This chapter examines the family systems that do the scripting of individuals. (Scripting means the development of an set of rules, programs, reactions, mostly unconscious, that manifest themselves as abnormal personalities.) The purpose of this introduction is to give an overview of the characteristics of these systems, to allow for a better comprehension of how scripting works in people's lives. The primary focus here will be on the major family system types.
In general, the survival strategies of the family have been found to be composed of three broad patterns, and each of these family patterns precipitates relatively predictable roles, "bailing stations" or "scripts" for the children. These are the "CRUTCH-AHOLIC" (dysfunctional) family, the "WHIM" ("What's in it for me?") family, and the "KAOH" ("Keep 'em Around the Old Homestead") family. These have been found to correspond rather well to the "cowardly lion", the "tin man" and the "scarecrow" from the "Wizard of Oz" in their characteristics. Baum was really on to something -- and haven't we "unconsciously" known it!?. (The "CRUTCH-AHOLIC", "WHIM" and "KAOH" family types are discussed in more detail in separate documents. See references at the end of this documents for the titles and web locations.)
In coming to understand the family types, it should be noted that individual families usually have components of more than one of these, though usually in differing amounts. The worst family system is, of course, the one that is a "triple whammy family", in which all of the systems are equally powerfully operative. This corresponds to the fact that individuals are almost always mixtures of scripts that constantly shift in expression. This book is intended to be an explanation of how people come to function the way that they do, what's going on inside of them when they are behaving out of the scripts, and some notions as to how to "break out" of the various "behavioral prisons". It is not a simple "golden pathway to quick diagnosis". (The script "abnormal personality" types are discussed in more detail in separate documents. See references at the end of this documents for the titles and web locations.)
We turn now to the three family systems. They will be presented in order of pervasiveness in the culture and also of relative significance or importance to the individual and society. This order will be adhered to in the presentation of the scripts as well, with the most frequent and significant ones presented first.
THE "CRUTCH-AHOLIC" FAMILY
This family system is the resultant of enormous frustration and rage created by the dehumanizing conditions of life in the isolated nuclear family, and by the resulting inhumanities that humankind is now exhibiting to each other.
The net effect of this rage is what could be characterized as "gaminess", a mutually scarring indirect hostility-release process that turns the family into a "hidden agenda"-loaded "melee of machetes and stilettos". The children have to find some way to fit into this "dance macabre" while still getting at least a minimum of their fundamental survival, human and maturation needs met.
The result is the phenomenon known as the "bargain with the devil". This is a selection of what "games" (which are structured interactions in which one of the participants ends up bleeding on the floor from the emotional body) and self-protective reality-, feeling- and responsibility-avoidant strategies they are going to use to get by in the household, out of which come their "behavioral prisons", of course.
Since these self-protective strategies perforce involve significance-avoidant activities and lifestyles so as to prevent activating the "furies of hell" in the family (by introducing reality, feelings and responsibility), the particular significance-squashing and "safe" time-structuring "prosthetic device" to "get them through the night" becomes the "crutch" on which they depend, and which becomes the individual's "trademark". Some example "crutches" are alcohol, drugs, food, love affairs, "causes", thrill-seeking, sex, and work. The family system that produces such a lifestyle is called the "Crutch-aholic" (or "Crutch") syndrome. It is a well-documented system that is known as the "dysfunctional family" as well.
There is no joy in "Bloodville", and there is no spontaneity around a booby trap. Everyone in this family system trades their soul for survival in the anger- and fear-ridden, reality-scrambling household in which nothing is as it seems, nothing is real, nothing makes any sense, and everything is painful and potentially dangerous, perhaps even lethal.
One of the most disconcerting aspects of the "Crutch" family is that it operates like a "travelling tornado", sucking everyone and everything in its path into their devastating way of life. They seem to have to have chaos and crises constantly, creating an overload and overwhelm experience continuously. They are emotional-commotional, "trauma-drama"-ing, resource-vanishing, mutually contradictory, sibling rivalrous, alliance-seeking, jealous/possessive, intimacy-incompetent, blame-throwing, injustice-nurturing, victim-tripping, rigidly restricting to irrelevant rules and roles, and completely accountability-avoidant.
And they put anyone who would have an impact on the system in the position of having to either 1) "blast them out of the water" -- or try to (with very poor odds of success, given the lifestyle of the family), 2) get into a huge hassle and losing battle with them, or 3) capitulating to their barrage of bullshit. Most people end up settling on the latter after trying the earlier ones with too many god-awful experiences as the result.
The household typically gets started as two individuals who are themselves products of "crutch" families recognize kindred spirits who have been through the same mill, and who will "mesh" with their respective scripts to in effect reproduce both families, an effect that looks hereditary in its generation-to-generation transmission of identical patterns.
Both individuals were thoroughly frightened of life and feelings by their ubiquitously miserable life histories, and they are simply not equipped to step out of their "behavioral prison" to select some one who is not "crutchy". So they help each other hide from reality, responsibility and their feelings, reflecting the avalanche of disastrous experiences and outcomes that occurred when they were in any way real, significant or vulnerable in their behavior as a child. The functional effect of a "crutch" learning history is to make it supremely dangerous and immoral to in any way be themselves.
So they perpetuate their particular "games", with the resulting "magical mystery tour" parade of misery in which "Ya never know when the next piece of shit is going to hit the fan and spray you -- just that it will". Strokes and power are withheld in any form other than the "drama triangle" ("victim"-"persecutor"-"rescuer"). Autonomy is also destroyed, and they force each other to operate in a "stimulus-slave" and "environment-dominated" manner. Success is not allowed, and when it does occur, it is ignored, exploited, distorted or destroyed. Avoidance becomes their way of life, and the particular "crutch" selected dictates the details of the relief-seeking escapes, and of their associated accoutrements of behavior, equipment, people, roles, environments, events and the like.
As the years go by, the "crutch"-related aspects of their life take on more and more dominance, as the cumulative effects of their life-style mount. Their "crutch" keeps them out of touch with their bodily feedback and needs, and it keeps them in control of themselves, out of trouble, and entertained, filling the need for time-structuring and "safe" (trivial) social strokes. Their communications take on a "banal retentive" -- "CB" ("crutch behavior") quality as they are totally significance-squashing and pain-avoidant, all to the accompaniment of joyless "tavern laughter".
Which is ironic, for it is the "intimate enemy" from whom the pain comes, along with the effects of the total restriction of rewards and options created by their reality-avoidant way of life. All of this is, of course, intensely anger-inducing, which then has to be suppressed, lest it unleash all the furies of hell from the environment (disaster-avoidance) and from oneself (runamok-anxiety). As a result, there is a desperate need for anger-release avenues that won't have these effects, and they therefore engage in a steady "scream-stream" of subtle and indirect aggressive behaviors -- the "games".
This pattern produces individuals who alternate between significance-avoidance and passive-aggressive behaviors. The passive-aggressive patterns take on two basic forms. One is "moral indignation" and "guardian of morality" self-justifications for what could be characterized as "critical parent" and "corner in the courtroom" types of behaviors. Here one individual places themselves in the position of the "judge and jury" and they observe, evaluate, adjudicate and punish continuously.
The other type of passive-aggressiveness that occurs with high frequency is the "sneaky sadist" set-up and stage-setting for vicarious anger-reduction by watching the resulting fireworks, "drama-traumas" and "bleeding on the floor". The perpetrator of all this mayhem starts out seeming "hyper-moral", nurturing, or emanating a subtle "Look how much I'm doing for you!" projection. However, this is then used to lay the groundwork for various "switch" behaviors, where they turn on the "critical parent" pattern or various "Let's you and him fight" events.
Everything in the "crutch" household is laced with assumptions, implications, and innuendoes, and things move very rapidly from seemingly mellow to screamingly bellowing interchanges all the time. Sudden surprises, chain reactions, escalating avalanches and uproar are commonplaces. There are all kinds of phenomena like the "sadomasochistic minuet", in which one individual behaves the part of the moral monster and the other plays the innocent victim or the helpful rescuer, while it turns out that the "bad guy" is a "well-guided missile" for the seeming "good guy" (who uses their apparent trustworthiness as an information- and trust-gathering device from which to launch the "missile" more tellingly).
Capricious reality, "eggbeater" perception, recall and interpretations and "gambler's fallacy" expectations (it's been so long, it's bound to come any time now) abound in the "crutch" family, creating the "magical mystery tour" experience. It's all form and no real content or substance there, and they operate out of indirection and implications continuously. They also do a lot of interrupting, "having to interrupt" and not hearing, which invalidates each other's existence, identity, dignity and impact by constantly changing the subject. It is a systematic worth-undermining process. The family members have such low self-esteem as a result of all that happens there that status-seeking, favoritism and worth-symbols pervade and permeate their behavior, goals and life. They are desperately trying and vying for some survival-providing strokes and standing.
Another characteristic of the "crutch" family is that because of the way it is set up and impacts, the family members become addicted to each other and the family system. There is a real "family prison" effect in which the members are totally entrapped. One major piece of this process consists of trying to "get blood from a hostile stone" by trying to please unpleasable people. A "hung up in principles" (HIP) type of perfectionistic idealism is established, and no one can "meet the standard" in such a household, and they end up literally killing themselves trying to anyway. Furthermore, a kind of "systems-paranoia" develops in which the individual reacts to any outside system as a threat to themselves and to their family "lifeline", along with a massive blame- and accountability/responsibility-attribution terror arising from the way the family handles these issues.
There are a large number of other very characteristically "crutchy" patterns that mark the experience in such a household -- the "clutch of crutches" effect. To take just one example, there is the "zero-sum set-up" in which an atmosphere and even a reality of the scarcity of fundamental life-support systems and resources is set up, and then the "alpha male" -- "meanest son-of-a-bitch-in-the-valley" playout proceeds. Or a sly and sadistic "loan shark" process gets started. Or in any number of other ways, the controller of the key resources lords it over everyone and plays sadistic games with the supply flow.
There is a massive fear of and resistance to change of any kind in the "crutch" family. One result of which is the liberal insertion of "fail-safe" mechanisms and "death implants" in the children. These are processes that are triggered by environmental events or internal intentions that indicate that the individual is going to "break out" of the "family prison" or their "behavioral prison". The "death implant" then "goes off" and drives the individual back to the fold or they eliminate the individual from this plane.
The lifestyle resulting from this type of thing can be devastating indeed, and in the more extreme cases, multiple disastrous illnesses, calamities, mayhem and deaths are the earmarks of the family. There is a type of homicidal rage that comes from the capriciously cruel "carrot-dangling" and "carrot-yanking" that permeates a "crutch" household. It becomes a maelstroming mess around any form of "abandonment" as a result -- and of course the "yanks" precipitate mayhem constantly. This can lead to very early assault arrests on the part of the children. Of course, when the parents are confronted on this type of thing, they focus on concrete, simple and comparatively irrelevant issues like the child's grades in school so they can have a sense of control. They also harass the interveners and turn the whole situation into a confusion of "corner in the courtroom" processes to the point where things are just dropped.
Chaos-, confusion- and crisis-courting, disaster-inviting, enticement-entrapment games, seductive-destructiveness, vengeance-vendettas, multi-generational emotional mutilations, landmine explosiveness, "cops and robbers" games, "souse-louse spouse" alcoholic/rage-aholic people-battering, flying furniture and bodies, "concentration camp" patterns, and death-inviting are the way it is in the more intense "crutch" households.
The same patterns occur in the more subtle "crutch" households, but they are disguised under the covers of various pseudo-nurturing, conventional, "high moral purpose", "keeping up with the Joneses", "What will the neighbors think?", "For your own good", "I'm only trying to help you", "But you SAID . . ." and other misleading and as a result impact-increasing, source-befuddling and correction-preventing ruses. Bottom line, the story is always the same -- the "crutch" lifestyle is always a "magical misery tour".
Now enter a conception into this melee. During the pregnancy, the diet, noise, stress and suppressed emotions create ample warning of what is to come, and when the infant enters the household, the "vibes" and events are very loud and clear in their import. It is a matter of finding a way to come into "synch" with the "whirling machetes and stilettos" or perish in the attempt. The infant sticks its head up out of the crib and gets an "instant haircut", and they duck down again to regroup and figure out how to "whirling dervish" themselves into "synch" with the machetes and stilettos. Infant deaths in "crutch" households are not at all uncommon. But for those who do make it, the result is a "bargain with the devil" and the "being handed" or selecting one of the "crutch" "bailing stations", and the whole process takes another spin into the next generation.
Now the above description applies, of course, to the most dyed-in-the-wool "crutch" families. There is a whole range of manifestation of this family system, as might be expected. At one end is the situation where well-meaning and unaware people keep shooting themselves and others in the foot due to their having come up in a milder form of such a household and therefore unknowingly perpetrating what was done unto them. Then there is a series of gradated manifestations of this pattern in action until we reach the level described here. The most extreme form was chosen so as to make crystal clear what the "crutch" system looks like and how it impacts. The milder forms are very well covered in the literature on dysfunctionality.
Returning now to the heavy duty version of the "crutch" system, intervention in such a system is like entering a machete- and stiletto-slinging riot -- subtle or not so subtle. Trying to introduce growth-enhancing and "game-busting" strategies can be like putting your hand into an Osterizer (food blender), due to the way in which they take everything and turn it to destructive use. The more severe the family (in pathology, not necessarily in overt behavior -- in fact, the more subtle ones are usually far more dangerous and pathological), the more viscous their reaction and the more resistive they are.
In the more extreme cases, such an endeavor can lead to career-destruction, blackmail, violence and even homicide. They are terrified of losing their armor, and their belief systems don't include the possibility of genuinely altruistic intervention -- they are absolutely convinced that you are up to no damned good or to get a goodie at their expense. And they will in no way on Earth ever allow that to happen, period, end of report.
Even when they seem genuinely motivated, one has to be ever on the alert and super-careful not to trust too much, lest you find that you have been "sucked in" by a "good guy" or pseudo-healthy front. One needs to be very cautious in how much and what kinds of information are given to the "crutch" people. It is usually a good idea to feed in some relatively harmless input to see if it results in "mayhem-making" efforts one way or another. In general, their intention is to become ever more sophisticated and effective in maintaining their "dance macabre" exactly like it is.
Moving with appropriate vigilance, caution and control, however, there are some general strategies for intervention in this system. Overall, the idea is to break into the viscous cycle of gamey patterns, and to introduce the capacity for realistic functioning and emotional honesty. The key to "de-crutching" is taking full responsibility for yourself -- not blame-throwing, victiming or victimizing.
To bring this about involves taking a small-step, carefully calibrated, constant impact-checking process which emphasizes behavioral contracts, tiny experiments in being real, pattern feedback, effective usage of incentives, introducing "crutch"-substitutes, communication-training, and above all patience, unconditional (but not foolhardy) positive regard, and firm but feeling structure. Over time, with luck, this type of approach can make a real difference for the "crutch" family, provided they aren't so severely pathological as to prevent all intervention. And, on the other end of the spectrum, such interventions can perform miracles of transformation.
THE "WHIM" FAMILY
"WHIM" is an acronym for "What's in it for me?", and it describes the family system very well, indeed. For it is a highly self-immersed and self-serving system in which the only real criterion applied to everything is its payoff value, gain/pain ratio, effort quotient and hedonic experiential meaning. In this system, the needs and desires of the adults take on so much significance that the needs of the children take a very distant second (or third or last) place in their priorities. This results in the infant's having to "decide" whether to leave forthwith or to go it alone. This "decision" is made somewhere in the vicinity of three months of age, and if the individual opts to live rather than to leave, s/he proceeds to become his/her own parent. Now again, we are speaking of the really intense versions of the "WHIM" family here, for purposes of providing clarity regarding the nature of the system and it's effects on the offspring and future adults.
To fully understand the impact of the "WHIM" family, some basic developmental psychology needs to be reviewed. The fundamental biology of early infancy (0 to 9 months) is a symbiosis with the care-taking adult(s), particularly the biologic mother if she is there. That is, there is a mutual dependency of a profound and "no boundaries" nature involved -- a kind of "double bubble".
The major purpose and need of the infant is to attach to another human being, to establish emotional closeness and a sense of belongingness, protection and sustenance. To do this, they literally merge with the person(s) most committed to caring for their needs, usually profoundly aided and abetted by the genetic and gestation bonding with the natural mother. They mutually establish comfortable rhythms with the "caretaker(s) through the subtle and synchronous "dance" process at the sixteenth of a second by sixteenth of a second level, which is where all human interaction really takes place.
It is a mutually beneficial union of biological needs, processes and rhythms which results in an emotional symbiosis and union experience in which both need the other for comfort and confidence. The adult(s) involved in this bonding process end up feeling intensely the infant's needs due to the closeness between them. This connects the infant to the environment in such a way that their survival is guaranteed.
From this comes a basic confidence in the universe that their needs will be met. They feel that they are not alone, that they belong, that people care, that people are sensitive to and in synch with their needs, that people know where they are at, and that people are therefore relevant. They also learn that they themselves are fully relevant to other people, that affection is spontaneous, deserved and plentiful, and that the world is a safe, depend-on-able place. In addition, they discover that they can impact and that the world will respond, and that therefore they can cope and be effective. They learn that they have the right to be here, that their needs are perfectly acceptable and part of the flow of the universe both ways, that they have plenty of time to meet their needs, that people like them and like to be there for them and to "stroke" them in the various ways that are needed, and that the world is glad they are who they are.
Unfortunately, most people who become parents are not aware of or able to respond to all this, and to varying degrees they did not experience this in their own infancy. And since unless you are a very old soul, you can't do unto others what was not done unto you, most people confronted with parenting are less than ideally prepared for the task.
On top of which, the enormity of the commitment creates a lot of ambivalence, the father often feels left out and rejected, and he is not available much of the time, and the mother feels burned out very early on. The infant's survival depends upon immediate parental responses to their distress and need signals, and that gets to be a major drag in an isolated nuclear family where there are no relevant and trustworthy associate caretakers available. Often the parents, especially the mother, end up feeling, "Take her before I kill her!". And all too often, the outcome of this is that "To be or not to be" is the ultimate question that begins to enter the infant's experience.
The right to live and belongingness are the fundamental issues here, and a negative outcome results in the feeling that you don't deserve to exist, to take up space and resources, and to impose. If their cries and initiations of contact are not responded to, if the care-taker(s) are out of synch with them, they end up feeling unwanted, that their needs will not be met, and that their existence is unimportant, undeserved and, in the worst case scenario, unwanted. If the infant isn't allowed to nurse (as opposed to an inability to nurse or be nursed), they get "poverty consciousness" because their power to attract and elicit needed resources is totally blunted.
And if the parents respond to the infant's cries as "broken promises" by the baby that s/he would love the parents like the parents never were in infancy, and then adds "insults to injury" by making demands on top of it, there results a "punishment" for being "deficient", "ungrateful", "betraying", "demanding" and perhaps "evil". The infant then comes to expect "slashes" as their only familiar, deserved and "predictably trustworthy" form of "strokes". They will then add a need for punishment to their sense of undeservingness to live, with a resulting self-assaultive and self-destructive lifestyle.
The infant who experiences a non-depend-on-able environment will end up making a profound conclusion and "decision", namely that they either have to leave or to go on in the absence of bottom line basics. And, indeed, it is not uncommon in "WHIM" households for infants to die of "failure to thrive", of "sudden infant death syndrome", of illnesses like pneumonia and bronchitis (which are grief-reactions), or of accidents.
If the infant goes on despite it all, it is at great personal cost. The cost is the basic, gut-level "realization" that s/he is alone on their own, that there is no one out there for them, that they have to do it all by themselves. They then start the long, lonely journey as they "raise themselves by their own bootstraps". They feel that they have the "mark of Cain", that they are inherently evil, and that they don't deserve their mother's ("God's") love.
They go into "survival psychology", convinced that they've got nothing but themselves that they can rely upon, and "One strike and I'm out!". Theirs is a pessimistic worldview in which anything good has to be earned or coerced the hard way, as well as being continuously and vigilantly protected from loss. They come to the conclusion that, "I will live alone", and they start the "island unto themselves" emotional recluse lifestyle. Their feeling is that no one could, would or should care, that they have to do a "one man band" life.
A more subtle and later developmental "flatline" arises when the mother is so needy of love that she in effect reverses roles with the child and she demands that the child be HER mother. In the mildest form, this can become a doting reaction to the child during their early period, followed by a panic reaction when the child reaches the separation-individuation period (around 18 months). In the more intense versions, the pattern described above occurs first, and then is followed by this reaction to separation-individuation, for a double whammy effect.
By definition, separation and individuation means that the child is becoming their own person, and the mother experiences that as a recapitulation of her being emotionally abandoned at about the same age or even earlier. She then reacts with a "cornered rabbit" response along the lines of, "If you self-empower, self-express, self-advance, self-develop, and individuate, it'll be the death of me, and I won't allow that! If you insist on any of that kind of thing, I'll abandon you like you are abandoning me!". Of course, this all occurs at the gut level and sixteenth of a second level and out of consciousness for the most part.
In the more severe situations, a "suicide pact" develops between the mother and the infant, along the lines of, "I'll love you as long as you kill your personal power. If you assert or separate, it will kill me -- and you! And I will do whatever is necessary to see to it that it doesn't happen!". So the child capitulates and terminates the vast majority of their selfhood in a kind of "soul-suicide", as they keep their power down and stay alive to keep the mother alive.
And in the worst case scenario of a self-destructive spiraling mother, the "suicide pact" involves keeping the parent alive by agreeing to share their misery and by "going down the tubes" together. Any true self-commitment activates terrible betrayal guilt, and any deterioration in the parent activates the imperative to do the same to themselves -- and they often do so. It is a frantic last-ditch parent-rescue effort in order to prevent the "pact" from being activated. And of course, the child believes that they deserve nothing better.
Now the "WHIM" family is one in which not only are the normal impediments to the successful outcome of the early formative process in operation, but there are additional active forces afoot which work against the development of effective self-commitment and self-manifestation even further. These extra impediments can cover quite a broad range of situations. On the one end are parents who are, say, committed to some overriding societal need, service, or value system dictates, and who therefore are only partially "there" for the infant and child.
Somewhat more severe are those who are "hung up in principles", who do things "by the book" in some way or another. Then there are the intellectual types who care but who can't show it. Further on in the seriousness dimension, there are the families with deviant subcultures which value the type of characteristics that result from early deprivation and/or engulfment patterns, but who are otherwise reasonably close-knit and supportive.
Then there are the ones who never had decent nurturing themselves, and who are starved for love, with the result that they can't give it to their kids. Some of these end up alternately accepting and rejecting the child, or they reverse roles with their infant and expect the infant to commence being the parent they never had. Moving a bit further into pathology, there are the self-immersed, self-involved and selfish parents who can't be bothered with child care.
Next, there are the "soul-scorchers" who deeply resent the infant's existence and/or the individual soul, ego and/or body of the infant. A not uncommon reaction here is, "You're just like your father (mother)!". These parents take it out on the infant and child in a vengeful manner, yet all the while, they keep the child tied in with occasional touches of acceptance and support.
Finally, we get to the totally neglectful and the severely abusive parents. The "neglectors" leave the child unattended for long periods, and they don't provide the basic support resources and experiences for the child because they are too caught up in their own "movie" to notice or care.
The abusive parents take all their frustrations and devastations out on their children via projective identification arising from the process of "developmental recapitulation" where we re-experience our own childhood at every step along the way of rearing a child. They therefore re-experience the massive self-hatred they had in response to their own abuse, and they attack the child within by decimating the external child.
Going even further, we have the super-pathological types who do things like leave the infant in the crib for days on end, or lock the kids in tool sheds, or shove things up their vagina or anus, or even systematically and sometimes ritual abusively sexually assault them. In a similar vein are the ones who systematically suck whatever energy and resources the child has for their own desires and purposes -- the "Dracula moms and dads" who produce "ghost-like" children.
All "WHIM" families have in common the fact that "kids come last", and they place their own needs ahead of those of their children to such a degree that their offspring are significantly crippled in the ability to connect with others, and to meet their own needs in a viable or healthy manner. The individual ends up heavily into hand-me-down, settle-for, leftovers and "me last, if ever" as their felt deserved lot in life. The "WHIM" product is relationship-incompetent and often unable to emotionally emancipate from the family. Or, conversely, they are unable to allow any emotional closeness with anyone. In all cases, they are systematically success-avoidant and intimacy-defective in one way or another. They are in effect trapped in the aftermath of self-involved or selfish parenting.
The goal of intervention in "WHIM" situations is to correct for the debilitating effects of the self-immersed parenting pattern when there are children involved, or of the self-defeating lifestyle for the individual themselves. When the identified individual is still in the family system as a child, the process focuses on developing support systems for both the parents and the child, and on defusing the undermining parenting patterns.
For both the still-a-child situation and the now-an-adult situation, however, the key intervention is to re-frame the individual's interpretation of their experience of their family and its implications. It is a universal characteristic of "WHIM" family products that the individual feels personally worthless and unlovable, a conviction that arose out of the "WHIM" parenting pattern. The individual MUST come to the conclusion that it was the parents' problem, not theirs.
As a result, the healing process will invariably center around developing the individual's capacity to take a "visiting field anthropologist's" approach to either the way it was in childhood or the way it is now in the family's current behavior patterns with them (so as to see how it was as a child). They must come to see the systematic competence- and confidence-undermining effects of the conditional love and the self-serving parental patterns.
Only then will they "get it in the guts" that their parents were operating out of the parents' own neuroses, not out of some sort of reaction to who THEY (the child) were. Indeed, one of the prime problems with the "WHIM" parenting pattern is that all to often they don't even know or care to know their individual children well enough to put out differential experiences for them -- unless they want something from the child. THEN the child got whatever kind of special attention it was that caused all the damage.
Once the "inner child" grasps the full nature of the situation in their guts through the process of "educating Rita", so to speak, the individual will finally come to truly understand that the parents were NOT God-incarnate (which is what they tend to think parents are until they are about four, in what is called the "in loco Deity" phenomenon). Once the "inner child" is freed from trying to please and appease an unpleasable parent who is hell-bent on withholding the "God Housekeeping Seal of Approval" for their own purposes, including out of fear of losing the individual, the "inner child" is able to let go and let the individual's true self out. Then they can start their own life without guilt, self-doubt and cope-ability-anxiety.
THE "KAOH" FAMILY
"KAOH" stands for "Keep 'em Around the Old Homestead", and it describes the family whose mutual dependency has devolved into mutual over-involvement and debilitating enmeshment. The general process that goes down in the family consists of various strategies and roles which have the collective purpose of keeping the family group together "forever", so as to fend off the frightening future of life without the support systems upon which they have become totally dependent.
What in effect is happening here is that there is an excessive dependency by the parents upon the presence of the children to meet the parents' needs. The parents come to rely upon the children as their basic survival resource, as if the children will never grow away. This puts the parents in the position of having to have the children available more or less permanently.
As the years go by, the tendency is to strongly expect the grown up children to reverse roles overtly, becoming the functional parents of the parents. This message had been being given at all sorts of levels all the way along, of course. In this situation, the parents have delegated a large amount of their survival capabilities to the various children, and the notion of their "lifeline" leaving produces panic. The resulting reactions from the parents can range from guilt-induction through intense confrontations, manipulations and control maneuvers to precipitating disasters such as hospitalizations and even deaths.
However, leave they must, for the alternative fate is one that is often worse than death, at least in the really intense "KAOH" situation. Again, there is a range of severity manifested, and we are examining what could be called the "worst case scenario" here. And in that scenario, what happens when the offspring never leaves the parental orbit is that the ultimate situation becomes one of a mutually draining and destructive symbiotic dependency. It has the effect of cutting off all other sources of sustenance and support for both the parent(s) and the offspring. This produces a mutual life-energy drain-out that often even literally physically shrivels them up to dry skin and bones or to lifeless, doughy pudginess. This is the "bachelor man" or "spinster lady" taking care of his/her parent(s).
By this time, the parent has become totally dependent upon the younger person, and they are therefore usually highly restrictive and confining of the younger person's activities and relationships. Partly, this comes from their increasingly dire needs, and in part, it results from the massive resentment that any totally dependent individual has for his or her caretaker.
In the meantime, the younger person watches the world go by and their life drain away, and they can see the "handwriting on the wall" of their future. A sort of unspoken mutual hatred and simultaneous inescapable need for the other person develops, and in effect, both individuals become functional "living corpses" generated by the "mutual Chinese buttermilk" process (whereby there is a straw stuck up their nose and the other one is constantly sucking the life energy away). Unfortunately, there is no cord to pull out to put an end to it all.
A general effect of the "KAOH" family is to produce in the offspring a certain incompetence, a kind of ineffectualness in living. The parents systematically derailed the development of the younger person's personal power and powers, moving fast to cut it off whenever it threatened to rear its ugly head. They also didn't acknowledge, validate, use, or honor their offsprings' achievements and contributions. They also "scramble-jammed" outside inputs to and influences on their family environment and the individual to prevent growth and change.
The resultant in many "KAOH" products (though certainly not all of them) is a certain childlike quality that is very appealingly innocent but very limiting. The family system had the effect of keeping them at the "concrete operations" level of cognitive development and functioning (at about age 7 to 8), so the individual doesn't have the capacity to see themselves objectively enough to know their dilemma. They can and do utilize abstraction, but they avoid it because it broadens their perspective and horizons, and it threatens their sense of security. They want to stay with what is familiar to them.
"KAOH" people are fixated in their "adaptive child", with an unusual access to their "natural child". They tend to be respectful, responsive, responsible, gentle and ingenuous. They are also exuberant, excitable, expressive and enthusiastic in a bubbling, spontaneous and vulnerably open manner. They are, however, also simple, gullible, naive, provincial, earthy and concretistic.
In addition, they tend to be fearful, change-avoidant, conservative and desiring of homogeneity and sameness. They are prone to be fearful and intimidated, and they are apt to be assertion-avoidant. They check their desired actions out with others by asking things like, "Do you think I (we) should . . .?", and they are placating and appeasing constantly.
With this kind of under-preparation to handle the complexities, ambiguities and demands of the larger world, "KAOH" products tend to have a disorder of functioning involving systematic success-avoidance, a felt powerlessness to impact on the environment or on their own behalf, a severe self-distrust and competence-anxiety, and an air of "immaturity" and "greenness behind the ears" that has the effect of inducing distrust from the environment.
All of these effects are self-spiraling, and if they go unchecked, they have the inexorable effect of driving the individual back to the parental home and keeping them there. In addition, with an engulfing and/or invalidating early parenting history, listening to your inner voice becomes suicidal because "the universe" (the "God"-stand-ins) would "kill" you if you did. So spiritual development, self-commitment, initiative, and visualization of alternative situations became deadly. Also, no boundaries between them and the family were allowed, and the individual became the complete property of their parents.
This generates a hermetically sealed "tight little island" culture that the younger person never dares to leave. In addition, parents who give their kids their power via wanting the kid to love them too much and to stay with them too long effectively let the situation get out of hand. They tend to pedestalize the child, which results in the individual then believing they have to live up to the perfection image, and they become very subject to "humiliation" fears (which involve catastrophic losses, monstrousness, and annihilation -- all because they were so "bad" or "such a failure").
Some "KAOH" parents can hold the kids in line via fragility -- "I'll die if you live your truth or be yourself in the world!". Others go so far as to systematically generate functional retardation in their offspring so they literally can't function away from the family homestead. Still others do it much more directly and pathologically, along the lines of, "If we can't have you -- NOBODY can!!". They then build in "death implants", systematically sabotage and prevent development, destroy their accomplishments and connections, etc. And in the worst case scenario, you get the "till death do us part" family, where everybody is suicidal, quietly desperate, and totally trapped. They only way out of this type of family system is to death out.
Under the surface, the younger person (and sometimes the parents) are frequently trying to "find some way out of here" by clandestinely checking out the environment and themselves, by testing the situations, by risk- and cost-assessing, asking themselves, "Can I do it?", etc. Others get so "compressed and restricted" that they have to inject negativity into their relationship with the family to have space to develop their fundamental personhood. This produces the "stormy adolescent" pattern.
Still others develop exploitation-paranoia out of a fear of being drained dry by "love". And some get so burned out from so much over-responsibility that they reach a point where they can't get it up to take on the responsibilities of success, and they then want to be totally taken care of. They get bitterly resentful of any self-responsibilities or requirements, and you get the "family failure frazzle-out" syndrome.
The trouble is that the younger person has usually been so well trained to feel so responsible for the family, responsible to the family, incompetent in living and/or frightened of the world that they are frequently extremely reluctant to break away, when it gets right down to it. This whole process is, of course, heavily rewarded and reinforced by the "behavioral prison" effect where the environment inadvertently validates and supports the individual's world-view, self-perception and "script patterns" by being conned, coerced, charmed or cajoled into fitting into the individual's "self-fulfilling prophesy" pattern.
The basic goal in the intervention strategy designed to change the situation for the "KAOH" families and their progeny is to break up the massive mutual dependency pattern that is operating. To do this, the primary objective is to provide alternative resources for the people involved which meet their needs without the debilitating effects of the mutual dependency and the "scripts".
This calls for an assessment of the needs met by the relationships, roles, routines and "scripts", and then seeking out healthier means of meeting these needs that are also more enjoyable. It may involve a "pole vault" relationship with a therapist for them to be able to successfully disengage from each other and to start "de-scripting".
There will almost certainly also be the need for skill-building, insight-induction, information-provision, resource-finding, desensitization, hand-holding and alternative lifestyle counseling and facilitation. The younger person might well also need assistance in achieving emotional emancipation and protection from the system- and situation-preserving efforts of the family -- including fairly drastic actions like calamity-set ups, seeming senility and "hostage reactions" (threatening the welfare of siblings still in the home).
In the more pathologically severe cases where the individual is still a child and the family is willing to go to extremes to keep their resource around the old homestead, it may be necessary to remove the child to a residential treatment facility, and then to engage in the "feed the lion" strategy. This is where you give "tidbits" of information about the younger person's progress on "convenience items" for the family such as self-care and compliance, so that the family will feel they are "in on what's happening", able to have an impact on the situation, and getting something out of it for themselves. They will then be likely to restrain themselves from the more extreme measures to get the kid back.
In the meantime, a systematic effort is made to prevent the family's finding out the true degree of self-sufficiency, self-commitment, and reality-perception the younger person is achieving until the "point of no return" has been reached. This is the stage in intervention where the younger person has become capable of running their own life and of deflecting the role-restoration efforts of the family. Once this point has been reached, the younger person can fend off the attempts to bring them back into the fold of the family.
Needless to say, this approach is loaded with ethical, legal and practical pitfalls, and it is to be activated only under circumstances where the most clear-cut and catastrophic consequences to the younger person (such as death or permanent disability) would be unavoidable if the family were to be kept intimately informed of the individual's true progress and situation.
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That completes the brief description of the three family systems that generate the "life scripts" out of the "bailing stations" they put the child in. Perhaps the best way to close this part of the discussion out is to remember the three "if only's": "If I only had courage" (the "cowardly lion" crutch), "If I only had a heart" (the "tin man" WHIM), and "If I only had a brain" (the "scarecrow" KAOH). With that, we are now off to see the Wizard -- about a bunch of scripts . . .
The SCRIPTS
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