Like many people, I have often wondered why our rate of violent crime is so much higher than the rates in, for example, western Europe, Canada, and Mexico before the drug war erupted. The role of easy access to guns in this violence is debated after every mass shooting, and there is a compelling argument to be made that our weak gun control makes it easy for those who would take their extreme alienation out on others to do so. But what about other symptoms of alienation and breakdown that also seem to vex the United States? Easy access to guns doesn’t cause those.
In a globalizing world, it is perhaps unsurprising that many societies find themselves contending with drug addiction, depression and weakening family bonds. Certainly Mexico is experiencing rising rates of family breakdown and upwardly creeping rates of violence above and beyond the drug war, not to mention increasing domestic demand for the drugs the traffickers spill so much blood supplying to the north. European, Canadian and other welfare states are no strangers to dysfunction either; no human society is. These are not trivial concerns, either statistically or in human terms, but I have never shaken my impression, first gained in college, that people from other countries are more...grounded than we are. Without looking for it, I have always felt a very different, more secure and healthy vibe coming from the people of other countries than from my fellow Americans. These impressions have come not only from the foreigners I’ve met at home but also from the time I’ve spent traveling abroad: 30 years of visiting Mexico, four trips to Europe and multiple trips to Canada, as well as visits to other countries, for a total of 19 on three continents. As the wife of a Mexican national, I have met hundreds of Mexicans in our time spent there--perhaps as many as a hundred of them are members of his extended family!
I had the same impression again when my family and I welcomed a teenaged French exchange student into our home last September. At 17, he is self-assured, evidently secure both emotionally and socially. Beyond occasional moodiness, which may be due to homesickness, there does not appear to be any of the neurosis that so many of my fellow Americans and I have grappled with: anxiety, low self-esteem, insecurity in social situations, narcissism, a tentativeness and self-doubt in facing the world and deciding what to do.
I have never consistently encountered this kind of chronic insecurity, poor self-image or angst among people raised outside the United States. That’s not to say that every single American is neurotic--I know a few who seem quite grounded--nor that those from elsewhere have no hang ups or blockages. It has simply been my observation that we Americans are among the most emotionally insecure people in the world, or at least the parts I’ve visited. At home, this observation seems to mesh with the large numbers of us with stories of dysfunction from our growing up years, as well as those who are in therapy or on antidepressants.
I know I can barely name anyone from my young years or among my friends today who doesn’t have a childhood story somewhere on the spectrum from sad to horrifying: abandonment, abuse of one kind or another, neglect, addicted or otherwise emotionally absent parents. There’s no doubt in my mind that American childhood experiences of dysfunction outnumber those of smooth sailing, and, having ruminated on the possible reasons for many years, I’ve concluded that the explanation lies in our lack of what Alice Miller called the “helping witness.”
Miller was a psychoanalyst and later an author whose numerous books about the mistreatment of children represent what many believe to be the most powerful understanding we have of the experience and consequences of child abuse. Miller tells us that the abused or neglected child who has someone in his or her life acting as a “helping witness” will suffer less severe damage from that abuse than the child who lacks a witness. The helping witness may or may not be aware of the actual abuse suffered by a child, but he or she fills an important need by sympathizing with the child’s feelings in reaction to that abuse, or by at least allowing the child to express them. These witnesses are usually unaware of the role they play; many of them are grandparents or other members of the larger family, but they may also be coaches or teachers, family friends, or anyone the child knows.
Here’s why having a witness matters. A child’s natural and legitimate reaction to being abused or neglected is feelings of rage, terror and despair. By allowing the child his or her expression of these feelings, the witness implicitly affirms their correctness in the situation, thereby enabling the child to maintain contact with her psychic reality instead of psychologically splitting it off. Without this help, a child has every incentive to see himself as being responsible for his mistreatment, a distortion of reality that helps protect the child at the time but which feeds into dissociation, which proves dysfunctional in adulthood. (Common sense tells us this is correct. Who will carry more damage into adulthood, the child who believes that her mother beats her because she loves her, or the child who sees being beaten as the betrayal it is?)
Miller explains depression as the absence of vitality that comes from “owning” all of one’s emotions, the opposite of dissociation. In avoiding dissociation, the child avoids depression and the compulsion to violently or masochistically act out an experience that, for lack of a witness, had to be driven underground, out of his or her conscious awareness.
Is it possible that the welfare state and the extended family act as helping witnesses to the children of the countries that enjoy these institutions? Surely it’s not farfetched that an abused or neglected child living in a place like France would have a sense that “someone” cares about him, thereby making him less vulnerable to his abuser? It can only be a great psychological advantage to a child to have a government that views her as worthwhile enough to care for her health and keep her and her family from the streets in case of unemployment or poverty. Such acts of caring would stand in direct contrast to the behavior of an abusive caregiver, and it seems reasonable to conclude that they provide victims some validation of their worth, helping them to take their feelings seriously and avoid the tragedy of dissociation. Though a child will suffer damage at the hands of an abuser under any circumstances, it may be that in the context of an effective welfare state the worst effects are avoided by the child and therefore his society.
In the case of Mexico, which lacks a social safety net, the extended family provides sheer numbers of potential witnesses to abused and neglected children. Even if both parents are disturbed, the odds are good that at least one other person--a grandparent, aunt, uncle or older cousin--will serve as a helping witness to a child. Based on my time spent in Mexico, I am convinced of these protective benefits to living within an extended family. Indeed it appears to be the healthiest context for human beings to grow and develop within, and to mature and grow old in for that matter, given that it’s been the norm throughout human history. So firm is my conviction about this that I hope to see a time when growing up in a nuclear family is understood to be a risk factor for psychological problems.
This brings us back to the United States, which enjoys neither a comprehensive safety net nor the extended family. Here the vast majority of children are dependent upon two caregivers, and for the large numbers of children of divorce, this already precarious number is cut in half. The axiom “It takes a village to raise a child” is not a new-agey invention but an anthropological fact. It does take a village, or at least an extended family, to raise a well-adjusted child, and the prevalence of psychological problems among American children and adults alike speaks, I believe, to the cost of children growing up without numerous and diverse caregivers, or at least the psychological benefits of an effective social safety net. There simply is no consistent, effective witness to the suffering of most abused or neglected children in the United States, a fact that condemns most of them to suffer in what Miller called “boundless isolation.” It seems reasonable to expect that this isolation would increase the chances of a mistreated child dissociating from his abuse and the intolerable memory of it. When this happens, a potent mix of unexamined fear and anger festers, sometimes for years, until an often pathological outlet for it is found.
This thinking may not sit well with those committed to the rhetoric that sees the nuclear family as “traditional.” Having grown up with two badly overextended parents who had no support, a thousand miles from extended family, I do not have the luxury of believing in that particular bit of rhetoric or its warm and fuzzy connotations; there simply wasn’t enough energy, attention or concern to go around to my four siblings and me, all born within seven years. As I got to know Mexico many years later, and the importance of the extended family to its cohesion, I began to understand how deeply unnatural the way I grew up was. Many hands make not only light work--and therefore less resentment--but also many outlets for children when the parent-child relationship periodically becomes too intense, as well as sources of love and validation of a child’s feelings. Intensity of dependence in a relationship breeds stress, guilt and resentment. The multigenerational home is a safety valve, and no child anywhere is immune to the need for it. I certainly wasn’t.
When I think about the origins of my alienation growing up and as an adult, I understand how much it has had to do with my lack of dependable, caring adults in my young years. By the time I was 11, both my parents were emotionally absent (like so many parents in the 1970s), and I was left to my own devices to not only navigate life but to cope with a life-threatening illness. There were no social workers in my affluent town and no other adults available to me, and the result, after becoming an adult, was several years of severe depression, alcohol dependence and deep alienation. Not understanding what I had missed out on, it has very slowly and gradually dawned on me what a recipe for disaster it was to grow up in such a vacuum. It’s no mystery to me why my husband, who grew up surrounded daily by his extended family, has none of the deep unease that comes from the absence of strong, stable adults to guide and protect one as a child. He had not just one or two of these essential people, but half a dozen!
Abstract as it is, I can also imagine the sense of security one derives from living where one receives health care simply because one is alive. Though it would seem ideal that one’s helping witness be an actual person, I’m convinced that welfare states like France provide the children of inadequate parents a sanity-saving substitute in the form of help and protection that communicate to them the existence of an organized, dependable, caring presence. For these kids, it must make all the difference. As Jennifer Freyd explains in “Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse,” the more a dependent a child is on his or her abuser, the greater the damage. It stands to reason that French children are less psychologically dependent upon their parents than American children are, and therefore relatively less vulnerable to any abuse; my chats with our French guest about his growing up years appear to confirm this greater independence and sense of security. I’m convinced that growing up in such a place would have made all the difference to me, providing me with a sense of safety and trust that I have never had, to this day, not to mention a solid foundation for my self-esteem. These qualities are meant to be established in childhood, and are very difficult to achieve in adulthood, a fact I think helps explain the prevalence of neurosis among American adults.
For all these reasons I believe the American “model”--lacking both the extended family and an effective social safety net--is a recipe for dysfunction, and that the nuclear family must be replaced with a return to multigenerational arrangements, unless we move toward, at the least, single-payer universal healthcare. I’m convinced that one of these institutions is needed if we are to give children the greatest chance of avoiding neurosis, and the country its best chance of moving away from violence and costly alienation. (An alternative to extended biological family, and an excellent one, is the small co-housing movement, which so far has more adherents in Europe than in the U.S.)
A lovely quote I saw on Facebook seems apt here: If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others. Don’t we acknowledge this principle in many arenas? The best government is not achieved by one institution but by a balance among various entities. Writing on its way to publication requires scrutiny by many people to be worth reading, and scientific research duplicated by many investigators is always the most trustworthy. Why should children’s optimal development put the lie to such a proven idea as the need for checks and balances?
Returning to the win-win institution of the extended family or implementing a national health care system may well be one of our best hopes for fortifying American children, and the adults they will become. In this way we may have a chance of lifting our culture from a prolonged period of widespread disaffection that too frequently ends in violence and broken lives.
This is not rocket science. It’s wisdom that has been here all along.
COPYRIGHT FEBRUARY 2016
