What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [120]
If your child is abused or if you were abused, my best advice is to turn the volume down as soon as possible. Reliving the experience repeatedly may retard the natural healing.
Thus the first inner-child premise—that childhood events have a major influence on adult personality—does not stand up to scrutiny. Only a few childhood events, like the death of your mother, have any documented influence on adult emotional life. And their influence is surprisingly small, particularly when compared to the effect of genes on adult personality. “Toxic shame” and “toxic guilt” in adulthood, instilled by parental abuse, are inventions of the recovery movement. When careful investigators look closely and analyze the route, they do not find evidence that shame and guilt cause the adult problems. There is some evidence that parental abuse leads to troubles in adulthood—bad marriages, for example—but not via guilt or shame. The cause is more drastic, as in the statistically well documented scenario in which bad parental abuse leads to a little girl’s placement in a residential nursery. When she reaches puberty, she has no place to go. She escapes by teenage pregnancy or by an early, impulsive marriage, the sort that usually don’t last. Then there are those instances in which a difficult girl causes ill-tempered parenting. That also results in her becoming a difficult grown-up. Such women marry mousy men, who withdraw from them. Their marriages then fall apart.9
Another fashionable candidate for major influence on adult personality is childhood sexual abuse. This case is, at best, unproven.10 Traumatic events, like brutal sexual abuse, exert destructive effects on later life. But childhood trauma is not more destructive than adult trauma. If anything, children heal better than do adults. Put simply, the case for childhood trauma—in anything but its most brutal form—influencing adult personality is in the minds of the inner-child advocates. It is not to be found in the data.
The Flashbulb or the Snowball
Here is the single most surprising fact about child rearing and childhood events: Study after study has shown that the interfamilial variance in personality is about the same as the intrafamilial variance—once you control for genes. (Practice saying this and you can take the life out of any cocktail party.) Translated into English, this means that, on average, the personalities of any two children from the same family turn out to be about as different from each other as they are from the personality of any random child—once you control for genes.11
Childhood events seem so important because we have one and only one model in mind: the flashbulb. We have long assumed that these episodes explode brightly and so are foundational because they are so vivid. This model does not fit the facts. Here is a model that fits better: the snowball. When two rocks start rolling off the top of a snowy hill, very small initial differences get bigger and bigger as the snowballs gather momentum. A small depression on the hill can also alter the trajectory enormously. Small, early variations in direction and small deviations along the path develop into big differences by the time the snowballs have bumped their way to the bottom of the hill.12
Take Joan and Sarah, two little sisters, six and seven, growing up in the Marquez household. They share 50 percent of their genes and seem quite similar. They are slightly different in athletic ability. Joan is a bit stronger than Sarah. When it comes to choosing teammates for tug-of-war in the first grade, Joan always gets picked before Sarah. Sarah comes away from