Step Out from under the Parental Shade
Our first models of the “other” derive from our immediate caregivers. What we know now, we could not know then. Parents are not giants, though their bodies appear huge. Parents are not gods, though they seem authoritative enough. Parents are not all knowing, though we suspect they read our minds rather easily. Only later do we begin to realize they were just people like us, often with histories that we little know, with scant access to the literature, the information, and the media we take for granted. What they learned about life, the instructions they got, usually came from their models, the exigencies of their time, minus the range of permission most of us have today to examine, compare notes, and critique everything with the latest information. Most of them walked in ignorance and fear and with inordinate pressures — all without the opportunity to express themselves that we take for granted. Their lives were often furtive, secretive, guilt ridden, and silent, for to speak of these matters was to risk large consequences. Those of other religions or races were suspect. Though they professed goodwill toward all, they were also afraid of otherness and clung to stereotypes and traditional lines of constricted exposure and communication. It was not a world for which nostalgia is appropriate. There are no “good old days.” Memory is deceptive, and what is longed for is that unconsciousness, that “certainty” that comforted the ignorant and kept them safe within their fixed categories of belief and behavior. It was a constrictive world, an ignorant, fear-bound, prejudicial, and bigoted world, and I am grateful so much of it is gone.
In the face of such large examples, such overt and covert instructions, we have three choices: repeat what we saw, serve the messages; run from them into overcompensation; or try to “fix the problem,” heal the split within in any way, little knowing what gave rise to and sustains that split within us.
Most commonly we serve the model, the instructions, the stuck places we experienced in our families of origin, churches, synagogues, mosques, and neighborhoods. All children desperately need some security, some reassurance, and what is more secure than common values, common practices, common prohibitions, common marching orders, and common expectations to meet? Only if we make the mistake of travel and find that there is another world, another set of choices over that hill, do we tumble into a larger world of possibilities. And so the stifling patterns roll over into the next generation until, as in the ancient Greek tragic trilogies, some person suffers enough, comes to consciousness enough, and breaks the skein of cause and effect. Only when the incestuous values of tribalism — the most emotionally seductive but psychologically primitive, culturally impoverished, and dangerous idea of all — are transcended does renewal ever come to the person or the group.
Second, something in us sounds an alarm, announcing: “Something is wrong here; this is not right for you. You must find a better way.” Most children try at least once, and most get slapped down or find the isolation or punishment too much to bear. Most children go underground. Some act out in ways inexplicable to themselves or others, while a few have the courage to break forth and declare their independence, no matter what the cost.
Such persons, sensing the difficulty of replicating someone else’s life, even that of a beloved parent, understand that “I cannot live my mother’s life,” or “I won’t repeat my father’s life.” And, with the best of intentions, they choose a partner to replace the parent or one whose values repudiate the parent’s, and so on. Overcompensation is still being governed by the “not that,” rather than from some guiding energy within.
Or third, the person lives an ongoing “treatment plan,” a life constructed on blotting out, fixing, avoiding, and resolving those primal models and instructions. We have a popular culture, after all, whose chief purpose is distraction. But distraction from what? The existential yawn of the abyss? The progressive unfolding of aging, debilitation, and death? The deep anguish of the soul that has lost its way? Yes, all of these, and more. Distraction means we can stay wired to the Internet, entertainment, conversation, controversy, and seductive images and ideologies, and therefore no longer dwell in the house of remembrance. Or we can live a life of numbing — excessive work, drugs and alcohol, directive ideologies, compelling causes — allowing us to override the still voice of the soul within.
I do not mean to suggest that all parenting is pathogenic. Quite the contrary, most parents mean well and do their best, as characterized by even the generation of parents with whom I grew up. I never faulted their good intentions or love for me, and to this day I grieve how much it cost them and what deformations of their own souls they suffered, about which they seldom complained. After all, they grew up not expecting much more than struggle, hardship, and, at best, to be thought well of by their peers. There are bad people and really bad parents, but these were not bad people or bad parents. Jung’s comment that the largest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent is a stunning reminder of the silent cost these generations bore. Jung’s own father was chronically depressed and unable to question the premises of his belief, his conditioning, or his tribe; his mother was chronically unstable. And so, Jung confessed, when he thought of father, the word “powerless” came to mind, and when he thought of mother, the word “unreliable” came to his mind. So, set forth into the world with the dynamos of powerlessness and unreliability in your engine room, either you repeat it, overcompensate for it, or try to fix it.
The first half of life is characterized by the role these influences play in our lives. We leave home believing we have left our parents behind and step into large roles, large decisions, and most of all, large accountabilities as we become parents ourselves. We are struggling to find our own ways, thinking we have left that family of origin, that tribalism, behind. But given the power of such idealized images, we serve them, try to make up for them, or seek unconsciously to fix them. And therein the next generation receives the imprint not only of us but also of the often-invisible generations that preceded it. Only through suffering, coming to consciousness, and being humbled, can one start anew.
When we violate our psyches, our souls, the moment does not go unrecognized by something within. So often the task of the therapist is to receive these reports, dilemmas, and recast them into another perspective. Then one learns that the psychic protests, the relational discords, and the generalized dis-ease have meaning after all. The forty-year-old woman who is gifted with a dream that she is in the hospital, visited by her favorite relative, and told she is going to die, is not afflicted with a terminal illness. Rather, she is being told by a helpful agency within her that the premises, scripts, and roles of the first half of her life have been served, and something else is about to begin. In the reframing of that dream, and so many other symptomatic portraits, one can move from the psychopathology of the hour toward meaning. So rather than repress the symptom, anesthetize the discord it causes, we might rather ask: Why has it come? What is it asking of me? And in light of this portrait from the interior, how might I re-vision my life? Only in these moments do we begin to move out from under the influence, however well intended, of the parental conceptions, paradigms, limitations, and models.
Through the years, so many conscientious parents have asked me, “How can I spare my children this discord through which I have had to pass?” My answer has always been something of a disappointment to them. The one thing parents can do for their children is live their lives as fully as they can, for this will open the children’s imagination, grant permission to them to have their own journey, and open the doors of possibility for them. Wherever we are stuck, they will have a tendency to be stuck also or will spend their life trying to overcompensate. Living our own journey as fully as possible is not only a gift to our soul, it also frees up the generation behind us to live theirs as well. The very freedom to live our lives that we wished from our parents, we thereby grant to our children to live theirs.