What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (39 page)

One day, Myron disappeared from his corner. I looked for him frantically, and a policeman on the beat nearby told me that Myron had “gone away.” I was heartbroken. He hadn’t even said good-bye.

Five years later, I saw Myron as I got off a bus to go to the Palace Theatre way downtown. “Myron!” I shouted joyously. He took one look at me and ran away as fast as his limp allowed. A pile of unsold newspapers, flapping in the cold winter wind, remained.

Today, of course, I can fill in the gaps. A passing neighbor must have seen Myron “molesting” (i.e., hugging and kissing) me. She told my parents. My parents told the police. The police told Myron that if they ever saw him with me again, they would send him to prison—or worse (Albany was not a gentle place in the 1950s). No one told me any of this.

I forgot about it until ten years ago, when child molesting became a much discussed topic. First came reports on incest among the poor, then alarming statistics on the middle class. There were warnings about uncles and stepfathers—since the molester was usually found to be a friend or a relative. Then one celebrity after another revealed that her father had abused her and left hideous psychological scars. Then therapists began to probe routinely for forgotten sexual abuse in therapy—and usually found it. Then, in lawsuits, grown-up children began to claim that they now remembered the parental abuse thirty years earlier that had ruined their lives.

A body of research grew up to bolster the public alarm. In a typical study, the mental health of adult women who are incest survivors is checked. The results are uniform: These women are more depressed, anxious, suicidal, drug-abusing, lonely, guilty, and sexually troubled than members of control groups.
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The published interpretation is that sexual abuse in childhood caused the adult problems.

The curmudgeon speaks: In their zealotry, the authors of these articles abandon methodological niceties like adequate control groups and consideration of rival explanations. Often, the survivors in the studies are very self-selected. They are recruited because they are troubled adults: They are in therapy or in self-help groups, or they even, literally, answered an ad for “incest victims.” It is no surprise that they have more problems than the control group. And the control groups are suspect, too (when there even is one); they fail to match the incest victims for the most obvious, critical variables. What these studies fail to control for (this is the unmentioned alternative) are genetic differences and other environmental differences confounded with incest. The kind of fathers, brothers, and uncles who abuse young children are men with major problems of their own. Incest victims, more often than not, come from very troubled families with much more mental illness than the control groups have. Some of the mental illness and some of the family problems are probably genetic. So it remains entirely possible that the depression, anxiety, anger, and sexual problems in the incest survivors do not come from incest. They may stem from some of the other nasty events so frequent in a dysfunctional family, or they may be genetic. Once the ideology is stripped away, we still remain ignorant about whether sexual abuse in childhood wreaks damage in adult life and, if so, how much.

Often forgotten is the child herself. What can we do to best contain the damage? What can we do that will best help the adult who was abused years before as a child?

In talking about post-traumatic stress disorder, my main conclusion was that awful events have lasting ill effects that therapy seems to do little to alleviate. Concentration camps, torture, brutal rape, all leave lasting scars. This is true when the event occurs in adulthood, and this is also true when the event occurs in childhood. But contrary to the inner-child premises, I know of no data that childhood trauma has more power than adult trauma.

My impression is that the natural healing of children is, on the whole, better than for adults. There have been several follow-up studies of sexually abused children, and each shows surprisingly good recovery. More than half the kids improve markedly within a year or two, and the number of kids with severe problems diminishes markedly. A few, tragically, get worse.
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Child sexual abuse varies in objective severity from brutal rape at one extreme to erotic fondling at the other. In post-traumatic stress disorder, objective severity, short of violence and life threat, does not determine how long the symptoms last and how intense they are. Suffering identical traumas, some adults are scarred for life while others are unchanged. A few are even strengthened. (“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” says Nietzsche.) This is also true of children. Consistently, a quarter to a third of sexually abused kids show no symptoms, and contrary to theories of “repression” and “denial,” these children stay symptom free. Our job as therapists and parents is to contain the damage. With our help, brutal assault need not get translated into full-blown PTSD, and mild fondling need not get escalated into PTSD.

If we do things to magnify the trauma in the child’s mind, we will amplify the symptoms; if we do things to mute the trauma, we will reduce the symptoms. Natural healing occurs, but well-meaning parents, therapists, and courts of law can slow healing. Sometimes they even repeatedly rip the protective scar tissue off the wound. Children involved in lengthy criminal cases are ten times more likely to remain disturbed than children whose cases are resolved quickly.
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This is the message of my story about Myron. My parents and the police—in those unenlightened days—lowered the volume. They quietly got Myron off my street corner and scared him badly. If they got enraged or hysterical, I didn’t know about it. They did not interrogate me about the intimate details. No emergency-room doctor probed my anal sphincter. I did not go to court. I was not sent to therapy to undo my “denial.” I was not, years later, encouraged to rediscover what I had “repressed” and then to relive the trauma to cure my current troubles.

If your child is abused or if you were abused, my best advice is to turn the volume down as soon as possible. Reliving the experience repeatedly may retard the natural healing.

Thus the first inner-child premise—that childhood events have a major influence on adult personality—does not stand up to scrutiny. Only a few childhood events, like the death of your mother, have any documented influence on adult emotional life. And their influence is surprisingly small, particularly when compared to the effect of genes on adult personality. “Toxic shame” and “toxic guilt” in adulthood, instilled by parental abuse, are inventions of the recovery movement. When careful investigators look closely and analyze the route, they do not find evidence that shame and guilt cause the adult problems. There is some evidence that parental abuse leads to troubles in adulthood—bad marriages, for example—but not via guilt or shame. The cause is more drastic, as in the statistically well documented scenario in which bad parental abuse leads to a little girl’s placement in a residential nursery. When she reaches puberty, she has no place to go. She escapes by teenage pregnancy or by an early, impulsive marriage, the sort that usually don’t last. Then there are those instances in which a difficult girl causes ill-tempered parenting. That also results in her becoming a difficult grown-up. Such women marry mousy men, who withdraw from them. Their marriages then fall apart.
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Another fashionable candidate for major influence on adult personality is childhood sexual abuse. This case is, at best, unproven.
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Traumatic events, like brutal sexual abuse, exert destructive effects on later life. But childhood trauma is not more destructive than adult trauma. If anything, children heal better than do adults. Put simply, the case for childhood trauma—in anything but its most brutal form—influencing adult personality is in the minds of the inner-child advocates. It is not to be found in the data.

The Flashbulb or the Snowball

Here is the single most surprising fact about child rearing and childhood events: Study after study has shown that the interfamilial variance in personality is about the same as the intrafamilial variance—once you control for genes. (Practice saying this and you can take the life out of any cocktail party.) Translated into English, this means that, on average, the personalities of any two children from the same family turn out to be about as different from each other as they are from the personality of any random child—once you control for genes.
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Childhood events seem so important because we have one and only one model in mind: the flashbulb. We have long assumed that these episodes explode brightly and so are foundational because they are so vivid. This model does not fit the facts. Here is a model that fits better: the snowball. When two rocks start rolling off the top of a snowy hill, very small initial differences get bigger and bigger as the snowballs gather momentum. A small depression on the hill can also alter the trajectory enormously. Small, early variations in direction and small deviations along the path develop into big differences by the time the snowballs have bumped their way to the bottom of the hill.
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Take Joan and Sarah, two little sisters, six and seven, growing up in the Marquez household. They share 50 percent of their genes and seem quite similar. They are slightly different in athletic ability. Joan is a bit stronger than Sarah. When it comes to choosing teammates for tug-of-war in the first grade, Joan always gets picked before Sarah. Sarah comes away from gym day after day feeling disheartened. But she is slightly more talented in music, and so she tries hard in choir. Joan skips choir to play softball. By the end of high school, Joan will be a star gymnast with Olympic ambitions and Sarah the lead soprano in local summer stock. Similar snowballing could eventuate from small differences in optimism, or in looks, or in how much the third-grade teacher liked them, or in how much they liked gardening with Daddy.
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In spite of their being taken to the opera once a month, learning to eat chèvre, gardening with Daddy, and taking tuba lessons, Joan and Sarah are no more likely both to like opera, chèvre, the tuba, or gardening than any two random kids—once you take genetic similarity into account. So even though they start with similar personalities and are raised in practically the same way—same parents, same teachers, same strict discipline, same church, same allowances—Sarah and Joan turn out to be very different adults.

Freedom and Depth

Childhood events—even childhood trauma—and childrearing appear to have only weak effects on adult life. Childhood, contrary to popular belief, does not seem, empirically, to be particularly formative. So, contrary to popular belief, we are not prisoners of our past. How we were raised—by martinets swatting our little fingers with rulers or by permissive parents of Spock (the pediatrician, not the Vulcan) persuasion; how we were fed—on demand or on schedule, on breast or on bottle; even mother’s death, parents’ divorcing, and being second-born exert, at most, small influences on what we are like as adults. We do not need to go through elaborate exorcisms, like ceremonially divorcing our parents, to change our lives.

As adults, we are indeed free to change. I believe that most of the hoary free-will controversy has been empty, full of false dichotomies and reifications: “Is all action strictly determined by the past, or is it sometimes a product of free choice?” “Do we have a faculty of free will?” “Can human beings participate in their own salvation, or is it a gift of God?”

I believe that these questions stem in large part from a misunderstanding about words. With opposites, we sometimes understand both words fully. Both members of the pair can be known separately.
Sweet
and
sour, smart
and
stupid
, are examples. Sweetness, sourness, smartness, and stupidity all exist, and have meanings definable without reference to their opposites. But sometimes we understand and can define only one member of a pair fully, and the other means nothing more than the absence of the first. We know what
embarrassed
means, but
unembarrassed
means nothing more than “not embarrassed.” There is such a thing as embarrassment, but there is no such thing as unembarrassment.
Embarrassed
can be defined without reference to
unembarrassed
, but the reverse is not true.
Colored
and
colorless, finitude
and
infinity
, are like this.
Insanity
and
sanity, disease
and
health, abnormality
and
normality
, have generated disputes, with scholars manufacturing qualities of sanity or health or normality, when all these concepts amount to is the absence of insanity, the absence of disease, and the absence of abnormality.
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The attempt to define
free will
is the granddaddy of these pointless quests. We understand what it is to be
coerced
. It is to be a prisoner frog-marched down a hill. Coercion is something tangible. Freedom is the absence of coercion, nothing more.

Events from childhood do not coerce our personalities in adulthood. We are not frog-marched by parental spankings at age six into being guilt-ridden thirty-year-olds. Our genes do not coerce our adulthood. Unlike spankings, they have a substantial statistical effect on our personality, but we are not frog-marched into being alcoholics even if our biological parents are alcoholics. Even having the genetic predisposition, there are tactics we can adopt to avoid alcoholism. We can, for example, shun drinking altogether. There are many more teetotal people with alcoholic parents than you would expect there to be by chance alone.