Relating the Past to Present Day, part 1

Relating the Past to Present Day, Part 1

Notes on Birth to Seven

So far in my life I have been very loyal to both of my parents. I have recoiled from criticizing them too harshly. The reason has something to do with self-preservation. See, I had to put everything I had into supporting my mom's success. It's kind of like the immigrant family who toils so the next generation can have a better life. Only for me it was the reverse. Well, my mom is doing well. And my own life is stable. This stability, as well as using a pseudonym, give me the space to say things which matter to me and which are true. Even if they're not loyal.

My hope is that my words about my process will benefit not only me but others as well. I am not out for vendetta but simply to heal myself.

I basically like myself. I have a number of good qualities and I am basically a likable person. But I have some pretty big issues to deal with. On the "issues scale" they're probably somewhere in the middle, between minor and major. But they're keeping me from expressing who I am essentially and so I feel an existential need to tackle them. I need to focus on my problems and their sources because they're what's blocking me from achieving my human potential.

One observation I have is that my belief in my own basic competence is low. Why is that?

In looking at my developmental path from birth to seven, some themes have risen up to the surface. One of them involves this issue of competency.

I have clear gifts in a number of areas but I have learned about them as an adult from my friends and from my wife. I do remember my mom telling me I was good at certain things but that I didn't believe her or downplayed any of my competencies. Consequently, I have not developed my basic talents to anywhere near the degree I could have if I had been more aware of what they were or how to develop them.

When I do something well in a group I usually defer to others because I automatically assume I am not the most competent at any given activity. This lack of a sense of basic competency makes me very susceptible to the opinions of others. Self worth is not a basic psychological structure I can rely on and use to build other aspects of my life on.

My best guess as to what happened goes like this:

My parents both had a fair degree of narcissism from the time I was born on. They loved me but neither of them had a level of empathy for me that would force them to put their self-focus on the back burner, like parents need to do. I don't blame them. Neither of them had that from their parents. And they were dealing with issues (mental illness, alcoholism) beyond what I face in my adult life.

My mom did not choose to be narcissistic. I see it as more like a psychological fact than a character flaw. It is related to her brain disorder called bipolar. I can share an example of how this is expressed today.

When you're talking with her she frequently refers the subject back to her personal experience, something she did or saw. Sometimes her "related" experience has minimal connection to what you're talking about and it feels like she changing the subject. She almost never enters into what you are saying to see it from your point of view. She rarely asks questions to get a clearer picture of what you're talking about.

Today this is something one soon notices when talking with her but it's not that big of a deal. When I was a kid, however, it was more of a big deal because I really needed her to empathize with me.

So my base in early childhood had some strong points but it also had some real gaps. Then from the time I was four there were about three years of steady and increasingly damaging shocks to me which both parents seemed only dimly aware of. They were trying to keep their own heads above water.

Rather than have a stable household from which my sense of competency could emerge, the shocks between the ages of four and seven made me unsure, made me doubt the security of my basic environment.

The move to a different state when I was four probably qualifies as a minor shock. If things had been good in other places it would have been fine. The move happened to coincide with the end of my parents marriage, which in turn led to a chain of negative events for me.

The first was being separated from dad. I missed him terribly and was very angry with my mom for taking me away from him. I didn't understand. He drove out to see me only once during the year. I was in shock. My life was very very different from what it was and no one was making me feel any better.

I got a lot of earaches that year and mom took me crying to the emergency room in the middle of the night on a number of occasions so I could get a penicillin shot. She had her hands full. I think it was all she could to take care of my physical needs.

My understanding is that my dad never offered child support and my mom did not pursue the matter. There is more to say here but I'll save it for another post.

At age five my heart was very hurt. Mom was considerably more focussed on work than ever before in my short life. The fact that she was dealing with (undiagnosed) bipolar means she was "ramping up" into a low level manic state that helped her to move effectively in professional circles. She could project energy, confidence, optimism, loads of ideas and ability to work long hours.

From birth to age four my parents had enough space in the structure of their lives to be "good enough" parents. By the time I was five both mom and dad were highly focussed on themselves. I was emotionally dropped.

Here's my best guess of the connection between my developmental path and how I am today: Today I have a basic sense of the world being a good place and of myself being lovable. I like myself. I think I am a good person. This relates to my early childhood up to age 4 1/2 being "good enough".

Where I struggle is in feeling myself to be competent in what I am doing or to find purpose that matches my skills. People meet me and think, based on my intelligence and some other intangible aspect of me, that I must have skills and aptitudes beyond where they actually are.

But there was disruption in my life at the time when I was developing a sense of basic competence. And so there is a part of my psychological foundation which was damaged, which affected all of my development from that time on. I always thought of myself as average intelligence and a little slow, until feedback from a few teachers in high school and college suggested to me that I might have thoughts and ideas that could be considered "above-average".

My best guess is that this is related to what happened in my life between ages four and seven.

I present well and can seem more skilled than I actually am. I believe this comes partially from an echo of my mom. She can present very well to others and can come across as talented, charming, highly intelligent and fairly sophisticated. And she is all of those things in a certain very real way. But her illness means there are gaps in her ability to do a lot of different things. She is a wonderful person with many wonderful qualities but in the psychic structure that holds up her personality there are holes created by the disease that sends a certain flaw into those qualities.

Because my mom was my most formative model I have an echo of the same phenomena.

When mom and I moved back to the town where dad lived, my confidence had been hit. I needed life to even out and needed parents to treat me like I was very important. Spend time with me, give me their attention. Exactly the opposite happened. I did have weekend time with dad and I lived for that. But he was in bad shape and getting worse--clear signs of depression and alcoholism.

Then the sex abuse started. Mom was even busier. She was not tracking my emotional life because she was totally focussed on projecting herself into the professional world. Then dad left; that was a hit. Mom's job continued to be very demanding, and draw a great deal from her attention. Not just the hours but the demands of a professional job, being a single mom, no financial support from dad, and mental illness. In many ways it seems a wonder she did as well as she did. Nevertheless, my life was very difficult.

The babysitter who abused me gave me a parting salvo before we moved to a new home. I had colored in a coloring book page and done it very well. I could see that it represented a level of skill that was new to me. I wanted to show it to someone so I brought it outside and saw my (now ex) babysitter. I showed her the drawing. Her response was, "You didn't do that--you're not good enough to do that."

This is one of the few pieces of feedback of my artistic skill I can remember as a child. Other feedback did not take its place so this comment held a relatively large, albeit unconscious place in my self image about my ability to create. Her comment has tied into my self image in regards to my basic competence. Her words, naturally, had amplified force because of what she had done to me.

The sexual abuse was an attack on my personal boundaries. Someone used my body, against my will, for her pleasure. I have long had difficulty with boundaries on a number of fronts. One of them is, of course, sexual. If someone is attracted to me it is very difficult for me to not reciprocate their attention. I am getting much better at this but it takes real effort.

As I will speak to more in the next post, there were also serious boundary issues that came about in relation to my mom.

As an adult I have an inner response to people that has served to keep me on more of a loner's path. At a certain level my (unconscious) inner response to men is "don't abandon me". And the response to women is "Don't envelope me (swallow me up) and objectify me as only being worthy as a sex object"

Obviously these inner experiences are problematic in forming and maintaining healthy friendships. It would be inwardly easy for me to say I will more or less be a loner in my life. I also see that my dad made that decision and it didn't seem to help him much. We humans are social creatures.

No, it would be much better to continue to try and figure out where I was hurt so that I can heal and transform those parts of me which were damaged. That is the only path that has any real hope of giving me happiness and satisfaction. The other paths lead, from what I can see, to sadness and despair.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben