Last night I went out for drinks with a new friend and we showed one another our scabs. I always let the other person go first. She doesn't get along with her parents, who continue their lifelong practice of not much caring about her. The effects are obvious; she's twitchy, nervous, eager for approval. She makes curious relationship choices. She's in therapy, even though she doesn't think it's ever done her a lick of good or ever will.
"How about you?" she asked. "Do you get along with your parents?"
Here we go.
A simple "not really" will precipitate another question, which will precipitate another, and soon this will be a cross-examination. I know from past experience that in 30 minutes' time, this friendship will be forever changed. She'll fall in love with me (or more precisely, with the notion of repairing me), recoil in horror, or some contorted combination of the two. Mind you, I won't volunteer any information. It's just that for every follow-up question she will ask, the answer will be "Yes." On life's grand childhood trauma quiz, I get an A. Not a 100%, more like a 95%, but an A nonetheless.
It's 30 minutes later. Her drink is empty, her eyes are the size of manhole covers, and her arms are flailing wildly.
"How does that not affect you?!?"
"My family? It does."
"I don't see it."
"Oh, they're there. They're always there in the back seat of my mind, chattering in my ear. But I don't let them drive."
"But...but...how can you, like, just decide not to let it affect you?"
"Well, it'd be naive to think that it doesn't affect me at all. I mean Jesus, just look at my life. How many people like me do you know? But yes, at a certain point, I did decide to stop whining and take ownership of my own issues as best I could."
"Yeah, but how?"
"I just got fed up with my family's twistedness and decided that from that point forward, anything wrong with me was my own fault."
"Yeah, but how?"
"I just told you how."
"No you didn't."
And so it will go, forever, neither of us ever understanding the blocking issue for the other. I have friends who get it, and I have friends who don't. The ones who get it? At some point they'd decided to take ownership of their problems, too.
I have a new theory that parents who are off-the-charts, comic-book-villain bad are actually doing their kids a favor. It's not hard to make a dissociative break from comic book villains. They bear no resemblance to me or to real life, the child can honestly say. They have nothing to do with my reality. The child is forcefully shoved toward this realization. He's forced to man-up. Meanwhile, the kids with the merely shitty parents get no life-changing shove. No epiphany. They likely remain in their moderately negative parental dynamic forever, doomed to a desperate, grasping lifetime of "Yeah, but how?"
You heard it here first: parents, if you're going to mess up your kids, do them a favor and really pile it on. They'd thank you for it later, if they were still speaking to you.