How parents shape us

[Droopy]

I got to thinking about this after I realized what a negative stamp my father had put on my mind by being mean when I was little. I got to thinking about it even more after mopinko and I had a discussion about the 11 year old boy who was suicidal. Some people in that thread expressed their problems with loved ones who had a mental illness and who were blaming those around them for their troubles, even though the problem may only have been in their own minds.

So this is kind of tricky. On one hand, yes, parents can and do shape our personalities and how we feel about ourselves. On the other hand, parents are not always the culprit when we discover that we have a mental illness. Both sides of the story pertain to me. Let me explain.

I have a mental illness called schizo-affective disorder. It's like bipolar disorder on steroids. :) My parents are not to blame for that. In fact, nobody is. It looks to be a genetic problem that runs on my father's side of the family. My great grandfather and a great uncle on my dad's side, and my dad have all appeared to have suffered from mental illness and the associated problem of self-medicating with alcohol and drug abuse. These men were ill before there was effective treatment for mental illness. My dad is now being treated for depression at 56 years of age.

My dad was also a bully when I was young. I asked my mom one time when he started to turn away from her. They got married when they were 18 and I was born when they were 20. She said my dad started to get mean right around the time I was born. Twenty years of age also happens to be prime time when it comes to people developing a mental illness. For the first 8 years of my life my father verbally and emotionally abused my mother. Then one day my mom and dad were having an argument. My mother had started to become defiant of my father and he wasn't having anything of it. The argument escalated and my dad hit my mother right in front of me. That was the end of that marriage.

Now, this part is very important. When I was a teenager I hated my father, but as I grew I began to forgive him for what he had done. I get along well with him now and since he has gotten the treatment that he needed and stopped drinking, he is like a totally different man. That is very, very, very important. I could not proceed with my therapy if I could not forgive my father.

Now I can get down to the business of unraveling the tangled mess of this learned behavior of being hard on myself. I am making progress. For a long time I thought that I would never be able to love anyone- that I was destined to be alone. But now, at 36, good things are starting to happen. There's a smart, pretty woman who likes to talk to me and we are going out this weekend. I think it's a sign of progress.

[mopinko]

1. children also shape their parents, as an old poet once said.

i tend to come down more and more on the the nature side of things. it is a complex situation. i can tell you for sure that what we think we are teaching our kids is rarely what they learn. for instance, many a successful person takes their drive from a need to prove an asshole father wrong. said asshole father is also likely to feel that it is his duty to make his son a tough man. and the result can be anything from a proud, strong man, a mean nasty jerk, a tender soul who refuses to repeat his father's mistakes, and everything in between.
although it gets knotty, i think that how that kid turns out is more a matter of how that kid meets that dad, which is only how he can meet that. i don't think we have an entire universe of possibilities. i think we have our genetic complement, which is a filter through which we react to life. some babies cry and cry, which makes most parents sad, mad, or feeling had. which feeds back on that baby. which feeds back on that parent. which, you get the idea. all the circumstances in a kids life have an impact on them. parent's personalities, as well as wealth, health, extended family, city, state, country, nutrition, schools, on and on.

obviously, we can find a correlation between really good parents, and kids who have the tools to deal with what nature throws at them. we can find one between horrible parents and damaged children. but all manner of possible combinations occur, giving all manner of outcome. i just see the whole old freudian idea that mom did x so kid ends up y, while a great start to understanding human nature, is so simple as to be useless more often than useful. and probably mostly useful for the age old pastime of assigning blame than solving problems.

i suppose that it is safe to say that cruelty usually begets cruelty. but perhaps even that is missing something. it has been shown that one of the functions of the fetus is to interrogate the environment, and adapt the brain structure based on the level of stress that the mother's adrenalin levels. the more stress, the more the brains is shaped for bare survival. the less stress, the more the brains is tilted toward higher brain function. now, you might look at this as- moms in bad situation beget violent children- all bad. but perhaps a better lens is- mom's in bad situations beget children ready for the world they inhabit. happy well fed moms beget children ready for a peaceful and plentiful world. both are fine tuned to success in their own realities.
maybe when we get over freud, we will see that we all have a hand in shaping the future if we all lend a hand in shaping each child.

ok, i don't think that went anywhere near where you were pointing, but, what the hell.

[Droopy]

3. Here's some B.F. Skinner for you

You might find him more agreeable. He is at least as popular and influential and maybe more-so than Freud in the field of psychology:

John B. Watson argued against the use of references to mental states and held that psychology should study behavior directly, holding private events as impossible to study scientifically. Skinner rejected this position conceding the importance of thinking, feelings and 'inner behavior' in his analysis. Skinner did not hold to truth by agreement, as Watson did, so he was not limited by observation.

In Watson's days (and in Skinner's early days), it was held that Psychology was at a disadvantage as a science because behavioral explanations should take physiology into account. Very little was known about physiology at the time. Skinner argued that behavioral explanations of psychological phenomena are just as true as physiological explanations. In arguing this, he took a non-reductionistic approach to psychology. Skinner, however, redefined behavior to include everything that an organism does, including thinking, feeling and speaking and argued that these phenomena were valid subject matters. (The challenge was that objective observation and measurement was often impossible.) The term Radical Behaviorism refers to just this: that everything an organism does is a behavior.

However, Skinner ruled out thinking and feeling as valid explanations of behavior. The reasoning is this:

Thinking and feeling are not epiphenomena nor have they any other special status, and are just more behavior to explain. Explaining behavior by referring to thought or feelings are pseudo-explanations because they merely point to more behavior to be explained. Skinner proposed environmental factors as proper causes of behavior because:

Environmental factors are at a different logical level than behavior
One can manipulate behavior by manipulating the environment
This holds only for explaining the class of behaviors known as operant behaviors. This class of behavior Skinner held as the most interesting study matter.

Many textbooks, in noting the emphasis Skinner places on the environment, argue that Skinner held that the organism is a blank slate or a tabula rasa. Skinner wrote extensively on the limits and possibilities nature places on conditioning. Conditioning is implemented in the body as a physiological process and is subject to the current state, learning history, and history of the species. Skinner does not consider people a blank slate, or tabula rasa<7>

Many textbooks seem to confuse Skinner's rejection of physiology with Watson's rejection of private events. It is true to some extent that Skinner's psychology considers humans a black box, since Skinner maintains that behavior can be explained without taking into account what goes on in the organism. However, the black box is not private events, but physiology. Skinner considers physiology as useful, interesting, valid, etc., but not necessary for operant behavioral theory and research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_behaviorism

[mopinko]

5. i think that skinner made a good start along the road away from freud.

but the people that i find really interesting are the evolutionary psychologists. i think one fine day when the human race can admit that they are naked apes, they will be able to figure out a lot of things about themselves.
a good book on the subject is 'the moral animal' by robert wright.

[nadine_mn]

2. My parents suck

lol... that sound so petulant and adolescent

My dad had a very abusive father and his mother had frequent nervous breakdowns (as they were called back then). My dad was physically and emotionally abusive to me. My grandmother (mom's mom) told me a lot about my childhood, apparently she threatened to take me away from my mom if my mom didn't leave my dad. The breaking point for my grandma was when I asked for a gun at the age of 3 for christmas.. so I could kill me dad. My family members joke about a time when I was 2 or 3 and at a family party started screaming at my mom about letting my dad hurt us, then sitting in the middle of the floor and cried. (The joke is that I have always been outspoken). I remember when my parents fought, I would bang my head against the wall until my nose bled to make them stop (no surprise I became a cutter 10 yrs later). Fortunately, my mom did divorce my dad when I was young. What followed has a childhood of being kidnapped by my dad (to piss my mom off), forced visitations (where he would lock me in a bathroom for the weekend), forced family therapy with me and dad until he finally was out of my life at the age of 8.
In the meantime, we also moved around the country, my mom remarried, divorced, and somewhere along the way I was sexually abused.

Being an only child with a single mother was hard because my mom was so extremely emotionally abusive (she would hit me and stuff but that was nothing compared to emotional and verbal abuse). Thankfully, after several moves we ended up back near my maternal grandparents, who essentially raised me from the age of 9 on.

When I was in college, I finally got in touch with my dad - my mental health was in crisis, I was cutting daily, binge drinking, and was having horrible flashbacks of terror from my childhood. I had court ordered therapy from age 5 until I was 18 then stuck with it when I was in college. Since I couldn't remember what was scaring me (I just have memories of sensations and emotions which are gut wrenchingly vivid but no details) I decided make seeing my dad would shock me. We kept in contact off and on through college and law school, but he would threaten to kill my mom, I would threaten to kill him... eventually he just disappeared. I realized that he only wanted to see me as a way to get to my mom (it was visitation all over again) and when I graduated from law school, he came out to see me graduate. My mom wanted me to go to law school the minute she found out she was pregnant, so my dad knew she would be there (my parents hadn't seen each other in over 15 yrs at the time). I told him not to come out, that he was not in my life to help me get to the point of graduating, so he shouldn't be there now. He refused to listen. I told him flat out - if he came out, I would not attend my own graduation. Because a parent who loves their child would back off... nope not my dad. My mom had been hospitalized, so she wasn't coming to my graduation. When my dad showed up, I told him I wasn't walking, he didn't care. When he saw the class picture, he saw that I had changed my last name from his to my mom's maiden name. He got pissed and walked out and I never saw him again. I missed my graduation and realized that my dad never loved me.

That sounds like self-pity, but its not. I forgive him, I know that he just does not have the capacity to love me. All the years my maternal grandma kept trying to tell me he loved me. Finally a few years ago I told her, no he didn't I was always a means to get to my mom. She just sighed and said she never wanted me to know that (which is why she would tell me nice things about my dad - she never wanted me to hate him or to think he didn't love me). When I told my mom that my dad never loved me, my mom said no - he didn't. Ha, no trying to ease my feelings there.

My mom, man she has hurt me in ways I can never explain. For years, I would cry to my grandma and I know it must have really pained her to hear how her daughter caused her granddaughter so much pain. Once, I said that my dad must have made my mom the way she is - my grandma (and my mom's brothers) all laughed and said, no my mom has always been that way. Last year, I had a long talk with my grandma, I told her a lot of what my mom had done (stuff I never told her before because I didn't want her to be mad at my mom or hurt) mainly because I was trying to figure out why my mom treated me like that. My mom used to tell me she wished I had never been born, that she hated me, that I was the reason for every failed relationship, on and on and on. My grandma said "what did we do wrong with her".... my grandma, blamed herself for my mom's failures. I said nooo, that my grandparents raised me and look at how I turned out.

Which is the long-winded point I am trying to make. You can have a shitty childhood, one where a parent beats you, throws you down a flight of stairs, and another parent spits out vile and hateful comments to you daily and it can fuck up how you see the world. But there is a point when you make a choice.... a choice to be like that or to be different. Its not easily done, but I have tried to not be my parents, but more like my grandparents. I know there is some mental illness I inherited and I have no choice with that, but I work on it a little bit everyday.

[EFerrari]

4. Families are like a group of rocks in a stream.

They shaped one another constantly.

I hope you guys have a nice time, Droopy. :hug:

[redqueen]

6. I hope therapy can progress without forgiveness.

I can't forgive him, and I doubt I will ever be able to.

I can look at the good things he did for me, and recognize that. But I can never forgive him for what he did.