When you think of the traditional oriental person, particularly the female, you have a good idea of who the "model child" is. They are extremely inhibited, retiring, self-effacing and eager to please, but you might as well piss in the wind rather than to try to get them to share themselves or to express a preference. They are the "quiet ones", the ones who silently labor their way to accomplishments in the background.
In terms of their personal life, they are the original "nowhere man" with "nobody home". They are too terrified to have an inner life or a set of goals, priorities, preferences and needs. Indeed, their big need is to meet your needs. While this makes for a lot of good functionary support, it doesn't make for relationships or a real life for the person. Nevertheless, their top priority is to lie low and to stay out of the way.
And because of this pattern, their life is a "vast wasteland" full of dire dangers. They seek to require as little as absolutely possible, and they work very hard to earn little tokens of approval or at least of lessening of disapproval. They are extremely apologetic, soft-spoken, unobtrusive and eager to remain unnoticed. Their motto is "Me last, if ever".
Of course, underneath all this silent service is a severe shadow that arises from having so many of their inherent qualities, potentialities and personal needs not allowed. Since the shadow consists of distorted versions of that which has been suppressed/repressed/oppressed into non-expression, non-manifestation and non-need-meeting, these individuals have a whopper of a shadow.
And the largest single component of it is their unreleased power and personal beingness. The result of this being the prime quality of the shadow source, they are a walking seething volcano of fulminating fury ready to erupt indiscriminately and devastatingly at any time. And at some level, they are painfully aware of that fact, and they are therefore terrified of themselves in a total "runamok-anxiety" pattern.
Unfortunately, this only drives them to a frenzy of frantic efforts to keep themselves under control and to submerge their personal requirements and self-expressions even further. This all has a nasty habit of resulting in a continuous stream of passive-aggressive behavior on the one hand, and in an ever-mounting violent explosive outburst potential on the other. Which then only drives them further underground until something rather drastic happens or their body "bursts" on them in some significant way. The worst case scenario is that they end it all in a "wrong side of the freeway" manner.
HOW DID THEY GET THIS WAY?
"Model child" individuals come from a rather intensely and virulently authoritarian environment. It can vary from an overall cultural gloss like the traditional oriental to a massive sadistic/murderous ritual abuse situation in its intensity. We'll start the discussion with the mildest intensity situation, and then we will go on to the more intense situations as separate topics.
In its most innocuous form, the "model child"-inducing family is intensely morally oriented and highly restrictive in its child-rearing practices. Running through the whole process, however, is an underlying message that the child is somehow always "wrong, bad and evil" for some unspecified reason. The result is that the individual ends up feeling things like they are causing the family arguments, the absence of the father and their own restrictions.
The individual receives experiences like the mother saying, "If you don't stop that, I'll walk out that door and never come back!". Another common phenomenon is coerced activities such as hated piano lessons, recitals, etc. Going hand in hand with this is a set of highly restrictive limitations of their range of activities and outside contacts. For instance, they are given messages like, "If that's how you act around ___________, maybe you shouldn't play with him!". The result is that friends and outside activities become strange and scary, and the individual becomes socially inept, shy and uninvolved.
The prime motivator and disciplinary mechanism in the "model child's" family is guilt-induction along the lines of , "NOW look what you've done!" and "Go ahead, it's YOUR decision, but . . .". What this does is to make the individual afraid of their own choices, impulses and environmental impacts. For instance, they end up never getting angry. They just adjust and let things slide and avoid arguments. And they try constantly to get the "God Housekeeping Seal of Approval" — that is, to turn off the torrent of disapproval and guilt-induction.
In the more typical "model child"-inducing situation, things are a good deal more virulent. It is a severely dysfunctional and abusive household, though often in a highly disguised and well-projected front manner. This latter characteristic produces the "singing frog" phenomenon, where whenever anyone else is around, the "singing" (sadistic treatment) stops, only to resume as soon as they are alone with the parent again — so that all any outsider sees is the normal "rivits" from the "family frog". Things also go on under the surface in a "things that go bump in the night" manner, so that implications and innuendoes are the individual's only real reality. It is a largely subtle, subterranean and subconscious systematically assaultive system. Assumption and attempted assessments then become the bread and butter of survival, as they try to ascertain what's going down and what's going to happen next.
Most of this pattern emanates from the mother, usually, and she becomes an overwhelming figure to the individual. The father functions as the mother's ally due to his hostility, weakness or fear. He is addicted to a re-run of his own mother. This situation instills a terror of God because of her being seen at the very beginning as the "in loco Deity". She keeps the individual totally in line by the threat of annihilation and by the profound guilt involved in going against God's intentions and wishes. She twists all breakout attempts into self-destructive meanings, and eventually it gets to the point where if some one says God will strike her dead for what she is doing, the individual's instantly horrified gut response is, "He wouldn't DARE!".
Everything they tried didn't work, and they couldn't bring about the desired life-sustaining resources. Even more importantly, they couldn't get relief from the pain in the melee of machetes and stilettos they faced daily. Finally, they stumble on the one thing that holds the pain and potentially imminently lethal mayhem at bay, which is to minutely track and read the nuances of facial expression, vocal intonation, bodily movements, situational scenarios, and contextual cues and then to "dance with them" — to give what is seemingly wanted instant by instant. In the meantime, they largely ignore verbal inputs as potentially dangerous red herrings and disguises.
Any form of self-commitment or self-expression is met with potentially lethal reactions. It was soundly thrashed out of them, along with any verbal outputs that were not the "party line". The mother was repressive and smothering, seductive and cold, non-nurturing and unloving, and sadistic and brutal. She constantly labeled any form of self-commitment as "moral cretin selfishness". The individual was not allowed to want — "You're lucky you've got what you have. Be happy with what you've got!". She consistently seized upon what the individual's ultimate hopes and despairs were, and she built enslaving implants into their "automatic pilot". Her ultimate goal at the deep unconscious level was to make the individual miserable, alone and perhaps even dead.
In a very real sense, the "model child" is reared in life-threatening circumstances. It was a situation in which there was systematic torture, with massive threats of unspeakably worse treatment if they resisted or blew the cover on the situation. It was a situation where "Anything you say or do will be used against you!". And when the individual had no place else to go as an infant and child, they had to sit there and take it, and to even learn to get off on being hurt — the birth of punishment- and pain-seeking. Their experience of the mother is one of utter helplessness as her message was, "One way or another, I'm gonna gecha — you can count on it!"
She took any indication of desire and used it as a bludgeon, so that desire-expression, hope, anticipation, goals, etc. became anathema and lethal to the individual. The individual continually got messages that nothing ever works in a despair-induction pattern that ultimately drives them towards a "suicide injunction" effect. That is, the individual ends up feeling that suicide is the desired outcome. The individual also gets the message that they can do nothing right. They could never reach criterion. There was always something unpredictable about their functioning that led to punishment, failure, and being morally wrong and evil. It was a "one error and you're dead" type of trip.
The "model child" is not allowed one iota of independence, initiative, integrity or individuality. No selfhood is permitted to develop, and perennial pummeling and punishment is the process by which this is enforced. Any initiative is instantly decimated, and continuous enforcement of instant compliance to her every move is the name of the game. Furthermore, any enthusiasm or emotional expression became a lethal handle for the torturing parent to utilize. The "model child" literally had to "dance with the second" to deflect severe punishment at all times. Any drift out of synch with her instant-by-instant dance was the occasion for mayhem.
Reality has no weight in this type of household (which, incidentally, is simply "passing it on", "doing unto others what was done unto them" in a "church mouse" fashion). Only potential audience impact is of importance to the mother, and the individual is therefore systematically trained to be totally other-directed. The general message that accompanied all this was, "You'll take this or die!" in a "singing frog" pattern. To disclose or complain was to invite immediate demise. And, of course, all negative emotions were "am strengsten verboten" (most strictly forbidden; deadly sin).
It is also a household which is deliberately unpredictable, uncontrollable and irrational. The result is that pattern perception is not only impossible, it's suicidal because they don't dare let her know they know what's happening. Pattern perception also took the individual out of synch with her, and mayhem resulted. It was just plain dangerous to "go meta" to the immediate situation and to perceive what was really happening. The "model child" has no options, and they have to dance, duck or disappear, period.
Still another parenting pattern that is going on while all the above is happening is the "seductive-destructive", "seduce-slap", "Venus fly trap" process. She in effect plays "cat and mouse" with the child's affections, especially after the Oedipal/Elektra period starts (age 3 to seven). She systematically entices and provokes the child's affectional advances and then rejects them furiously. The result is confusion and then fear, as they are induced into sexual frenzy and simultaneous total sexual squashing. They are seduced and then slammed up against the wall so often that they give up on sexuality and love altogether, and they end up really seriously sexually hung up. And, of course, it involves a fusion of sexuality, masochism and severe punishment. Bottom line, she profoundly hates males and the patriarchy with a passion, and she either lays that on her son or she acts from it with her daughter.
In the case of the female "model child" in this regard, the mother either forces and coerces her into the "lesbian dynamic" of hating males and being hung up on non-available mother love, and/or she in effect sics the father on to the girl. He then seduces and then cuts her off, and he promises and then betrays her over and over, just like the mother, in a collusive or direct expression of his own rage at women (his mother in particular).
In the more extreme versions of this pattern, the individual develops a "dance around their own funeral pyre" lifestyle. This is where they are so suppressed that they have no choice but to focus with all they have on the instant to see what mother wants so as to give it to her without fail, hesitation or going out of synch with her. The situation is so severe that the individual is allowed no room for any form of spontaneity or self-expression. Meanwhile, she engages in continuous enraging, enticing-slamming, and utterly devastating "soul-searing" games with the individual. She plays "super-clincher" and "catch-22" no option double binds on lifeline issues, and she is totally ownership-avoiding the whole time. She engineers the situation so that the "model child" has absolutely no choice but to sit there silently while she in effect "little murders" them to death.
This, in turn, results in a fulminating fury about not being allowed to be in any way whatsoever. And that, in turn, leads to such out-comes as fascination with fire and arson. What happens here is that as the "model child" starts to become consumed with rage, the pokes and provokes them and then says, "See. S/He's crazy/dangerous/horrible!" — and "It's not MY fault!". She drives them into impotent blind fury that combines rage, sadistic sexuality and fire into one orgiastic metaphor. And of course if they arson, that is all they ever are from then on. And she is then totally justified in all kinds of viscous maliciousness towards him/her.
Another outcome of this process is the "ticking time bomb" situation. Here the individual desperately tries to do the right thing at all times at total expense to themselves and in utter self-suppression, all the while with the refrain, "Remember — Mama says . . ." playing in their mind. They self-straightjacket themselves in all-consuming "runamok-anxiety" and they bend over backwards to be the model citizen and the star student and the eagle scout. They avoid feelings, awareness, significance and self-release like the plague and they become highly specialized in some impersonal activity such as computers. Then ultimately they explode with a "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" outburst of murderous hostility.
Still more extreme is the "Sybil" type of situation where the mother is fiendishly cleverly effective at covering her tracks in the "singing frog" fashion while she psychotically acts out her seemingly unlimited hostility on the child with unbelievable virulence and violence. It is difficult to know the workings of the mind of such a mother, but in general, she is doing some form of either transference of her homicidal hostility towards her parent(s) or projective identification with the child where she is taking her murderous self-hostility out on the child. The result is that the woman is so out of contact with reality that she allows the child to develop "alternate" personalities because they don't represent defiance by the child of her absolute hegemony over them. And the outcome is, of course, a multiple personality pattern.
Finally, in the most extreme form of all, the mother or more usually both parents take the "singing frog" thing to its ultimate conclusion — ritual abuse. Here they maintain a facade of upright citizens while they engage alone, with each other or even in the company of other "upstanding people" in systematic massive sexual assault, orgies, and all manner of unbelievable tortures such as burying the child in a decayed body-filled coffin with snakes, rats and spiders, and even forcing them to engage in cannibalism. This almost always results in a virulent multiple personality pattern.
WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?
"Model child" people operate under an invisible but ever-present "sword of Damocles". They are laboring to deal with a constant severe annihilation-anxiety with regard to their soul. Even if the family wouldn't be physically lethal, they seek to destroy the individual's soul — and they therefore could kill. That's the experience and the bottom line catastrophic expectation that runs their show. They have a great deal of free-floating anxiety along the lines of, "What would happen if I say/do anything?". They are scared to death, so to speak.
Their experience of life is of a nazi concentration camp in which the guards unpredictably torture until they tire of it, then they terminate you. And there's no use resisting — it only makes things ten times worse . . . As a result, they are really into catastrophic expectations. The reality is that the ultimate catastrophic events and experiences actually do occur in an unpredictable manner. They never fully recover from that, and their experience is that it is never safe in what feels like a totally capriciously cruel world.
Their experiences is that anything and any behavior can be the occasion for disaster, and that they can do no right. They can't please anyone, and nothing is real. They experience a "magical mystery tour" that is a "kaleidoscope of shit". Corrective efforts were punished consistently, and advice from others was usually inapplicable, impractical and/or irrelevant. And to make matters worse, due to the tendency for people to want people to stay as they are, the more competent and confident the "model child" gets, the more the environment becomes alarmed and angry at them for changing.
"Model children" live in implications constantly. They are intensely afraid of getting hurt, and they are super-gun-shy. They are in effect trying to avoid being killed. Things went so badly for them that when they get into unknowns, they totally freak out. They will avoid unknowns like the plague. Security is a real Biggie for the "model child". They have a pronounced tendency to over-generalize from immediate experiences and situations into catastrophic cataclysms. They live a continuous "Day of Judgement". The effect is to make them forever frightened by the "implications" of current circumstances; implications they then act on — to the utter dismay and alienation of their associates and intimates. The result is self-fulfilling fear fantasies, especially in intimacy around abandonment issues.
To make matters worse, the required process of "dancing with the second" had the effect of undermining the "model child's" capacity to perceive patterns and to grasp the understandable significances in what they experience. They had to function at the front of their nose or die, so to speak. Furthermore, they had to NOT see or perceive what the situation, family pattern and parental behaviors were, so they learned to engage in "mental squinting", as in "I don't see her doing it!". They are therefore meaning-blind, nuance-tracking, gestalt-grokking and living in the instant in their functioning. "What dance do I have to do to survive?" is their whole approach as a result.
Their thinking tends to be very simplistic and dichotomous ("It's either this or that") because of their assiduous efforts to avoid detecting the patterns in their environment. They have a pronounced tendency to focus in just the wrong place because of this, and they usually ignore the figure and scan the ground. They also self-obfuscate and self-confuse so as to not bring on the furies of hell by knowing/perceiving too much. They not infrequently develop myopia (near-sightedness) and other visual disorders as a part of this process. They also had to develop dissociative patterns of disengaging from their experience due to its intolerability, and they also needed to develop "memory-erase" mechanisms to survive in their family. As a result, they can't do things like creative visualization, the foundation of most therapeutic out-routes, which condemns them to remain in the grip of their handicap.
The "model child" feels like they are in over their heads and unable to cope with life's demands to a considerable degree. They have a severe case of, "They've got a secret I can never have" feelings. They are therefore intensely responsibility- and commitment-avoidant out of a deep fear of royally screwing it up. They have been so dominated and decimated that they don't know how to decide things, and they are enormously competence-anxious. They feel that anything they do isn't, wasn't or won't be good enough. They are extremely reluctant to do anything unless they can be guaranteed success and no harm from it. They feel like they have to fake it to make it every-where they go, because they can't really make it and they are a "professional failure". They always try to take the easy way out of things because of this. In their eyes, "they have the world by the fail".
The "model child's" experience is that it doesn't matter what they do, they have to dance with the second, and they have no control over the environment. Powerlessness is the "model child's" thing, and they give all their power away. Their major deficit is in the will, and they don't have the wants to make it out of their situation. They never know what they want, and they are always trying to placate, appease, please, serve, avoid trouble or self-punish. Having been self-destructively programmed, "What I want" feels like a lethal consideration, and they are maximally self-distrusting. They are also emotionally illiterate and feeling-avoidant. They fake "appropriate" feelings and they deny their real feelings so much that they can't tell the real McCoy, and they wonder if they can ever feel any-thing any more.
They therefore approach life in a "settle for the crumbs" manner. They have been programmed to set off "booby traps" in a "That'll learn ya!" fashion if they ever want anything. Any time they try to go for something, the world has a strange way of making them very sorry they ever even thought of it. And they have an, "I KNEW it!" reaction. They have a "ground hog" lifestyle as a result. They live for the second and they desire-avoid like crazy. They are horrendously fatalistic. In their eyes, no impact is possible, and their strategy is to take what they get and shut up — or else . . .
Another aspect of this is that they have the firm conviction that nothing good can ever be trusted. First of all, there is the "fact" that they don't deserve it. Secondly, there is the "poison apple" effect in which what appears to be good is in fact deadly or laced with razor blades. Thirdly, there is the "fact" that if the world finds out they want or need something, it will see to it that they never get it. And finally, if they DO manage to get something nice, sure as shooting, it will be taken away — or it will turn into a painful obligation or other negative experience.
So they always think in terms of doing without things instantly. Wanting and dependency is losing and dying to them. They are afraid to commit to anything or anyone because they'll lose what they commit to. They are scared to death to want or enjoy anything, and they are pleasure and joy-avoidant as a result. Their experience is, "They'll kill you for having it or God will get you". Their feeling is that positive things are in effect traps, and that they have no right to them. Doing things "for fun and profit" is completely beyond the ken of the "model child". Their "bottom line" is, "Thou shalt not have anything good!". They live in mortal fear of retribution, and they are so afraid of something going wrong that they don't let anything good happen. Their motto is, "If it feels good, don't do it!". Change is also not an option for them because it will bring on the Wrath of God. This brings about the paradoxical effect that they will attack in a "Maxwell's silver hammer" manner anyone who threatens to bring on the good life for them.
The result of all this is the "magical misery tour" experience of life. They become fatalistically resigned to the worst case scenario and life becomes a process of trying to pull a few things from the coals. They shut down in a "What's the use?" life stance. Their experience is one of "no win" and "everything to lose and nothing to gain". They come from a "bottom line" of despair, and they feel unable to express themselves, to seek strokes and goodies, and to ask permission or to even ask questions. Their overall feeling is that they don't have what it takes, that the world will kill them, and that they don't deserve any better anyway, and they work out of a "Me last, if ever" approach. They are super-joy-avoidant and they talk themselves out of things constantly. They won't give themselves anything and they avoid giving the world handles to hurt them with. After all, "There is no joy in Bloodville" . . .
A paradoxical fact about how the "model child" operates is that they can't stand pain and discomfort. Since joy is impossible and extremely dangerous, pain is intolerable. They do anything and everything they can to minimize the pain they experience in their life. They are totally pain- and punishment-avoidant, and their experience is that the best they can expect is not to get hurt any further. They are anxious to give whatever seems to be wanted at the moment to avoid trouble and pain. They minimize pain and don't even think of gain. Their pain-avoidant lifestyle is a desperate attempt not to be stomped to death. As a result, they "can't say 'NO'", for fear of the pain they are sure would result if they did. Theirs is an escape-avoidance lifestyle. The absence, deflection or relief of pain and hurt are the only real rewards the "model child" is capable of experiencing. Challenges, demands, opportunities and risks elicit a "bland-on-bland" panic- and pandemonium-prevention reaction.
The "model child" is sure that if they express themselves, they will get severely hurt via abandonment or annihilation because they somehow deserve it. They feel like a terrible bad child who has never known what they did wrong, only that they did in some mysterious way. They have chronic despair and a "demonic" self-concept along the lines of, "That's another demonstration that I can do no right!". They experience themselves as an untrustworthy "magical monster". Then they look and feel guilty, which invites distrust and punishment that "validates" their "mysteriously evil" self-concept. And old world cliché's like "You have to finish what you start!" and "You made your bed, now lie in it!" have a tremendous impact on them. They feel worthless in and of themselves, so they feel they have to "make up for" their "moral cretinism" by compulsive service. This gives them a sense of power — the power of the helper.
However, they are also terrified of screwing it up by, for instance, killing with their words and self-assertion. They also feel deeply destructive and dangerous when they are self-committed in any way, so they are highly ambivalent about their serve-aholic pattern. This makes them all the more compulsively determined to "make up for it" with unending service. Unfortunately, they are apt to burn themselves out in the process. And if they don't feel they are succeeding in compensating and atoning, they will resort to self-punishment and even self-destruction. They won't even consider coming out of it unless they "hit bottom" in doing what they are doing. An apt epitaph for the "model child" might be, "All give and no play makes for a very short stay . . ."
They are trying to make up for what feels to them to be an inherent "evilness" and non-right to exist, so they have to serve to survive. They feel that they are the cause of all problems, and they feel that they have to "take care of it" as a result. They are convinced that they have to produce and perform to justify their existence and to atone, and they are absolutely sure their essence is completely worthless in and of itself. However, they can't really give of themselves and they can't really receive, so they serve, shiver and shrivel in a corner until they explode or die. It is a kind of "kamikaze good Samaritan" trip.
Because of the uselessness of the father as a role model and source of protection, and because of the tremendous seductive-destructive and overwhelmingly demoralizing and demonic power the mother has in this process, the "model child" ends up identifying with her and rejecting the masculine as unreal, unknowable and undependable. There is guilt for love for and from the father, as well as for their sexuality and rage at their situation. The mother reacts to all this with murderous hostility towards the individual, which results in the "model child's" submission, atonement-seeking and punishment-seeking. The "model child" becomes the "man of the family", protecting the father and meeting the mother's sexploitative demands on this unthreatening child. Or she becomes the "mother of the family" who tries to make it all better.
The "model child" is totally tied into their mother sexually and emotionally. That effectively ties off any and all love going in or coming out. Then when they hit puberty, it is totally destroyed by the mother's violent/virulent reaction to their threats to "grow away", to become adult sexually, to release the mother's intensely repressed and suppressed sexuality, and to become their own person. As a result, love and sex become permanently separated, the individual becomes sexually incompetent, and they become incapable of forming connections with anyone but mother.
The "model child" tries to re-activate the mother's love, the loss of which they think is due to their responses to her seduction. So they suppress their sexuality and they self-disempower as they seek intimacy with her. What comes out of this is a complete rejection of sexuality as the fusion of joy and love because it is NOT ALLOWED. Instead, it becomes the cause of disaster and dastardliness, according to the mother and her impact. Their relationship with her is super-sexually saturated, but that is extremely dangerous, with the result that their sexuality is totally squashed, along with any other form of spontaneity. It is the initiation and invitation to death and destruction in their experience.
As a result of all this, there is a massively seething suppressed sexuality emanating from the "model child", and this can become the basis of a sexual addiction. They are warm in the extremities and cold in the heart. Their rejection of sexuality, along with its associated low self-worth and high self-denigration, has the effect of closing the heart to love, as well as making for massive guilt and self-hatred over the "tantalizing tarantula"-generated hyper-sexuality. It can also lead to various sexual deviancies such as exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism- and pedophilia.
The "model child" was so powerlessness-scripted that they end up feeling that love and joy are impossible, that they might get killed if they "step out of line", that relief is the best they can expect, and that vulnerability to a relevant intimate is out of the question, virtually impossible. Their experience is that they have to "sing for their supper" and to "rent their approval". They are deathly afraid to love or be relevantly reciprocated in love. To love is to love themselves first, and the implant against that is overwhelming. They experience emotional annihilation expectations when they are involved in intimacy.
They have undergone profound, even near fatal hurts "in the name of love". They don't trust any intimate, with the result that intimates they have eventually punish and withdraw from them, which of course recreates their catastrophic beginnings — a viscous cycle in action. They are massively vulnerability-avoidant in a "Once murdered, twice shy" pattern. When they get paranoid in reaction to love being expressed towards them, it is the result of having had the experience that when their mother expressed love, she was preparing another near-lethal attack. Bottom line, they can't receive love and therefore they can't give genuine love either. They can form a unilateral service relationship, but not a really reciprocal relationship. They can't feel loved, only needed and demanded of. They are threatened when they hear, "I love you" because they know in their heart of hearts they can't love back, and because it will mean mayhem to them.
The individual ends up super-sensitive to the mother's psychology, and thereby to the feminine principle and process. But there is a continuous background fear of being devoured, dropped off a cliff or destroyed in some other God awful manner. They end up unable to trust love or joy, and they settle for manifesting the feminine service process in a "servaholic" fashion. They also play on the mother's protective instincts by projecting helplessness and vulnerability. They worked hard at putting out a "harbor seal" or "cute kid" look to turn off her rageful attacks, and the result is a "Campbell's soup kid" round face at times. They survived that way, but they end up a caricature of the feminine — helpless, searching for protection and for asexual nurturance and love.
"Model children" end up in effect married to their mother. They can't connect anywhere else, on fear of death. They feel that if they give up the "tie that grinds", they will have nothing to live, be or do for. There is in effect "nobody home" inside and they feel they need the mother to whom to "prove" themselves. They define themselves in terms of getting a reaction of validation of their existence and worth from the torturer — to no avail of course. They end up picking people who allow them to keep their self-suppression trip in a dependency-security type of relationship. And/or they find themselves with "re-runs" of the same old story with "stand-ins" for the "original cast".
As might be expected from all the above, there is another major component to the "model child's" emotional make up. And that is the seethingly volcanic fulminating fury at having to in effect cut off their arms, legs, tongue, genitals and heart, and at having to be an utter puppet of the moment at all times. They desperately seek to suppress massive rage this at all costs. They are totally terrified of what would happen if they would unleash the furies of hell within them, and they try desperately to keep the "monster within" under control.
They needed their rage to stay alive under all the abuse, as well as to preserve what identity they have under all that crushing castration process. But most of it is an honest reaction to all the devastation. The problem is that they don't dare own it, contact it or release it directly. So what happens is that it comes out in a "constant slow leak" passive-aggressive manner, so that everywhere they go they leave a trail of devastation in one form or another, mostly by means of "errors of omission" (failure to carry their end of the bargain). The "Campbell's soup kid" face is often accompanied by a "travelling tornado" of passive-aggressive decimation effect on the environment around them. A more ominous tactic is to "go along" with even severely antisocial activities as a form of vicarious and passive-reactive acting out.
They have much obligation-resentment, and they are either obligation-dominated or obligation-avoidant. Duty is everything to them, and they end up a kind of seething "travelling savior". They are superficially kind, understanding, submissive and passive. But underneath, they are full of fulminating fury, with hatred, resentment and rage against everyone. They are constantly manipulative, cunning, indirect and devious to get their way, just like they had to be to survive. And they have a lot of judgementalness, suspiciousness and disgust behind their "smiling, dancing, pleasing, appeasing" inter-face. They frequently engage in subtle and suppressed "After all I've contributed . . . !" reactions. They are super-disapproving, especially if others violate the accepted order in anything. They also tend to operate out of what could be called "irrelevant perfectionism". The feeling is that "I have to be perfect or die". They operate in a total "win-lose" experience where they do most of the losing, a fact which utterly enrages them.
All in all, the "model child" is a totally "sealed unit" who is utterly self-determining out of a massive fear trip. They are massively egocentric, self-protective, self-inhibiting, self-sustaining and self-involved. They utterly refuse to learn from the example of others because of the "magical mystery tour" distrust of appearances, because of "district attorney" cross-examination fears, be-cause of their "legalistic loophole-leaping" decimation experiences, and in general because of their "no win" life history.
They become their entire world, and their whole trip becomes one of trying to avoid trouble. They are astute cue-readers but they are quasi-delusional interpreters, especially concerning themselves. They engage in a lot of "Maybe they won't notice" functioning, along with deviant self-justifications and "Everyone hates me!" grandiosity in reverse. Underlying this is the notion that "If everyone hates and suppresses me that much, I must be awfully important and powerful". But it is a feeble self-reassurance process in a slowly dying system.
Ironically, one of the ways they keep going in the face of all this is a kind of paradoxical "cock-eyed optimist" despair-deflecting "looking under stones" in the hope that something better might materialize pattern that a considerable number of "model children" display. They sometimes feel that if they just "dance" well enough, they might be able to have power, joy and love. Basic self-commitment starts with the decision to live despite the "hopelessness' of their situation. The trouble is, the "model child's" way of doing this is a kind of "Alfred E. Neuman" "What, ME worry?" attitude as a denial defense against their profound underlying despairing despondency and terminal depression. Unfortunately, their whole approach to life is the classic pattern for cancer-proneness, along with the "ticking time bomb" and "wrong side of the freeway" ending potentials.
HOW DO THEY FUNCTION?
The "Model Child" found that no general patterns or strategies of behavior work for them, so they learned to "dance" with the immediate situation, to be whatever the whims and dictates of the moment require. They are a professional pleaser who continuously self-straight-jackets in a sequence-insensitive and pattern-blind manner. They do a lot of "wheatfield-rippling" and "immersing in the instant", staying in synch with the second for survival, rather than manifesting themselves.
They are intensely "papa-pleasing" authority-deferers and -fearers, and they jump ten miles high when called on something. They also instantly intention-reverse if they sense any danger arising from their having started to disclose their intentions, because any self-directed response is potentially lethal, in their experience. They have ended up having to operate in an almost totally yin-receptive mode. Yang-reach outs almost always backfire on them due to their clumsiness, in addition to their pronounced tendency to pull the furies of hell on themselves when they do that. They operate in a "nobody home inside", "whatever gets me through the moment" manner. "Don't do — or die!" is their "burn-learning" life history experience.
They are intensely immobilized by bald power, desire and intent assertions from other people because their history was that such assertions are backed up by utter unscrupulousness and irrationality of behavior. They have also found that nothing works for them and that they have to dance with whatever is front of their nose to survive. Their experience is that they were given the injunction, "Don't MOVE! Don't even breath!"", and they also feel that it is totally unsafe and immoral to let on to their intentions and reactions. They are intensely release-avoidant, and they feel that the whole world rests in the balance with their every utterance and behavior. Their experience is that intangible, unpredictable, awful emotional retribution will occur if they do anything. They also are convinced that there is some sort of horrendous demon within them that requires total self-squelching to keep it from destroying the world. They are terrified of releasing their power.
"Leave well enough alone!" ("Lewella!"), "Don't touch!", "Do not disturb!", and "Don't poke the dragon!" are their guiding principles, the implication being that any attempts to change things will release a calamitous catastrophe and an escalating disaster. Their feeling is that "They'll kill me!", "I'll hurt some one, hurt myself or destroy something!", and "I don't deserve to initiate". Their attitude is, "Nothing ventured, nothing lost!", and "If at first you don't succeed, quit before you set off an avalanche!". They do a "follow-the-dots" life-style, and they avoid decisions like the plague. They just go along with the "killer mom" and later with whoever is in a position of power. They are massively awareness- and feeling-avoidant. They don't manifest an identity, just role-compliance and complete capitulation to the "killer mom" and her stand-ins. Their orientation is, "Psych out what is wanted and give it — or ELSE!". They get into a profound "You'll kill the world or yourself if you do or say ANYTHING!" attitude.
"Model children" withhold information constantly. They are convinced that to verbalize is to destroy or be destroyed. When they are confronted, accused, or demanded to reveal their feelings, reactions or position, they clam up and stare ahead, at the floor or at something other than the person speaking to them. When they are asked what they think about something, they go into inhibition-freakouts along the lines of, "Oh my god! I can't! I'll blow it! They'll kill me!" Differences of opinion or negative evaluations are supremely threatening to them, and they keep their thoughts to themselves. The other person has to do the talking for them to get anything going with them. They are in effect "murmph-artists" who mumble, grumble and stumble when expected to communicate. When two such individuals get together, it results in a "mutual murmph" process. Of course, this withholding pattern tends strongly to drive people away in droves.
They are terrified of decimation or desecration if they speak out about anything. They are most likely to "murmph" when the situation is experienced as too much complexity to communicate, when the stakes are too high to try and fail, and when the audience is experienced as too punitive, "magical mystery tour" and/or arbitrary/authoritarian to trust. The other time when this happens is when the topic, person or situation runs into the "nobody home" phenomenon where their avoidance and deprivation/decimation experiential history has prevented the development of anything to communicate in that area.
"Model children" read the continence and context and go with that, period. They anxiously watch the other person's mouth to see what they are going to do to them and what they want of them. They don't track words and auditory input very much because it was lethal to believe when they were a child. They desperately try to be what is needed of them instant by instant, and they try frantically to smooth oil on troubled waters. They are a past master of the "slip it in" response. Indirection, excessive discretion, and subtle substitutions permeate their functioning. They avoid confrontation at all costs, and they please, placate, use humor as a calming influence, withdraw and inhibit to the max. They try to mediate everything, to make everything all right for everyone.
They use any and all information channels they can to get any lay of the land they can — the more indirectly the better. They are very much into subtle control via withholding, "divining", assuming shared information and that others "understand", and "waffling", all of which only makes their situation all that much more difficult. Their experience is that they have to appease the angry gods, and that somehow it never seems to work right. They have no time perspective and they react to the present as an ever-lasting reality. They have no capacity for fun or vulnerability. They become pattern-paranoid, implication-overwhelmed, super-somber, and serious in a "Sydney Sobersides" manner.
When the "model child" is stressed, they go into "total computer", with no experienced feelings — they "freak and freeze". They rely totally on prediction as their means of control and meeting the demands of the situation. They scope and scan to find out what seems to be wanted of them and they try to give it. They are emotionally unavailable, and if such expression is what is demanded, it goes into a spiraling disaster. The result is "pattern-paranoia" on their part regarding themselves and on the other people's part concerning them. One effect of all this is that they end up forcing others to hold many things back because the "model child" doesn't say when things are too much so much that others eventually back off altogether on a lot of things for fear of "doing in the "model child" again.
"Model children" are so feeling-suppressing that when a feeling does come out, it is so extreme that it becomes overwhelming to the environment and them. They tend to over-react intensely in the form of behavioral expressions of their catastrophic expectations. They had no options or opportunities for opposition as they were growing up, which generates enormous backlogged volcanic rage, which leads to "spring-releases" of autocraticness, freedom-demanding, commitment-avoidance, authority-freak and "Reggie the raging room-wrecker" reactions. All of which leads them to suppress themselves all the more.
The "model child's" feeling-avoidance produces a withholding, letting down, omitting, etc. pattern that results in utter isolation and pattern-preservation outcomes. They are also horrendously egocentric, in the sense that it is exceedingly difficult for them to REALLY relate to others' needs, space, wants and intentions. They're always processing in terms of their own survival or release. To make matters worse, they are grossly socially inept, so they either talk trivia the wrong way or they don't talk at all. In either case, intimate others are "bored to death" because there's "nobody home". They just simply lack the "automatic pilot" little social gestures and conventions that make social interface functional.
Another experience the "model child" has a lot is irrelevance, in the sense of "You just don't understand and you are recommending the impossible, the intolerable or the irrelevant" or 'You are punishing me for what I can't be or change" or "There's nothing out there (or in it) for me". They are culture-distrusting, challenge-avoiding, control-resistant, power-suppressing and success-preventing, partly out of a deep sense of not fitting in, belonging and deserving, and partly out of a profound distrust of the larger environment. They have a real systems-paranoia arising out of having had community approval of their parents' abuse. They also have experienced a great deal of having had all too many systems totally not understand, care or meet their needs, if not actually doing them great harm. The net effect is that they stay away from the usual support systems and resources of the culture out of a fear of being "done in" again. And this has the effect of alienating them from people and people from them, resulting in an "island unto themselves" phenomenon.
This whole pattern is part of their larger failure-generating process. They are programmed to read cues very effectively — and to do just the wrong thing with the information. And they do so a new way each time, so that there is almost no learning from experience. All they learn is how not to do that particular thing wrong again — and that everything they try turns to shit unless it is a well-repeated skill where all the possible screw ups already have been tried. They also do a lot of preparing for and garnering equipment for skill- and occupation-attainment, but all it ends up being is fantasy hopes and abortive attempts to break out of their script. They are actually terrified of the responsibilities of success and personal power. A major result of all this is that they end up totally sticking to the "tried and true" and they also end up a "Johnny/Joanie One Note" — all by themselves.
The "model child" has the feeling that the world is unpredictably deadly, and they put out a kind of "chronic wince" pattern which unfortunately has the effect of eliciting just the "axes falling" kind of attacks, discriminations, discounts and the like that their catastrophics predict. To make matters worse, they have a wide variety of behavior patterns that tend to bring about repeated validations of their worst fears. For instance, they lack self-monitoring skills to such a degree that they are unpleasantly transparent in their motivations for approval and the like, and while they feel they are being totally honest, they are so much out of touch with themselves that they end up functionally emotionally dishonest and manipulative-appearing.
In addition, they do things like excessive apologeticness, studied incompetence, self-denigration, egregious eccentricity, self-undermining, self-punishing, self-disgust expressions, pattern-paranoia, inadequacy feeling manifestations and despair-freakouts that severely alienate the world around them. They also do a lot of "gallows laughter" (reinforcing themselves for self-destructive, fatalistic, "non-person" behaviors) that telegraphs to the world that they don't count, that they are doomed anyway, and that it doesn't matter what the world does to them. The net effect is to emotionally isolate them to a rather remarkable degree.
"Model children" are emotional hermits who are still totally tied to the torturing parent. Their history told them that "If you commit to anyone else, you'll die!". They can't commit till they severe the "tie that grinds" with mother. They are commitment- and intimacy-avoidant, both out of the fear of the "killer mom" and out of "betrayal"- and "disloyalty"-avoidance. They do the "dance macabre" with the mother while simultaneously denying it vehemently as a "death implant"-avoidance strategy.
They operate in a "roadrunner" manner of freaking out and splitting rapidly in reaction to being gotten close to. There is also the fear that if they put it all out and then get rejected, they would not be able to handle it. "Home is where the hurt is" in their experience and they are afraid of intimacy as a result. In addition, they are addicted to "stand-ins" for "dear old mom" and they end up re-running the same old story over and over. And then they do a thing of hankering after the non-reciprocating withholder, wanting the unattainable. They also don't reciprocate love or let it in out of their terror, and they thereby make the attainable unattainable after a while.
Furthermore, in their desperation for acceptance, affection and abandonment-avoidance, they put out a lot of promises that entice would-be intimates, only to have their engulfment-, abandonment- and annihilation-anxieties activated. They then withdraw into themselves to protect themselves from assault, to prevent release of rageful bluntness and harmful destructiveness, and to deflect "spring-release" and "runamok" episodes. They also "carrot-yank" and "service-trip" rather than become intimate, and they end up driving potential intimates away over and over again. Another pattern is that they form multiple relationships about which they can't make decisions, and they never give their primary relationship person the acknowledgement they deserve. This is, of course, a process of "pleasing mom" by preventing a full-fledged commitment from developing or working.
They don't connect with people due to severe vulnerability-paranoia and abandonment-anxiety. They never were allowed to want or to be, and the only want to avoid being thrown out in the cold is total self-suppression and perfection-seeking. The result is that they have no relationships and they leave a trail of shattered intimates. The script they come from is to not trust anyone, especially themselves, to be miserable, don't move, and don't be. The result is repeated validations of their worst case scenario expectations and utter despair.
As might be expected, having to undergo all this generates a humongous amount rage in the "model child". In addition, they not infrequently "identify with the aggressor" in their childhood at a deep level, and they operate out of the subterranean and suppressed "killer child" system within themselves. Furthermore, it was often one of the requirements from the mother that they "be like me". As a result, much of their behavior is intensely and brilliantly passive-aggressive in a kind of underlying "get back attack" pattern.
Above and beyond that, there is a particular subtype of "model child" who could be characterized as the "smirker". What they do is to continuously "drain" their "reservoir" of rage so that they don't become too dangerous or self-destructive. It seems that when you are around such an individual, everything you do is wrong, and they invalidate, discount and subtly accuse with almost everything they say. They operate in a manipulative, power-oriented and controlling manner, all with the "best of justifications". They also use sly systematic subtle semi-sadism, along with Calvinistic attitudes, subtle put-downs, angry puns, set-ups, spy motifs, sarcasm, cynicism, deviant self-justifications and other forms of low key anger-release activities. This has the extra side-effect of preserving some of their self-determination, self-respect and integrity in the face of the parental onslaught. It works because the parent appreciated the "sincerest form of flattery" — so long as it didn't get "out of line".
Another type is what could be called the "pseudo-sadist". Here the individual is allowed or even required to utilize some of the parent's responses — so long as it ends up "doing themselves in". They become "pseudo-sneaky" so that she knows they know she knows what's going on — but they NEVER talk about it of course. They therefore do their set ups clumsily and self-defeatingly, and ultimately they only harm themselves, with occasional minor injuries to others. In effect, they end up bleeding while others end up pseudo-hurt (and often helped in disguise). They operate like an undercover agent who gets themselves caught. All the while, they furiously strive to appear to themselves and everyone else as "lily white" in the moral sphere. This moral purity is basic suicide-avoidance, because the pseudo-sadist "model child" is so self-hating that they tend strongly to "save up red trading stamps" to "cash in" on a suicide or termination-elicitation as a function of their "pseudo-sadistic" activities that they had to adopt to survive in their family.
There are several other varieties of "model child". For instance, there is the intellectual "nerd" type, who becomes a "Johnny One-Note" in some super-cerebral area like computers. Then there is the "clown-fool" type who systematically engages in self-denigrating and self-destructive humor as a desperate bid for acceptance. Then there is the "professional scapegoat" who becomes the safe target of every group and individual's wrath in a reproduction of their child-hood environment pattern because they feel they deserve it and because they were systematically trained to elicit it. Then there is the awareness-avoidant denial-dominated "Alfred E. Neuman" who vacuously says, "What, ME worry?" with all of their behavior and projection, a pattern that was required in their virulently dysfunctional and dangerous family. Then there is the "turtle-tripper" who lies low and avoids all forms of risk at all costs, out of a total terror of the world generated by a massively oppressive and aggressive family system.
Then of course there is the "Sybil" type who becomes a multiple personality disorder. They are usually the product of brilliantly front-projecting but underneath virulently psychotic parents who engage in the most extremely violent and viscous torture tactics imaginable — all the way out to ritual abuse. What happens here is that the attacks are so extreme that the child dissociates from the experiences and their aura is effectively "shattered". This results in two types of "alternate" personalities emerging. One type is composed of "fragments" and "arrested development" figures who reflect the arenas and the age at which the abuse became totally unbearable in the particular capabilities involved at the time. The other type consists of external entities who are attracted by the roiling condition of the individual's emotional state, and who come in through the "holes" in the individual's aura to "be in the world" for a while without having to be reborn, etc. Both are accepted as preferable to the individual's being able to manifest their natural capacities and characteristics, and so they become stabilized as part of the individual's coping repertoire.
Finally, we have the "time bomb" who "sits on it" to such a degree that they become a slowly building volcanic eruption of violent self- and other-destructive intentions steadily "ticking" away. They were so severely assaulted in such a subtle way that they do the "dance around their own funeral pyre" thing to the ultimate degree. They were allowed and allow themselves absolutely no latitude to express or be themselves whatsoever, and "Remember, Mama says . . ." is their constant internal experience.
They typically become model citizens, star students and marvelously attractive and supportive people. And then suddenly, they "go over the top" and they can't take it any more. Their homicidal rage and their all-consuming self-hatred culminate in a "wrong side of the freeway" ending. In other words, they suddenly decide to "take themselves out", and to take as many others with then as they can while they do so. The result is the literal going up the down ramp wrong side of the freeway thing, the Texas sniper thing, the Lizzie Borden thing, the nurse-murderer thing or the "go into an off-duty policeman's bar with a drawn and firing gun so as to end up Swiss cheese" number. In all cases, the reaction afterwards is one of befuddled marvelment at the total inexplicalbeness of "such a WONDERFUL person's" having done such a hideous thing.
HOW CAN THEY BE HELPED?
As might be expected for such a severe disorder, the intervention process for the "model child" is a bit complex and intense. In general, it involves four processes. These are l) information, 2) support and protection, 3) emotional release training, and 4) self-commitment-activation. These perforce have to run in an intermingled manner, and as a part of the process, there will be a "rebellious" period and an "emotional hermit" period to process everything as they go through the whole thing.
Knowledge of the scene is all-important to the "model child's" training/healing. They simply must have "lay of the land" explanations and they have to be trained in the ability to come up with realistic explanations for themselves. The absence of this results in their "shooting from the hip" in a manner that is highly unskilled and apt to result in massive punishment experiences. They have to be "de-mystified", to find out how things work.
A key component of this process is pattern-perception training so as to "de-dread" them. They need to learn to relate "this to that", especially with regard to their feelings vis-a-vis environmental events. They need to be able to predict things so as to gain confidence, to find that they aren't delusional, and to see that other people don't necessarily "have the secrets" either. They need to find that they are not alone and that other people are reacting much the same way they are. They need to develop gullibility-avoidance strategies to prevent "burnt child retreat" reactions to poor choice outcomes. And finally, they need "identity therapy" in which they find who they are, rather than always scoping for what others want. They need to then learn to be what they are, to find their essence and to be true to it.
"Model children" desperately need support and assurance of being accepted and loved, especially during the healing process. They need recognition and validation from both their therapeutic relationships and from the larger social environment. They especially need support from their peers, as opposed to "parent" figures. They need to feel safe enough to trust the world as they "break out of pattern". And they particularly need protection from or assistance in handling their family's reactions to their changes. The family is apt to become quite delusional around their hopes for the return to the "bad old ways". The "model child" has to carry the onus of the "moral cretin" and to deal with all sorts of aggressive attacks and manipulations. These processes need defusing and deflection whenever possible.
You can't push a "model child", you can only lead them to the water and to entice them to drink. As much as possible, they have to be allowed to go at their own pace and in their own manner. They are fear-frozen, and they need to find out that it is safe to change. Once they do, they typically go like a house afire. However, it is really tricky business to pull off just the required amount of motivation-activation with them. If you put too much pressure on them, they well slide out, freeze or flee due to their annihilation-anxiety. If you don't put enough fire under them, they will cop out and con themselves and the world. If you do things that are too off-base or irrelevant to their experience, they will distrust and fear-escape. And if you do too direct an approach, they will smile and dance away.
They need calibrated "pitchfork motivators" in relevant areas that lead to changed experiences and outcomes, with them drawing their own conclusions. They also need guidelines and "follow-the-dots" training in how to go with the events that feel totally right on, with no "settle-fors". They then experience joy for the first time. However, this has to be done with very narrow tolerances and no allowances for settle-for pseudo-joys. The general approach here is, "You have lots to lose if you stay as you are, and you have everything to gain and nothing to lose if you move ahead".
The process involved in this is called "cardiac rhythm therapy". It involves carefully calibrated and targeted pitchfork pressures, along with permission to fail, protection from failure and negative environmental feedback, and payoffs for successful performances, along with numerous plateaus to process and regroup. In other words, you alternate between pressure and plateau, over and over, area by area, skill by skill. The idea is to gently force them to come out and to become whole.
The bottom line for the "model child" is self-commitment of at least a pain-avoidant "I'm not going to take that any more!" variety. They have to take the risk of losing all in their "catch-22" life situation. They have to have their desires forced out of the closet in a "go for broke", "shit or get off the pot", "give me all or give me nothing" pathology-confrontation exercise. And the "cardiac rhythm therapy" provides just that experience. It puts them in touch with their despair and anger at their situation, which can then be used to go back and learn how it was implanted and then to serve as the basis for a "re-parenting" experience.
The "model child" needs to look at their first attempts at self-manifestation as being like any other skill-development process — full of bumbling and terrain-testing. They will need that, because in their process of "coming out", they will blurt spontaneously, "let fly with one" in "spring-release" episodes, and punishment-seek as they go along. They will need protection against real failures in this process, as the therapeutic resource people coordinate the processes and outcomes along the way. The trick to the whole process is to erode the script away by degrees, in the context of relevance, protection and payoff.
There will also be a lot of rage-release episodes of the "Reggie the raging room-wrecker" variety. These will feel like bottomless, limitless and dangerous feelings, but they will find that they are surprisingly small in their actual nature. They also find that they have a bottom line ethicality and reality perception that prevents their episodes from getting completely out of control. In fact, these "spring-release" episodes are a necessary step in the training/healing process. They need training in desensitizing them to their anger, in understanding it as an outraged indignation response to being treated the way they were, and in how to release it constructively and with sublimation.
Because of their "in front of their nose" behavior pattern, which in effect is "survival-placating", "model children" are pattern-avoidant and long-range outcome shunning. They therefore need immediate payoffs for their risks and stretches. Also, their disaster-deflecting and "magical mystery tour" perfectionism demands failure-prevention and unassailable results before they'll commit to an under-taking. They refuse to try anything new and they are frozen in fear, in a spring-release-avoidant, ineptness-dreading, injunction-honoring pattern. They have tremendous annihilation-anxiety-based non-connectedness that is perforce self-preserving because they won't allow anyone to have an impact.
The result is that they have to do a lot of their healing by themselves at their own pace in their own way. On the other hand, their life mess and running-from-themselves process can provide the impetus for self-cure. You have to approach them with, "Here are some relevant-to-you practical ways to maximize desirable changes", and then to accept what they choose to do with that. A real sign of change in them is when they can cooperate with and benefit from a "canned program" process. Ultimately, they are going to have to divide their life up into areas and to delegate things that are better done by others, and this ability to work with the world is a critical goal for the "model child".
Another requirement is for them to get in touch with and to love their "yang principle" — the initiative/creative spark process. They have developed the "yin-receptive" principle very well, and they need to balance that out. They have to learn to be direct and real all of the time, and to be concerned with more than self-preservation, evil-avoidance and despair. They have to be honest, goal-directed and positively expecting, as well as to be able to rely on their own perceptions and intuitions in the face of pressures from outside. They also need to develop the ability to convey their comprehensions in "concrete abstraction" metaphors and analogies that encompass all their super-sensitive sensibilities understandings of things. And they need to foster their ability to assert, express and self-manifest in small step reasonable risk situations.
They also need some form of "denouement" (final "reckoning") with their family. This can take place in person, by phone, by mail, or in fantasy, dream or gestalt exercise, so as to free them from the original hostile environment in their head. The general idea is to give them the protective support they need to "turn around and face the dragons within". The confrontation has to deal with the massive restriction, virulence and exploitation they experienced, and it also has to handle the "tantalizing tarantula" sexualizing that took place. The particular form and content of the "denouement" depends on the individual person and situation, but the purpose is to free them of the "ghosts of Christmases past" so they can get on with their life as identity-owning and destiny-manifesting individuals.
They need a "critical mass" of positive experiences and feedback on their competence and worth from other people. They have to stop trying to please and to be perfect, and to learn to go for what they want. The key is the development of self-acceptance and self-commitment. They need also to develop the ability to sort out their feelings and motivations in terms of what is "demonic possession" and what is the "real McCoy". Joy-seeking and self-expression are the foundations of personal power and of feeling-release so they can relate to others. The whole thing is done with small step self-commitment processes.
Still another characteristic of the "model child's" change process is what could be called "brinkmanship". They go to the very edge of decimation and disaster in each sphere — once — and then they pull it out. Once their process is completed in any area, it is out of the fire forever. They even use sleep as a work process when they are making big changes. They take a long time to move because they prepare a lot and then they do an overnight shift. They change internally until the externals literally can't be held in any more. They do a lot of under-the-surface changes and then suddenly flip-flop and stay that way. In the advanced stages of the healing process, their behavior goes first, then their feelings, and finally their thinking about the area. Growth leads to a lot of energy in the "model child" because all that went into self-suppression now goes into self-expression.
The "final frontier" for the "model child" is relationships. They analyze, smile/dance and withdraw themselves away from other people, and they avoid feeling-experience and feeling-expression. They are uncomfortable with males because of father-betrayal and they are deeply distrusting of females because of their mother's patterns (or vice versa). In order to be able to form a relationship, they have to "de-mystify" and to "de-nemisize" (to end "fatal attractions") so they won't experience further "love is a poison apple" processes. They have to learn to see clearly who people are and what they are doing at all times so as to not have further distrust of the universe and "nobody home"-inducing events.
"Model children" have a lethal fear of love coming from the "Mephistopholian" (see Mephistopheles) infancy experience, followed by the draconian environment of their childhood that generated profound environmental-paranoia and self-fear leading to immobilization. As a result, they have to do their initial changes in non-intimate spheres first. Intimates come last due to their severe vulnerability-paranoia and intensity-impactability. Intimates can read them and they hold all the marbles, in the "model child's" experience. To them, love is death, and they therefore avoid it like the plague or they do the "paranoid puff-up" poseur pattern. They need systematic desensitization of intimacy-annihilation-anxiety, the fear that those who profess to love you are trying to kill you.
They have to arrive at the decision not to continue in this belief, followed by the decision that no one can really hurt them at that level. They have to elicit and turn on to relevant reciprocation, and to face the whole reality of who they are so that can forgive them-selves and realize that they are lovable and that intimates are also. "Model children" have a tremendous well of love, wisdom, joy and strength in them that attracts like a pot of honey — when they can let some of it out. They also have a certain "Rock of Gibraltar — Mother Earth" feeling about them as well. Their task and that of the therapist is to get them to recognize these qualities with honest feedback, along with the other processes of intervention. It's easy as falling off a log to love themselves when they "get" that about themselves. Then and only then can they truly be intimate and loved.
One of the primary processes in that is to take the chance of "kissing the little red-headed girl" to find out they don't get killed — "Charlie Brown being a classic "model child". Total trustability of relationship is essential in their early learning here. They have to have gone through a "denemisizing" process prior to this in which they learn to turn off to "fatal attraction" re-runs of the rejecting parent. They simply cannot afford to have "war zone" validating experiences with intimates. If they do de-nemisize and if they do have a successful intimate experience, joy, sexuality and power then are able to be experienced. Not needing the intimate is the key.
The final treatment consideration is the "MPD" — the multiple personality disorder. In effect, what is required is all of the above plus a complete re-parenting. It takes almost a live-in therapist type of situation (and in the more serious cases, it literally requires this). The therapist has to be extremely patient, compassionate, sensitive and strong so as to provide the protection, comprehension and healing the MPD needs to overcome the horrors of their experiential history. The goal is the integration of all the component selves, plus the exorcism of unwanted alternate beings, along with the goals and processes required by the "model child".
WHAT IS THEIR PURPOSE?
The "gift in the garbage" of the "model child" is their incredible sensitivity. They are a remarkably tuned in subtle sensor and a pattern-tracking, people-reading, nuance-noticing profound understander of whomever and whatever they encounter. They are amazingly astute and aware assessors of everything and anyone they are required to know.
Their contribution lies in their great ability to compassionately comprehend what is happening, where it is going, and what is needed in any situation or with any person. They become sort of "cosmic eyes and ears" for the world. They also have remarkable resilience and survival capability, and they are able to share their strategies and wisdom with others for purposes of making it possible for others to have the kind of life the "model child" never did until they healed.
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