The Good News Is That You Are Good Enough

We were all born innocent and beautiful. Then we had a childhood, in which the people who raised us gave us some combination of three things: love (getting the good stuff), neglect (not getting the good stuff), and abuse (getting the bad stuff). When a kid gets neglect and/or abuse from a parent, the psychological process involved is something like this. The person who is supposed to take care of him with nurturance and protection is giving him pain instead. Why? Because the parent is a bad parent. He or she may be a good person, but too damaged by their own untreated trauma to provide good parenting.  If the child realizes this, he will be forced to see that his parent will never meet his needs for consistent nurturance and protection, since they aren’t capable of it. That’s despair, and no kid can tolerate that, because the younger you are, the more your very survival is at risk if your parent is bad. Babies can actually die from lack of love, even if they get all their physical needs met (food, cleanliness, protection from heat and cold, etc.). The name for that is marasmus, or “failure to thrive.” To avoid such life-threatening despair, the child uses the only available defense, despite the terrible price it will cost him. He keeps the parent good, by taking their badness into himself: he must be the bad one, so that the parent can still—in his mind—remain good.

This defense solves the terrifying problem of being stuck with a bad parent. But it does so at the expense of the child’s self-respect, and he grows up believing that he is bad to the core. After all, only a bad child would get bad treatment from a parent who was fair and just. If the parent is good, and yet she treats him badly, it must be because he himself is bad: he must deserve the bad treatment. Believing this, he grows up with a heart full of toxic shame. Guilt is pain about something you have done, but shame is pain about what you are. Some kids misbehave—lying, stealing, hurting themselves or others, abusing drugs, failing at school, having sex too early and unsafely—in order to verify that they are indeed the bad one. If they are going to get neglect and/or abuse no matter what they do, then doing bad things will at least mean that they really do deserve the pain they get, and that feels less unjust. This story accounts for the fact that, when troubled adolescents do get asked why they behave so badly, they often have no idea.

Such a kid typically hates her parents and appears to be in a battle with them. Her destructive behavior is seen as a means of revenge against the parents, and in a way, that’s just what it is. It can also be a protest against a deeply felt though poorly understood sense of having been wronged. It can also be an effort to attract the parent’s attention so that neglect will be replaced by punishment (since, unlike neglect, punishment at least requires the parent to acknowledge the kid’s existence). And in an environment of authoritarian bullying, parental commands backed by force, and unexplained rules, a kid may become destructive in order to preserve her integrity. I may be a bad person, he thinks, but at least I’m my own person.

Now that you’re an adult, the old defense has worn out its usefulness. It costs far more than it’s worth. When you hear the question—what’s wrong with me?—the answer is nothing, because it’s the wrong question. The right question is, What happened to me?

There are several reasons why being kind to yourself might feel terrifying (at first). It requires admitting that the good parents you yearned for are never coming, because here you are, doing for yourself what they should have done. It reminds you of what you should’ve gotten from the people who were supposed to nurture and protect you. The better you treat yourself, the greater the contrast between what you got and what you now realize you deserved. And if you grew up believing that kindness was weakness, that kind men were feminine, that kind people were naïve and lucky and full of shit, then you have to admit you were wrong.

Feelings of worthlessness/self-hate are messages from a wounded child part of you. Don’t buy into what he says. You know things he does not know. Turn toward him, and in your mind’s eye (your imagination), pick him up and dry those tears and speak to that kid with soothing words of love. Tell your inner lonely little child: I love you… I got you… we’re ok… come with me. Talking to parts of yourself that way is not crazy, it is a survival skill.

When you hear intrusive negative thoughts, use your mind/your intellect/your inner observer. Say, oh, look, part of my mind is attacking me right now… isn’t that interesting. Say to that inner attacker: Oh, you again. Yes, I know what you think. But I know something you don’t know. Say to that inner attacker, Yes, I know you think you’re making some kind of contribution, but aggression is not the kind of help I need right now. When you hear intrusive negative thoughts, connect them with what you know about your history. Oh! This is an echo of other people’s shit that got thrown at me in the past. I do not have to hang onto it.

Your inner attacker is an internalized parent, a copy of the one(s) who gave you some amount of neglect and/or abuse. Your parent(s) may have grown old and harmless by now, but those aged parents aren’t inside you. What is inside you is a figure made of the young, strong, crazy people they were when you were a kid. You can’t get rid of that inner bully or kill him/her off. S/he has a place at the table. But not the head of the table. The inner bully needs a seat in the car, but not the driver’s seat. Get that person into a passenger seat so you can steer your life.

When you start to love yourself, it will soon become clear that the love that you have inside—which is yours to give, when and where you want to—is very high-quality, and it’s going to get even more valuable as you grow. It’s the good stuff. It is worth a lot. You can be a source of the good stuff, giving as well as receiving. When you’re accustomed to feeling like a vacant cave of darkness, a black hole from which not even light can escape, it’s strange to think you might turn into a star that radiates light instead. But it happens.

For Further Reading:

The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller

The Forgiving Self, Robert Karen

Healing the Shame That Binds You, John Bradshaw

Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach

Slings and Arrows: Narcissistic Injury and Its Treatment, Jerome David Levin