BP 161
You can’t dedicate all your strength to survival and expect to grow at the same time.
My name is Joe. I survived my childhood instead of flourishing from birth to eighteen years old. My dad was not an alcoholic, but he might as well have been one. He was unpredictable, quick to anger, slow to look inside his own heart at his flaws but so quick to scrutinize those around him and point out their faults. He was never wrong, and so someone else always had to be wrong.
Never underappreciate a person who can confess his sin and ask for forgiveness.
The belief I (Joe) have taken away from surviving a family at war can be captured by the image of trying to repair a house (your heart) while a hurricane is raging around you. Hurricane weather demands that a person seek shelter, hide in a safe place, focus on the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy, namely, basic physiological needs like physical safety and sheer survival (corporeal and emotional).
My father’s explosive anger and overall emotional unpredictability robbed me of what all developing selfs need, namely, a safe environment where the child can relax, play, and not even think about the parent. A healthy, mature parent is like oxygen for the child while the immature parent is like a noxious gas. One will often go unnoticed but give life to the child while the other will demand attention (the parent is dangerous and must be avoided at all costs) and poison the child slowly even to the point of death (at least death of the emotional self).
Yes, in a healthy family, a child does not even have to think about the parent. They are just there, like calming background music or a towering shade tree that is silently soothing to the point of not noticing them until you pause to intentionally be aware of them. Blessed are you if you grew up in a home where you were not even aware of your parents’ presence. I grew up in a house where I always had to be aware of my father.
Have you ever heard of CEWS–Child Early Warning System? When you grow up with a volatile parent, you develop strong radar at a very young age. What is radar? According to Wikipedia, radar is a location system that uses radio waves to detect “the distance, angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site.” Radar detects and tracks the location of guided missiles, aircraft, ships, and motor vehicles as well as weather formations (like tornadoes and hurricanes).
For children, the CEWS is a type of radar that employs highly developed 360-degree radar to detect the distance, mood, and incoming aggressive nature of a parent relative to the child’s position. One component of that system is the driveway radar that warns the child that a car is pulling into the driveway. A related component is the garage door opening radar that alerts the child to the imminent arrival of the parental unit.
When these radar systems are triggered by an approaching threat, a child must then enter high vigilance mode to prepare for the incoming parent who might be closing in fast in missile mode–ready to destroy anything in his path.
Yes, my father was a missile that often came into the house hot, searching for a target. Avoidance was the best tactic when confronted with a heat-seeking (or better said, a child-seeking) missile.
Healthy parents are just there—predictable, safe, grounding. They don’t require a child to construct a hypersensitive radar system. They don’t cause a child to focus on them as soon as they drive up the driveway.
Below are some other insights I wish to pass on to you as a child who had to construct a complex CEWS.
- Immature parents (often 2-7 years old emotionally) focus on the child’s badness. In fact, they project their own badness on the child instead of looking inside at their own badness. They observe the child with binoculars. They correct the child quickly usually not to correct or discipline but to shame and cause the child to feel bad. Scapegoating is the norm. The child ends up carrying the parent’s shame and badness.
- Growth of the child’s self is hampered in an environment that is dominated by unease, fear, anxiety, terror, even panic. How can a child learn when he or she is anxious all the time? Highly gifted children are often paralyzed by anxiety and obsessive thoughts and simply cannot develop their intellectual skills much less their emotional and psychological skills (e.g., self-comfort) and interpersonal skills.
- My father remained emotionally immature and did not grow so I ended up living in a volatile environment for eighteen years. If, like me, you are exposed for years to a dysfunctional parent, you will take many hits as a child—possibly physical in nature but certainly emotional. You will internalize this parent with his critical voice and take him with you for the rest of your life—unless you identify that voice and replace it with a healthy voice.
- When there is a boy-father or a girl-mother in the house, the child will either hide or rise up and challenge the emotionally immature parent (sometimes to a degree even more than the other parent is capable of doing). Hiding and challenging both take a toll on the child. The hiding child learns to suppress emotions and needs and later in life experiences Leakage like anxiety, depression, addictions, EDs, perfectionism, physical pain, sleeping issues, passive aggressive behaviors, a conviction that they are never pleasing to God or that God is going to punish her, “niceness”, poor boundaries, etc. The child who challenges the parent could later become like the parent—angry, explosive, unpredictable, being an emotional volcano. Here we see the whole “identifying with the aggressor phenomenon.”
- Whenever the parent is unpredictable and has an emotional hair trigger, the child must accommodate who he is to be safe in that environment. The child must please the parent, walk on eggshells, avoid the parent when he hears the garage door open or quickly disappear when the parent shows early signs of an explosion. The child cannot freely be himself. He must adjust his emotions, needs, opinions, so as not to be annihilated by a parental land mine. How can a child develop a self if he must continually adjust to the capricious parent instead of being encouraged by the parent to be seen and honest and even have emotions and dissenting opinions?
So, what is a child with a CEWS to do when she grows up? How does she recover? How does she restart the stalled self-development that could not occur in an unsafe environment or that was highly compromised by anxiety and daily accommodation of self to the fragile parent?
The only healthy path is to find someone (divine or human) who is strong enough that accommodation does not have to occur, and it is safe to be true self. Sometimes a person can find that strength (and safety) in the person of Jesus first. Other times, the person needs to begin with a caring and predictable human who can help heal the adult child with the CEWS who believes (or feels) that God the Father is probably like the earthly parent—quick to be offended, angry, punishing, shaming, abandoning.
It is essential that the adult child (the survivor of childhood) find a person (or Jesus) who is not protected by a mine field. Mature parents do not need to protect themselves because they are not fragile people living in glass houses. They are living in a sturdy castle that can withstand and contain emotions, needs, disagreements, and even direct attack.
A child or adult can only develop a self when the environment around them does not require an Early Warning System to protect them against volatile, easily wounded parents. None of us can grow unless we have around us a parent who is predictable, safe, celebrating, brings a loving presence, and knows how to discipline the child in a healthy way (not at the two extremes of permissive or authoritarian). Yes, it’s all about safe and loving presence.
Final thought. If you run to God the Father, you will be safe even though so many people believe He is wrathful and reactive in character. God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the kindest, most predictable, most loving, most forgiving personalities in the universe. No EWS is needed around them because the Triune God is unchanging, faithful, and will never leave you or forsake you.
Never.
His presence naturally and inevitably matures people and develops the human self.
“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” ~ Romans 8:38-39.
“Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” ~ Hebrews 4:14-16