Today's NY Times reports that the now famous victim of a decades-long kidnapping, Jaycee Dugard has suffered sexual abuse, neglect and emotional manipulation...to an extent hard to imagine.
But therapists say the biggest challenge facing Ms. Dugard, may be switching families. "Her captor was her primary relationship, and the father of her two children and...separation may be difficult for all of them," said one child expert."...it is an extreme version of a phenomenon that is really not that uncommon: a child engaged in an abusive relationship when young and, not knowing any better, coming to accept it as their life, adapting as best they can," offered another professional.
Obviously, this is a horrifically extreme case and yet its extremeness illuminates the normal.
In a way most of us become prisoners of what we have experienced. Not only are we prisoners, but even when we are free, we still (unconsciously) attach to our psychological captors. The philosopher John Paul Sartre once famously remarked that we are condemned to be free. We don't always want to be free. This may be one of the reasons that we repeat the past. We repeat the good and we repeat the bad, but we repeat. We are in a sense, at least when it comes to the bad, repeat offenders. We ingeniously take the present and turn into a repetition of our early life and it seems to be even beyond our control even as we do it.
For example, a relative of mine, Eric, is cheap as the day is long. I knew his father, a holocaust survivor, very well. He was a tailor from Lodz, Poland. He constantly was patching up his son's old clothes, counted the minutes that his son spent using hot water in the shower and would charge him for phone calls that Eric would make. When Eric would reach across the table to take a hunk of bread, his father would whack him.
Yet, this horrific treatment only served to slightly dim the fierce father-son attachment. Now dead more than 20 years, my friend is unfortunately as close to his father as he ever was. Already on his third marriage, each of his relationships has been disfigured by his cheapness. I remember that his first wife was "forbidden" to have any household help even though she had just that week given birth. At the same time, Eric is a marvelously creative and successful, honest human being.
Another friend of mine I once met in a training group "refused" to enjoy sex. It was couched in the narrative language of a series of sexually incompetent boyfriends, but it was understood by the group at least, to be a powerful reenactment of her relationship with her mother, a stern German-Jewish woman for whom pleasure was pathology.
Nor is the compulsion to repeat confined to the negative. A man I know is a philanthropist, but not by "choice." His father, a Polish Jew who became very rich in the button business loved to give away money. Various rabbis, from the ne'er do wells to the illustrious came to him for donations. They would stream up to his office every working day, all day and receive monetary gifts large and small and make great displays of gratefulness. There wasn't a cause that his father didn't like from the rinky dink to the august museums and universities. When his father died, my friend felt "compelled" to live his father's life and continued this worthy but rather odd form of daily theater. He is a warm and wonderful human being who takes pleasure in philanthropy, but there is an unstated shadowy depression that hangs over him. It is possible that this "depressive shadow" may have something to do with his addiction to prescription painkillers. He would do well to "look" at himself, but instead he just goes on automatic.
It makes you think: why bother going forward if our past is our only future?
Don't despair. There are ways to avoid repetition, but it's not easy. If you can afford to, you can hire someone to review your life with you and bring it down to slow-motion frames. This is commonly known as psychoanalysis or psycho-analytically oriented psychotherapy. When you catch the repetition in progress if you talk about it enough you can turn the ship around even in rough waters.
In a future article we will discuss the elements that go into a successful analysis and successful life. You can really have more.
*Acknowledgment to Ncaps Learners and faculty
