hating one’s own children (assuming he’s talking about young children), he’s totally off there. No child deserves the hate of his parents. After all, Jesus wasn’t perfect. He went far, but he still had his emotional work cut out for him – and he agrees!
Take John 14:12:
“He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do…” [italics mine]
Jesus realized that even he was an evolving person who had not reached the pinnacle of man’s consciousness. He was a person of his time, and one who died young, at a mere thirty-three. What might he have become had he kept on exploring, maturing, growing, developing his thoughts?
This he leaves to us to find out for ourselves…through our own lives, through our own healing processes.
•••