The Discomfortable Process of Growth

• Caroline: Introduction II by Vic Comello, 4/4/98
  • What keeps beliefs alive? by Jessica, 4/15/98
    
    

Thank you for going right to the heart of the matter. I would like to preface my answer to your question by expanding on some things I said in my last post.

We are the most adaptable of all animals. It’s a little off the mark, however, to say that means we can learn. More precisely, it means that we are impelled to learn, that our ability to satisfy our needs depends directly on the adaptations we acquire.

This learning process begins early in life, when, as Weiss says, a child knows nothing about the world and the intricacies of human behavior. It does receive guidance, though, from powerful developmental imperatives, which lead it to look to its parents for information about itself and to imitate them in an attempt to acquire the behaviors it needs to establish and maintain a close relationship with them.

Another developmental imperative is also at work during childhood, I believe. This was discovered by Freud but formulated by him in different terms. I am speaking of so called Oedipal strivings, of the child’s sexual awareness and its efforts to compete with the parent of the same sex for the other parent’s attention and love. Without this developmental imperative, the child could not fully appreciate the sexual component of its emerging identity.

CM takes the position, in effect, that during the early learning process a child may make mistakes that thwart its future development. These mistakes CM calls pathogenic beliefs. These mistakes are errors of judgement that any child would make under similar circumstances. CM assumes that these errors maintain a strong hold on a person’s behavior far into adulthood despite the passage of time.

How can this be, if the brain is made up of neural networks that continually adapt themselves to present reality? One part of the answer comes from Weiss, when he points out that a child endows its parents with "absolute authority." Here we hit upon the biggest mistake of all that a child makes, namely that what it is learning from two particular, and sometimes very peculiar, human beings is reality in the absolute, reality about itself and about the world in general. So one reason childhood learnings persist into adulthood is that they represent "givens" in a person’s life, the person’s unquestioned basic orientation.

At one point, Caroline’s therapist listed her main pathogenic beliefs. That is something Caroline before therapy lacked the perspective to do, because of course these beliefs did not operate in Caroline’s life then as mental precepts, but rather as mysterious feelings and emotional reactions that arose automatically and enigmatically in certain life situations, affects that Caroline could only think must represent her genetic makeup, the way she was born.

In a previous post I took the position that the unconscious testing CM talks about begins long before a patient’s first day in therapy. And I believe that is true, but what is also true is that the person’s pathogenic beliefs are all mixed together in the person’s life and mind. The testing that the person does, therefore, lacks the focus needed to disconfirm anything in a definitive way. This is another reason pathogenic beliefs persist.

Actually, the mix that operates in the person’s life is even more complicated than that, and here is where I depart from CM somewhat. A child learns more than beliefs in childhood; it learns behaviors, too, behaviors that are evoked automatically and that also participate in the person’s affective reactions.

What do I mean by behaviors? A belief is a type of behavior, so what kind of distinction am I trying to make? A belief shows evidence of the child having unconsciously tried to understand disparate experiences within some kind of general framework. For example, Caroline’s main pathogenic beliefs, according to her therapist, were: 1) her conviction that having a healthy life, free from addiction, compulsive sex and crippling anxiety, would damage and expose her parents, and 2) her feeling of responsibility for her parents' difficulties in parenting her, which led her to blame herself for having been a difficult child.

Caroline could not have had such beliefs had she not tried to conceptualize and unify the meanings contained in many different sorts of experiences. What I call behaviors show no evidence of generalization. A behavior could be learned simply through imitation. Another example would be a son learning to like liver, say, a food his father hated but his mother loved, a behavior acquired initially merely to achieve tactical advantage in the completion for the mother’s affection.

The problem with such behaviors is that they are evoked automatically. For example, it is a common experience for a new parent to initially find himself reacting to his child exactly as his parents did to him, even to the point of using the same hurtful phrases, despite the promise to himself that he will not repeat the mistakes his parents made. These behaviors were learned through imitation, and they were evoked when they were meant to be evoked--when the person became a parent himself. In fact many imitated parental behaviors are of help to a new parent, but the hurtful behaviors are imitated too, because, as Weiss says, a child lacks the perspective to judge whether a parent is right or wrong.

The point is that behaviors and beliefs participate in a person’s personality as underpinnings that must be integrated if the person is to have a well-defined sense of self. In achieving an integrated identity, therefore, the person so blurs the lines between the separate elements of his personality as to make a definitive challenge to his pathogenic beliefs almost impossible to achieve.

Let me give you a speculative example of a mixture of behaviors and beliefs acting together in a person’s personality. The person in question is Caroline’s father. Her father is a well-respected university president from a prominent New England family. A Blue Blood. And apparently he is temperamentally just like his father, which is to say that he imitated his father’s behavior and probably picked up some of his father’s pathogenic beliefs, too. Caroline’s mother is also "respectable," a professor of psychology, no less.

Despite this facade of respectability, both parents encouraged Caroline’s use of drugs and the father at least regularly took Valium. This respectable pair also paraded before Caroline and her two sisters an "intense and inappropriate interest in sexual matters," her therapist reports. "Both parents had taken the children to nudist camps each summer where they and others engaged in ‘free sex’ without protecting the children sufficiently from hearing and seeing it, and where men made inappropriate comments about her body. In addition, both parents engaged in sexual innuendo with each other in front of the children, using nicknames for each other’s genitals as well the girls' genitals, as well as regularly having sex in such a way that the children could not avoid hearing…Both parents seem to have had an intense need to prove themselves sexually, which, along with father's various affairs, explicates more fully Caroline's pathogenic belief that her parents needed her to act self-destructively, with sex as well as drugs, and alcohol." In all of this, the father took the lead.

Caroline’s father demanded that Caroline and her sisters be at the top of their respective classes in school, and it is clear that his motive was merely to ensure that they reflect well on him, that they promote his image of respectability to the world. The father also seems to have ridden Caroline particularly hard for her "artistic temperament" and "hysterical emotionality."

I speculate that Caroline’s father operates out of the pathogenic belief that he is innately strange and that to succeed, he must hide his true self from the world. He received this belief directly from his father, in all probability. His inappropriate interest in sex and drug use served as a continual reminder of this feared weirdness, a reminder that he needs to keep himself in check. Involving his wife and children in his inappropriate interests was a way, in part, of buying their silence. They could not tell on him without implicating themselves.

Why did he ride Caroline so hard? Probably because he saw a bit of himself in her behavior, a bit of that feared weird self showing through in her genes. So he would admonish Caroline to keep that self buried, just as his father had done when he recognized an outcropping of feared weirdness in himself. What we are talking about is a pattern of behavior that goes back generations and which is being perpetuated in Caroline. I believe that one of her pathogenic beliefs was that she too is innately weird and must strive to keep this fact from herself and the world. I see her year and a half of promiscuous sex and alcohol and cocaine use as a way of testing what would happen if she gave this hidden self full reign by dropping all pretenses of respectability. This test led her to realize that she was treading on very dangerous ground, a realization that led her to seek therapy.

I have gotten a bit off the track and haven’t yet addressed the central issue of safety. One more factor tending to keep Caroline clinging to her pathogenic beliefs before I do. I believe that Caroline’s pathogenic childhood was such as to deprive her of the experiences she needed to begin shedding her pathogenic beliefs on her own. Caroline’s parents were so relentlessly intrusive that they left her with virtually no experience in developing interests of her own. They also deprived her of the ability to value anything she did on her own. Caroline clung to the past because she had no clue about how to define a future and how to appreciate herself for whatever future she chose.

Now to the issue of safety. Let me quote from one of your posts concerning the Caroline case, since I think it probably relates to this issue. "I think it would be a much easier treatment if the patient felt comfortable pursuing his or her goals and could allow themselves to actively work toward their goals and inhibit the behaviors that got in their way. My experience and Control Mastery Theory teaches me that although patients want to get better and lead productive lives, they are often in conflict about pursuing these goals. The conflicts often come about from irrational beliefs about the consequences of these goals. They might act as though they really want to be in a relationship or get a great job but their actions indicate that they are in fact acting in a manner that is counter to their stated goals."

In a subsequent post, you were more specific about this lack of comfort. "In CM we…feel one of our patients’ biggest obstacles to change is how uncomfortable they feel feeling different from and better off than their parents. The experience of feeling shame unites one with his or her parents--you are the same as the person who in Caroline's case was so hurtful, thoughtless, and cruel. She couldn't bear to be like them or to be different from them. If you are like them then you are capable of or guilty of doing the same things to others that were so to you. If you allow yourself to differ from, and do better than your parents, you risk the danger of ‘shoving the truth’ into your parents face. This creates the possibility of making your parents see how bad they were and thus risk hurting them or damaging them simply by being a different, separate person."

I agree with everything that is said here as far as it goes, but I also believe that the discomfort you are talking about would exist to an extent even if a patient had no pathogenic beliefs. What I am talking about are the uncomfortable feelings that necessarily attend psychological growth. Pathogenic beliefs can act to magnify these feelings, but have nothing to do with their origin. We come now to my basic disagreement with CM and why I have said I feel CM dwells too much on guilt.

When a person pursues a growth path, he necessarily opens his life to new experiences and to potentials that may or may not be present. As Hemmingway once said, "No one knows what’s inside him until he tries to pull it out. If there is nothing or very little, the shock can kill a man." We do take subjectively put a lot at risk when we commit ourselves to the quest for a new life. It’s much safer and more pleasant to daydream about a talent or being loved than it is to go out and seek to develop that talent or pursue that love. If you try and fail, your hope will diminish. And if you fail again and again, what will happen to hope then? And without hope, would you be better or worse off for having tried? These are possibilities one faces when one pursues a growth path. It’s scary business, and pathogenic beliefs will magnify such fears, but the fears will be there even if these beliefs did not operate.

More about growth next time. Thank you for helping me to focus my thought.

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