What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [115]
The Inner Child
The centerpiece of my discussion here is the philosophy of the “recovery movement,” the widely popular view that adult problems are caused by childhood mistreatment. I criticize this view on both factual and moral grounds, though I am addressing it in order to be constructive. I want to underscore the theme of this book: that you can make major changes all throughout adulthood if you know the ways of changing that actually work.
Many failings of adult life are currently blamed on the misfortunes of childhood. Depression in mid-life is blamed on the punishment meted out by parents decades before. In her 1991 best-seller, Patti Davis, Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s daughter, blames her current troubles on her parents. She highlights being slapped in the face by her mother when she was eight, and she blames both her mother and her father for not giving her enough love because they were too much in love with each other (this is the First Family, no less). In the larger society, inability to love is blamed on sexual abuse by an uncle, a father, or a brother. The talk shows buzz with tearful recountings of childhood incest and sexual molestation. Your beating up on your kids is blamed on your father beating up on you. Indeed, the basic premise of the recovery movement is that bad events in childhood cripple adult life. But, the movement promises us, this is curable. By coming to grips with those early traumas, we can restore our health and sanity.1
Farquhar is a troubled thirty-year-old; angry, depressed, and guilt-ridden. He remembers a time when he was three: He refused to go to bed and screamed “I hate you” to his mother. His father, enraged, grabbed him and shouted, “You have violated God’s Fifth Commandment: ‘Honor thy father and thy mother.’” Little Farquhar felt guilt and shame, and now grown-up Farquhar, wounded, still carries this “toxic guilt” around. By doing “inner child” exercises, Farquhar rids himself of this burden. He phones his father (now seventy-two) and discharges his anger. He relives all the pain and guilt, and in his mind he divorces his father and mother.2
Here are the twin premises of the inner-child recovery movement:
Bad events in childhood exert major influence on adulthood.
Coming to grips with those events undoes their influence.
These premises are enshrined in film and theater. The biggest psychological hit of 1991 was the film version of Pat Conroy’s lyrical novel The Prince of Tides, in which Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte), an alcoholic football coach, has been fired from his job, and is cold to his wife and little girls. He and his sister were raped twenty-five years before as kids. He tearfully confesses this to Dr. Susan Lowenstein (Barbra Streisand), a New York psychoanalyst, and thereby recovers his ability to feel, to coach, and to control his drinking. His sister, presumably, would also recover from her suicidal schizophrenia if she could only relive the rape. The audience is in tears. The audience seems to have no doubt about the premises.
But I do.
The Power of Childhood
It is an easy matter to believe that childhood events hold sway over what kind of an adult you become. The evidence seems to be right before your eyes. The kids of smart parents turn out to be smart; it must be all those books and good conversations. Kids from broken homes often divorce; they must have lacked good “role models” for how to love enough. Kids who were sexually abused often become frightened pessimists; little wonder, they found the world a frightful place. Kids of alcoholics often turn out alcoholic; they learned uncontrolled drinking at their father’s knee. The kids of authoritarian parents turn out authoritarian. The kids of basketball players and musicians turn out to have these talents. Kids who were beaten by their parents beat up their own kids.
As persuasive as they seem, these observations are hopelessly confounded. Yes, these people