Remember the figure of "Atlas" holding up the world? When "Atlas shrugs", the whole world comes tumbling down. This is the situation the "keystone kid" experiences. They feel totally responsible for the care and maintenance of whoever and whatever they are in contact with, and their experience is that if they don't cover all the bases, all hell will break loose and it's all their fault. Of course, the whole situation is their sole responsibility, and there is no such thing as a little help from their friends.
The "keystone" takes it title from that funny-looking stone at the top of a stone arch. It sticks up a little above the rest of the stones and seems somehow out of place. But the way the arch is built is with scaffolding up the to sides of the arch holding up the stones until the "keystone" is dropped in place. Then the whole thing stands on its own. Then the rest of the wall is built, then the upper stories and so on. When you look at the archway, you either see an entrance or if you look closely, you see that funny-looking stone at the top that seems like a misfit. But if you pull that stone, the arch collapses, the wall collapses and the rest of the structure collapses. It turns out that the "funny-looking stone" is the thing that is holding the whole thing together.
And so it is with the "keystone kid" in their family of origin. They were relied upon to hold the whole family up, like the silver hoist in the service station holds up the car. They therefore take on the family's hurts, and they feel responsible for hurt-avoidance as their raison d'être, sole role, and connection to the family. It also serves as a means of "atoning" for all their felt "failures" in the form of the family hurts that they were not able to prevent. They also do a lot of self-punishment for the same reason.
In effect, the "keystone kid" has a delicate dilemma. They have to serve to survive, yet to do so is to drain dry and die. They feel terrifically over-responsible and suicide-prone if they self-commit and thereby endanger the family. Yet if they persist in the pattern, they will ultimately collapse under the strain and betray/destroy the family that way. Their experience of life is one of continuous behind-the-scenes support with no support coming in, and with the looming prospect of doing the ultimate letdown and self-destruction if they persist in their pattern -- a total lose-lose lifestyle.
HOW DID THEY GET THIS WAY?
What happens is that for reasons of overload, personal neuroses and/or special qualities of the individual, the family turns to the "keystone kid" to be the total support system to keep everything afloat in a massive storm at sea. They then are expected to hold the pragmatic, emotional and/or informational fort for the family. They become the support pillar of the family, and they feel responsible for everything because they are expected to handle everything at the subconscious subterranean or even on the overt obvious level.
The effect is that the child finds themselves responsible for the welfare of the whole family with huge stakes involved -- a case of a little kid at the helm of the ship. They are held accountable for everything that happens and anything they say is taken as law -- and the cause of all their troubles. In effect, the individual ends up nothing but an extension of the parents, with no identity, no rights, no will of their own, and no existence outside the caretaking role. They therefore develop the "Florence Nightingale" pattern of feeling an enormous burden for existing that they have to make up for with continuous service and support.
They also end up having to deal with responsibilities far exceeding their capabilities, and they end up with unknowable processes and parameters leading to unexpectable consequences attributed to them. They end up frozen in fear and gripped in guilt for unknowable awfulnesses and powers to heal and hurt with no ability to program the effects they have. They always wonder why they are so awful, and the "magical misery tour" is the resulting experience of life. They therefore tend to take a "Look before you leap!" approach, and they seek to assess and anticipate everything possible as their primary means of coping.
At the same time, out of their fear of losing the child, the parents generate profound competence-anxiety, fear of the world, and utter dependence upon them in the "keystone". They teach the "keystone" that s/he would die without the parents, and that the parents would die without them. They undermine the individual's capacities to cope in the world, and they then attack them for being incompetent. If the "keystone kid" doesn't produce perfection, it generates rejection and punishment. The "keystone" experiences two parallel one-way streets with their parents. One of them is one way from them to the parents on giving, and the other is one way from the parents to them on impact -- they are allowed no influence on the parents directly, and they have to stay "at effect" rather than "at cause". So the parents take and the "kid" takes it.
As a part of their process of "keeping 'em around the old homestead", the family programs the "keystone kid" in such a way that away-from-home experiences are disasters for them. They do this by training them to engage in rejection-eliciting behaviors that the "keystone" experiences as "demonic takeovers" in public, and they end up feeling that home is all they've got that's safe and doable. The parents also do things like buy clothes that are just off in the crucial way -- producing "social leprosy". They never buy the "keystone" what they want or need, only the most painful near-miss -- always justified by moral and pragmatic undeniables. Furthermore, all the "keystone's" potential friends are vilified until the "keystone" ends up sneaking to friends guiltily, or they drop all acquaintances and they are unable to relate or interact effectively. And of course, they are NEVER supposed to be sexual under any circumstances.
Paradoxically, because of the family's massive over-dependence on them, with its overload of responsibility and its excessive demands, the "keystone" inevitably ends up seeming pragmatically irresponsible because of their "failures". They always get selective public negative attention and disapproval for their failures and selective ignoring, distraction, discounting, disdain, and "just expected"-ing for their successes, with the result that they experience that they can do no right or that what right they do is no excuse or compensation for all the wrong they do.
Their goofs and shortcomings become never-dying and oft-repeated family myths, and comments like "Here's another fine mess you've gotten us into!", "You think the whole world is wrong and you're right. Why can't you adjust?", "If you go on like this, . . .", "Why do you always mope around the house?", "I don't know where we went wrong . . .", "What did we ever do to deserve you?", "We've tried everything with you!", "What makes you think you have a right to complain? You should have been more harshly dealt with!", and the like permeate the "keystone kid's" experience.
To make matters worse, it not infrequently happens that everyone tells the "keystone" that their parents are totally wonderful, paradigms of virtue and wisdom, and that they are a rotten child for not appreciating them. In effect, they are told, "You have to be grateful for how good the shit you eat daily is! SHAME on you!". "You're a spoiled brat!" is the message they get any time they do anything to label their situation or to do anything to make their life more sensible. If they don't feel lucky for what they've got, they are told they are completely despicable.
The family blamed them for everything and they severely punished them when things go wrong, and the "keystone" ends up believing it and feeling the cause of all evil. This, in turn, leads to a mania for punishment as atonement and "the way my world should be, after all". They develop a kind of "failing savior" trip out of the guilt-inductions for not saving the parents from themselves. The "keystone" gets the message over and over that all evils were their doing, and that they have no reason to feel or be as bad as they are. By implication, they become the Devil personified -- inherently omnipotently magically evil -- the original "Darth Vader".
They feel totally guilty for "all they've done" and massively ashamed for what they are. They feel that they have an enormous load of devastation to make up for just for existing, and even more for all their failures and evil-inductions. As a result, they become massively morally oriented, and ethicality, integrity, responsibility, accountability and cosmic congruence are the cornerstones of their thinking and being. They become the conscience of the family, and they are utterly merciless on themselves continuously.
There are two varieties of "keystone kid" who emerge out of this general process. One of them is the "associate parent", who is assigned that role because of birth order, personal characteristics, interpersonal dynamics within the family, and/or circumstances. The expectation here is perfection of performance in the pragmatic realm, so that they are required to cover all the bases of daily living at the practical, hands-on level. They are thrust into a role-reversed parental and/or spousal role, and they are always at the center of everything and held responsible for everything, including things they have no control over. They get accused of selfishness and immorality if anything goes wrong.
The other variety is the "fool in the hill", who appears incompetent and irrelevant, but who is in fact intensely wise and emotionally supportive. It is a generated by a convenient behavioral control process that doesn't touch the "keystone's" mind. They are thrust to the sidelines of the human condition from the very beginning, with the result that they are not allowed to develop coping capabilities and interpersonal skills. At the same time, they are expected to make things all better, and their response is to "run up the periscope" scope and scan whatever is happening and whatever is developing so that they can serve as the emotional/informational family consultant and confidante. The result is a "wise klutz" who has been punished into self-hate, self-distrust and despair.
In this process, they have to deal with the uphill battle of their pragmatic insufficiencies and their seeming impracticality and irrelevance. No one respects them or expects them to succeed at anything. They were so prevented from competence-development that they end up with a lot of idiosyncratic characteristics which set them aside from others. One of the more important of these is super-succinctness and hyper-abstractness of communication arising from having to convey so much information in the 15 seconds or so before some one says in disgusted irritation, "Oh, for Heaven's sake, _________, shut up!".
Yet at the same time, they are the one to whom the family turns for emotional support and informational inputs. This happens because in their sidelines watching position, they have been able to see the whole human parade, and they have developed a lot of profound comprehension and compassion as a result. They in effect become a "rabbi" -- a wise adviser, teacher, counsellor and healer. But they are treated as the "fool on the hill".
The ultimate extreme of the "keystone kid" lifescript is the "catatonic schizophrenic", whose genetically-based insufficient viability results in a breakdown of their whole system under the impetus of the "keystone kid"-inducing parenting pattern. They in effect "sacrifice their soul", along with their identity and destiny for the family, as they end up mentally, emotionally and behaviorally paralyzed.
So the "keystone kid" is subjected to a systematic injunction-induction process designed to make them feel totally and permanently umbilically connected to the family in the life support system position on the grounds that they are too incompetent and immoral to do otherwise, and the "keystone kid" buys it hook, line and sinker. They work quietly and subtly behind the scenes with no recognition in their often subterranean and subjective contributions.
WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?
"Keystone kids" have a great deal of self-distrust, guilt and shame, and they are most eager not to impose on the environment. They feel they have no right to any needs, wants or desires, they are afraid of releasing the furies of hell from "Godzilla" on themselves or from themselves, and they are deeply guilt-avoidant. "There I go AGAIN!" ("TIGA") is their whole experience of their environmental impact. "I don't know what I did, but I must have done something wrong!" and "What did I do NOW!?" are fundamental places from which they come.
Getting into trouble and not knowing how they did it is the way the "keystone" experiences life. They become immobilized with "demon-anxiety", and they feel that the whole world hates them.
They have deep-seated feelings of stupidity, doubt and insignificance, and they feel emotionally insecure, worthless, unappreciated and somehow ugly. They had no childhood, so they seal over and never really grow up. Their childhood fears and delusions continue under the surface. Getting in trouble and not knowing how they did it is the way the "keystone kid" experiences life. They experience a relentless, withholding, imperious incoming wall as in the "Pit and the Pendulum", and impact is always from, never on. The result is a feeling of total helplessness and victimization. They are significantly immobilized by life so they frantically seek to compensate with compulsive service.
"Keystones" end up trapped in a "nurturing parent" isolation booth, and they give too much to others. They assume that they have literally nothing to offer but service, and they feel that they have to be continuously brilliant, relevant, original and consultatively contributory due to a feeling of utter worthlessness. Being needed and appreciated is about their only satisfaction in life, and they deeply want to help and to have a positive effect for others. They use their unconscious as a source of great energy and knowledge in this quest. However, this can very quickly deteriorate into a kind of "messiah complex" and "rescuing" process in a "Let me help you so I can feel better" pattern. Their compulsive service then becomes a kind of cosmic sucking selfishness, and they have to learn to give up and let God do His part too.
"Keystones" dance with the meanings of things, and "It all depends ..." is one of their favorite phrases. In fact, they tend to get overwhelmed by their perceptions of the "Big Picture". But at the same time, they feel that to stay alive and to serve, they have to keep the information coming in, in a kind of "infomaniac" pattern. They are deathly afraid of opening "Pandora's Box" if they don't know the whole story. And then again, they also find that truth talk is powerful and harmful because people get blown away or hurt or angry or walk away and don't listen. They feel like they are perpetually on the old "Gong Show" (where you can be "gonged" off stage at any instant). So they have the feeling that they mustn't say what they see or feel or think. "Discretion is the better part of disclosure" is one of their mottoes. And again, they end up with a deep-seated distrust of themselves.
This self-distrust is greatly amplified by their unconscious deeply resentful and rageful reaction to their whole life experience, and particularly about their parents' irresponsibility towards them. This greatly adds to the fear and guilt they experience regarding themselves. They are intensely angry at a subterranean and subtle level over the enormous inequity between outgo and input their life. Unfortunately, this tends to feed rather strongly the feeling that maybe they should do the world a favor and get themselves wiped out somehow. This tends to lead to systematic self-punishment and attack-elicitation, along with self-destructive tendencies.
The basic bottom line feeling the "keystone" has about themselves is that they are the "terd of the Earth". They have a strong "almost" pattern in which they could have, would have, should have, but they blow it all away. They even think that the way to love their parents is to hurt themselves, and they have an equation in their head that self-commitment = mother-murder. They have the delusion that any self-commitment hurts others. They are convinced that any form of success is total family-betrayal because it means potentially "abandoning" them. They have a deep internal conflict between their "Atlas trip" and their reality-perception and need for self-commitment.
They go into paroxysms of guilt when they stop compulsively contributing, and they have a horrible time receiving. They've never had the experience, and it doesn't "feel right" to them. Their great discomfort is caused by the reservoir of repressed resentment-rage and the gaping maw of unmet needs. It tends to trip off "runamok-anxiety" and "retribution-paranoia" in them. They also totally freak out when they make a mistake. So much rides on their shoulders that errors are disasters. They are therefore perfectionistic around their functioning to protect the world. They also assume that any mistake is theirs -- "How did I do THAT!?".
The fact is that the "keystone kid" has a terrible time severing the "tie that grinds" and growing away from their family. They are over-involved with them, excessively focussed on "letting the family down", and under-related to the outside world. They are the kind that does their life in to take care of their incapacitated parents. They are systematically success-avoidant for this reason and also out of guilt over imagined faults, flub-ups, failures and wrongs, and over fear of competence-demands from the environment. They also have a grossly exaggerated sense of worthlessness as their major feeling.
HOW DO THEY FUNCTION?
"Keystones" are always on the outside supporting and setting things up for success -- for others. They are success-avoidant personally while they systematically work to guarantee the success of systems and situations. No one supports them, and they tend to be "professional failures". They are in effect perpetual "child-parents" who are simultaneously dependent and nurturingly responsible. Indeed, they have a tendency to "kill with kindness" and to be "pooper-scoopers". They feel that they have to run the whole show and to look like it doesn't bother then so as to not bring down the whole "house of cards" they live in. They are totally fixated on their family and the immediate circle of people and systems in their life as they serve the situation at hand over-responsibly.
They tend to be rescuers and protectors -- to the point of not allowing dysfunctional people to experience the consequences of their pattern. They are compulsive people-pleasers because they are exquisitely sensitive to rejection. They are also afraid of the pain that other people's pain puts them through. This can even result in desparate shame/fear-based subtle collusion and sabotage-support episodes because they are afraid to say "no" or to cause harm by objecting to what is going on. But in general, they provide life support and they deflect disasters all the time, and they tend to "pass it on" as a pattern to their kids. They also become profoundly guilty when they start to leave their family behind. They are the original "Sydney Sobersides" and they don't know how to play or have fun.
"Keystones" think of and track everything. They see it as their most important function. They are attuned to all aspects of whatever is happening and whatever the ecology is, as well as to the implications and ramifications of all events. At the same time, their pattern of not feeling able to impact on what's going on tends to make them operate like the "court jester" -- especially the "fool on the hill" type. One unfortunate aspect of this is when no notice is taken of their input due to their social persona, and then they get held accountable and punished for the negative outcomes. They also tend strongly to elicit rejection, to seek misery, and to punishment-generate out of their atonement and worthlessness feelings. They get shat on, spat on and sat on a lot as a result. They are also demanded of, not appreciated, and never supported wherever they go.
One rather unhappy consequence of the "fool on the hill" style is that they often get into interpersonal difficulties. They tend to be deviant-seeming, "wierd", and untrustworthy-appearing. They tend to elicit a "pariah" reaction any time they scare or inconvenience others with their wisdom and interventions. People find their "walking X-ray machine" quality too threatening as it is, and extra cost or discombobulation is too much. They even get caught up in the "church key" syndrome where they are seen as malevolent manipulators. Another thing that happens is when they get hit in their "Achilles heel" -- the "Why?" question. Reality-exploration is their only survival skill and raison d'être, so they can be utterly had with that question and by absolutely flat-out reality-denial by others. Both reduce them to a gibbering infant in a flash when their responses lead to trouble.
The "associate parent" is heavily relied on for pragmatics, and they often turn into harsh parenting figures to everyone due to the treatment and role modeling they got from their parents. They also pack a lot of resentment over the constant overload of responsibilities, and by the incompetence and irresponsibility of those around them. They, too, are over-involved with their family, excessively responsible, and underrelated to the outside world, And despite their considerable competence that came from their family role, they are still subtly success-avoidant, worthless-feeling, misery-seeking, and so on.
For the "keystone kid", "love" (their super-nurturant, massively over-responsible, "me last" support system for an incomplete partner conception and process) is all there is that matters. Life often consists of a quest for the "perfect partner", without whom life is experienced as meaningless and death as imminent. They transfer their whole family trip here, out of the "Without me, you'd die, you klutz, fool, moral cretin!" messaging from the family. The effort is to try to regain the "lost orb", the "God Housekeeping Seal of Approval". They are trying to experience the merging of essences they have never had. They have no recognition of their tremendous power and potential. They therefore tend to end up in a "Chinese buttermilk" situation in intimacy (where the other person sucks them dry through a straw stuck up their nose).
They invest enormous energy in their intimate relationships, and they have a pronounced tendency to get "hooked on potential". They have a problem responding to people's souls instead of to their pragmatic personality, with the result that they set themselves up for sudden surprises, dreadful drain-outs, and persecutory punishment, and they usually end up "running on empty". They also have a particular propensity to attract and be attracted to "perennial children", who are professional parasites and potential-promisers. And, like the rest of us, they tend strongly to pull in re-runs of the original story. In any case, they tend to end up hopelessly dependent on their intimates in the belief that they couldn't survive without them. They really bought their parents' "You can't make it on your own" trip. They then get into a "chronic parent" relationship that has the impact of generating engulfment-anxiety and smother-mother-paranoia reactions in their partners.
They remain emotionally symbiotic with their parents, bottom line, even as they try to "put a new ending on the old story" with "stand-ins for the original cast". They also try to avoid their feelings of non-belongingness, aloneness and lack of existential roots. They refuse to separate from the semblance of security, support, guidance and love they think they have with their family. When they start to do so, they experience separation-depression, loss, boredom, loneliness, isolation and despair. In the meantime, the parents avoid facing the loss of the "kid" and they go to extremes to prevent it. Needless to say, this all really plays havoc with their intimate relationships.
They also have a very strong injunction against committing anywhere else and against sexual vulnerability and bonding. It feels like murderous betrayal to them, and it activates abandonment-annihilation-anxiety as well. They also have a terror of receiving, the experience being that the intimate would be permanently driven away if they had needs and desires. Of course, ironically, that is exactly what happens with the "chronic parent", "nobody home inside", and "delusions of worthlessness and unlovability" pattern going down, and it is powerfully validated when the intimate leaves.
The other self-defeating pattern they get into in intimacy is where they are such resonators of the other person's feelings that they become caught up in them in a feeling responsible for the other person's feelings manner. They therefore become compelled to see the world as the other person does, and to be forced to act on this experience, often in violation of their own priorities, identity and needs. This has the effect of creating a "non-person" experience of them by their partner, with the expectable results.
About the only way a "keystone" could ever be successful in intimacy is for them to heal themselves and to then connect with another ex-"keystone" in a relationship of mutual sensitivity, relevance, commitment, nurturance and enrichment.
In the absence of this happy outcome, the "keystone kid" runs the very serious risk of "going down the tubes" in a terminal burn out reaction to all the tremendous inequality of energy exchange, self-hatred, and rejection that their lifestyle involves.
HOW CAN THEY BE HELPED?
The final and ultimate responsibility of the "keystone kid" is to break out -- lest everyone goes down the tubes. Their mutually parasitic relationship with their family is a mutual drain-out process, and their "serve to survive" trip will "Chinese buttermilk" them to death. It is highly immoral to continue in such a destructive pattern. They have to become totally self-committed and to cut the tie that grinds lest it kills them all. They simply cannot live with the equation that self-commitment damages others or leads to rejection any more. Healing therefore involves the end of the continuous unilateral giving with no return drain-out phenomenon.
They need to work with some one who is capable of giving them unconditional positive regard, relevant understanding, reasonable expectations, and transitional assistance towards a reciprocal relationship with the universe. They need self-compassion-induction, guilt-alleviation, permission-giving, reality inputs, self-respect- and self-appreciation-induction, and self-awareness-activation. They also need work on self-punishment-interruption, anger-expression, self-nurturing, success-avoidance-deflection and self-commitment-generation.
The primary route is helping them clearly conceptualize their situation and process and to re-experience the whole pattern, including its inception, so they get a true grasp on the realities of the situation in an "Educating Rita" process -- filling the "inner child" in on what is the real scoop. They need to be made aware that they are not the cause of all the troubles in the world. They also need to know that they not only have a right to emancipation, they have an obligation to do so, given the disastrous results of not doing so.
They are exquisitely responsive to understanding and information, and insight-induction is the way to go with them. It is especially helpful to come up with "convincers and clinchers" -- pithy metaphors and capturings of the situation in colorful and concrete image format. Rounding out the approach are helping emancipate the parents from them so they can live their own life rather than through the "keystone kid", along with competence-building for the "fool" type.
There are a few pointers about the change process itself with the "keystone". For instance, it is not uncommon for them to do a "bend over backwards" compulsively irresponsible process as they go to stop the excessive-compulsive nurturing parent thing, and that can of course lead to massive self-hate and despair-reinforcing results. Another common pitfall is for them to suddenly come out and try to inform the whole world in the forefront in a self-defeating manner. They also have a hard time being nurtured obviously, and you have to creep up on them or they'll blow it all away.
If these cautions are followed, the "keystone kid" will usually respond quite well to relevant therapeutic or life space intervention. They are, after all, dedicated to do the right thing and to be of true assistance on the planet.
WHAT IS THEIR PURPOSE?
They have experienced much and witnessed much more in their life history. This gives them the capacity to be an excellent guide and teacher. One of their big gifts is the ability to show the way out to others. They can be participants, not stage managers, finally, and they can wait until they're asked instead of having to consult and contribute. They end up a self-committed blueprint-developer and groundwork layer in a cooperative and reciprocal relationship with other people, the ecology and the cosmos. They become in effect cosmic consultants and contributors.
More information: email: Narayan-Singh@dbs2000ad.com
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