A Case Study Life

There seems to be a trend now, which I generally applaud, to fling open that closet door and let the skeletons scatter where and how they will. Another aspect is to speak aloud many words, naming issues and illnesses which have been hidden and ignored for much too long. For example, mental and emotional illness and issues, every form and level of abuse and many types and levels of dysfunctional families and lives.

It’s taken me a very long time to get here. However I belatedly realize that my experiences and the things I hid for decades, often even from myself, need to be brought into the light of day. It can be embarrassing, uncomfortable and certainly very difficult but that cannot stop my efforts. If just one person who is feeling alone and isolated due to their early life realizes they are not all alone in the world and unique in their personal tragedies, then I feel my effort worthwhile.

I’ve come across a lot of books, some new and some old, in the last several years and find myself in a peculiar “case study” that combines aspects from them all. First of all, I am an eldest daughter and one who was the only child for eight and a half years. This birth status, even more for girls than boys, creates a unique personality and some traits that seem to be almost universal among that group. ⁽¹⁾ That in itself is not such a difficult situation to deal with and modify enough to get along reasonably well with one’s life. But my case study adds several other matters!

The next perhaps is a fairly new syndrome or phenomenon called “Toxic Enmeshment.” I am sure there are one or more books but I’ve just read shorter essays and dissertations on the subject so far. A search on the term will turn up many of these. This occurs in families where for any of a variety of reasons, individuality is suppressed if not completely squelched so there is group-think, an extreme us-vs-them paradigm and a general withdrawal from outside interactions until no member really knows whether emotions, ideas or anything else is “theirs” or the group’s. Several horrible examples of this have appeared in the news lately where parents have subjected their children to total horrors. The opportunities for all sorts of abuses are completely inherent in this situation.

This usually seems to come about through the dominance of one parent or one member of the family who by the force of their personality and any of many forms of manipulation and coercion such as threats, bullying, or brainwashing binds everyone in a nearly irresistible net. If that person is also narcissistic, seriously unbalanced in some ways or living under various neuroses or psychoses such as bi-polar disorder, various delusions, schizophrenia and paranoia, etc. one has a huge can of wicked worms!

Another similar situation has been identified and discussed at some length. It is called “Emotional Incest” ⁽²⁾ and normally involves a parent and a child of the opposite sex. The child is very rarely physically assaulted or molested but is drawn into a quasi-spouse role where the parent is very controlling, alternatively demanding, abusive, very supportive and complimentary, using sympathy or pitiful dependency and often playing this child against the real spouse in many underhanded and divisive ways. It plays very well in conjunction with the eldest daughter situation.

Another book, Toxic Parents ⁽³⁾ skirts along the edges of these and various other generally very closely held and hidden situations where one or both parents seriously damage their children by neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse or other warped and twisted forms of family dynamics.

Of course in the case of female children in these situations, there is the added aspect of the last three millennia of male dominance fostered by the major religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. That sets the father as the primary person of importance—virtually God for his family--with the wife and children as his subjects and property to the point where whatever he may choose to do to or with them is generally condoned if not actually supported. We are starting to come out of this but you cannot reverse and undo a tradition of at least 3000 years in a decade or two.

So there I am, an eldest daughter entangled in a fiercely enmeshed family, locked into a position of emotional incest and living in a state of serious poverty which two college educated and talented adults chose, perhaps not intentionally but through their lifestyle and other actions, to live under for all the years spent in the home by their daughter and two sons.

There is no way I can understand or fully forgive what was done. All three of us suffered damage that cannot be healed. We have gone on to be responsible adults and I believe fairly good citizens who have held mid to upper level jobs, obtained schooling and struggled to create and keep relationships which would avoid the pitfalls we observed in our formative years and sought to escape. Now in our later years we often talk and try to reach some understanding and a degree of healing which has been painfully difficult to find.

The youngest of us, who I often thought had gotten off easy as the petted baby, probably really had it the worst. He stayed at home after we older siblings got off on our own. He felt responsible for and tried to help and support the parents who as the result of their inability to build a solid base and save for retirement were left in a pitiful state. When he finally was able to move into his own life at the age of thirty after our dad’s death, he had to try to leap from a middle teen’s experience and life pattern to full adulthood in a very short time. He did very well, completed college with honors, got his JD degree and went to work joining an established law practice where his expertise in legal writing was highly regarded. Still his struggle finally became too much. I call his death at the age of forty six “suicide by neglect” because he ignored or did not attempt to correct health issues that became fatal in due time.

At this point, I wish I might have opened the door of my mental closet much sooner and started to realize that very little of this was ever my fault or due to any failure or weakness on my part. After I finally divested most of the lingering guilt, the anger and bitterness began to boil up and still catches me by surprise at times. I know I need to get it out and rid my spirit of its corrosive weight but this is a long, slow and often difficult process. My journal helps and sometimes sharing things like this essay in the most calm and rational way that I can.

Perhaps I should have sought counseling but several things inclined me against that. For one, the youngest of us tried that all through the years of his advanced schooling and was not able to find much real concrete help. Also it is really difficult to lay out the whole history in its complexity to the degree anyone ‘outside’ can comprehend the whole picture. Had our family issues stemmed from drugs, alcoholism, gambling or any of those “normal” or common vices and frequent problems, things would be much simpler. The extreme eccentricity of our parents, particularly our father, and our mother’s codependency and almost unswerving cleaving to him and his choices are almost impossible to portray in a simple or direct manner!

Life goes on and we with it. How much longer, I cannot say, since I have both short and long-lived ancestors. Mom and Dad died just short of their 77^th birthdays while paternal grandparents in their sixties/early seventies and maternal grandparents in their ninth and tenth decades. If it is true as many say that we are here to experience and learn from our lives, I hope that what I was to learn will be clear once I have crossed from this realm to the next. Right now I am still searching for those answers but I feel I do learn and find at least one small insight each day.

I offer the books below as starting points if any of these comments resonate with you in some way. There are many more books and journal articles etc. available now and more new explorations are coming to light all the time. My sincere prayer is that in time we can ease many of these patterns and break them by letting people get past their own traumas rather than passing them to the next generation.

Footnotes

1. The Eldest Daughter Effect, Lisette Schuitemaker & Wies Enthoven, Findhorn Press, 2016
2. The Emotional Incest Syndrome, Dr Patricia Love with Jo Robinson, Bantam Books, 1990
3. Toxic Parents, Susan Forward, PhD with Craig Buck, Bantam Books, latest 2002