Hate the Parents

Posted on December 9, 2003 in Childhood Crosstalk PTSD Social Justice

The other day, I began to write an article about the effects of the “adult survivors of abuse” movement and recovered memories on our attitudes towards our parents. I killed the article after several paragraphs because it wasn’t taking me anywhere. The theory I proposed was that two types of individuals came forward because of the publicity: those who actually suffered abuse and those who wanted the cachet of being a survivor.

Jeremy uncovered an article about the work of UCI psychologist Elizabeth Loftus who came under heavy attack during the 1990s because of her opposition to the idea of “recovered memory” syndrome. I must admit that I was suckered in by early reports, the tale of a San Mateo County fireman who was accused by his own daughter of killing a friend of hers being the most emotional for me. The adult woman claimed that he’d taken her along for a ride and made her watch the murder. The story went that it was so horrific that she shut it all out of her mind until her therapist unlocked the door many years later. In court, she described all the details as if she were a camera photographing the scene for a snuff film maker.

This is where I stopped believing her. You don’t forget that shit. Not the scary stuff. What make look on the outside like repressed memories is simply the mind reacting to the rest of society. They don’t want to hear about your pain. You go to the therapist for a kind ear, lessons to undo the very conscious lessons you learned from your family about how to deal with others, and, most importantly, to forget.

The details about the beatings and other abuse that I suffered are scanty. I can, from other memories, tell you the color of the walls, the type of carpet, the bedspread, etc. because these events happened in my room, a place where I spent much of my childhood. But when I summon up the details of what happened, I do not remember these things. I do not remember the color of the clothes my parents wore (though I could create such a picture from my knowledge of their habits) or what music was playing on the stereo or even the nature of the arguments that led to the abuse much of the time! What I remember is being whirled around, catching glimpses that are blurred and don’t make a lot of sense, hitting the floor, covering my head with my hands, maybe hearing my parents say “you little shit” or some similar endearment.

This fits with recent studies:

Bryan Strange of the Wellcome department of imaging neuroscience at University College London and colleagues showed that people were more likely to remember a word if it was emotionally arousing – “murder” or “scream”, say – than if it was neutral. And the words most likely to be forgotten were neutral ones presented just before emotionally arousing ones.

You don’t forget the shit, but the way in which you remember it depends on other factors. For many of us who remember the past, our descriptions of events come out as a gargle, a scream, a series of disjointed words mixed with anguished cries and snatches of a howl. English professor Elaine Scarry compared the words used by various institutions to describe pain — literature, the law, philosophy, medicinel, religion, human rights advocates — with the actual experience as reported by the sufferer. Her classic work The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World concludes that what makes it hard to deal with pain is that one of the effects is to break down language so that we can’t describe what we’re dealing with. To evoke pain, we are best served by showing the effects or tools of violence — the mangled bodies, the bruises on the face, the truncheon used by a torturer, etc.

People find reports of mental pain the hardest to accept without some external acting out such as suicide. Many depressives have reported to me, for example, that friends have expressed surprise when they have attempted suicide or told them that they are seeing a therapist. “But, but, you looked fine and happy the other night!” Indeed. Part of this is due to the fact that all pain is ultimately invisible. You can never see the intensity of another person’s suffering, only guess at it by the external clues. Part of it is due to the training of many to “look at the bright side of things”. Part of it is due to their lack of training in seeing the cues that a competent psychotherapist would pick up in minutes of interviewing. Part of it is trained denial and hostility towards “shirkers” based on the American work ethic. There’s no pointing to a single factor for explaining why we don’t pick up on suffering in others.

Pain is a moment that denies intimacy. You don’t notice much except for the mechanisms that cause it and the confused turns of the world. It can be confounded by the practices of truly devious types who take advantage of the Stockholm Syndrome, that weird affection that arises between victim and torturer that Isabelle Allende describes with subtle brilliance in her novel The House of Spirits. It can be invented outright, it appears, by therapists too eager to find a historical explanation for the depression their patients suffer. Elizabeth Loftus catalogued this phenomenon before the recovered memories fad caught on in psychotherapy. Her work continues to raise serious questions about those who have experienced real as well as fabricated emotional trauma:

In a study soon to be published, she and colleagues describe how a little misinformation led witnesses of a terrorist attack in Moscow in 1999 to recall seeing wounded animals nearby. Later, they were informed that there had been no animals. But before the debriefing, they even embellished the false memory with make-believe details, in one case testifying to seeing a bleeding cat lying in the dust.

“We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience,” says Loftus. “And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories – we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big.”

The implications that we should draw from Loftus and Scarry are twofold: we should realize our susceptibility to embellishment and our inability to describe our pain to others. The demand of courts and the reading public for details may prevent us from seeing the truth as it occured. We’re better off, I think relying primarily on forensic evidence and using the eyewitness as a secondary source. Still, we must be careful because many sadists are clever.

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I’ve strayed from my main concern yet again. I shall put it briefly like this. The “fad of repressed memories” that has been building momentum since the early 1980s may have served the interests of those who engineered the recent Republican/DLC Medicare fiasco. By (perhaps accidentally) promoting the idea of “hating the parents”, the psychotherapy profession may have created a voting base seeking revenge against the elderly as a class. These are the mothers and fathers of my generation who are being robbed of health benefits that they provided via their taxes for their parents and grandparents. They gave, why should they be short-shrifted now?

Our parents have become scapegoats for the American oligarchy’s heartless dismantling of our social-democratic protections. The finger points at the wrong tyrants.

Look to and blame those who have arrogated — outright stolen — power for themselves: a president, a Congress, and perhaps a Supreme Court who having lost their credibility after the 2000 election now clutch desparately for a cause that they can get people to follow. “Hate the parents” is one that many yuppies and Generation Xers, conditioned by the pop psychology of the 1980s and 1990s, are all too ready to adopt. Frail old men and old ladies will not beat them now. The phonies, I dare say, have been conditioned by the new politics of hate to become abusers without blood, using the ballot and the donation instead of the bludgeon to exact cruel revenge against what the Greatest Generation built for their good.

Ultimately, we will payfor demanding that rifts that occurred between individuals be addressed by oppressing a class that consists of the withered and life-wearied. Remember this: We will become them.