Essay: Why Winchesters Fall Apart
This is what happens when I let my musings get the better of me.
Title: Why Winchesters Fall Apart
Author: SCWLC
Author’s Note: I don’t often do essays on TV shows, and this is more a matter of going through, in semi-organised fashion, my personal theories about the Winchester boys and their childhoods. The thing is, I’m not sure I’m up to writing the fanfic I would need to explain everything, so I’m going to simply write it out in prose, and make it a concrete position.
Why am I not up to writing it in fanfic? Because it’s an epic length of story, otherwise. You see, the whole of this story stretched back to John’s days in the Marines, before he was living with Mary and the two of them had Dean, right up to the day Dean came back to ask Sam to go looking for their father in the pilot. That’s more than thirty years worth of storytelling, and that’s more than I think I can do.
So, here is my combination of speculation, theory and fact that I’ve woven into my view of what makes the Winchesters fall apart, even as they shore everything up again by putting Nair in Sam’s shampoo.
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Here are the big questions set up by the show that I intend to answer. Why, exactly, does Sam resent his father so much? Why is Dean so stuck in the middle? Why couldn’t John see what he was doing to his kids? Why did Sam have to run away to university? Ultimately, the big question is, why are there such huge fractures in the Winchester family dynamic?
As I said, this goes back to John’s military time and training. Now we’ve all at least seen some movie parody of military basic training, and most of us know what it’s for. Yes, it’s to create a degree of physical fitness in order to allow for proper military training and life. However, there’s a secondary purpose. That purpose is to create unquestioning and immediate reactions. That is, to make sure that when a soldier hears an order, he follows it without question (yes, he or she, but since all the people in question in this essay are men, forgive me the grammatically correct, but not politically correct, shorthand). That’s why there’s all the shouting, that’s why there are all the punishments if you don’t hop to it immediately, and that’s why there are all the frequently pointless little points of discipline.
It’s not just about personal discipline, it’s about creating a chain of command, and having everyone know that when a superior officer says jump, you should already know how high and do it - without asking questions. John would have come out of the Marines with that particular mentality burned into his brain. So, while he would know, intellectually, that civilian life is different, it would still be there in the back of his mind.
He marries Mary, and the two of them have their first son. John would have had Mary right there, consciously, deliberately reminding him or telling him if he was being too harsh. I’m also willing to bet John had childhood memories of a fairly normal upbringing to rely on, so between those, he would have been a loving father, possibly and fairly strict one, but a loving one. Mary would have been able to step in if he was expecting too much out of Dean.
So for four years, Dean’s got an awesome Dad and Mom.
Then the tragedy we all know strikes. Mary dies, John visits Missouri and learns the truth. To quote him. John becomes a hunter, going after the thing that killed Mary. What do you think he fell back on? His military training. The thing that taught him all these skills about guns and shooting and fighting and strategy and all that kind of thing, is going to be the first thing he latches onto to get some sort of mental stable ground.
So he treats hunting like being in the military again. More than that, he wants to train his kids to be hunters. He wants to train them to be safe and be able to protect themselves from whatever’s out there. What are the training methods he knows? Military ones.
And that’s where things start to fall apart. John would have started off treating Dean mostly the way he always has. That changed, over the years, into being a drill sergeant. He admitted it himself. As he trains Dean more, and he gets further and further into the military mindset that was so second nature to him, he starts to lose sight of the fact that the little Private Winchester in front of him is his kid, not an officer under his command.
This is where the second major stage of alienation of Sam kicks in. The first is the trauma of losing Mary. Dean remembers it, maybe even saw his mother on the ceiling. John, obviously remembers it. They both remember her and feel the loss of her. For Sam, she is a theoretical construct. You can’t miss what you never had, and Sam can’t really miss having a mother, because he never had one. He can miss the fact that he didn’t have one, but he can’t miss the individual that she was.
But back to the second stage of alienation. What are your earliest memories? I can tell you that mine hover between the age of three and four. Anything before that just isn’t really there. Well, I’m willing to bet that Sam is roughly the same. His earliest memories of his father are of a man who already treats his kids like a drill sergeant treats raw recruits. So while Dean recalls Daddy, and backyard football and snuggles and hugs, Sam just remembers lights out and a lot of yelling.
Oh, I’m sure there are points where John was affectionate. There had to have been or both boys would be even more screwed up than they are, but for a predominance of behaviour, I’m betting on orders and shouting.
Here’s another thing. I’ve never been through basic training, and I have no intention of doing so, but from everything I’ve heard, praise is thin on the ground, and the way you know you’ve done a good job, for the most part, is because no one’s yelling at you. If you’re a child, how are you going to respond to this? Some kids do okay with minimal encouragement. Everyone’s different. But others really need to be told when they’re doing well.
So what if you’re Sam, and you really need someone to tell you, “That was a good try Sammy.”? He’s not going to get that. Neither will Dean, but he has an advantage over Sam. He knows all the little tics and habits of John’s that indicate approval. He’s had verbal approval in concert with those tics and whatnot. So, while a single nod from John tells Dean that he’s doing well, Sam has no idea what that means. Eventually he might know, but when you’re four, an obvious and plain answer is better than subtlety.
And really, isn’t it awfully hard to look back, neutrally, at your own past and put everything into a, “If I knew then what I know now,” perspective? I know I find it hard to look back at my own childhood and say, “Oh, what I was doing there was inappropriate, that’s why my parents cracked down on me.” Mostly, I’m still resentful of the things I felt then were unfair or what-have-you.
So there’s Sam with his constantly pounding sense that his father approves of nothing he does, and it’s just reinforced by the fact that John is generally incapable of expressing approval. He’s being shouted at all the time, he is not to question anything, and he’s supposed to always know how high to jump based on the particular moment his dad says jump.
But it goes further. You see, John turned Dean into a parentified child. Which is exactly what it sounds like. A child forced into the de facto role of parenthood. Dean wasn’t Dad, however. Dean was filling in for Mary. Dean was Mom.
Now here’s the thing, parents, if they want to be relatively effective, have to present a united front for the kids. They shouldn’t undermine each other’s authority, especially if they want to have any sort of ability to discipline. So Dean, as Mom, has to present a united front with Dad. However, unlike (most - let’s not bring abused spouses into this, it won’t be helpful) a normal mother in a marriage, Dean is subject to his father’s discipline, and therefore has no ability to act as the mitigating force a second parent might be able to. He’s like a powerless, unequal, spouse. He slaves all day over a hot microwave to make Sam’s Spaghetti-Os, but he can’t say, “Dear, you’re being too harsh with him.”
So there’s Sam, who’s got a typical older brother, in that I bet Dean gave him noogies, punched him, made fun of him, and was generally a pain-in-the-ass older brother. But Dean also was being Mom. So you have whatever the Dean equivalent of telling Sam to eat his vegetables was, and all those sorts of things, including, of course, “Dad says you have to . . .”
So Sam’s getting both of those from his older brother, and that’s going to be stifling enough. Then there’s his father, who’s going to be doing discipline for all the things a father disciplines over, but also the things a drill sergeant would be doing them over. And let’s be frank, there are a lot of things a drill sergeant wouldn’t give a damn about, discipline-wise, that a father would, and vice versa. So Sam’s got his Dad, at the other end, filling in all those discipline spaces Dean misses. He can’t get out, he can’t catch a break, and he doesn’t have anyone on his side.
Normally, one parent can step in and take the kid’s side on some level or other. But Dean doesn’t have that power, because the parental power balance is the same as the parent-child power balance. However, in those situations where the kids could present a united front against their parents, whether it’s in demands for chores, or treats, or whatever, Dean has to take Dad’s side, because parents have to present a united front for the kids. So Sam’s got no one in the family onside. Ever.
Another problem, which I suspect is there, is that John may well be guilty of assuming that he’s figured out “the trick to parenting”. There are some people who, after getting child number one through his or her early years, think they’re figured out how to raise any kid, since they’ve made all the mistakes on the first one, so they can get it right with the second now. They pay lip service to the fact that every person (and therefore child) is different, but it doesn’t make a dent.
John got Dean up to age eight, say, and having figured out what he did ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ with Dean, assumed that doing everything ‘right’ with Sam, and not doing the ‘wrong’ things with Dean, would get him a kid who was even better than Dean. Better trained, better behaved, just generally better. The only problem with this, as we all can guess, is that Sam, being very different from Dean in terms of interests, preferences and personality, reacted differently than Dean would to all these stimuli. So John, convinced he knew the ‘right’ way to do things, blamed Sam, rather than adjusting his own parenting style.
I see it as . . . well . . . accidental almost-not-quite abuse. John, in expecting that Sam will take disciplinary actions the same way Dean would and did, simply clamped down harder on anything Sam did that contradicted him. He also probably drove Sam harder than Dean at a younger age because of a) the drill sergeant factor I discussed above, that is, that he had changed from father to drill sergeant, and b) assuming that since he had trained Sam from age one onward, Sam ought to be further along than Dean was at the same age. So he pushed and pushed and Sam pushed back.
Among the things John would have failed to factor in would have been that Dean liked hunting. He liked playing with weapons, he liked the nomadic lifestyle, he liked the action of hunting, he enjoyed the physical activity for itself, and he got a real sense of accomplishment out of the whole thing. Sam, on the other hand, didn’t. He didn’t like playing with weapons, he didn’t enjoy the physical activity, he didn’t like the nomadic lifestyle, and while he could appreciate the value of what they were doing, it felt soul sucking to him.
As long as Sam didn’t have the drive of vengeance, or anything else, to him, hunting was some sort of horrible cross to bear.
John also didn’t factor in that Sam couldn’t understand his and Dean’s grief and rage over Mary. John just assumed that Sam ought to be as outraged as they were, but let’s face it, he was right in the pilot episode when he said that she was gone, and killing the demon that killed her wouldn’t do anything to bring her back. Just because Sam didn’t understand the power of desire for vengeance at that moment doesn’t make him wrong.
One other thing, John and Dean both blamed Sam for not calling them while he was at university. Here’s one thing to consider. Sam was eighteen. He was a kid, and one who’d probably been sheltered in certain ways through his childhood and teen years. John was the adult and Dean was the ‘other parent’. They’re the grownups. It’s up to the adults to be mature in any relationship, (something else that always pissed me off when it came to Harry Potter - why is Harry supposed to be mature, but the adult get to get away with being the irresponsible ones, then also tell Harry that he’s wrong for not having a full adult grasp of a situation while still a child?) so it was up to John and Dean to make the first move for reconciliation.
So, that’s what John did to Sam. Now on to what John did to Dean.
I mentioned before that John turned Dean into a parentified child. Let’s go into the details on that. First, we know that John must have had at least something of a drinking problem, because Sam’s excuse in the pilot about dad stumbling off the Miller time shift wouldn’t have tripped so easily off the tongue. More, he wouldn’t have been able to see the possibility at the end of “Nightmare” of their father having a little more tequila and a little less hunting. Which means that at least part of John’s neglect of the boys growing up was related to him being passed out on the sofa from whatever he’d been drinking, and Dean picking up the slack.
However, there’s also the fact that he was clearly leaving the boys alone a lot. He was leaving them alone enough that it’s standard practice, fanfictionally, to assume that John was always gone for days, even weeks, at a time. So Dean, who’s not even ten yet, has to take care of his little brother, get his father through hangovers and is also being treated like a military recruit when he’s not doing those things.
This isn’t just a matter of expecting his eldest to take up the slack left by Mary’s death in terms of physical care for Sam. It’s that Dean was having to make up for the slack in terms of Sam’s emotional upbringing. He was the one who had to give Sam the encouragement and praise for his grades, for his successes in training and hunting, even as Dean isn’t getting all the emotional support that he needs from a parent or guardian figure.
John also, therefore, placed Dean in the position of eternally being in the middle. Sam on one side and John on the other, both of them wanting Dean to take their side in the arguments that were so frequently happening between them. And Dean, with the inability to take John’s side, because Sam has a point, and he should back up his younger brother, and unable to take Sam’s side, because John has a point and is their father, with the authority to back that up, probably took John’s side more often than not because he was deferring to his father’s authority.
There’s the general bulk of John causing Dean trouble. There’s more, however. There are the things John did to both kids. So to speak.
“We do what we do and we shut up about it.” That strikes me as the core of the Winchester family philosophy. Unfortunately, there are some things implicit in that, which all come down to a lack of communication. We don’t talk about the fact that a twelve-year-old kid just saw the ghost of a woman who was raped and murdered try to kill someone. We don’t talk about the fact that Sam is sitting back in the motel room, terrified that his father, or brother, or both, won’t be coming back from the latest hunt. We don’t talk about why we’re hunting. We don’t say things to comfort anyone after things take a turn for the worse.
What the shutting up about it did was two things. First, I think it helped John convince himself that all the normal socialisation that children get growing up happens by some sort of osmosis. So instead of Dean learning how to deal with things he doesn’t understand in an adult way, instead of Dean learning how important friends are - that is, people who share your interests that you can spend time with, or even people who know you well enough that you can talk about your family, knowing it won’t get back to them - Dean just knows family. He doesn’t know how nice it is to be able to get away from your family to hang out with people you know and who know you. He has just two settings. Family, and everyone else. And everyone else are strangers.
So, by not talking to Dean and Sam about important personal things, and I’m not talking about the, “Always have a condom when you’re going out with a girl,” talk, John can also convince himself that nothing’s wrong.
The other thing John not talking to the boys did, is make sure they didn’t know how to talk about anything important. It also meant they didn’t know how to talk to themselves, so to speak. By this, I mean that it’s very hard to examine yourself and your motives for things if you have no experience at looking into why people do things. The only way to understand motivations is to talk to people about those motivations until you know the emotions and logic behind the actions. Which you only get by talking to other people.
So, all of season three, four and five, most of us fans of Supernatural sat there screaming at the TV at some point or other, wanting the boys to sit down and freakin’ talk to each other. The thing is, neither one probably knew how to examine their own feelings in order to explain them to the other one in the first place.
I see that inability to both talk and self-examine as the core of why John and Sam wound up clashing so much. Sam didn’t know what he really wanted. He was using ‘normal’, not as a descriptor of what he wanted, per se. He was using it as a shorthand to describe it. Sam didn’t want normal, so much as he wanted safety, routine, stability and a sense that he was appreciated. A normal family is safer than one that goes out every night into the dark woods where a scary monster lives. A normal family has a routine, because the kids go to the same school for years at a time, the parents have the same jobs for years at a time and everyone has a schedule they can put together to follow. Routine wouldn’t have really existed in the traditional sense for the Winchesters.
Stability certainly wouldn’t have existed, and Sam always felt underappreciated. But I’ll get back to that last one in a moment. Sam, without examining his wants too closely, just knew that so-called ‘normal’ families had these things he wanted. So he wanted those lifestyles. Between the lack of communication and the lack of self-examination, Sam never clearly articulated to his father and Dean what it was he wanted. All he could figure was that he wanted ‘normal’.
Dean meanwhile has become very emotionally constipated, unable to talk about anything, and no doubt had a helluva lot harder a time recovering from John’s death than he would have had he been able to work through his feelings. He also was therefore never able to explain to Sam that he liked hunting. That he felt that it was his calling. So Sam was never able to understand, at least when they were younger, that Dean wasn’t hunting because he didn’t know anything else, he was doing it because he loved to do it.
The lack of communication meant that Sam was probably never given anything close to a chance to understand the trauma John and Dean went through, and it meant John and Dean never had a chance to understand that Sam never knew what normal was. Sure Dean was only four at the time, but he had four years to live in a stable place with a nuclear family and ordinary activities. John probably had a fully normal upbringing and life right up until the day Mary died. Sure, he was probably deployed somewhere and saw real action at some point, but that was divorced from ‘real life’ and he could compartmentalise it away. The nomadic hunting life he raised the kids in had none of that. So Sam never knew normal, and I think John and Dean both thought, on some level, that Sam knew what it was anyways, because who doesn’t know that stuff?
Lack of communication was at the core of a lot of Sam and John’s fights over John’s military tendencies. After all, junior officers should not question the orders of superiors. John turned their family into a three-person military unit. So the junior officers, ie\ Sam and Dean, should not question anything. It got John’s back up that they were questioning the chain of command. John, forgetting that he was supposed to be raising a family, not training Navy recruits, would have treated Sam asking what they were doing and why as insubordination.
Now I will say this. People not answering questions in these situations in fiction always gets my back up. I hate it when someone says, “Why are we doing this?” and the only response is, “Shut up and do it, you don’t need to know.” It makes me tear my hair out that the response wasn’t even, “I can’t tell you because the bad guys can read your mind, and until you can keep them out you can’t know.” Yes, book five of Harry Potter made me scream like nothing else. I wanted to beat Dumbledore’s head in, why do you ask?
So John not wanting to tell Sam and Dean what he knew of what was going on always just made me furious on Sam’s behalf. In no small part because I got the feeling that half the time, John wasn’t telling them things because when you’re in the military, the fact that your superior told you to do something ought to be enough, and that he had long ago decided that every time Sam asked a question it was Sam questioning his judgment.
I think here, John and Sam basically wound up pushing each other’s buttons. John deciding that every time Sam asked a question it was an insubordinate statement that he thought John was an idiot, and Sam deciding that he was going to ask questions every chance he got because John was choosing not to answer questions to teach his younger son a lesson.
Now there’s one other thing John did which didn’t do anything useful for his sons. At least, that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. I’m betting, and betting hard, that he never complimented either one. I mean, sure, he probably did a smidge, but if you’ll recall, waaaaaaaay back in season one, there’s Jerry Panowski saying that John talked about Sam all the time. Was real proud of him. There’s Dean in Bugs, on the college campus, telling Sam that Dad was really proud of him. Sam seemed shocked. Well, what if John never said a damn thing about it to him? What if this was the first time he’d ever heard a single word of praise for anything he’d ever done that wasn’t related to hunting?
Possibly even the first word of praise for doing anything that was unDeanlike.
That would have done a number on him, wouldn’t it? We all know Sam didn’t like hunting and pretty much everything that went with it. So he wouldn’t have cared all that much about compliments relating to hunting. More, in Bugs, Sam tells Dean that Dean was the perfect son. Dean was the example to be pointed at and say, “Why can’t you be more like him?”
So odds are, John, in spite of being proud, and doubly so given that he never gave Sam any encouragement, never told Sam anything good about himself and the things which he was interested in. More, though, Dean never knew that.
Dean never knew that John never complimented Sam on his schoolwork, on his research, on his soccer trophy or on anything else that Sam did that wasn’t shooting and tracking and making salt lines. He probably never knew that every conversation John had with Sam, out of his earshot included a variation on the phrase, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”
Now, why do I think he never complimented Dean either? I suspect John always tried motivating his sons negatively, rather than positively. “Do better, because otherwise someone will die.” Never, “You’re doing great, and with a little more work you’ll be awesome.” Always, “You’re doing passably, work a lot harder and you might someday be a fair shot.”
We all saw the mess he made of Dean in Something Wicked. Dean spent literally years convinced that everything that came from that was his fault. I’m pretty darned sure that John held that moment over Dean’s head for years. I’m sure that John held every mistake Dean ever made over his son’s head. I’m also pretty sure that he talked to Dean, out of Sam’s earshot about how Sammy was brilliant, but just needed to learn to take orders better. He probably always dismissed Dean’s innate brilliance, just because Dean preferred to be active over being cooped up in school.
John was thinking, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” He never realised that a person can’t know something if they’re not told. He was expecting that Sam and Dean would just know how he felt about them, because obviously he’s proud of them. It’s not like he’s not saying it all the time. Just . . . he never said it to the ones that mattered. He never told Dean he was proud of Dean, and he never told Sam he was proud of Sam. He just assumed that saying it aloud was the same thing.
And on to Sam and Dean and what they did to each other. A lot of this is offshoots of their upbringing, but let’s be frank, they’ve said and done some crappy things to each other over the years too.
Sam always assumed that Dean wasn’t as smart as he is. Partly that comes from the fact that Dean cultivates a persona of the skeezy, sloppy, lower-brain-doing-the-thinking, gluttonous jerk. He didn’t do well in school, and let’s be frank, a lot of people judge intellect based on grades. After all, if you’re smart enough, you can do fairly well in school with almost no effort. So, between Dean scraping by, and his persona, Sam can’t really be blamed for treating Dean like he’s kinda dumb.
But when Dean produced that EMF he’d made out of a walkman? Sam should have bowed down and worshipped the ground his brother walked on. I know a few girls who had a geekgasm when they saw that. I know I had one. Seriously, think about the effort that would go into that. That’s hardcore awesome engineering skillz.
Sam’s response? Mockery. And he keeps on with these things. The Latin for Christ is Christo? Sam, seriously, your brother’s not an idiot. You’ve both been hunting for your whole lives. He knows everything you do. Probably more, since he’s been at it longer, and didn’t have a four year hiatus. But Sam did it. He treated his brother like an idiot. Nowhere is this clearer than in his presumption that Dean hunts because he isn’t smart enough to realise there are other options. Dean made choices, important life choices, and Sam belittled them because they weren’t the same ones he’d make.
It was unkind, and I’m sure it did a lot to damage their relationship.
At the same time, Dean refused to respect Sam’s choices. Dean places such a premium on family, that he treats a desire to not be around the family 24/7 as a betrayal of epic proportions. While John was just scared that Sam would be killed or spontaneously become evil or some variant thereof if he left for university, Dean felt like Sam was abandoning them. This comes off of Dean’s family versus friends issues, and that the only people he has in his life are family, but Dean treated Sam’s desire for a life that wasn’t centred on hunting as anathema.
Both Sam and Dean, with their lack of ability to communicate, and their own self-centred viewpoints, treated the other’s point of view as being morally and emotionally wrong, and his own as the only valid stance. It ruined any chances of the two of them understanding the other’s perspective. After all, Sam stopped looking for normal, not because he wanted to, but because he felt like he had no other choice any more. Dean stopped treating Sam’s desire to leave as a betrayal, only because Sam stopped talking about it, so they could sweep everything under the rug.
In the end, the family was held together with spit and a prayer because they loved each other so much they stuck it out. There are levels on which Sam, Dean and John understand each other that come from living in each other’s pockets with no one else to interfere for eighteen years. Sam and Dean have the kind of bond some parents would kill to create between their kids. But running through these are cracks that go all the way to the core of that familial and filial trust and love.
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