The psyche of a young child is like an unfinished house whose windows do not yet have any glass panes installed. Her mind has its own interior separate from the minds of others just as surely as her vital organs are contained within her skin, but during her formative years the psychic boundary is porous. She must breathe whatever is in the air outside.
This is natural and it poses no problems for a child born into a healthy family. The inherently respectful and nurturing environment created by fully mature, healthy parents flows into and fills up the child’s mental interior. But vast numbers of children are stuck with traumatized parents who, because they are traumatized, create environments where it is unsafe to have one’s psychic windows open. Their parents look at them and speak to them with inappropriate expressions of irritation, confusion, bitter loneliness, fear, disgust, love-hunger, resentment, emptiness, jealousy, or rage. When faced with the vulnerability and intense neediness of a young child who depends on them, most parents feel threatened by potent reminders of how they were emotionally deprived and poisoned by their own parents. Very few acknowledge this is happening, even though they sense it on some level.
Unresolved traumas festering inside the parents will inevitably darken and distort their communication. The entire atmosphere of the family becomes polluted with desperation, uneasy compromises and the unspoken resentments spawned by those compromises; the parents compulsively act out their wounds instead of working to heal them. Thus they make their outsides (the family atmosphere) into a mirror image of their insides (their fragmented, fear-ridden minds). And the child has no choice but to breathe this atmosphere. Is it such a mystery that so many people unconsciously hold their breath even in moments of mild stress?
Faced with this intolerable dilemma many children abandon their natural impulse toward building a clear separation between their inside and their outside, “choosing” instead to merge with one or both parents by taking in the pollution along with whatever nurturance is available. Many other children adopt the “strategy” of boarding up their unfinished psychic windows, refusing the poisonous intrusions at the cost of blocking out actual love. Virtually all of us gained crucial safety in our childhoods through some combination of these two self-protective responses. Tragically, these defenses against parental toxins damage our innate abilities to grow and to connect with others. No wonder so many adults have poor emotional boundaries and are prone to tangling themselves up with others in confusing, disrespectful and violating ways. No wonder so many adults are closed off to intimate contact and live stuck between the terror of emotionally starving and the terror of being force-fed toxic material.
To reclaim our birthright of forming healthy boundaries we need to see the truth of how our boundaries were violated in childhood and how we coped with these violations. We need to develop safe, nurturing environments both inside, in our private relationships with ourselves, and outside, in our relationships with other people. Ignoring this task leaves us stunted and breeds the temptation to spread our troubled insides onto external targets, especially those whom we have power over. But accepting this excruciating task of healing brings the gift that keeps giving: an increasing ability to open and close our emotional windows appropriately, and to let others see our vibrant interiors without fear or shame.
Beyond the Family Cult 