TRANSCRIPT
Not infrequently, when I’m talking with people about the subject of childhood trauma, people reply to me, “My parents did the best they could.” I found this an interesting thing to say, especially since I’ve heard it so, so many times. Once upon a time, I said similar things about my own parents: “They did the best they could.” So what did I mean, and what do I think people mean when they say, “My parents did the best they could?”
Well, what I think people mean is that, yeah, my parents really screwed up in some ways. They did some things that were pretty awful to me—traumatizing even—and yet they couldn’t help themselves. They tried as hard as they could. They really worked at being parents to the best of their ability, even though their abilities might have been limited. They really were trying as hard as they could, so I can’t blame them. I can’t hold them responsible for the things that they did to me.
Now, a little extra thing that I thought about that I found was very interesting, and it popped into my mind just the other day, is the legal equivalent of “my parents did the best they could.” Well, what popped into my mind is the legal equivalent: the insanity defense. It’s actually very similar to the idea of “my parents did the best they could.” The insanity defense being the idea that people, because they are insane, are not actually responsible for their actions. They don’t know the difference between right or wrong. They may have done the best they could, but they may have done horrible things because of their state of insanity, and therefore they can’t be prosecuted. They can’t be put in jail if they are found not guilty by reason of insanity.
The interesting thing is, when I hear people say, now that I’ve been thinking about it, “My parents did the best they could,” in a way what they’re saying is, “My parents can’t be held responsible for what they did to me because, in a way, they were insane.” So I guess for me, what this brings up is: are parents who harm their children yet are doing the best they could, are they insane?
Well, me, the definition of insanity is being unconscious—doing things unconsciously, especially things motivated by unresolved traumas, traumas that are buried in the unconscious. I think often, actually always, when parents do bad things to their children, it is unconsciously motivated. It’s parents replicating what was done to them, often in their own childhoods, by their parents and unconsciously replicating it on their children. This is the idea of the repetition compulsion—that people who have been traumatized, even mildly or in extreme ways, bury what was done to them and yet have all the dynamics still living in their unconscious, out of their awareness.
So, in spite of their best intentions to be good people, or parts of themselves that really are good people, in spite of this, they’re repeating. They have a compulsion to repeat what was done to them, directly or metaphorically, and especially to repeat these dynamics—not always the direct actions, but the underlying dynamics, the emotional dynamics of what happened—to repeat them on people over whom they wield power. And who has more power than a parent over a very young child?
And that, to me, explains—and that’s been my observation also—why parents so often and so easily traumatize their children, often in very similar ways in which the parents were traumatized by their own parents, and their parents were traumatized by their parents, going all the way back. What I’ve also seen is that when parents are harming their children, often and usually, they’re really not aware of it. So it’s like parents, in general, from what I’ve seen, really do have the best intentions. They want to be the best parents they can. They actually put a lot of effort into being the best parents they can. They sacrifice so much. They sacrifice so much of their lives to be good parents, to give their children as much as they can.
But they can’t help the sides of themselves that are harming their children. And I think at some level, their children know that. Their children know that their parents, although they’re trying the best they can, and they can feel the love that’s coming from their parents, they can also know there’s really horrible stuff happening. And yet the child is in a position, by nature of their less powerful role in the family system, that they can’t openly blame their parents. They can’t hold their parents responsible. It’s dangerous for them sometimes even to blame their parents because then the bad things that are happening will just get worse. Parents often do not like it when their children hold them responsible for the bad things that they’re doing. I personally experienced that, and it’s so common from what I’ve seen in other people.
And that’s the reason that children, when they have negative feelings toward their parents—very healthy, normal negative reactions to the bad things that their parents are doing to them—they have to bury those feelings. They have to push those feelings down, push them out of their consciousness into their unconscious. They have to dissociate. And that is a perfect example of how dissociation is a normal and expected consequence of trauma, of unresolved trauma. When a person can’t grieve their trauma, when a person can’t blame their traumatizer, or when a person can’t have all their normal reactions to trauma and integrate them into their personality and move forward in their life through this grieving process, they bury it. And that’s how they become traumatized.
And part of becoming traumatized, part of dissociating, is letting traumatizers off the hook. The most extreme way to do it is just to forget that the trauma even happened—totally block it out of memory. And there are so many people that don’t even remember their childhoods. From what I’ve seen, often those people are the ones who most easily say, “Oh, my parents did the best they could,” or they even take it to the next level that says, “Oh, my parents were great. My parents were perfect. All my parents never did anything bad to me,” because they don’t even remember it.
So back to this idea of the insanity defense. Well, there’s one alternative thing in the legal system that, as far as I know, goes back thousands of years in Western civilization. I think it even goes back to Socrates. And that’s an opposite idea to this idea of the insanity defense, and that’s the idea that ignorance of the law is not a defense. The idea that just because you don’t know that something that you’re doing is bad doesn’t allow you to not be held responsible for it. That is, if you break the law, whether you know you’re breaking it or not, you’re still going to be held responsible.
And that goes actually very, very much against the idea of “my parents did the best they could.” Because if children, adult children even, actually held to what is a cornerstone of Western civilization’s law, Western civilization’s legal systems, what children would say is, “Yes, my parents traumatized me, and they must be held responsible.” It doesn’t even matter that they didn’t know right from wrong. It doesn’t matter if they were doing the best they could. It’s irrelevant.
So basically, like if a drunk driver is out there and they’re totally not aware of what they’re doing, and they’re so drunk that they don’t even know that it’s wrong to drive a car, and they do it anyways and they kill people, they’re going to be held responsible for it. They can’t say, “I didn’t know.” It doesn’t matter.
So when parents say, “I didn’t know that what I was doing was wrong. I didn’t know that it was wrong to put my child in this terrible school where they were harmed. I didn’t know it was wrong to emotionally abandon my child again and again. I didn’t know that I was so traumatized and that I would unconsciously repeat some of my traumas against my child. I didn’t know.” Well, guess what? What I’ve observed in psychology, in my own life, in observing people as a therapist, is saying “my parents did the best they could” does nothing to help me heal from my own traumas, and it does nothing to help other people heal from their traumas. And ultimately, it does nothing to help humanity heal from its traumas.