Parenting and its Distortions
Michael Lerner
...Most parents are refugees from the pain of their work experiences and the pain of their childhoods. They enter each encounter with their own children in a state of inner pain and frustration. Their attention is scattered and their perceptions blunted by dramas that have been going on in their lives long before their children entered the scene.
The psychic costs of the world of work, I hope you remember, are not only impacting on the people in the most conventionally stressful jobs. While there are many people who have succeeded in repressing the awareness of the psychic costs of their jobs, the constant frustration of their needs to be creative and to use their intelligence at work still has an important impact. Similarly, the people who have spent their days molding themselves to be the "right kind of personalities" to win advancement in their corporations or more clients or customers for their ventures may see themselves as having an advantage over the clerical or assembly-line workers, and may even have time to read the latest best seller on how to be a good parent. But the embedded falseness in one's personality necessitated by competition in the economic marketplace inevitably carries over into the relationships at home. For most people in society, the dynamics of self-blame and repressed anger are the legacy of the world of work -- and we have seen how these emotions then play a role in generating a need for compensation that is sought first in one's spouse, and then in one's children. Many women bring with them the additional pains and frustrations generated by sexist institutions and sexist expectations in their relationships. Both parents bring with them the legacies of their own childhoods, and the pain that they still cause in adult life. All these interact as deflecting conditions, making it extremely difficult for most parents to see their own children's beauty and strength, pain and need. Too often parents respond to their children more as symbols of their own internal dramas, objects who will potentially shore up their failing senses of self or prove something to their own parents or bosses or friends, than as new human beings who offer new possibilities of relationship.
"Wait a second," you may want to object here. "I'm sure that there are some parents like this -- perhaps the kind that need to come to therapy or the kind who come from very poor or very oppressed families. But this can't have much relevance to the kind of people I know, people who make a whole big thing of their kids, gave their kids lots of attention, and even took courses on child development or went to support groups for parents or read all the latest books on children. The truth is that in some parts of our culture parents are overly child-centred and yet you seem to be talking as though they were living in the Middle Ages."
My answer is that I am not denying how very much energy many parents put into their children, how much time they give them, or how hard they try to do what is psychologically best for them. All of this is completely consistent with parents being emotionally blocked in a wide variety of ways that prevent them from being emotionally real and honest with their children. All of this is consistent with the parent seeing the child through the frame of pain, self-blaming and anger that they have repressed within themselves. All of this is consistent with the child appearing through a symbolic frame as an "accomplishment" who will be used as part of the parents' own ongoing dialogue with their own parents about their own worth ("Now look at my wonderful child - so now, Mother, Father, will you love me and accept me, now that I've been able to produce this terrific child?"). In short, the distortions in our ability to be fully available and to authentically recognize our children for who they really are, are very subtle and completely consistent with the parent appearing to be "the perfect parent" from the standpoint of external appearances. You have to be there to know - and usually it's only the child who is fully there, knows, but misunderstands and blames him or herself for what is not happening...
Reprinted with permission from the book Surplus Powerlessness, published by The Institute for Labor and Mental Health, 5100 Leona, Oakland, CA 94619.