What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [117]
The recovery movement enlarges on these precedents. Recovery gives you a whole series of new and more consoling explanations for setbacks. Personal troubles, you’re told, do not result as feared from your own sloth, insensitivity, selfishness, dishonesty, self-indulgence, stupidity, or lust. No, they stem from the way you were mistreated as a child. You can blame your parents, your brother, your teachers, your minister, as well as your sex and race and age. These kinds of explanations make you feel better. They shift the blame to others, thereby raising self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. They lower guilt and shame. To experience this shift in perspective is like seeing shafts of sunlight slice through the clouds after endless cold, gray days.
We have become victims, “survivors” of abuse, rather than “failures” and “losers.” This helps us get along better with others. We are now underdogs, trying to fight our way back from misfortune. In our gentle society, everyone roots for the underdog. No one dares speak ill of victims anymore. The usual wages of failure—contempt and pity—are transmuted into support and compassion.
So the inner-child premises are deep in their appeal: They are democratic, they are consoling, they raise our self-esteem, and they gain us new friends. Small wonder so many people in pain espouse them.
Do Childhood Events Influence Adult Personality?
Flushed with enthusiasm for the belief that childhood had great impact on adult development, many researchers eagerly sought support. They expected to find massive evidence for the destructive effects of bad childhood events such as parental death, divorce, physical illness, beatings, neglect, and sexual abuse on the adulthood of the victims. Large-scale surveys of adult mental health and childhood loss were conducted. Prospective studies of childhood loss on later adult life were done (these take years and cost a fortune). Some evidence appeared—but not much. If your mother dies before you are eleven, you are somewhat more depressive in adulthood—but not a lot more depressive, and only if you are female, and only in about half the studies. A father’s dying had no measurable impact. If you are firstborn, your IQ is higher than your sibs—but by less than one point, on average. If your parents divorce (we must exclude the studies that don’t even bother with control groups of undivorced families), there is a slight disruptive effect on later childhood and adolescence. But the problems wane as children grow up, and they may not be detectable in adulthood.3
The major traumas of childhood, it was shown, may have some influence on adult personality, but the influence is barely detectable. These reports threatened one of the bulwarks of environmentalism. Bad childhood events, contrary to the credo, do not mandate adult troubles—far from it. There is no justification, according to these studies, for blaming your adult depression, anxiety, bad marriage, drug use, sexual problems, unemployment, beating up your children, alcoholism, or anger on what happened to you as a child.4
Most of these studies were methodologically inadequate anyway. They failed, in their enthusiasm for human plasticity, to control for genes. It simply did not occur to their devisers, blinded by ideology, that criminal parents might pass on criminal genes, and that both the felonies of criminals’ children and how badly criminals mistreat their children might stem from genes rather than mistreatment. There are now studies that do control for genes: One kind looks at the adult personalities of identical twins reared apart; another looks at the adult personalities of adopted children and compares their personalities with those of their