TRANSCRIPT
Some months back, I was reading a news article about a book written by one of Bing Crosby’s children. I can’t remember if the child was a boy or girl, a man or woman. Now, I think it was a man. I think it was Bing Crosby’s son. And what I remember of the article was they were saying he wrote a very critical biography of his father, saying his father did all sorts of horrible things—neglectful, abusive parent. And what really jumped out at me was that so many people in this son’s life, other siblings of his, other children of Bing Crosby, other people in Bing Crosby’s life, said it never happened. This kid is lying. B. Crosby wasn’t an abusive father. This kid was making it all up.
And that wasn’t the first time I’d heard it. I’d heard it several other times—children of famous people writing critical, negative, but what I presume to be honest biographies of the flaws and limits and traumatizing behavior of their parents, and having their siblings and other family members and people all around saying it never happened. I think another famous one was that book “Mommy Dearest” about Joan Crawford. Her daughter wrote this book saying what an awful, traumatizing mother Joan Crawford was, and all of Joan Crawford’s other kids saying, “No, it never happened. This girl’s a liar. It never—it was lies. She was a good mother,” etc., etc. And what’s up with that? How do we make sense of this? How do we reconcile it? Were these people making stuff up and writing lies about their parents just to denigrate their memory, or were they telling the truth?
Well, I believe them. I believe nobody writes horrible things about their parents unless it was true. Now, can people exaggerate a little? Can people’s memories change things a little over time? Can people do a little bit of—have a little bit of exaggeration in their written biographies? Perhaps. But core fundamental stuff, I just know it’s true. Yet how can all their siblings and all these other people, famous people even, come out and say they’re lying? It never happened. There was no abuse in that home. So and so was a loving parent, a good parent.
Well, that’s what I’d like to explore because I’ve experienced it myself. I’ve said a lot of very critical things about my parents and had so many people in my own family system just say it didn’t happen. He’s lying. He’s exaggerating. He’s making it up. He’s full of bitterness and rage, blah blah blah blah blah. And yet I know it happened. I was there. I saw it. And what’s interesting is some of these very people who are saying it didn’t happen, he’s lying, he’s making it up, were actually there when it happened. They saw it.
The simplest one is my own parents. My mother saw my father abusing me, and she said, “He’s not abusing you. It didn’t happen.” Yes, she saw him hit me multiple times and did nothing about it. And it’s like turning a blind eye. And my father saw my mother being sick and perverse and twisted and manipulative toward me, did nothing about it, let it go on for the longest time. And when later, part of my healing process, I started speaking about it, started confronting about it, he said, “Your mother wasn’t just a good mother. She was a great mother. She loved you deeply.” And he defended her, even though they divorced and supposedly he hated her and supposedly she hated him. But when push came to shove, they defended each other, and so did other family members of mine—my extended family, my grandparents. It was like everybody lined up with the family system.
And am I coming here to complain and whine? I’m not. I’m actually just exploring it as a psychological phenomenon. Why would they do this? Why do people just seem to line up with the power players in the family system and side with them? Why do people side with the traumatizer against the victims? Why do they side with the people with power against the people who have less power? And I think the power thing is where it’s at. There’s no personal gain in siding with the powerless. It’s not about truth for most people. It’s not about morality. They themselves are so wounded and hurt and lost and split off, and their own traumas are pushed down deep down. They feel so powerless just under the surface. They are so powerless under the surface that the last thing that they want to do is in any way side with, or heaven forbid, identify with a powerless person talking about the roots of their powerlessness, talking about the roots of their trauma, speaking out against the powerful. And what better example than talking about parents who are rich and famous and beloved by the world?
It’s been very, very hard for me to speak out against my parents, and my parents aren’t even rich or famous. I think it would probably be a lot harder when people are the children of the rich and famous. But how conscious is it, all these people who are saying Bing Crosby’s son is a liar? It never happened. Or whatever her name was, Joan Crawford, her daughter’s a liar. It never happened. Do they really believe it when they’re accusing these biography-writing children of being liars? Did my grandparents actually believe it when they called me a liar for saying what I said about my parents? Strangely enough, I think they’re really telling the truth. And the only way I can explain it, ’cause I’ve talked to them, I’ve explored this, ’cause it really made me curious: why is everyone lining up against me and siding with my parents? Why do my parents, who hate each other, side with each other against their supposedly beloved son?
I think for starters, it’s denial. Denial being a primitive, unconscious defense. Strangely enough, a few months ago, I had the opportunity to see a huge and beautiful river in Africa—the Nile. And when they say as a joke, “Denial, it’s not just a river in Africa,” well, I saw two different sources of the Nile River. I saw this beautiful pure water flowing out of mountains and flowing into tributaries that went to the Nile, went into Lake Victoria, and then Lake Victoria going up into the Nile River at Ginga in Uganda. And I thought, I have now seen the source of denial.
Well, denial as a psychological defense, where does it come from? I’ll speak for my parents. I know their histories—both traumatized, unloved people. Both of them who had so much fury and pain and longing and desperation and rage buried just beneath the patina, the facade of their adult selves they presented to the world as mature, sophisticated, productive, functional adults. But under the surface, they were just lost, wounded, hurt, violated children—violated by their parents. And yet they couldn’t see this and feel it, not really, in any big, deep, honest, consistent, processed way, because they still were desperately hoping their parents would love them. And they were choosing parental stand-ins all over the place to love them. That’s why my parents chose each other. They chose partners who were like their own traumatizing, limited, wounded, hurt, violating parents. And they replicated their childhood history in their own romantic relationship with each other, in their marriage. And that was the boundaries of my family—this insane system that replicated both of my parents’ painful, difficult, traumatizing childhoods.
And denial was necessary to keep this system in line, to keep it fueled. If either of my parents had started to break their denial, starting to have—they really started to look within and look in the mirror and see who they were and see what had really happened to them when they were young, how wounded they were and how wounded they still remained, how they still remain wounded little lost children hungry for some parental figure to love them—well, if they’d seen this and started to feel the feelings, the rage and the pain and the hurt—all things that traumatized children go through and bury beneath the surface in order to survive in these sick systems, sick family systems, sick religious systems, sick societies, sick schools—well, if they started to feel this, I think they would have gone crazy. I think everything would have broken apart. I think they really would have had breakdowns. And so they held it together with that glue of denial, that glue that said, “I had a good childhood. My parents loved me,” and no one criticized them for it. And their parents gave them some attention and gave them…
Some money and gave them some inheritance for staying in line and staying in denial. And guess what? My grandparents were exactly the same. They came from horrible backgrounds too. By and large, this is the history of humanity: this denial about the sickness of parents, the flaws of parents. Denying this is what keeps our sick society in line and keeps it running. It keeps the machine going and keeps people having more and more children who they can abuse because, well, it kind of feels good to a traumatized child who’s now grown up to abuse someone. And who can you abuse more easily than a powerless infant who you own legally? People say “my child” because they actually own this little infant, and they can abuse him and neglect him and do all sorts of horrible things to him and get away with it. Do things to her and get away with it. Did Joan Crawford treat her daughter in a rotten way? Of course she did! Because if she really loved her daughter, if she hadn’t traumatized her daughter, her daughter would never have grown up to write well, negative and cruel and nasty things about her mom. People who are loved don’t turn on the people who love them. It just doesn’t work that way. If Bing Crosby had really been there for his son, really loved him deeply, his son wouldn’t have written the biography that he did. He wouldn’t have said those things. Even if, even if there was some exaggeration in it, even if—and I don’t know that there was—maybe there wasn’t. Maybe both these children were directly accurate. But it totally also makes sense to me why all those siblings lined up and pointed to the sibling who was the truth teller and said “liar, liar, liar.” Because these siblings were in denial. The ones who told the truth were the healthier ones. How healthy were they? I don’t know. What was their motive for writing a book about all the flaws of their rich and famous parent? Maybe part of it was to heal. Maybe part of it was to get fame themselves. Maybe part of it was to get some acknowledgment from the world. Listen, it wasn’t all what it was cracked up to be. I’m not so lucky. Maybe they wanted to get some money out of it. I mean, there could be all sorts of motives, but I still feel and know fundamentally that they were telling the truth.
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