When we love bad people

One of the most prevalent issues that brings people to psychotherapy is the problem of having been raised by abusive people. By 'abusive', I do not mean those who were stern, or remote, or emotionally detached, unavailable, or difficult. In using the term 'abusive', I refer to those who actively and intentionally did harm to themselves, to one another and non-relatives, and to their children. People who assisted others in committing crime against their own, i.e. the mother who held her five year old child still while the boyfriend raped her. Or the father who committed pre-meditated murder, with assistance from his own brother. The uncle who coerced his pre-school niece into oral sex. The parents who stole their young adult daughter's financial identity in order to defraud credit card companies.

You know who I'm talking about-- bad people.

We all agree that there are bad people in the world. We read about them every day in the newspapers, online, etc. They blow themselves up on train platforms, decapitate members of rival gangs and post the heads for all to see, hatch plots against the government. We can also agree that bad people have children, just like good people do. But the logic breaks down when those bad people are our own parents or relatives.

When the bad person is a parent or relative, the issue is nowhere near as clear. The adult survivor of abuse quite often still harbors feelings of love for the attacker, alongside the profound resentment. And it is this sense of attachment that blurs the vision and stops us from knowing the truth.

The central issue for the survivor is Why? Why was this done to me? The most common answer, deeply embedded in human nature and exposed by abuse, is that there must be something wrong with me, that I must somehow invite this treatment. It is the child's best answer, because the self is all the child has to offer as an explanation. She does not have the breadth of experience with the human race to place the crimes in context, and so blames herself. The child's implicit trust in those who raised her will not allow her to understand that she is not the reason why she was victimized.

And so, when discussing these events, the survivor says things like "I don't want to judge him...", "I'm not saying he's a bad person..." when describing a person who committed murder. Because the family itself has probably been rationalizing evil for generations, the child also learns this trick and so becomes numb to his sense of empathic outrage for himself, his own suffering and that of other victims. If treated badly enough long enough, one of two things happen: 1) the survivor becomes a victim of himself, and his search for the nullification of pain through drugs, alcohol, sex, or a combination of all three 2) the survivor begins to prey on others as a way of escaping the enveloping sense of helplessness experienced by all victims.

In therapy, we are always seeking to stand before the truth. The answer to the question Why? is that the perpetrators are, or were, bad people, who succumbed to and were enslaved by their own evil. A potentiality we all share, but do not all give ourselves over to.

The question then becomes, how does one have a relationship with a bad person? How does one resolve the ambivalence of love and resentment, while struggling with the truth of having been victimized by someone you love? And what about forgiveness?

I believe that for most, forgiveness is beyond them. In therapy, I do not make forgiveness a goal, as I believe that is between the perpetrator and whoever he or she takes her Creator to be.

If ever there was a 'no easy answers' issue, this is certainly it. What is the right way to have a relationship with a person we know to be bad? (Hint- one thing for sure to NOT do is to allow any further abuse/manipulation/crime, etc)

To Be Continued

Depression in the 21rst century

Any reader who has been staying up with the latest information about the human race's ongoing and titanic struggle with the condition known as 'depression' will know that we still have not arrived at the end of the story. And most likely never will.

Depression is a mental/emotional condition shared by more of us than probably any other, with the exception perhaps of its close relative, anxiety. They both seem to reverberate along the same continuum of experience, and both are just about equally unpleasant. The two states are so closely related that there is even a diagnostic category called 'anxious depression'.

And just as many had begun to assume that we could almost certainly point a well informed finger at the brain and its chemical bath as being the culprit, we discover that the target has moved again. There is plentiful recent research calling into question the serotonin hypothesis, and all the major anti-depressants have showed questionable results in several large, recent studies.

This questioning echoes my own observations as a clinician. Thirteen years ago, I wrote this article http://lotuseaters.net/waydepres.shtml, as a way of responding to the hype surrounding the still relatively new Prozac. I personally have never seen Prozac or any other medication cure depression. Most patients have, at best, mixed results with meds, and many more have hosts of side effects they'd prefer to not have.

It is my opinion that in instances of severe, morbid depression, then by all means, patients should be medicated with anti-depressant drugs, and quickly, with much medical supervision. But I have also come to the opinion that most of the 'depression' being treated as such is really nothing more than the suffering most humans do in the course of a lifetime. That suffering has to do with human nature itself, and is as mysterious in its origins as is the transition from animal to self-aware, reflexive consciousness.

As I did thirteen years ago, I still believe that most depression is the suffering that comes with making and knowing our place in the world, securing it, and enduring the buffeting of instinctual life, its hungers, demands and cravings, against the light of consciousness that knows the difference between right and wrong, and what it can and cannot have.