Beverly WillettBeverly Willett is a writer and former attorney.
Posted: February 22, 2011 11:22 AM

"If there's one thing feminists love, it's divorce - they consider it liberating." That's just one of the claims Phyllis Schlafly and her co-author Suzanne Venker make in their new book, The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know - And Men Can't Say, to be released this March. Schlafly--political activist, bestselling author, syndicated columnist, radio personality--is often called the grande dame of the conservative movement (she is perhaps best known for her successful campaign to stop passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and founding of the national volunteer organization known as the Eagle Forum). Venker, a.k.a. "No Bull Mom," is author of 7 Myths of Working Mothers and a regular contributor to NewsReal.

In a series of e-mails and telephone conversations over the last few weeks from their offices in St. Louis, Missouri, they weighed in on marriage, divorce and feminism in our society:

Why do you claim feminists love divorce?

Phyllis: Their own writings reveal that feminists sought liberation from home, husband, family, childbirth, children, and the role of fulltime homemaker. They wanted to be independent of men and liberated from the duties of marriage and motherhood. So, their first legislative goal was the adoption of easy-to-get divorce. They were behind California's adoption of unilateral divorce, which then spread across the country.

So why do so many marriages fail, not just those of feminists?

Suzanne: Living in a culture in which people break vows easily makes it difficult to keep one's own vows. The modern generation was groomed for an independent life. Marriage and motherhood are not something to which young women have been taught to aspire. Instead the women in their lives tell them to focus solely on their career. The result is women don't think of marriage and motherhood as fulfilling in and of itself. It's silly to think there's something wrong with being in the kitchen--everybody has to eat! Sandra Bullock's claim marriage is the end of who you are is indicative of the modern generation's defeatist attitude toward marriage.

What do you believe is the single biggest obstacle to lasting marriages?

Suzanne: Americans' attitude. We have this notion that "Hey, we can always get divorced if it doesn't work out." This is in stark contrast to the attitude in previous generations, where marriage was assumed to be a lifelong, irrevocable commitment. In my twenties, I had what we now call a "starter marriage": one that lasts less than five years and does not produce children. My ex-husband and I both had considerable doubts, and I distinctly recall our conversation, before we got married, about the fact that we could always get divorced. How pitiful is that?

You claim feminism failed women. Why?

Phyllis: None of the feminists' goals, including the Equal Rights Amendment, offered women a single benefit they didn't have before, zip. But it would have taken away a lot of the rights and benefits women then possessed such as the right to be exempt from the military and the right of a wife to be supported by her husband. Feminists demeaned marriage and motherhood even though most women want marriage and motherhood. Feminism has run its course, and surveys show that women are not as happy now as they were in the 1950s.

Suzanne: Let me add that feminism also taught women that men are idiots, so now there's a lack of respect for men who are considered an inconvenience. It's a wonder any marriage survives.

If, as you say, divorce is not "the answer to what ails us," what's the solution?

Suzanne: The Flipside of Feminism! We honestly believe Flipside has the potential to change women's and men's lives -- and that includes their marriages. Flipside is a call for Americans to change their perspective completely, to challenge themselves to think in a way that goes counter to what they've been exposed to their entire lives.

Flipside takes a positive view of women and their role in society as wives, mothers, career women and volunteers in the community. It's the antithesis of the average feminist book in which the author kvetches about how bad American women have it. How is that helpful?

You claim American women have never had it better. What do you mean by that?

Phyllis: American women can structure their lives to accomplish anything they want.

How so?

Phyllis: It is self evident that American women are the most fortunate women who ever lived and enjoy more freedoms and opportunities than are available in any other country. Armed with the right attitude, they have every opportunity for happiness and achievement. Women should stop feeling they are victims of the patriarchy, reject feminist myths, and follow the roadmap to success and happiness spelled out in Flipside.

Do we need divorce reform?

Phyllis: Yes. We need to restore fault-based reasons to justify divorce. When a man and woman stand up before witnesses and solemnly swear to love and cherish, forsaking all others, 'till death do us part, do they mean it, or are they lying?

The best way to reduce divorce is to legislate 50-50 joint custody of children, unless evidence proves one parent unfit. It would eliminate the current incentive to one parent, usually the woman, who now believes she can walk out on all marital obligations, taking the kids and the income of the other parent.

One comment I get writing about divorce reform is: "You can't legislate morality." What do you think?

Phyllis: That's ridiculous. We have adopted thousands of federal and state laws to legislate morality. What do you think the criminal code is?

Flipside states that our courts no longer protect the sanctity of marriage, but rather owe their allegiance to the institution of divorce. Can you explain?

Phyllis: Marriage is a contract, and one party should not be able to renounce it without the consent of the other party.

The family courts are the lowest in the judicial hierarchy, but the most powerful. Family court judges exercise unaccountable discretion according to their own personal biases and preferences. They have control over the private living arrangements and income of 48 million Americans and $40 billion in transfer payments made between households. Family court judges are an arm of government that exercises virtually unlimited power to dictate the private lives and income of millions of Americans who have committed no actionable offense. Divorce has become a tremendous money-making industry with judges, psychologists, psychiatrists, custody evaluators, and counselors getting well paid to run other people's lives.

Despite the commercial success of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed, you're fairly critical of both. Why?

Suzanne: Elizabeth Gilbert makes several great observations, for example, that marriage cannot be solely about romantic love, a point we make in Flipside. Gilbert is also a gifted writer. In Committed, however, her analysis of marriage is wrong-headed and immature. No woman who reads Committed will be encouraged to embrace marriage and family life. Ms. Gilbert does not have children either. Thus her experience is extremely lacking. Like any modern feminist, Gilbert's attitude toward marriage is hopelessly doomed: she believes it threatens women's independence and well-being. She questions the purpose of marriage at every turn and blames conservatives for keeping women down.

And yet Gilbert remarried?

Suzanne: Gilbert was "sentenced to wed" due to her boyfriend's status as an illegal alien. If the couple wanted to continue living in the United States, or ever visit the United States, they had to get married--and Ms. Gilbert was resentful, for she had sworn off marriage altogether.

But don't conservatives avail themselves of unilateral divorce just as much as liberals?

Phyllis: Many conservatives are seduced by feminist and anti-marriage propaganda and peer pressure. Flipside is designed to arm them against negative social trends and decisions.

So how did things get so out of hand?

Phyllis: The decline of marriage is the result of the work of highly motivated special-interest groups, and they enjoy the support of Big Media. Feminists have also had the support of academia and Hollywood, and they did a pretty good job of intimidating politicians.

Where were conservatives when the divorce rate got out of hand?

Phyllis: They were quietly raising their own families.

Is feminism really to blame for all our marriage and divorce woes?

Suzanne: No, there are other factors that helped it along. Technology, for example, has played a role in the disintegration of the American family. In previous generations, people's worlds were rather small. Close-knit communities and family ties, along with the universal moral order, meant Americans were mostly exposed to people who lived like they did--conservatively.
Today, this world is gone. Families are spread out; people rarely mill about in their neighborhoods but are instead glued to their television sets and computers; and religious life is at an all-time low. Because of this, young people's preferences are largely influenced by technology and mainstream media, all of which are very liberal. In other words, the culture at large--via college life and the media--has played a larger role in shaping the values and attitudes of young people.

I consider myself a liberal Democrat though I put my career on hold, became a stay-at-home mom, opposed my ex-husband's wrongful divorce suit and now speak out about divorce reform. Yet you state there is a "chasm" between feminists and conservative women. Is there any common ground or way to bridge the gap?

Suzanne: This is a great question. There are many women I know who vote Democrat and/or consider themselves liberal, yet their lifestyles and attitudes do not jibe with their voting patterns. Many of these folks do not identify with feminism at all, yet at the same time they don't think of themselves as conservative.

This confusion is primarily a matter of semantics. Liberal-minded women are often more conservative than they care to admit. Unfortunately, modern liberals have butchered the term conservative by teaching people that it means being backward and close-minded--and who wants to think of themselves this way? Consequently, people refer to themselves as liberal-- even if they're not -- because that is the socially acceptable worldview.

But being conservative isn't just about politics -- there are many conservative Democrats in America. Conservatism is a lifestyle in which independence and self-reliance come naturally. Conversely, feminists - who dominate the Democratic party -- are negative by nature and believe women are oppressed. Thus, the question women who vote Democrat need to ask themselves is, Why do I stand with a party whose goals and values are in direct opposition to my own? Most women in America have nothing in common with the feminist elite, which means that any time a woman in America pulls the Democratic lever, she sabotages her own future.

Any final piece of advice for parents contemplating divorce today?

Phyllis: Unless they are dealing with abuse, addiction or extreme conflict, we recommend parents stay together at least until the children have left home. Not only must adult happiness come second to children's needs, research shows that most marriages that end in divorce today are not a result of these extreme circumstances. Judith Wallerstein's work demonstrates that children fare much better if their parents stay together. Research also shows that couples who once reported being unhappy in their marriage were much happier together five years down the road.

Judith Wallerstein: Forget the Notion Divorce Won't Hurt Kids. It Will.

By Jane Meredith Adams

Parents who divorce like to think they re doing what's best, and that their youngsters will bounce back healthy and whole, with no long lasting trauma. Society in general upholds this idea, and our lawmakers and courts have followed suit with liberalized divorce laws. But psychologist Judith Wallerstein says it rarely works that way. "Too often," she reports, "children of divorce pay for their parents' breakup for years to come in both psychological and economical ways."

Wallerstein should know. One of the nation's leading experts on divorce, she heads a project unprecedented in the annals of psychological research. For 25 years, she has been following a group of 131 children whose parents split up.

Wallerstein knew all the details of the parents' marriages and divorces (in some cases, second, third, and even fourth divorces). She knows which kids smoked pot, which earned straight A’s, which had nightmares. And she remembers.

"The remarkable thing is that I have all the kids in my head," she says. "I remember every dream, every fantasy. I remember how they played, so I can remind them, and they love that because they have a sense of discontinuity [in their family setting]."

Into the political and social debate about the American family, Wallerstein has given voice to a group left unheard: the children themselves. Her startling findings - that 25 years after their parents' divorce, children continue to suffer emotional fallout - have reshaped the debate.

Judith Wallerstein: Let me give you a little bit of background. I've been working on children and divorce since 1970. In the center that I established, we've seen more divorcing families than anybody in America.

Now, what distinguishes this study is several things. One, that it is a very, very long study--25 years. There's nothing even comparable; I started with these children prior to the legal divorce--at the time that the parents separated. At that time the kids were 3 to 18. This was 1971, '72, which is just when divorce started to rise in America. And at that point, the prevailing view was that divorce was no big deal. That it would have no effect.

Biography: What does that mean? That it would have only a temporary effect?

Wallerstein: Not even an effect on children. There was some romantic notion that if we did away with the hypocrisy of having to go into court and to prove that the woman was a tramp and the father an alcoholic or vice versa, that parents and children would continue as before. Nobody foresaw the terrible issue of child support. Nobody foresaw that people wouldn't agree, that in most divorcing families with children only one person wants the divorce. It was assumed that if the marriage is broken down for one person, it's obviously broken down for both. That just isn't true. And nobody foresaw that the children would be in distress, because it was assumed, and it's all very logical, that any child would know that the parents are unhappy and it would be a great relief for the child.

The only trouble is none of this works out. Child support was an enormous issue. Women were very much economically less well off. It was also when women's lib was full of optimism: women would all become heads of General Motors. That didn't quite work out. I became interested in the subject when we moved to California, and 1 was teaching at Berkeley, which I did for 26 years, and I became a consultant to a whole lot of clinics. And nursery school teachers and elementary school teachers started to call. That's where our first alert came from. I mean nursery school teachers said that these kids were out of control, what should I do?

Biography: How were they out of control?

Wallerstein: Kids were very aggressive. They were hitting everything. They were throwing things. Or they were crying, or they were hiding their heads in their teachers' laps. Largely it was very aggressive behavior, or refusal to separate from the parents. The kids had terrible sleeping problems. When parents divorce, school children become very frightened that they'll be abandoned by both parents. Then they sit there and can't concentrate on anything. And they certainly cannot settle down and go to sleep because they're quite sure the minute they close their eyes, the parent will go. And their logic is irrefutable. If one parent can leave another, why can't both parents leave me? It's tragic.

Nobody told the kids anything. These kids didn't know what was happening, and they woke up one morning, and guess what? Daddy's gone, or Mommy's gone. Mostly daddy's gone. So we started to get all these calls, and I took myself to the Berkeley library and found that nobody had done a single bit of research on this issue. And at that point I decided I would look at it. It was as simple as that.

I was interested in children who were in good psychological condition prior to the breakup. These were middle class kids who had been well fed, well clad. This was a really nifty group of children, which makes the findings all the more striking. With college-educated parents, with professional fathers. Then I found that these kids were seriously unhappy, showing a lot of symptoms. I couldn't believe it. It's not what I expected.

Biography: The presumption was, there would be a crisis around the time of the divorce, and then the kids would get over it.

Wallerstein: Yes. So then we decided to follow them, and we were launched into what became the California Children's Divorce Study, which is now known all over the world. We started to publish professional articles, and our colleagues got angry at us. I mean, adults didn't want to believe what I said.

Biography: Why is that?

Wallerstein: Because there is a conflict of interest. I mean if you're married, and want out of the marriage, you want to think that your children will approve. You don't want to face their anger. You don't want to face their rejection. Parents are very concerned.

And lo and behold, we have a whole impoverished group of people because two can't live as cheap as one. And because people remarry very fast. About 80 percent of divorced men remarry. A lot of the fathers in my study, during periods in which their kids were growing up, married and divorced three times! I had one man who married five times. I first saw his son when he was six. He's now close to 30. I said to him, John, what do you make of your dad getting married five times? He said, I'll tell you. My dad has no identity and he has to marry so he can know who he is. That's a little different view of a father/son relationship, right?

After five years we published our first book, Surviving the Breakup. After ten years, I published Second Chances.

The method of the study is that I sit and I talk to a kid for hours. I know the kids well enough to say, come on Jimmy, tell me what really is happening in your marriage. Don't give me this big bunch of bull. And I know them extremely well. I remember every dream, every fantasy. I remember how they played. It used to wake me up in the middle of the night. I don't remember what I served for dinner yesterday, but I do remember that.

Biography: So what were your main findings that you want to emphasize in 25 years?

Wallerstein: The kids had a hard time remembering the pre-divorce family. And they had a hard time remembering all the things the courts were struggling with. You know, who's angry at who, who fights, but what they remembered about the post-divorce years was their sense that they had indeed been abandoned by both parents, that their nightmare [of abandonment] had come true. Because some of the mothers both went to work full-time and were also at school at night. They would lock the bedroom door to study. I mean, you can't study with a bunch of pre-school kids around.

The kids remembered a lot of baby sitters, one after another, or being in strangers' hands. They remembered they were left in the care of older kids, who threatened to hit them, or did hit them, because you know, a nine year old is a nine year old. And they remembered the years in the post-divorce family as lonely and feeling, as one kid said, I went for days without saying a word. Another kid said, I was angry at everybody for years. I was angry at my mom because she abandoned me. I was angry at my dad because he abandoned me. I was always angry at someone. So this was more important than the efforts of the court to tell parents, don't fight, don't fight. It's much bigger than don't fight. It's what kind of support can you provide for your children. And that's one of my main issues--that the serious issues were not being addressed.

Biography: What do you mean by serious issues?

Wallerstein: Well, the issue of the child feeling abandoned. I mean, I'm arguing for the fact that when you divorce, you have to plan for the child's post-divorce years, not just for what you're going to do the next year. Not just custody or visiting rights.

Biography: What would that require?

Wallerstein: There would be a built-in delay in getting that divorce, during which time parents--with help from the courts, mediators, counselors, educators, or whatever--would make plans for the whole lives of the children afterwards, including sending them to college. Only six of the kids we studied got full support during college, and these are sons and daughters of very wealthy people.

Biography: Because of the acrimony between the parents?

Wellerstein: Because of the second and third families, and acrimony, and the fact that there's no law. I asked the men, why didn't you send your son to college? They'd say, Look lady, I paid everything I was supposed to pay. I did everything I was supposed to do. Enough is enough.

One third of the kids we studied stopped their education in high school because they couldn't go to school and support themselves. One reporter I talked to said, Well I put myself through college. I knew my parents couldn't afford it, and I got out cum laude. Great. But how would she have felt if her father was earning $200,000 a year? Big difference.

These kids feel that they have paid for their parents' divorce, and I don't think they should. They are entirely unprotected. And they know it. You're making visiting orders and custody orders for young kids, okay? So when the same young kid gets to be older, I think that child should have an input. They don't.

Biography: About how they want to be living?

Wallerstein: Yeah, and the metaphor I use, because I wanted to say something very clear to these people, is that it's like we bought a pair of shoes for a child at age six, and we expect the child to wear the same shoes at age 10, 12, and 15. And when the child limps, complains, and can hardly walk anymore, we don't change those shoes.

Biography: What would you like the courts to do?

Wallerstein: I would like to build in flexible orders. Obviously a six year old can't decide, but a twelve year old can.

Biography: It seems like what you've done is given a voice to the children. Children haven't been heard.

Wallerstein: They haven't been heard at all. They're mute.

Biography: What else would you like to see the courts do?

Wallerstein: I'm arguing that divorce is not a trauma from which a child recovers. It's a long-lasting effect which for many children is cumulative. I'm saying that for these kids, the crescendo was in their 20s, because that's when they ran into relationships, and that's where they suddenly faced the ghosts. And they were especially frightened of having children; they didn't want their children to experience their feelings. The model I'm suggesting is a long-term, a cumulative experience, which peaks at different places. It peaks at college, when they can't go to college and they feel like second-class citizens. Half of my kids got involved in serious sex and drugs and alcohol in adolescence. Nobody intervened. They felt nobody cared. As one young woman said, I kept coming home to an empty house, and that's how I became involved in drugs and sex. We have to implement long-term planning, building in changes as the child grows, assuring that the kid will have the same college as they would have had the family remained intact. Now there's a wonderful suggestion by a professor of law at Harvard that I would like to see implemented. Her name is Mary Ann Glendon, and she's suggesting this would really cut down the divorce rate, that before you divide marital property, you set up economic provisions for the children. Wow. It's a theory suggested from a professor of law, it's not just a fly-by-night.

Biography: What if the family doesn't have a lot of money?

Wallerstein: Probably those children wouldn't have gone to college anyway.I'm just saying they should have the same. I'm not saying these kids should be a privileged group; I'm saying they shouldn't be second-class citizens because of the divorce.

Biography: It seems like part of the thinking was it was better to be divorced than to be fighting and generally unhappy. Tell me a little about that.

Wallerstein: The question is, should people stay married for the sake of the children? I think adults have rights. I'm not saying only children have rights.

And on the other hand, should we have some ways of educating people better for marriage? Of course.

Biography: What would those ways be?

Wallerstein: Well, we're into a whole new field. I think that there would be real room in adolescence for teaching about relationships. Not marriage. But how do you choose a friend? What's the difference between liking and loving? Teaching child care to high school boys and girls. In other words, I think preparation for family life shouldn't be left for television.

At a Glance

Name: Judith Wallerstein

Born: 27 December 1921, New York City.

Education: Undergraduate education at Hunter College, New York City; graduate degree in social work from Columbia University, New York City; Ph.D. in psychology from Lund University, Sweden.

Personal: Married to psychiatrist Robert Wallerstein for 50 years.

Children: Michael, 46; Nina, 44; Amy, 40.

Resident of Belvedere, California, for 31 years.

Achievements: Founder of the Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition, a research, education, and training center in Cone Madera, California. Co-author of Surviving the Breakup, Second Chances, and The Good Marriage. Recently returned as a senior lecturer at the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.

---------------------------------------------------

Article Insert

Judith Wallerstein's Ten Tips for Divorcing Parents

1. Be direct in age-appropriate ways. Explain that while you'd hoped the marriage would last forever, it wasn't working out. Present the divorce as a solution both parents have come to reluctantly.

2. Tell your children they remain one of the joys of your life.

3. Apologize for the hurt and disruption the divorce is causing.

4. Reassure your children they did not cause the divorce and cannot rescue the marriage.

5. If one parent has moved out, take the children to the new residence so it becomes real to them.

6. Before going to court, work out a financial plan to cover your children's needs through college. If possible, set this money aside in a trust fund before dividing assets.

7. Give your children a voice in flexible-custody arrangements. Don't force a 14-year-old to abide by a plan developed when the child was five.

8. Allow your children to mourn.

9. Seek professional help for your children, if needed.

10. Let your children know it's okay to love both parents.

NO ONE is an island, according to the old saying, and so it should be recognized that no psychological problem is ever a purely individual problem. Therefore, any psychological distress felt by an individual has roots in society at large.

Contemporary American society certainly offers ample opportunity for psychological distress. Ever since the 19th century, traditional pre-industrial family values have been pushed aside in favor of the various pleasures of mass consumption. In a permissive, self-indulgent society, there is less and less use for self-discipline and self-restraint. When anything goes, nothing means anything, and all paths lead nowhere. And right in the middle of nowhere you are sure to find anxiety, depression, and distress.

This does not mean, however, that all psychological problems can be solved by changing society. Some political groups may try to suggest such a solution, but ultimately the individual must be responsible for recognizing and transcending—or “seeing through”—all the social illusions that can lead a person astray. Many persons have been brought to disaster by believing that they can change, control, or be responsible for anyone else.

In fact, any attempt to “control” the thoughts or behavior of another person is just an unconscious attempt to control—rather than face up to and heal—your own “ugly” inner life. And until you have made peace with yourself, you will never be able to live in peace with anyone else. So in this world you can’t change anyone but yourself. Then, it can be hoped, your example might influence others to change themselves.

This is how it works in life, and this is how it works in a family.





The

Rationale

for

Family

Therapy



In the early part of the 20th century, the psychologist Carl Jung noted that children tend to live out the unconscious conflicts of their parents. And, as Family Systems Theory teaches, all too often a child will be marked as a “problem,” the “scapegoat” or “black sheep” of the family—the Identified Patient, in Family Systems language—when really the entire family is locked into some dysfunctional pattern of interaction.


An Example

A truly stunning example of a child “acting out” a family dysfunction can be seen in the 1964 movie, The Chalk Garden. I won’t describe the plot of the story here, so go rent the movie. But the basic problem is that parents often have children because of their own desires: they need to feel loved and they believe that a child’s helplessness will be a source of love; or perhaps they have in mind a particular role for the child to fulfill. As a result, they end up expecting that the child will grow up to be totally obedient to them as a sign of love. But the child feels suffocated by the parents’ desire and tries to find his or her own destiny. This search for independence only marks the child, in the parents’ minds, as disobedient, ungrateful, and unloving. Love quickly turns to hate and disaster follows.


Many of the clinical disorders of infancy, childhood, and adolescence, such as the Learning Disorders, Communication Disorders (e.g., stuttering), Attention-Deficit and Disruptive Behavior Disorders (e.g., Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD), Conduct Disorders, and Elimination Disorders (e.g., Enuresis, or bedwetting), as well as the general Sleep Disorders (e.g., Nightmare Disorder and Sleep Terror Disorder) can all have origins within the overall family system.

In such cases, it’s always easiest to medicate the “Identified Patient” and then forget about the rest of the family. It would be far better, and more clinically appropriate, to ask some specific—and painful—questions about how the child’s symptoms may be reflecting parental conflicts and family anxiety.





Marriage



How many people ever contemplate the psychological meaning of marriage?

Marriage has its origin in the concept of a man and a woman giving themselves to each other for life in order to bring new life into the world: to have children and to create a family in which the children are raised to honor such values as faith, hope, and charity—not to fear love. The conjugal act between the man and the woman guarantees this generation of life. Marriage, therefore, is an act of service, not a psychological “right” to soothe your fear of emptiness through a “relationship” with another person.

Across cultures and through the ages, however, the concept of marriage has been perverted into a mere economic contract that simply guarantees the closed transmission of wealth, status, and power. Even the concept of “family” is irrelevant to this kind of marriage, except in so far as children serve as necessary and vital agents of hereditary transmission. Keep in mind that none of this has anything to do with romance—or love.

When most people today think of marriage, however, they think of love. Even though they might talk about committed relationships, to what is the “commitment”? Free sex? Financial security? Self-indulgence? What sort of commitments are these?



The real commitment of an indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman for the sake of their natural children is the glue that has held human society together for ages. Altering this concept is like someone remodeling a house who decides that removing a load-bearing wall will give the house more liberty—but as soon as the wall is removed, the whole house collapses.



And so here is precisely where the psychological problems begin.



The great philosopher Aristotle said that “To love is to wish good to someone.” [1] So if you think about it, all the moral decisions about marriage and family actually derive psychologically from love—real love, not the “love” of popular fantasy. Adultery, abortion, divorce, and euthanasia, for example, all defile love through a focus on personal pleasure and convenience, at the expense of the dignity—and even the life—of another human being. And what is depression and trauma if not the despair of seeing life turned into a piece of garbage?



Unfortunately, contemporary culture tends to think of “love” as a way to find personal fulfillment in life. That is, each person in a “relationship” expects the other to fill up the existential void in his or her life. Ultimately, this is impossible, and so when there are problems, the conflicts are usually about one person complaining of not getting what he or she wants. In this situation, only one psychological solution can be possible: Take responsibility for your own life satisfaction. True love is about giving, not receiving. If you’re mainly concerned about getting pleasure or security, you’re being selfish, not loving.



This means that you have to look carefully at your own life and stop blaming others. If you are not satisfied with your life, it’s probably because you are not living up to your inner potential or are in one way or another betraying your life values. This can be a hard lesson to learn, but be honest—an adulterous sexual affair that defiles your marriage commitment, for example, is just a perverted attempt to avoid the real problem: yourself.







Divorce



In 1997, a prominent psychologist wrote an article which appeared in an American psychological journal. The author reviewed several commonly held beliefs about psychology, and one of his claims was that the brain is quite resilient to the effects of trauma. He noted that rats which had been subjected to trauma as infants developed into apparently well-adjusted adults.

I wrote a response [2] to his claim in which I noted that, unlike animals, we humans have language—along with a memory system with which to process it—and that trauma has a unique linguistic way of lingering in our unconscious minds. Humans, just like rats, may give the appearance of being well-adjusted, but, as any experienced mental health clinician has seen over and over, many of the seemingly “well-adjusted” individuals walking around in our society are tormented by inner lives of emptiness and self-destructive despair.

Professor, physician, lawyer—they all say the same thing to me: “I feel like mush inside.”

And most of them, as children, saw their families shattered by divorce or adultery—often the “adultery” of child sexual abuse.

We take divorce so much for granted today that it is hard not to find someone who has been divorced or who has married someone who has been divorced or who has parents or relatives who have divorced. And like that prominent psychologist, we brush it off and say, “It doesn’t matter.”

But it does matter.

Children need to have both a mother and a father who will protect them, care for them, teach them, and guide their feet through darkness into the way of peace. Even the trauma of losing a parent to death is less a trauma than losing a parent to divorce, for in divorce a parent essentially says to a child—and to a spouse—“My personal desires are more important to me than is your welfare. This family is nothing to me, and you are just an object to be moved around like a pawn in my self-indulgent search for happiness.”

Laboratory rats have only cheese and mazes. What can they say about trauma? Children, however, have phobias, eating disorders, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, sex, unwanted pregnancies, sexual diseases, abortion—and suicide, and guns—to “speak” about their traumas.

And yet we continue to look at divorce and say, “It doesn’t matter.”





The

Role

of

a

Father



A father must “come between” a mother and her child to sever the child’s natural bond of dependence on the mother and to lead the child out into the world so that the child can develop his or her talents and take up a meaningful, productive life of honesty and integrity.



All of us have experienced the delight of being fed and protected when we were helpless infants. In fact, if we don’t experience it, we die. And the delight of this early infantile experience, which makes no demands on us and leaves us free simply to enjoy it, is at the root of our adult yearnings for a “utopia” in which all of our needs are taken care of effortlessly.

But to function responsibly as an adult, a child must pass beyond this care-free infantile state of dependence. If this task fails, the child will remain neurotically dependent on maternal protection and will be afflicted with doubts and anxieties about assuming personal responsibility in the world. Moreover, the child’s talents will either remain buried in fear or will be expressed largely through an unconscious grandiosity. And, in its most severe manifestations, alcoholism and drug addictions can develop in adolescence and adulthood, because all addictions have their roots in a desire to escape the demands of personal responsibilities and return to an idyllic feeling of care-free bliss.



A child, therefore, has three essential tasks which must be accomplished under the guidance of a father.


1. To learn how the world works.

The father must teach the child not only about the abstract—and often dangerous—dynamics of social relationships beyond the family itself but must also provide instruction in the practical rules governing the physical world, including honest, productive work in the world.



Imagine a primitive society of forest dwellers. To teach the child how the world “works,” the father must take the child out into the depths of the forest and show the child how to survive and eat by using weapons, building fires, and making shelters. Now, the modern world may not be a forest anymore—though it is often enough called a jungle—yet the forest metaphor aptly describes the process by which a father must teach a child “how the world works.”




2. To learn to trust.

Yes, a child will more-or-less “trust” a nurturing mother. This sort of trust, though, is a necessary part of mother-infant bonding for the sake of the infant’s physical survival.

Real trust requires that the child grow to depend on and respect the father, a person different from the mother from whom the child originated; that is, the father is a different body and a different gender from the mother. The father—and only a father—can therefore teach the child to enter the world and encounter difference confidently. But, to be a successful teacher, the father must teach this from the place of his own faith and obedience. In other words, the father must live from his heart by the rules he teaches to his children. In this way the children can learn to trust him through his own integrity. Otherwise, the children will see him for a hypocrite and will disavow—openly or secretly—everything he represents.


3. To learn to trust oneself.

As a child receives instruction from a trustworthy father and develops a sense of confidence under the father’s compassionate guidance, the child will then be able to function more and more independently, assimilating the father’s external guidance into an internal, psychological confidence.



First the father builds a fire, saying to the child, “Watch me.” Then the father encourages the child to build the fire. Finally the child goes off into the forest alone, and builds a fire on his own, confident in what he learned from his father.




Lack

Now, considering all of this about the role of a father, look about you and see how many fathers fail miserably in their responsibilities. How many fathers are absent from the family because they are emotionally insensitive to their children’s needs? How many fathers are absent from the family because they are preoccupied with work or sports? How many fathers are absent from the family because of divorce? How many fathers are absent from the family because their adultery draws them away to another woman? How many fathers are absent from the family because they are preoccupied with their own pride and arrogance? How many fathers are absent from the family because of alcoholism? How many fathers are absent from the family because of illness? How many fathers are absent from the family because they were nothing more than sperm donors in a moment of lust? How many fathers are absent from the family because a woman decided she didn’t need a man to have a child? It can go on and on. And it does.



Consider communities in which single mothers are the norm, rather than the exception. What do you see there? A male disrespect for women, low educational performance, social disobedience, violence, drug abuse, prostitution, and a general lack of social opportunity.



And the sad thing is that when a father is absent—whether physically or emotionally—his lack causes a personal lack in the children. Lacking understanding of how the world works, lacking trust in others, and lacking trust in themselves, children—whether they be boys or girls—become lost, insecure, and confused. They lack confidence. They lack real faith. They lack a spiritually meaningful future. They lack life. All because their fathers were lacking.


Unconscious Distortion

Please note, though, that all of this lack resulting from the lack of a father is, in many cases, largely unconscious.

Yes, some persons are truly crippled—both emotionally and socially—by the lack of a father, and their lives become dysfunctional and stuck. And sadly, some of them die in childhood from abuse.[3]

But other persons are able to keep up a surface appearance of functionality; they hold jobs, they get married, and they have children. Yet under the surface of normality a deep secret of anger and victimization is buried. Here are the dark roots of symptom after symptom of secret resentment for the father.

In the unconscious, however, the anger gets distorted because it is difficult for children to feel angry with a father from whom they still desire a sign of love. To protect themselves from the threat of their own anger, then, the children distort that anger by turning it against themselves to ensure that they do nothing.

•


Addictions (such as alcoholism, drug addiction, obesity, smoking, video games, casinos, etc.) allow them to feel filled when they are really empty; thus they feel nothing.

•

Argumentativeness prevents them from accepting truth, which includes the truth that the father has failed them; thus they accept nothing.

•

Being late for appointments and meetings prevents them from having to wait; thus they wait for nothing.

•

Immodesty (whether as revealing clothing, gaudy make-up, tattoos, piercings, etc.) prevents them from respecting their own bodies; thus they respect nothing.

•

Learning disorders prevent them from discovering a world that seems hidden from them; thus they discover nothing.

•

Mental confusion (often expressed by forgetting things or as difficulty with math) prevents them from engaging with the the signs and symbols of life; thus they engage with nothing.

•

Procrastination prevents them from stepping out into the world they don’t know how to negotiate in the first place; thus they accomplish nothing.

•

Sexual preoccupation whether as self-created mental fantasies, pornography, lust, or sexual acts, prevents them from experiencing emotional intimacy; thus they are intimate with nothing.

•

Suspiciousness prevents them from having to trust a world they fear; thus they trust nothing.



In the end, all these nothings, taken together, lead to the nothingness of death: symbolic death, which keeps a child emotionally disabled as punishment for his or her anger, and real death—through slow self-sabotage or through outright suicide—by which the child, in making herself or himself the “missing one,” draws attention away from the truth that the father has been missing from the child’s life all along.



There is no current psychiatric diagnosis for this collection of symptoms, so I have named a psychoanalytic diagnosis: Ira Patrem Latebrosa (hidden anger at the father). This is an anger at the father that so cloaks itself in invisibility that a person afflicted with it will deny that it even exists. Yet it does exist, and the evidence above proves it, like tracks in the snow that reveal the presence of an animal lurking nearby.







Anger



Anger, and coping with anger, can be a big problem for many persons. Part of the problem, though, is that most of us don’t understand the difference between feeling hurt and getting angry.

Anger usually begins with some emotional hurt; that is, in being threatened or frustrated in some way. Adrenaline pumps into your bloodstream. Your heart rate jumps. Your blood pressure surges. You feel insulted and threatened.

However, even people who can’t list off the Seven Deadly Sins—Pride, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Greed, Gluttony, and Sloth, if you’re interested—know that there’s something wrong about anger. Well, what is it?

Wrath, or getting angry, refers to one way that people manage the feeling of being hurt and insulted: usually by loud, cruel, hate-filled words. And often the hate erupts into physical violence. So the problem isn’t with feeling irritated at the insult—which can be managed quite peacefully, believe it or not—but with a desire for revenge which is always hurtful and often outright abusive.

Anger, therefore, has no place in a family because, to be healthy, a family should be oriented toward love, growth, and support, not revenge and hostility.





Domestic

Violence



As sure as there are marital problems, there are many couples who resort to violent confrontation. Those who seek to console, to understand, and to love are strong in wisdom, and violence has been said to be the last resort of the weak.

Although some people claim differently, domestic violence is not so much a political problem rooted in “male domination of women” as it is a psychological problem rooted in an unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s own life. Granted, there are some persons—male and female—who are so filled with frustration and anger that they will attack anyone—including children, and pets—without provocation. But just as often there is provocation, and violence becomes a sly family dance. There are even some people so good at subtle provocation that they always come off looking like innocent victims. It’s a dirty business overall.



The DSM-IV [4] diagnosis called Intermittent Explosive Disorder is characterized by several discrete episodes of failure to resist aggressive impulses that result in serious assaultive acts or destruction of property, and it describes a sort of aggressiveness that is way out of proportion to anything that could have precipitated it. For example, a family member might go into a rage because the mashed potatoes have lumps in them. Or someone might throw a punch and start a fight after he accidentally bumps into another person who then says, “Watch where you’re going!”

Unfortunately, this diagnosis, like any other psychological diagnosis, tells us little, if anything, about the underlying reasons for the behavior. It really amounts to nothing more than a fancy way of describing a bad temper in a person who cannot manage anger, forgive others, or live with true peace of mind.



Even in a case that seems “political”—say, for example, the wife wants to work outside the home and the husband does not want to allow her—the real problem derives from a lack of loving communication. The woman harbors anger and frustration toward her husband and criticizes him at every opportunity; the husband feels threatened, rejected, and humiliated, often triggering traumatic memories of abuse he suffered as a child. And violence erupts because real communication has degenerated into a power struggle. Neither partner has approached the problem from a position of empathy and unconditional acceptance of the needs of the other. And when empathy is lacking, everyone, including the children, suffers.



California law mandates that when a psychotherapist or any other mandated reporter has knowledge or suspicion of it, the “unjustifiable mental suffering” of a child witnessing family violence is to be reported as child abuse.




Offenders

Many persons who get violent have been abused in some way as children. When a child is abused, he of course feels very helpless and vulnerable, and so unconscious defenses work very hard to keep this feeling under “control” by pushing it out of conscious awareness. When that child grows up, he may feel the unconsciously motivated need to control and manipulate everyone in his home; whenever he feels insulted, all the old vulnerability “leaks out,” and he can resort to violence out of pure frustration for not being able to do anything else. (Remember: Violence is the last resort of the weak and powerless.) In the end, he “loses control” because he never had it in the first place.

So, if you are prone to violence, the real “cure” in all this is in (a) admitting your old emotional wounds, with therapeutic help; (b) recognizing when those wounds are being triggered by a provocation; and then (c) mustering the self-discipline to walk away from the situation before the tension builds to violence. This is an emotional process, not an intellectual process, so you don’t learn it by reading about it; you learn it from encounter with others in a safe setting.

The most effective treatment for men who are prone to domestic violence is group education and treatment in a men’s group, rather than individual psychotherapy. Many domestic violence programs offer such treatment for men, whether they come voluntarily or whether they are mandated into treatment by the court after being arrested for violence.



In California, domestic violence is illegal (Penal Code 273.5), period. It’s considered a crime against the state, regardless of whether the abused person presses charges or not.




Non-offenders

As for those who are abused by violent offenders, there can be many reasons why a person gets involved with someone prone to violence. Sometimes it’s a matter of having been abused as a child and unconsciously seeking out the “familiar.” Sometimes it’s a matter of being attracted to the illusions of control and power in another person that on the surface seem protective but that only mask the underlying aggression and violence. And sometimes it’s a matter of having a rebellious and argumentative nature of one’s own that “plays off” the hostility of another.

In any event, once subjected to violence, a person can begin to perceive the violence from the perspective of an external locus of control and can then make the tragic mistake of trying to appease the offender. Unfortunately, this only makes the victim all the more susceptible to further manipulation by the offender.

The only real solution then is to (a) seek physical safety; (b) learn to recognize the dark human capacity to harm others in order to make oneself feel powerful; (c) encourage the offender’s healing through proper treatment; and (d) work to achieve one’s own capacity for forgiveness, and, if possible, reconciliation.





Child

Abuse



Whenever parents are violent, with or without provocation, there is always the possibility of child abuse—and even animal abuse. Families can be very good at hiding their “secrets,” so it might take an alert physician who notices a child’s injuries, a teacher who notices a child’s neglect, a veterinarian or animal control officer who notices a pet’s neglect or injuries, or a dentist who notices facial injuries, to uncover the hidden violence in the family.

And, with or without violence, child sexual abuse can be another hidden secret of even the most apparently upstanding families. The DSM-IV [4a] diagnosis called Pedophilia is characterized by recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a child or children generally less than 13 years old. Technically, though, this diagnosis cannot be made unless the fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. It’s an open question how much most child molesters are distressed by their behavior—unless it be the distress of worrying about getting arrested for their crimes.



In its unconscious dimension, “pedophilia” is really a sort of sexual vampirism in which the adult seeks to cheat his or her own emotional death by preying on the vitality of young innocence.

Through my clinical work I have seen that pedophiliac fantasies are “fueled” at the core by feelings of unconscious anger. The pedophiliac, lacking an innocent childhood himself, craves to devour the innocence of his victim child, and, in devouring it, to defile it. To his conscious mind, all the pedophiliac sees is desire, and he might even interpret this desire as “love,” as the name pedophilia (from the Greek paidos, a child, and philos, loving) suggests. But, ironically, in its deep unconscious reality pedophilia is nothing but envious hatred for the good and the innocent.

And when priests, rabbis, and ministers molest children, it only goes to show how much they are caught in the grip of false spirituality. Instead of seeking divine sustenance through spiritual denial of self, they choose to deny the good in order to glorify their own perverted emptiness.




TYPES OF CHILD ABUSE

•

PHYSICAL ABUSE

(bruises; burns; internal injuries; fractures; etc.)


•

PHYSICAL NEGLECT

(lack of medical or dental care; lack of food; lack of sleep; inadequate hygiene; unsanitary living conditions; etc.)


•

SEXUAL ABUSE

(sexual contact between minors and non-minors or between minors; sexual exploitation such as pornography or prostitution)

Sexual contact can refer to penetration (genital, anal, oral); fondling; kissing and/or hugging in a sexual way; and “showing” the genitals.

Note that the above definition applies even if a child says the experience was pleasurable or non-threatening. On the purely physical level, some aspects of coercive sexual contact can feel pleasurable to a child. Moreover, men who have been abused as children are particularly apt to deny that the experience was abusive because many cultures socialize boys with the false belief that males should be always eager for sexual activity. But abuse is abuse, simply because using a child for erotic pleasure strips the child’s vulnerable ego of its dignity and humanity and makes the child’s body into a mere object; this experience leaves the child with the life-long psychological scars of guilt and anger and of feeling unconsciously like a piece of garbage.


•

EMOTIONAL MALTREATMENT

(belittling; screaming; threats; inconsistent parental responses; family violence; etc.)

Note that even dog bites can be a sign of emotional maltreatment. Why? Well, remember that dogs are pack animals and are very sensitive to each other’s status within the pack. A dog that bites a child may perceive the child as being lower in status than itself because it has witnessed the child being maltreated by other family members.





Guilt



It’s bad enough for a family to be burdened with guilt over all the mistakes and injuries that have occurred in it over time—even across generations. But the narrow psychological path out of guilt is more painful than the guilt itself. It’s a classic situation in which the cure is more painful than the symptom. That’s why alcoholics and addicts, for example, remain stuck in their addictions. The cure is too painful compared to the relative ease of denial and self-destruction. For the dreaded cure is nothing other than repentance, penance, and forgiveness.

To understand this, you need to realize that any damage that was ever done to you has in turn led you to damage others. Those who are hated learn to hate; those who are abused learn, if not to abuse, at least to hold on to anger, a lack of trust, and an unconscious desire for revenge.

But if you allow yourself to step outside your own identity and to feel sorrow for the pain others experience because of the damage that you have done to them, then you will be ready to find healing from the damage that was done to you in the first place. In other words, it’s the sorrow for others—out of true love—that makes it possible to accept that terrible, painful “cure” for your own guilt.





Growth



The beginning of the solution to all family problems is to realize that just as plants can’t grow in chalky soil unless you add to the soil whatever is needed to make it healthy, so children—and husbands and wives—can’t grow unless you give them whatever support and encouragement they need to become independent and responsible. No one can grow in the “chalky soil” of pre-existing desires and expectations. And what a child or spouse needs might not be what you had expected—or wanted.

It’s unfortunate, but parents who do not raise their children with truly unselfish love thereby contribute to the child’s tendency to fall into perversion in seeking acceptance from the world—and then these wounded children have their own children who start the cycle all over again.

Therefore, it’s important for all family members to be aware of what other members are experiencing, and healthy communication within a family becomes an essential element of this awareness.

All too often, communication becomes unhealthy and takes the form of unconscious anger through
•

sarcasm;

•

innuendoes and hints;

•

not saying anything at all.


In contrast, healthy communication is direct, immediate, and clear, and it is a good model for learning healthy assertiveness. It depends on Facts, Opinions, Emotions, and Needs.


An Example

Facts

I had an important appointment this morning, and when I got in the car I found that you had left it with barely enough gas to get to the gas station. Stopping for gas made me late.

Opinions

I believe that none of us should park the car at night if it’s almost out of gas.

Emotions

The whole experience left me feeling irritated and frustrated.

Needs

I need to be able to leave in the morning without having to deal with unnecessary delays, and I need the car to have a reasonable amount of gas in it at all times, no matter who used it last.


Note also that, in most Western cultures, women have been socialized to depend on emotions as the basis for communication while men have been socialized to depend on thinking and intellect for communication. This gender-based communication bias can cause considerable problems. For example,
•


a woman might seek emotional support and a man will offer an intellectual problem-solving response, or



•

a man might seek concrete information (“just the facts”) and a woman will offer an emotional response.



Quite often men are socialized to be aggressive and hostile in their communication, but when women try to attain “equity” with men through aggression and hostility, it only makes matters worse, not better, because then all communication degenerates into endless arguments and rebuttals, and the underlying emotions get trampled underfoot on the battleground.



Therefore, remember that healthy communication generally involves both emotions and facts, unless the situation (e.g., an emergency) specifically requires one side or the other (e.g., emotions) to be suppressed.





Physical

Affection



Many years ago, just about the time that I was becoming interested in psychology, a nurse in my physician’s office suffered the sudden death of her father. Just out of kindness, I sent her a sympathy card. The next time I saw her, not too long thereafter, she ran up to me, threw her arms around me, and gave me a big hug. I almost fainted. The fact that an attractive, blond nurse was putting her arms around me was one thing, but the real surprise—as odd as it sounds—was that no one had ever given me such an innocent, spontaneous hug before.

Needless to say, that hug initiated a radical change in my life. It opened both my heart and my intellect to an awareness of the origins of my own behavior.



In the early 1960s, H. F. Harlow’s experiments with monkeys showed that when physical contact was withheld from infant monkeys, they became fearful, withdrawn, and apathetic.

And we know now that the same is true for human infants. Without physical affection, infants cease to thrive.



I was raised with all the affection an infant needs. My family, however, was not an emotionally open family. Yes, we were close, and we did everything together. But, beyond infancy and early childhood, aside from a handshake or a kiss on the cheek, I never learned to touch or be touched.

Fortunately, once I saw the problem, I had the emotional and intellectual resources to remedy it. I learned how bodily awareness relates to emotional awareness. And I learned how to hug. Many children, though, are not so fortunate. Lacking touch and emotional spontaneity in their families, they don’t even know how to recognize their own emotional experiences. They repress their emotions, they suffer psychosomatic illnesses, and they confuse a need for simple physical affection with sexual desire.

So, in order to develop emotional intimacy, children need to be touched and caressed. Surprisingly enough, it can all begin with one hug.



A lack of physical affection and emotional intimacy can cause great psychological pain to a child. Moreover, this emotional pain can persist even into adulthood as the underlying cause of social dysfunction. These emotional wounds can be healed in psychotherapy, but the healing doesn’t happen by receiving hugs from your psychotherapist; the healing occurs through your talking about the pain of not having received affection from your parents.




Clinical Considerations

When an infant perceives its mother as consistently protective and nurturing, it will actively seek out contact with her. In psychological language, a child who demonstrates this kind of comfort with its mother is said to be securely attached to her.

Impediments to a secure attachment can manifest in several ways. There can be an avoidance of contact, as exhibited by withdrawal, inhibition, or hypervigilance; there can be a resistance to contact, as exhibited by pushing others away, hitting and slapping them, or angry outbursts; and there can be indiscriminate sociability, as exhibited by excessive familiarity with strangers, or a lack of selectivity in choosing attachment figures.

These impediments can result because the child has been physically, sexually, or emotionally abused, or, even more specifically, has been witness to domestic violence or has suffered the emotional betrayal and confusion of a mother who abuses drugs or alcohol.

Insecure attachment styles can be diagnosed as Reactive Attachment Disorder if the cause of the non-attachment can be attributed to pathogenic care: persistent disregard for the child’s emotional or physical needs, or repeated changes of primary caregiver (as in foster care).





Discipline:

Overview

of

Behavioral

Techniques



Techniques of behavioral psychology offer many different ways to shape a child’s behavior so that it becomes obedient to the values the parents want to teach. This shaping can happen through strategies to increase selected behaviors or to decrease selected behaviors.


Increasing Behaviors through Reinforcement

There are two ways to increase a particular behavior; one is called positive reinforcement and the other is called negative reinforcement.

Positive Reinforcement occurs when you give something in response to your child’s behavior. What you give can be pleasant, such as a reward of money or food, or unpleasant, such as a verbal reprimand.

For positive reinforcement to be effective it must
•

follow the child’s behavior,

•

be delivered immediately after the child’s behavior,

•

be large enough to be significant to the child,

•

be consistently applied, and

•

have verbal clarification.


Negative Reinforcement occurs when you take away something in response to your child’s behavior. This can be a hard concept to understand, so consider the example of relieving a child from washing the dinner dishes after you have noticed that he or she just completed a special report for school. The idea here is that in being relieved of an unwanted task the child will be motivated to keep doing well in school. Even though taking away the task may seem like a reward, it technically involves removing something, so it is a “negative” reinforcement.


Decreasing Behaviors through Punishment and Other Methods

Several psychological methods can be used to decrease a particular behavior.

Overcorrection is a two-step process which involves first making restitution for the undesired behavior, and then performing correct behaviors. For example, a child might be required to pick up all the clothes from the floor of her bedroom and then to clean the floors of all the rooms in the house.

Time Out involves removing positive reinforcement for a brief, specified time. For example, each time a child has a temper tantrum, he can be sent to a place away from family activity (such as a chair across the room) and ignored for a short time (such as 30 seconds). For more details, see below. Note that locking the child in a closet, for example, is abuse, not a healthy form of psychological correction, and serves no good. And sending a child to his or her room as a so-called “time out” can, ironically, be perceived by many children as a form of reward.

Extinction is a technique to decrease a previously reinforced behavior by removing the reinforcement for it. A parent won’t have much use for this technique—unless you happen to read this section and find out that you have been unwittingly reinforcing a bad behavior and now want to remedy it. For example, you might stop giving attention to a child when she performs the undesirable behavior.

Differential Reinforcement involves positively reinforcing all behaviors except the unwanted behavior. Like extinction, this technique is unlikely to be used by a parent. Unlike extinction, this technique requires you to actually give something to a child for all behaviors except the undesired behavior during a certain time period.

Punishment occurs when you do something (which the child finds to be unpleasant) in response to your child’s behavior. An example would be removing driving privileges or adding extra tasks for a child to perform in response to a speeding ticket—all with the goal of decreasing unsafe driving habits.

For punishment to be effective, it must
•

follow the child’s behavior,

•

be delivered immediately after the child’s behavior,

•

hurt enough to be significant to the child,

•

be consistently applied, and

•

have verbal clarification.


The average person, untrained in psychology, often misunderstands the simplicity and benefits of punishment, so this leads to the next section . . .




Punishment—

and

Values



As long as families have to exist in a permissive culture, psychologically healthy families need more than healthy communication. Children also need to be punished when they have done something wrong. After all, punishment is a part of the reconciliation process, and unpunished guilt can cause psychological problems of its own.

As I said in the previous section, punishment is just a simple psychological technique to decrease specific behavior. But to be effective, it must be used properly. The punishment, then, must be just: it must be consistent, fair, and adequate to the transgression. And it must be tempered with mercy.



In its psychological sense, mercy means to withhold some—or all—of the punishment demanded by justice if the guilty person shows deep sorrow for his or her behavior.



But this is just the easy part. A parent can’t expect to administer punishment by remaining uninvolved. In fact, to administer punishment is to get involved.



Don’t expect to take away a child’s driving privileges and then say, “Well, you need to drive to school, so you can use the car for that. Just come home right after school.” What child couldn’t see through that nonsense—and learn to abuse it immediately? So wake up. You will have to drive your child to and from school, no matter what the inconvenience to you.

Don’t expect to confine a child to the house and then expect that you can come and go, leaving the child alone in the house, while saying “Don’t go anywhere.” Wake up again. You will have to stay home and monitor your child, never letting him or her leave your sight. Homework must be done under your supervision, not alone in a bedroom. Meals must be eaten together. Entertainment must be in your presence. Everything must be done in your presence, and, as a result—like it or not—you will be drawn closer to your child.

Sound hard? Well, that’s why there are so many family problems: the parents are always too busy to really get involved in the punishment. In the end, you have to accept the fact that the punishment will hurt the parent as much as the child. If it doesn’t, it will never be effective.



Finally, parents cannot provide healthy punishment unless they themselves live by healthy values—courage, integrity, and responsibility, for example—that they can pass on to their children through teaching and action.



Sadly enough, most adolescent “acting out” derives from the fact that many parents’ values aren’t really grounded in a deep devotion to something greater than themselves, such as religious faith. And so the adolescent in effect says, “Your values are all a fraud. They’re arbitrary. So why should I do what you say? It’s not fair. I’ll do what I want because my desires are just as valid as any of yours.”



As strange as it might seem, a permissive parent who fails to administer discipline actually causes a child to fear punishment and to associate it with irrational violence. These fears can become so strong that the child actually engages in violence as an unconscious plea to be punished for an unspoken, aching sense of guilt for other acts that were never justly punished.


Guidelines for Punishment

1. The best form of punishment (removing something to decrease a specific behavior) is time out. But, for this to work, there has to be in place both a system of positive recognition and a clear set of family rules. With these in place, “time out” then becomes the response of choice when the child breaks a rule: the child is removed from the positive family activity in such a way that he or she can still witness it while being excluded from it. For example, if a child swears, the parent responds—in a neutral tone, not angrily—“That’s a time out.” The child then goes to the time-out location, such as a chair on the other side of the room, and is ignored by everyone else. Then, after about 30 seconds, the parent says OK and calls the child back. And then the parent must offer positive recognition to the child, such as by giving a hug and saying, “I like the way you accepted the time out so willingly and how, even though you felt angry, you handled your frustration very well.”

2. Any infliction of punishment can easily become abuse, in which the punisher takes pleasure in the punishment. In terms of parental-child discipline, this is clearly not acceptable. Period. Many adults use the excuse that the abuse they inflict on children is “punishment,” but this is just a smoke-screen to hide the adult’s unconscious sadism—or sado-eroticism, for sadly enough many adults derive a sort of perverse erotic pleasure in inflicting pain on children.

3. Physical punishment can also be an “easy way out” for a parent who has botched up the whole job of parental discipline all along and tries to “save face” once in a while by lashing out at the child. I feel sorry for any children in these circumstances because there really isn’t anything that can help them. They will be wounded for life. The lucky ones will seek psychotherapy as adults, and the unlucky ones will end up in prison—or in their own private hell of drugs and alcohol or whatever.

4. As for “just” punishment, I personally cannot see any reason for punishment that involves a series of repeated blows, as in caning (whether with a cane or a belt) or with “spanking” as it is commonly conceived. So for older children the punishment should be focused on the removal of privileges or perhaps the assignment of extra tasks. For younger children in circumstances involving obstinate behavior, rather than simple childish desires, a gentle whack on the butt, along with a strong “No!” can be quite effective. But even this has to be done in compassion. And it needs to be done only once. If the child doesn’t get the idea with one whack, then something else is going on, and the parent needs to re-evaluate the whole situation.

According to California law, striking a child anywhere other than on the butt, or with an instrument (such as a paddle), constitutes child abuse.





Shaping

Positive

Behavior:

The

Best

Way



He was a “latchkey kid.” That is, he came home from school to an empty house while both his parents were still working. He spent his time watching TV and neglected his homework. When his parents came home, his mother was too tired to do anything with him, and his father blew up at him in anger. The child became disruptive in his classes; he began to set fires and to shoplift. He was given medication for ADHD. It seemed there was nothing he could do right. Nothing, that is, except play video games.

Maybe he couldn’t sit still in school, but he could focus his attention for hours on the games, achieving advanced levels of play. He was one of the best.

So how do we understand this?

Well, the video games offered three things that were sadly missing in his family:

•

Clear Rules. He knew exactly what he had to do to get points and exactly what would happen if he made any mistakes.

•

Rewards for good behavior. As long as he followed the rules, he earned his points. Immediately.

•

Punishment for breaking the rules. If he did make a mistake, the game punished him for it. But the punishment was never critical or belittling. It was just a fact: You did this, so this is the cost. And then the game resumed.

So what can we learn from this? Well, several things.

1. Families need rules of conduct that are clearly stated. This includes the no’s (no swearing, no hitting, no lying, etc.) and the do’s (do your homework, come to dinner clean and on time, go to bed at the appointed time, etc.).



Needless to say—although in today’s world it may be necessary to say it anyway—the parents must abide by the same rules as the children. Period.



2. Families need to give children positive recognition. Like the child in the story above, many children are ignored until they do something wrong, so they unconsciously are motivated to strive for even negative attention just to get some attention. But a healthy family will give a child positive recognition (a) for behavior that tends toward the desired behavior and (b) for not breaking the rules:

I like the way you [hung up your jacket, did your homework, helped your sister, etc.]. That shows [consideration for others, integrity, compassion, etc.].

I notice that you haven’t [fought with your sister, used swear words, thrown a tantrum, etc.]. Thank you for [being kind, having good manners, using self-control, etc.].

Note that this positive recognition, though largely verbal, is best offered with affectionate touching as well.



Some theories of dealing with difficult children advocate the use of a credit system, or token economy, in the school classroom and in the family. Such systems, however, tend to reduce human interactions to the level of commodities to be purchased. Token economies may be necessary in classrooms to keep order, but in families, though they may seem to be convenient, they ultimately subvert the deeper values of life.



3. Families need a fair and defined way to punish broken rules. But the punishment must be clean—it cannot be given in anger, and it cannot belittle or shame the child.





Death,

Dying,

and

Bereavement



Everyone has heard of the predicament of a person who receives a diagnosis of a terminal illness and is given only several months to live.

You might then stop to ask yourself, “What if I had only six months to live? What would I do now?” Unfortunately, the usual answer is something like, “I would sell everything and take that trip to Tahiti I’ve been dreaming about all my life.” I say “unfortunately” because such an answer does little to get at the real spiritual and human point of the matter.

Better to ask, “What would I do if I had only six hours to live?”

What would you do? And what would you do if you knew your parents or your children or your spouse had only six hours to live?

Notice that the Five Stages of Dying identified by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross [5] are based on a life that is unprepared for death:
1.

Denial

2.

Anger

3.

Bargaining

4.

Depression

5.

Acceptance


The truth of the matter is that a life unprepared to die—or unprepared for the death of someone close—is not much of a life in the first place. It’s a life whose first impulse is denial. It’s a life just waiting to be slapped in the face with trauma. In contrast, some of the saints lived lives of perfect joy and peace because they lived as if they were dying in every moment.

So, to have a family life that is truly intimate, learn to talk about death. Learn to ask “What would you do if . . . ?” questions. Learn to walk out the door with the awareness that you might not come back. Because it might be the last thing you ever do.


Fear of Death

Talking about death can be difficult for many individuals because they have their own unspoken fear of death. This fear of death can take on several dimensions, and each dimension has its own particular questions that need to be explored and prepared for before you can be at peace about your own death.

Contemplate the questions that follow and prepare yourself for the various possibilities. Even though you won’t be able to control anything after you die, while you are alive you can (a) make legal plans; (b) discuss issues with others; (c) alter your current attitudes; and (d) change your current behaviors.

1. The body dying. “What will I feel at the moment of death? Will it be gentle or will there be bodily pain and suffering?”

2. The body after death. “What will happen to my body? Who will touch it? Will my body be treated with respect or lack of respect?”

3. Possessions and wealth after death. “What will become of my possessions and wealth? Who will handle my possessions? Will they be treated with care and respect? What will happen to my financial assets? Who will acquire them? For what purposes will they be used?”

4. Relatives, friends, and acquaintances. “How will those who know me be affected by my death?”

5. The soul. “Will I experience anything after death? Is there a continuation of consciousness as some persons claim? Is there a God? Will I be judged for my actions in life? Will I experience reward or punishment because of my actions in life?”


Bereavement

Mourning after the death of someone close, clinically diagnosed as Bereavement, actually takes a full year, because you have to live through a full cycle of holidays, anniversaries, and birthdays—and ultimately the anniversary of the death itself—without the loved one.

The process of bereavement can also have many symptoms in common with a Major Depressive Episode, such as feelings of sadness, along with insomnia, poor appetite, and weight loss. The diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder generally would not be given to a grieving individual unless these symptoms are still present 2 months after the loss and the full criteria for the diagnosis are met. Remember what I said in the above paragraph: the bereavement cycle takes a whole year—so if you are still crying over the loss at nine months, but if you do not meet all the criteria for major depression, then you are simply still grieving, and a clinical diagnosis is not warranted.

Here is a comparison of normal bereavement with clinical depression:

Bereavement

Major Depression

The survivor may feel guilt about actions taken or not taken at the time of the death.

Guilt extends beyond actions around the death.

The survivor may feel that he or she would be better off dead or should have died with the loved one.

Thoughts of death extend beyond an identification with the deceased.

The survivor may feel empty and useless.

There are morbid feelings of worthlessness.

The survivor may feel lethargic or move slowly.

There is obvious and considerable psychomotor retardation.

The survivor may lose interest in work and daily tasks or experience them as a heavy burden.

There is obvious and considerable functional impairment.

The survivor may think that he or she hears the voice of the deceased person or sees the transient image of the deceased person.

Hallucinatory experiences extend beyond thoughts of the loved one.

When depression complicates bereavement, the root of the problem is often unrecognized anger toward the deceased. The dynamics are quite simple: one part of you feels anger for all the hurt the deceased ever caused you, and consequently you feel relief for—and even satisfied by—the death. But another part of you, which cannot accept the “scandal” of being angry with someone you love, feels guilty about your relief. So you end up unconsciously turning your anger against yourself. And that’s what depression is: anger turned inwards. Once the anger is recognized for what it is, and once you can accept honestly all the positive qualities and the shortcomings of the deceased, then you can forgive the person—and the depression dissolves.



Anger at the deceased may not always be turned inwards, as in depression, but it may also be felt as irritability. In this case you may feel that you have been cheated—or victimized—by the death, and you may find yourself expressing this feeling with complaints of being poorly treated and with subtle (or not so subtle) acts of hostility toward others.







The

Loss

of

Innocence



Once a child is born, its continued survival depends entirely on someone to feed it and care for it. So it comes to expect the world to be caring. And as the child grows and develops, its mental health and sanity depend on the innocent belief that the world is not completely irrational and hostile.

So what is a parent to do when social violence and natural disasters around the world shatter the child’s sense of innocence?

1. Don’t try to hide anything from the child. Parents sometimes believe that if they don’t talk about tragedies then it will protect a child from fear. But children, in one way or another, know as much, if not more, about what is happening in the world than their parents. So not talking about an event only increases a child’s inner, unspoken anxiety. And parental silence “tells” the child that the parent can’t be a source of trust and support.

2. Talk about the event from the child’s perspective. Parents often believe that “talking about” something means telling the child what they themselves believe. But usually, the parents are more anxious than the child, and so they end up making the child anxious. The fact is, children think about things that might not even occur to an adult. For example, hearing that an entire family was killed in a terrorist attack, a young child might not be concerned at all about his or her own death in a similar situation but might be worried about who will take care of the family cat that will be left alone in the house without food if anything happened to the family. Therefore, to “talk about” something with a child, it is necessary for the parent to listen carefully to the child’s concerns and help the child understand the meaning of those concerns.

3. Help the child express emotions. Children need help putting complex emotions into words. By listening carefully to the child’s concerns, parents can help the child distinguish anger from fear from anxiety from vulnerability from frustration from sadness and so on. Of course, you, the adult, are perfectly capable of sorting out your own emotions, aren’t you? Aren’t you?

4. Don’t overwhelm—or brainwash—the child with your own anxiety. Parents who become overly protective of a child after a tragedy only instill a sense of paranoia in the child. If a child is kidnapped in your city, bolting the doors, keeping the drapes closed, and refusing to let your child out of the house only cause additional trauma in your child.

5. Speak of positive and good things. Bad things happen, yes, but far more good things happen each day. Thousands of airplanes take off and land every day without incident. Hundreds of millions of children go about their lives every day without getting hit by cars, abducted, or shot at. Teach your child to trust in the good, not to fear the bad.

6. “Why do bad things happen?” Parents often freeze when a child asks this question—or they offer a cynical answer that reflects their own bitterness. Here’s the best and simplest answer of all:
God is love, and God created the world to share that love with us. But love can’t be commanded; if we are to love, we must love by our own free will, and that means we must have the capacity to not love. Therefore, God gave us free will, and with it came the freedom both to love and also to reject love and do evil. So the more you see evil around you, the more you should be reminded to love from your own heart.





Family

Therapy



Family therapy requires a counselor who can listen closely to the family’s communication patterns and intervene to break through dysfunctional communication styles so as to facilitate healthy, honest interactions. Forgiveness is also an element involved in healing family wounds.

This same style of counseling can be applied to organizational situations.





Special

Hint



I’m always deeply saddened when someone attempts to discourage a child’s behavior by saying, “You don’t want to do that.” But of course the child wants to do that! It’s perfectly obvious he wants to do it, or he wouldn’t be trying. So why confuse the child by denying what you both know is perfectly true?

Here, then, is a special hint on how to say “No” to a child without causing psychological hurt. You do this by acknowledging what the child wants and then, without making the child feel guilty or bad simply for having childish desires, explain why the child cannot have what he or she wants.

To a young child say the following:

I know you want to [have some candy, play in the water, chase the birds, whatever . . .] and there are times when you can’t always have what you want because other good things have to come first.

To an older child (or another adult, for that matter) try saying something like this:

I know that you really would like to [stay out past dark, bungee jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, or whatever . . .] and [the danger of getting mugged, the law, insurance regulations, etc.] just won’t allow it.

The point of such statements is to show the child (a) that you recognize and respect the child’s desire and (b) that since the world is filled with conflicting desires, one’s own desires can’t always be fulfilled. This is an important lesson for children to learn. (Too bad most adults haven’t learned it.)

Said in another way, it’s not that the child’s desire is wrong, it’s simply that, because the world is unfair, all desires cannot always be fulfilled. It’s important to learn that apparent “evil” is, in many cases, simply the conflict between two “goods.” This is why you use the word and, rather than but, between the two parts of your statement.

Boy forced to live with father 'because mother's parenting deficient'

A judge who ordered a boy to go and live with his father against his wishes did so because the mother’s parenting was “deficient” and she had allowed her son “too much power” over the custody battle, court documents show.
Judge Bond said the mother had failed to portray her ex-husband in good light, thereby turning the boy against his father at an age when he was too young to understand.

The boy, of secondary school age, whose parents split when he was a baby, had told the judge that he did not want to leave his mother and would “punch and kick” if told to move.

However, earlier this month he ruled that the child, known only as R, should change schools and go and live with his father and stepmother.

The decision was upheld in the Court of Appeal on Thursday by Lord Justice Wall, even though he acknowledged the change for the boy would be “cataclysmic”.

The boy has been given until Monday before arrangements are made for him to uproot his life.

A copy of Judge Bond’s ruling, seen by The Daily Telegraph, showed the extent to which each party had struggled to gain custody of their son.

Both have been embroiled in a legal dispute since R was two years old. A guardian for the boy was appointed in 2006 to represent his interests in court.

In the documents, the mother-of-one claimed her ex-husband was an “aggressive bully” who had threatened her verbally and emotionally while they were together.

In response, the father said she had poisoned their son towards him on purpose so they would not have a relationship.

At one stage, the father did not see R for six years, and when they did spent time together, the boy “would not admit” to enjoying himself and become withdrawn.

The father, representing himself, said he wanted proper access to his son or would break contact completely.

Judge Bond, sitting at Bournemouth District Registry, said: “The absence of a relationship with his father and paternal family is a serious loss to R.

“The guardian submits that the father can meet R’s emotional needs whereas the mother is unable to meet his emotional need for a relationship with his father. I agree.”

He said the mother had not helped her son form an attachment with his father, and had sent him on visits with “food, water, a pillow, a blanket and a cup for his tooth brush. I agree that these actions of the mother do not help R to settle in his father’s home”.

He went on: “The issue is the capacity of the relevant adults to relieve R of his present emotional turmoil and to achieve a healthy relationship with both sides of his family.

“The evidence and expert opinion suggests that the father and S are more likely to be successful.

“The mother’s parenting is deficient is deficient in that she cannot bring herself to promote a good image of the father. She has allowed R too much power in this situation.”

Giving evidence earlier this year, the mother told the court: “R and I will be back to the desperate years when I had no choice but to submit to the applicant’s ever demanding threats.

“I have always tried to protect R from witnessing the aggressive bullying and dominance of his father”.

However, in his evidence, the father said his son had relaxed and enjoyed his company, when he allowed himself.

Referring to the way the couple acted in court, Judge Bond decided that: “The father as at the previous hearings, conducted his case with skill and determination.”

However, he was far more sceptical about the mother who appeared in the witness box on several occasions.

“She was apparently more reasonable (this time) but I was left with the impression that she had become more skilled at dealing with process of litigation rather than revealing a genuine change in her attitude to the father and the issue of R’s contact.”

In his concluding remarks, Judge Bond said: “To remove a child from his mother in any circumstances is a very serious step. R has lived with his mother all his life.

“The effect of a decision to change residence upon the mother will be severe. R will be aware of that.

“It is clear that R has been the subject of litigation for much of his life.

The court heard difficulties arose over the boy’s use of his mobile phone when visiting his father.

The judge agreed with the father that it was wrong for the boy to feel he had to conceal his mobile phone from him. “I do not think that the mother behaved responsibly about this,” the judge said.

Another dispute arose over the boy’s passport, the judge said. The father claimed his name and address had been scribbled out, apparently by his son. The mother denied the claim, and said she had inserted a sticky label, on which was written the father’s address.

The judge found it probable that the boy had obliterated the father’s address after he had returned from France. Such an action seemed to be “consistent with his alienation, as I find, from his father.”

The court heard the mother had claimed her son would not be able to cope with a walking holiday in Slovenia that the father had arranged because the boy had a problem with his feet.

The judge found the mother’s attitude “curious” as she agreed that generally the boy was “physically active”.

The judge said the boy did not join the walking holiday and “there was no physical reason for this.” A consultant orthopaedic surgeon found the boy had flat feet but the condition was not serious.
To Learn More click Here