Kathy's Development II

Incapable and unworthy of interest. Children internalize parental actions in a quite literal manner. Kathy's mother's lack of interest in her would normally plant in Kathy the seeds of the belief that she is not worthy of interest. Her mother's indifference would also rob her of a sense of confidence in her abilities. After every little accomplishment, she would tend to look to her mother for confirmation that it was something in which she should take pride. Finding only indifference or impatience or outright animosity in her mother's eyes, time after time, would leave her doubting her abilities. All of these negative mothering reactions would be prompted by jealousy, but being a child, Kathy could not imagine anything except the most direct interpretation: that she is incapable, unworthy of attention, and bad. Another natural reaction would be anger. Children do get angry when they are denied the experiences they need.

Kathy's father did show her interest, and this did counteract Kathy's sense of unworthiness and inability to an extent. However, over the years, Kathy gradually came to recognize that her father was interested in her merely as someone to satisfy his own needs. To remain in his good graces, she had to do what he wanted and become interested in whatever interested him. Interests and accomplishments she developed independently that didn't fall within the narrow boundaries of his interests were not appreciated or encouraged. Kathy, therefore, had received evidence from both parents that she wasn't especially capable or worthy of attracting interest, despite the contrary evidence she received early in life.

Dan's death. So Kathy's journey of self-discovery started from a hole. Unfortunately for Kathy, the hole that she would be challenged to climb out of was to be even deeper. When Kathy was six years old, the family was forced to move again, because of father's employment needs. As a result, something changed for the worse within the family. Her father became even more critical of his wife and her son and began being critical of Kathy too. He would get upset when she beat him in a game. When she brought home a grade, he would make a point of telling her he did better in school when he was her age. As tension increased, father competed with Dan and humiliated him in front of his teenage friends. Dan retaliated by teasing and taunting his little sister. Kathy felt betrayed and hurt. And perhaps out of the perception that Dan's taunting was turning father against her, she sometimes wished that Dan would disappear. The situation came to a head when Dan (who was nine years older than Kathy, not seven) announced that he wanted to move in with his maternal grandmother's family in Texas. After much bitter argument between Kathy's father and mother, he was allowed to go.

Early one morning as she slept, Dan came to say goodbye to her. Kathy thought to herself: "Good, leave me alone. Maybe I can get some attention here soon." That was the last time Kathy ever saw Dan. Five months later, Dan, while swimming, dove off some rocks and broke his neck, dying in a hospital a few days later.

If the accident occurred partly because of a lack of supervision, fault must lie at the feet of Kathy's grandmother or one or more members of her family. Grandmother's family recognized this at least unconsciously, because the entire family became hysterical and viciously attacked each other at Dan's funeral. They came to agree on only one thing consciously, and that was that Kathy's father was to blame for Dan's death, apparently on the theory that he drove Dan from his home, thereby throwing responsibility for Dan's care into their incompetent laps.

Kathy, as usual, was ignored. She was almost excluded from the funeral, but, after begging, was finally allowed to attend. No one ever talked to Kathy, who was now 7 years old, about any of this trauma. She was left completely alone to make sense of all that had happened.

The night after the funeral, Kathy recalled the last time she had seen her brother and how she had wished he would disappear so she could finally get some attention.

Kathy began to think about death a lot. One day, 2 months after the funeral, Kathy became "fascinated" at hearing about a little girl who died falling off a cliff. A few days later, as she swam in a swimming pool, she suddenly found herself drowning. After someone pulled her out, she felt humiliated, ran off, and never spoke about the incident to her mother. She said later she was not sure what she feared most: that mother would be upset about the incident or about Kathy’s "survival."

Although she had never been close to Kathy, after Dan’s death, mother became totally unavailable, and never fully recovered. In fact, the entire family never recovered. Afterward there were no more family celebrations of any kind.

The next six years were some of the worst of Kathy’s life. She became "invisible." No one was available to her. Even father disappeared. He started drinking heavily and dove into work, rarely spending any time at all with Kathy. Kathy could get no attention at all, no matter how hard she tried.

Desperately, Kathy tried to rejuvenate mother and get her to mother her, but she got no response. Kathy felt grimly alone and learned to be self-sufficient.

Kathy's guilt. What was going on inside Kathy during this period? Did she suffer from a crippling guilt because she saw herself as an evil person who was somehow responsible for Dan's death? I think she suffered from a crippling guilt, but not for that reason.

If Kathy had wished Dan dead and if he had died soon afterward, then Kathy would almost certainly come to feel responsible. But she only wished that he disappear, and he did that by going to Texas. Then he died, not days but months later. The circumstances are too tenuous, in my judgement, for a crippling guilt to result. Did Kathy regret her statement? Sure. Did she at times get spooked into fearing that she was somehow involved? Yes, but even at those times she defended herself by saying, "Things don’t happen that way."

But what of her attempted suicide? It is difficult to know what was going through her mind at that time, but a recent study by George E. Murphy published in Comprehensive Psychiatry makes it seem unlikely that she was truly attempting to end her life. Murphy points out that of the roughly 30,000 suicides in the U.S. each year three-fourths are men, even though woman lead men in suicide attempts by a margin of two to one. He argues that attempted suicide most often is not an attempt to actually end one's life. Its purpose, he says, is to survive with changed circumstances.

"An attempted suicide is not really an attempt at suicide in about 95% of cases. It is a different phenomenon. It's most often an effort to bring someone's attention, dramatically, to a problem that the individual feels needs to be solved," he says.

So what effect did Dan's death have on her? I believe that it brought on a depression that stunted Kathy's development because of a type of survivor guilt. With the entire family suffering terribly, including Kathy, it would seem callous and disrespectful to Dan and the rest of the family to move on with her life when no one else could--and the first one to charge Kathy of that would of course be mother. Kathy was forced to hunker down and wallow in the depressive feelings of the family until she received a signal from mother that she could again resume her life.

Kathy blossoms. The moment came when Kathy was thirteen. The family moved again and mother started doing better. She became involved in some community activities and was a bit less detached. At that signal, Kathy decided to move ahead with her own life. And suddenly her life became a dream come true:

"Every dream I ever had and every hope I ever had came true. I caught on academically and became very successful, but more importantly to me is that I had social acceptance for the first time. It was a dramatic change. I moved from 'unnoticeable' to 'chosen' class favorite, Valentine Miss, Homecoming Princess. I got to be the special one all the time." She was careful to not tell her parents of any of this, which was easy because they never asked her about her life. Then near the end of her second blossoming year, Kathy fell deliriously in love for the very first time and evidently found someone who was deliriously in love with her.

Developmentally all of this was a wondrous source of hope in a general sense. It may have been a mixed blessing, though. Kathy said that she had a "lifelong" desire to become a writer, but that her teachers were critical of her writing. Was it during this period that she received the criticism? In any case, on balance, the period taught Kathy that there was a loving world outside the boundaries of her family, one that would welcome her with open arms, if she could only get free of her parents, particularly her mother. Why especially her mother? Because there was too much of her mother inside her. She spent her whole life identifying with and imitating her mother. Her own tendency to put herself down was in imitation of her mother. Had mother not recovered somewhat from Dan's death, Kathy would not have been able to allow herself this time in the spotlight, either. What would happen if mother returned to her depressive state and stayed there? What kind of future could Kathy have then?

Although Kathy had kept quiet about her accomplishments at school, she told her parents about the romance, even though she may have suspected that her father would not welcome the news. Did she in fact make an honest mistake, or had she finally reached the point in her development where she was able to stand up to father? I think it was the latter. It seems unlikely that father showed no signs of jealousy in the past, as when, for example, Kathy was having fun with Dan, so I think she had every reason to anticipate a negative reaction on her father's part.

In any case, she could not imagine the severity of her father's anger. Upon hearing Kathy's news, he sent her away to boarding school in another state. He also sold all of the sports equipment they used to play together. During the miserable year Kathy spent at the school, her father even refused to allow her visits home for the holidays.

For that year, Kathy continued to do well academically but remained socially isolated, possibly out of fear that school authorities would tattle on her to her father if she began being socially active. At the end of the year, father still refused to let her return home, insisting that she either finish her last year at the boarding school or graduate early and begin college. Kathy chose to graduate early and go to college away from home.

Did Kathy feel guilty for having hurt her father? Sure she did. Was this a crippling guilt? No. It was a natural concomitant of her growth, which because of her father's unreasonableness necessitated that she unshackle herself from caring about whether he would react negatively when she reached for something she wanted in life.

In college, Kathy once again blossomed. She felt alive and found success academically, politically, and socially. This time she enjoyed some success in journalism, too, which indicates that she had been honing her skills as a writer. Kathy proceeded with her development in other ways too. She apparently entered many contests and won many awards, thus achieving a measure of confirmation of her abilities.

Kathy marries. Kathy, however, began longing to marry and raise a family. The summer after her freshman year, she married Dave, who taught at the college and who turned out to be temperamentally like her father. She finished college and gave birth to three children over the next 6 years.

By announcing her engagement to her parents, Kathy was once again standing up to father, but this time she was putting mother on notice too, because of the possibility that she would become a mother herself. If she became a better mother than her parent, it would make her mother look bad, but Kathy's attitude evidently was, "So be it!" Having faced the relatively easy challenge of standing up to her father, she was ready to take on mother.

Once again, did the prospect of hurting her mother by becoming a good mother make Kathy feel guilty. Sure, but this was not a crippling guilt, because if it was, she probably wouldn't have become a mother in the first place. But she became a mother three times and evidently was a devoted mother; she stuck it to her own mother really good. And she continued to stick it to her when her own marriage deteriorated by being a better mother even when living with the daily marital conflict that her own mother lived with in her marriage. The guilt was something that developmentally she should ignore, and evidently she did.

Kathy's developmental problem was that the people she modeled herself on when a child--her parents--were not fit models to help her reach or even discover her life goals. Kathy's early developmental work necessarily had to involve breaking out of those restrictive and distorting molds.