Not the price of admission: Healthy relationships after childhood trauma by Brown Laura S

Author:Brown, Laura S. [Brown, Laura S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Alone Again, Naturally

Human beings truly exist only in relationship to one another. One of the founders of attachment theory, the psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, famously said that caregiver and infant invent one another. Mothers and fathers only become parents when there is an infant. Our development as individuals occurs in the context of attachment. Despite having the presence of another person with us from the moment of conception, one of the common emotional experiences for survivors is of being alone in the world, deeply lonely, unable to call upon others for support. Often this belief is accompanied by a complementary one saying that the survivor’s job in the world is to be of use to others. The price of relationship, connection, and love: Be of use and support to others, and know that you won’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, get support when you need it. You accompany others. They don’t accompany you.

This imbalanced view of relationships derives from particular kinds of experiences that you’ve had with your caregivers. Some of these experiences were not intended to affect you in this way, but they did. Your caregiver may have been depleted in some way—emotionally or materially—not only during your infancy but also throughout other times in your childhood. Depleted adults are not intentionally withholding care from children. They’re usually barely keeping themselves afloat. A profoundly depressed caregiver or one who is working too many minimum wage hours to make sure that there is food on the table and a dry place to sleep, is living in the lower reaches of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. It’s taking every ounce of this person’s energy to ensure that you have the basics of survival available.

If you were an eldest or close to eldest child in that family, you likely began very early to pitch in and take over whatever components of caring for younger siblings that you could. Otherwise good-enough parents who are struggling with poverty, low-wage and long-hour jobs, and effects of systemic discrimination are often among these depleted caregivers. These adults deserve compassion and social policies that support their capacity to parent.

Although outside of the U.S. almost all countries in the industrialized world have excellent social safety net systems that support parents with low-cost, high-quality childcare, lengthy paid parental leave, and subsidies for all families with young children, these systemic supports for parents are absent in the U.S. You can get these things if you have enough money, but many people I know pour almost all of the second parent’s income into the cost of childcare. As a result, depleted parents in America frequently have nowhere to turn for support that would allow them to be emotionally good-enough for their children.

Children in depleted families learn early that expressing needs for emotional care and support from parents usually ends in disappointment. If you’re sick and someone has to stay home with you, it costs your parents money if they’re working one those low-paying jobs that have no sick leave.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.