What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (38 page)

The Inner Child

The centerpiece of my discussion here is the philosophy of the “recovery movement,” the widely popular view that adult problems are caused by childhood mistreatment. I criticize this view on both factual and moral grounds, though I am addressing it in order to be constructive. I want to underscore the theme of this book: that you can make major changes all throughout adulthood if you know the ways of changing that actually work.

Many failings of adult life are currently blamed on the misfortunes of childhood. Depression in mid-life is blamed on the punishment meted out by parents decades before. In her 1991 best-seller, Patti Davis, Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s daughter, blames her current troubles on her parents. She highlights being slapped in the face by her mother when she was eight, and she blames both her mother and her father for not giving her enough love because they were too much in love with each other (this is the First Family, no less). In the larger society, inability to love is blamed on sexual abuse by an uncle, a father, or a brother. The talk shows buzz with tearful recountings of childhood incest and sexual molestation. Your beating up on your kids is blamed on your father beating up on you. Indeed, the basic premise of the recovery movement is that bad events in childhood cripple adult life. But, the movement promises us, this is curable. By coming to grips with those early traumas, we can restore our health and sanity.
¹

Farquhar is a troubled thirty-year-old; angry, depressed, and guilt-ridden. He remembers a time when he was three: He refused to go to bed and screamed “I hate you” to his mother. His father, enraged, grabbed him and shouted, “You have violated God’s Fifth Commandment: ‘Honor thy father and thy mother.’” Little Farquhar felt guilt and shame, and now grown-up Farquhar, wounded, still carries this “toxic guilt” around. By doing “inner child” exercises, Farquhar rids himself of this burden. He phones his father (now seventy-two) and discharges his anger. He relives all the pain and guilt, and in his mind he divorces his father and mother.
²

Here are the twin premises of the inner-child recovery movement:

• Bad events in childhood exert major influence on adulthood.
  

• Coming to grips with those events undoes their influence.
  

These premises are enshrined in film and theater. The biggest psychological hit of 1991 was the film version of Pat Conroy’s lyrical novel
The Prince of Tides
, in which Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte), an alcoholic football coach, has been fired from his job, and is cold to his wife and little girls. He and his sister were raped twenty-five years before as kids. He tearfully confesses this to Dr. Susan Lowenstein (Barbra Streisand), a New York psychoanalyst, and thereby recovers his ability to feel, to coach, and to control his drinking. His sister, presumably, would also recover from her suicidal schizophrenia if she could only relive the rape. The audience is in tears. The audience seems to have no doubt about the premises.

But I do.

The Power of Childhood

It is an easy matter to believe that childhood events hold sway over what kind of an adult you become. The evidence seems to be right before your eyes. The kids of smart parents turn out to be smart; it must be all those books and good conversations. Kids from broken homes often divorce; they must have lacked good “role models” for how to love enough. Kids who were sexually abused often become frightened pessimists; little wonder, they found the world a frightful place. Kids of alcoholics often turn out alcoholic; they learned uncontrolled drinking at their father’s knee. The kids of authoritarian parents turn out authoritarian. The kids of basketball players and musicians turn out to have these talents. Kids who were beaten by their parents beat up their own kids.

As persuasive as they seem, these observations are hopelessly confounded. Yes, these people did grow up in worlds in which they were nurtured in their parents’ image,
but they also have their parents’ genes
. Each of these observations supports a genetic interpretation as much as a childhood interpretation: smart genes, unloving genes, anxious genes, pessimistic genes, alcoholic genes, authoritarian genes, athletic and musical genes, violent genes. Why do the genetic interpretations sound so farfetched to the modern ear while the childhood interpretations sound so comfortably true?

The appeal of the child-rearing explanations has a theoretical dimension and a moral dimension. Freud assumed both that childhood events create adult personality and that their consequences can be undone by reliving—with great feeling—the original trauma. Sound familiar? It should, because the premises are just the same as those of the inner-child movement. Freud’s premises may have undergone a steady decline in currency within academia for many years, but Hollywood, the talk shows, many therapists, and the general public still love them. The recovery movement marries Freud’s basic premises to the confessional method of AA. The result is the most popular self-help movement of the 1990s.

Childhood trauma and catharsis do make good theater. But the appeal of the inner-child movement goes much deeper, for there is here a sympathetic moral and political message as well. Its appeal has its modern beginning with the defeat of the Nazis. The Nazis used the respectable science of genetics to bolster their theory of Aryan superiority. Genetically “inferior” people—Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, the retarded and deformed—were deemed subhuman and were sent to the death camps. In the wake of our victory over the Nazis, anything they used or misused was tainted. Nietzsche’s philosophy, Wagner’s operas, and authoritarianism all became suspect. American psychology, already environmental, now shunned genetics completely and became wedded to explanations of childhood personality and the dogma of human plasticity.

When stoked by this reaction to Nazism, the logic of the dogma of human plasticity is: Once we allow the explanation that Sam does better than Tom because Sam is genetically smarter, we start our slide down the slippery slope to genocide. After World War II, genetic explanations became explanations of last resort, for they had the fetid odor of fascism and racism about them. All this accorded well with our basic democratic ideal that all men are created equal.

The second aspect of the moral appeal of the inner-child movement is consolation. Life is full of setbacks. People we love reject us. We don’t get the jobs we want. We get bad grades. Our children don’t need us anymore. We drink too much. We have no money. We are mediocre. We lose. We get sick. When we fail, we look for consolation, one form of which is to see the setback as something other than failure—to interpret it in a way that does not hurt as much as failure hurts. Being a victim, blaming someone else, or even blaming the system is a powerful and increasingly widespread form of consolation. It softens many of life’s blows.

Such shifts of blame have a glorious past. Alcoholics Anonymous made the lives of millions of alcoholics more bearable by giving them the dignity of a “disease” to replace the ignominy of “failure,” “immorality,” or “evil.” Even more important was the civil rights movement. From the Civil War to the early 1950s, black people in America did badly—by every statistic. How did this get explained? “Stupid,” “lazy,” and “immoral” were the words shouted by demagogues or whispered by the white gentry. Nineteen fifty-four marks the year when these explanations began to lose their power. In
Brown
v.
Board of Education
, the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in schools was illegal. People began to explain black failure as “inadequate education,” “discrimination,” and “unequal opportunity.”

These new explanations are literally uplifting. In technical terms, the old explanations—stupidity and laziness—are personal, permanent, and pervasive. They lower self-esteem; they produce passivity, helplessness, and hopelessness. If you were black and you believed them, they were self-fulfilling. The new explanations—discrimination, bad schools, lean opportunities—are impersonal, changeable, and less pervasive. They don’t deflate self-esteem (in fact, they produce anger instead). They lead to action to change things. They give hope.

The recovery movement enlarges on these precedents. Recovery gives you a whole series of new and more consoling explanations for setbacks. Personal troubles, you’re told, do not result as feared from your own sloth, insensitivity, selfishness, dishonesty, self-indulgence, stupidity, or lust. No, they stem from the way you were mistreated as a child. You can blame your parents, your brother, your teachers, your minister, as well as your sex and race and age. These kinds of explanations make you feel better. They shift the blame to others, thereby raising self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. They lower guilt and shame. To experience this shift in perspective is like seeing shafts of sunlight slice through the clouds after endless cold, gray days.

We have become victims, “survivors” of abuse, rather than “failures” and “losers.” This helps us get along better with others. We are now underdogs, trying to fight our way back from misfortune. In our gentle society, everyone roots for the underdog. No one dares speak ill of victims anymore. The usual wages of failure—contempt and pity—are transmuted into support and compassion.

So the inner-child premises are deep in their appeal: They are democratic, they are consoling, they raise our self-esteem, and they gain us new friends. Small wonder so many people in pain espouse them.

Do Childhood Events Influence Adult Personality?

Flushed with enthusiasm for the belief that childhood had great impact on adult development, many researchers eagerly sought support. They expected to find massive evidence for the destructive effects of bad childhood events such as parental death, divorce, physical illness, beatings, neglect, and sexual abuse on the adulthood of the victims. Large-scale surveys of adult mental health and childhood loss were conducted. Prospective studies of childhood loss on later adult life were done (these take years and cost a fortune). Some evidence appeared—but not much. If your mother dies before you are eleven, you are somewhat more depressive in adulthood—but not a lot more depressive, and only if you are female, and only in about half the studies. A father’s dying had no measurable impact. If you are firstborn, your IQ is higher than your sibs—but by less than one point, on average. If your parents divorce (we must exclude the studies that don’t even bother with control groups of undivorced families), there is a slight disruptive effect on later childhood and adolescence. But the problems wane as children grow up, and they may not be detectable in adulthood.
³

The major traumas of childhood, it was shown, may have some influence on adult personality, but the influence is barely detectable. These reports threatened one of the bulwarks of environmentalism. Bad childhood events, contrary to the credo, do not mandate adult troubles—far from it. There is no justification, according to these studies, for blaming your adult depression, anxiety, bad marriage, drug use, sexual problems, unemployment, beating up your children, alcoholism, or anger on what happened to you as a child.
⁴

Most of these studies were methodologically inadequate anyway. They failed, in their enthusiasm for human plasticity, to control for genes. It simply did not occur to their devisers, blinded by ideology, that criminal parents might pass on criminal genes, and that both the felonies of criminals’ children and how badly criminals mistreat their children might stem from genes rather than mistreatment. There are now studies that do control for genes: One kind looks at the adult personalities of identical twins reared apart; another looks at the adult personalities of adopted children and compares their personalities with those of their biological parents and of their adoptive parents.

All of these studies find massive effects of genes on adult personality, and only negligible effects of any particular events. Identical twins reared apart are far more similar as adults than fraternal twins reared together for the qualities of authoritarianism, religiosity, job satisfaction, conservatism, anger, depression, intelligence, alcoholism, well-being, and neuroticism, to name only a few. In parallel, adopted children are much more similar as adults to their biological parents than to their adoptive parents.

These facts are the latest, if not the last, word in the renascent nature-nurture controversy. They come from a convergence of large-scale studies using up-to-date measures. These studies find ample room for non-genetic influences on adult personality because less than half the variance is accounted for by genes. But researchers have not found any specific nongenetic influences yet (nongenetic influences can include fetal events, child rearing, childhood trauma, schooling, adolescent and adult events, and measurement error, among others). Some of these specific factors may yet emerge as important to adult personality, but to date, none have.
⁵

If you want to blame your parents for your own adult problems, you are entitled to blame the genes they gave you, but you are not entitled—by any facts I know—to blame the way they treated you.

Childhood Sexual Trauma

There is one childhood trauma that is often singled out as a special destroyer of adult mental health: sexual abuse. What I am about to say on this subject can easily be misinterpreted, misquoted, and wrenched out of context. So this preface: I believe sexual abuse is evil. It should be condemned and punished. Abused children and adult survivors need help, but help that works—not “pop psychology” help.

Today I would be labeled a sexually abused child. Myron “molested” me every weekday for about a year when I was nine. I walked four blocks to School 16. On the corner, Myron sold the
Times Union
for a nickel. He dressed in dun-colored rags, was unshaven, and stammered badly. Today my colleagues would label him “a retarded adult with cerebral palsy.” In the early 1950s, people in Albany, New York, labeled him a “bum” and a “dummy.” But he and I had a special friendship. He kissed me and we hugged for a few minutes. He told me his troubles and I told him mine. Then I went off to fourth grade.