The times, the place
I saw my psychotherapist again today. I told her about the time when I was 2-1/2 that my adoptive mother came this close to killing -- or, at best, leaving us all so badly injured that death would have been welcome -- herself, her sister, Betty, me, and her sister's 1-1/2 year-old adoptive daughter, Jan, by trying to play chicken with a speeding freight train while she was driving us in Pasadena, California on a shopping tirp. She was approaching a railroad crossing up near Colorado Boulevard when the bells began ringing, the lights flashing, and the crossbucks cutting off the crossing from the road on both sides began to descend.
Suddenly her face twisted up into a mask of insanity/hate/demonic possession/who knows, and she gunned the car and shot over and across the crossing just ahead of the approaching freight train, which must have been bearing down on us at about 80 miles per hour. It seemed as if she cleared the front of the train's engine by maybe 5 inches, if that.
I screamed in terror. Jan screamed, as well. My adoptive mother pulled the car over to the curb so fast that she burned rubber, stopped the car, and turned around and started screaming at me, screaming that I'd made Jan scream. And all the while, her sister sat there next to her in the front seat, smirking, an expression wholly inappropriate to what had just happened.
I got yelled at for an interminable length of time afterwards by both women. Jan was cosseted and petted and soothed and comforted by them. When we got back to our house in San Gabriel, I had to go to my room, alone, for hours. My adoptive mother adopted a liquid-helium attitude toward me until my adoptive father got home, when she suddenly began acting as if nothing untoward had happened. Betty had taken Jan and gone back home in their car, so there was no one to tell my adoptive father how "bad" I'd been.
Obviously my adoptive mother was seriously mentally ill, and the stunt she'd pulled was almost certainly attempted suicide. That in turn implies that she'd been under enormous stress for a long time, with no comfort, no solace, no help from anyone to get out from under whatever her burden was or protect her from it. That burden was my adoptive father, who, to my knowledge, never laid a hand on her, but nevertheless kept her in a state of perpetual turmoil and fear. My adoptive mother's own sister did nothing to help her. Betty, who absolutely despised me, acted as if the whole thing were hilarious. Betty was a good deal more intelligent than her sister, Jane, and much more independent, but her participation in that incident and her behavior during and after it doesn't suggest sanity any more than my adoptive mother's behavior did -- if anything, it strongy implies even more serious mental problems, possibly compounded by or due to the sort of neurological deficit that is found in people who are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder.
The thing is, my adoptive parents' friends, especially the wives, must have known very well that my adoptive mother's mental state was not good, but nobody, as far as I know, ever did anything to buffer her against whatever had driven her into sometimes extreme borderline psychosis and attempted suicide/murder. Back then, it was never acknowledged that child abuse even existed, let alone that it was wrong, and that went double for spousal abuse of any kind, especially the sort that was all psychological, never leaving any physical marks on the victim. Sometimes women died as a result of domestic "accidents" that were rarely investigated as murder. And people believed that like financial affairs, the way their neighbors and relatives raised their children were the business of the latter, not themselves, not the public, not anyone else. So people rarely, if ever, intervened even in cases of child or spousal abuse so egregiously obvious that there was no way anyone could miss what was happening. And if a parent was under enormous stress and very unhappy, obviously it was the fault of that parent's child or children, not anyone else. As a result, those children never got any comfort or relief from what must have been chronically intolerable and, probably, dangerous situations. If they reached out to help from other adults, they invariably got slapped down for it. And they were, just as invariably, the favorite targets of every bully in the area. Condemned to hell at birth for no reason at all, many of those children committed suicide at some point before reaching maturity. Others were put away for life in mental hospitals or prisons after "acting out." Still others managed to hide their despair and horror and get through life somehow, but at the cost of becoming alcoholics or drug addicts -- and many of them themselves became abusive parents and bullies.
It wasn't just unfair. It was injust in the extreme, and mirrored the sort of racial and ethnic bigotry that was rife in those times. Lashing out at "permitted targets" such as the "wrong" ethnic or racial group was how people handled chronic unhappiness. Behavioral scientists call it "deferred aggression"; it's easy enough to see in small children who, wronged by an adult they don't dare react against, will turn and visit their pain and unhappiness on smaller, weaker children. This is how children become bullies and, later, abusive parents. And it was all over the neighborhoods I grew up in. People there were well off, upper-middle-class and upper-class people who did provide materially for their children with excellent food, fine clothing, the best toys -- but, all too often, utterly inadequate emotional nurturance. They threw money in quantity at their children, but either hated those children from Day 1 and made it clear that they did, or became alcoholics and treated their children erratically, one day apparently loving, the next cruel and vicious toward them, without any pattern to it those children could predict.
My psychotherapist was appalled, but it was a story she had heard before -- in fact, these days, when child abuse and spousal abuse are readily acknowledged by both courts and laymen as real and seriously pathological phenomena, and intervention in them by relatives, neighbors, friends, and courts happens frequently, stories about such things turn up in the media all the time. It's not that the frequency of such things per capita has risen, but rather that awareness of them and willingness to try to intervene and bring aid to the victims of them has grown hugely since I was a child. People are interested in such things, and the media do report crimes and other unfortunate things, so today we all know about such things.
But it was nice to hear and see a psychotherapist act appalled at my story. In the past, licensed psychotherapists I'd gone to in Southern California and, later, here in Seattle generally acted as if it were all my fault when I told them about such things, or simply didn't believe me. "How can you possibly remember something that happened to you when you were two-and-a-half years old? People do not retain memories from that age!" Oh, really? I'm here to tell you, junior, that that ain't so. More social mystification from social-control experts, a.k.a. psychotherapists, aimed at making people like me shut up and go away. Those were the same people who tried to tell me that the sexual abuse my adoptive parents visited on me was normal, or simply didn't happen. That's what it was like up until around 1990, when that finally began to change, big-time.
But because of all that, for many years, I gave up trying to find a psychotherapist who could help me. There was one exception, a wonderful young woman from Japan who worked at Seattle Mental Health for a few months, until she was unavoidably transferred from there, which broke my heart. And that was it for many years. But the lady I'm seeing now really is helping. At least I can tell her the worst of what I went through, including things that happened to me before I turned 3, and she accepts what I have to say and is very comforting.
I also talked with her at length about what the Cold War was like for me. I first learned about nuclear bombs through the duck-and-cover drills we had beginning in the 1st grade. Of course, what those imparted to children wasn't at all realistic, and it wasn't until I began reading hard science fiction at age 8 that I began to run across realistic descriptions of what the damned things could and would do if nuclear war broke out. I was so horrified that I began researching the matter in whatever non-fiction sources I could find that touched on it at all, from the newspapers to a few, a very few books in local libraries. As the years went by, I amassed more and more scientific information on the matter, all of which made it clear that if nuclear war ever broke out, the entire living world would be wrecked by it. It also made it clear that if I was within the radius of heavy destruction of ground zero for one or more hydrogen bombs anywhere, I would almost certainly be carved up into hamburger by flying glass and other materials, burned to charred meat by the thermal pulse, and/or otherwise so heavily and horribly wounded that if I survived any length of time after that, I would pray for a quick death to end my agony.
I dared turn to no one for any comfort over that, either. In the neighborhoods where I gerw up, anyone who did, however young, was branded a "Commie," and perhaps put away in a mental hospital for it. People did not want to be reminded of such possibilities. Adults never talked about them, and children didn't either, not if they knew what was good for them, as most did. So from age 8 on until age 46, the year that the Soviet Union fell apart and the threat of global nuclear war came to a crashing end, I lived in a state of terror and despair that I couldn't talk to anyone sbout, didn't dare. I did try writing about it, but had no place to publish such writings. I bore my terror of and despair over the spectre of being cremated alive by the Bomb for all that time. When it was over, in 1991, I had borne that terror, that despair for so long that the habit of not reaching out for comfort, not talking about it, had become so strong that it took until now for me to talk to someone about it. As I told my psychotherapist today, I had put what I knew about nuclear war, scientifically and otherwise, into my fiction, including the stories some of which I've been posting on this blog, but I hadn't been able to just talk normally to anyone about my own personal feelings about it.
It was good to get some of it off my chest. I wonder what will come out when I see her next time.
Suddenly her face twisted up into a mask of insanity/hate/demonic possession/who knows, and she gunned the car and shot over and across the crossing just ahead of the approaching freight train, which must have been bearing down on us at about 80 miles per hour. It seemed as if she cleared the front of the train's engine by maybe 5 inches, if that.
I screamed in terror. Jan screamed, as well. My adoptive mother pulled the car over to the curb so fast that she burned rubber, stopped the car, and turned around and started screaming at me, screaming that I'd made Jan scream. And all the while, her sister sat there next to her in the front seat, smirking, an expression wholly inappropriate to what had just happened.
I got yelled at for an interminable length of time afterwards by both women. Jan was cosseted and petted and soothed and comforted by them. When we got back to our house in San Gabriel, I had to go to my room, alone, for hours. My adoptive mother adopted a liquid-helium attitude toward me until my adoptive father got home, when she suddenly began acting as if nothing untoward had happened. Betty had taken Jan and gone back home in their car, so there was no one to tell my adoptive father how "bad" I'd been.
Obviously my adoptive mother was seriously mentally ill, and the stunt she'd pulled was almost certainly attempted suicide. That in turn implies that she'd been under enormous stress for a long time, with no comfort, no solace, no help from anyone to get out from under whatever her burden was or protect her from it. That burden was my adoptive father, who, to my knowledge, never laid a hand on her, but nevertheless kept her in a state of perpetual turmoil and fear. My adoptive mother's own sister did nothing to help her. Betty, who absolutely despised me, acted as if the whole thing were hilarious. Betty was a good deal more intelligent than her sister, Jane, and much more independent, but her participation in that incident and her behavior during and after it doesn't suggest sanity any more than my adoptive mother's behavior did -- if anything, it strongy implies even more serious mental problems, possibly compounded by or due to the sort of neurological deficit that is found in people who are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder.
The thing is, my adoptive parents' friends, especially the wives, must have known very well that my adoptive mother's mental state was not good, but nobody, as far as I know, ever did anything to buffer her against whatever had driven her into sometimes extreme borderline psychosis and attempted suicide/murder. Back then, it was never acknowledged that child abuse even existed, let alone that it was wrong, and that went double for spousal abuse of any kind, especially the sort that was all psychological, never leaving any physical marks on the victim. Sometimes women died as a result of domestic "accidents" that were rarely investigated as murder. And people believed that like financial affairs, the way their neighbors and relatives raised their children were the business of the latter, not themselves, not the public, not anyone else. So people rarely, if ever, intervened even in cases of child or spousal abuse so egregiously obvious that there was no way anyone could miss what was happening. And if a parent was under enormous stress and very unhappy, obviously it was the fault of that parent's child or children, not anyone else. As a result, those children never got any comfort or relief from what must have been chronically intolerable and, probably, dangerous situations. If they reached out to help from other adults, they invariably got slapped down for it. And they were, just as invariably, the favorite targets of every bully in the area. Condemned to hell at birth for no reason at all, many of those children committed suicide at some point before reaching maturity. Others were put away for life in mental hospitals or prisons after "acting out." Still others managed to hide their despair and horror and get through life somehow, but at the cost of becoming alcoholics or drug addicts -- and many of them themselves became abusive parents and bullies.
It wasn't just unfair. It was injust in the extreme, and mirrored the sort of racial and ethnic bigotry that was rife in those times. Lashing out at "permitted targets" such as the "wrong" ethnic or racial group was how people handled chronic unhappiness. Behavioral scientists call it "deferred aggression"; it's easy enough to see in small children who, wronged by an adult they don't dare react against, will turn and visit their pain and unhappiness on smaller, weaker children. This is how children become bullies and, later, abusive parents. And it was all over the neighborhoods I grew up in. People there were well off, upper-middle-class and upper-class people who did provide materially for their children with excellent food, fine clothing, the best toys -- but, all too often, utterly inadequate emotional nurturance. They threw money in quantity at their children, but either hated those children from Day 1 and made it clear that they did, or became alcoholics and treated their children erratically, one day apparently loving, the next cruel and vicious toward them, without any pattern to it those children could predict.
My psychotherapist was appalled, but it was a story she had heard before -- in fact, these days, when child abuse and spousal abuse are readily acknowledged by both courts and laymen as real and seriously pathological phenomena, and intervention in them by relatives, neighbors, friends, and courts happens frequently, stories about such things turn up in the media all the time. It's not that the frequency of such things per capita has risen, but rather that awareness of them and willingness to try to intervene and bring aid to the victims of them has grown hugely since I was a child. People are interested in such things, and the media do report crimes and other unfortunate things, so today we all know about such things.
But it was nice to hear and see a psychotherapist act appalled at my story. In the past, licensed psychotherapists I'd gone to in Southern California and, later, here in Seattle generally acted as if it were all my fault when I told them about such things, or simply didn't believe me. "How can you possibly remember something that happened to you when you were two-and-a-half years old? People do not retain memories from that age!" Oh, really? I'm here to tell you, junior, that that ain't so. More social mystification from social-control experts, a.k.a. psychotherapists, aimed at making people like me shut up and go away. Those were the same people who tried to tell me that the sexual abuse my adoptive parents visited on me was normal, or simply didn't happen. That's what it was like up until around 1990, when that finally began to change, big-time.
But because of all that, for many years, I gave up trying to find a psychotherapist who could help me. There was one exception, a wonderful young woman from Japan who worked at Seattle Mental Health for a few months, until she was unavoidably transferred from there, which broke my heart. And that was it for many years. But the lady I'm seeing now really is helping. At least I can tell her the worst of what I went through, including things that happened to me before I turned 3, and she accepts what I have to say and is very comforting.
I also talked with her at length about what the Cold War was like for me. I first learned about nuclear bombs through the duck-and-cover drills we had beginning in the 1st grade. Of course, what those imparted to children wasn't at all realistic, and it wasn't until I began reading hard science fiction at age 8 that I began to run across realistic descriptions of what the damned things could and would do if nuclear war broke out. I was so horrified that I began researching the matter in whatever non-fiction sources I could find that touched on it at all, from the newspapers to a few, a very few books in local libraries. As the years went by, I amassed more and more scientific information on the matter, all of which made it clear that if nuclear war ever broke out, the entire living world would be wrecked by it. It also made it clear that if I was within the radius of heavy destruction of ground zero for one or more hydrogen bombs anywhere, I would almost certainly be carved up into hamburger by flying glass and other materials, burned to charred meat by the thermal pulse, and/or otherwise so heavily and horribly wounded that if I survived any length of time after that, I would pray for a quick death to end my agony.
I dared turn to no one for any comfort over that, either. In the neighborhoods where I gerw up, anyone who did, however young, was branded a "Commie," and perhaps put away in a mental hospital for it. People did not want to be reminded of such possibilities. Adults never talked about them, and children didn't either, not if they knew what was good for them, as most did. So from age 8 on until age 46, the year that the Soviet Union fell apart and the threat of global nuclear war came to a crashing end, I lived in a state of terror and despair that I couldn't talk to anyone sbout, didn't dare. I did try writing about it, but had no place to publish such writings. I bore my terror of and despair over the spectre of being cremated alive by the Bomb for all that time. When it was over, in 1991, I had borne that terror, that despair for so long that the habit of not reaching out for comfort, not talking about it, had become so strong that it took until now for me to talk to someone about it. As I told my psychotherapist today, I had put what I knew about nuclear war, scientifically and otherwise, into my fiction, including the stories some of which I've been posting on this blog, but I hadn't been able to just talk normally to anyone about my own personal feelings about it.
It was good to get some of it off my chest. I wonder what will come out when I see her next time.