Gifted Children Learn to Deny Their Emotions To Please Their Parents
The habits that kept you alive as a child are now holding you back
Love equals survival
We are all born into this world dependent upon our Mother’s love. Not just for for the sustenance of breastmilk, but for the emotional connection and support that all human beings need to stay alive.
Although it seems obvious to us now, such a radical proposition as the idea that infants need a Mother’s love and attention was once the subject of serious scientific inquiry. One of the most famous studies was first published in 1945 and it tracked dozens of infants in experimental and control groups.
The experimental group was denied basic love and attention and breastfed by wet nurses in an orphanage. The control group was raised with their criminalized mothers in a penal nursery (Rosmalen et al., 2012).
Over one-third of those in the deprived control group died in infancy. By contrast, those in the penal nursery thrived in their earliest years. Nevertheless, those children who later experienced a prolonged absence of their mothers descended into a depressive apathy, loss of appetite, insomnia, and autoerotic activity. In each case, Spitz reported, the mother’s return restored the child to vitality.
Spitz concluded that securing a mother’s love and attention was essential to life.
Later, Spitz was inspired by Harry Harlow’s brutalistic experiments with rhesus monkeys separated from their mothers. He realized that Harlow’s mechanical mothers could never foster healthy development, because real mothers do more than offer comfort or sustenance.
A real mother has her own needs, distractions, and competing commitments.
Because of these, a real mother will inevitably frustrate her child, postpone its gratification, or disapprove of the child’s behavior.
Although many modern parents might harbor the indulgent idealization that they would never deny or delay their toddler’s need for comfort, attention, and succor, Spitz’ view was that some frustration was necessary to develop out of infancy and into young childhood. At an age almost certainly older than one year and less than three, this frustration “enables the infant to overcome its narcissistic tendencies and to develop the distinction between self and non-self, between ego and id, and to create a superego. In other words, mother–child conflicts are essential for normal child development to occur and unrestricted gratification probably hinders personality development” (quoted from Rosmalen et al., 2012).
Healthy human development requires an evolving negotiation between the infant and its external world. As the child matures from a newborn, to an infant, to a toddler, to a young child, that negotiation requires the child to learn how to modify itself and its behavior to improve interactions with its Mother and (eventually) others. On an instinctive level, the child understands that survival depends upon it.
When an infant is forced to give up too much in their negotiation with their Mother, the damage of deprivation is likely to follow them into adulthood.
Consider the origins of anorexia in a woman named Beatrice, as described by Alice Miller in The Drama of the Gifted Child (2008).
Beatrice learned as an infant to deny her need for food to ensure that she could maintain herself in good standing with her Mother. Not every infant will respond to a distracted, irritated, or angry Mother in this way, but Beatrice did. And once she discovered that denial of her own hunger worked, she perfected it as a child.
Given the rapid state of brain development in infancy, it is likely that Beatrice’s young brain was organized around this survival principal of appetite suppression in a way that most of us cannot imagine. By adolescence, Beatrice’s preternatural ability to disconnect from her own hunger must have been honed by thousands of hours of unconscious practice.
Beatrice as an infant found a creative, resourceful solution to the problem of her Mother’s withdrawal by denying her own feeling. This is what author Miller means by “gifted.” Only an extraordinary infant could devise such a clever solution or complete a successful adaptation. Beatrice’s earliest experiences taught her that emotional denial was essential to her survival. To make matters worse, Beatrice might have received encouragement, attention, or rewards for her anorexia from other sources.
Now 58 years later, Beatrice has finally discovered that the denial of her feelings that she originally learned to please her Mother is the cause of her depression. According to Miller, Beatrice must learn to experience her feelings — not just hunger, but anger for the baby who was denied.
We need not experience the extreme of Beatrice’s anorexia to recognize in ourselves some of the compromises we must’ve made as children to gain our parent’s approval. However, that recognition may be complicated by the fact that many of those compromises came so early in our lives that they precede our first memories and are hidden from us.
How might they be revealed?
According to Miller, depression is characterized by a denial of emotional expression, so when the prohibition against the emotion is lifted, the depression abates.
“We find a similar example in the behavior of addicts,” writes Miller.
People who as children successfully repressed their intense feelings often try to regain — at least for a short time — their lost intensity of experience with the help of drugs or alcohol.
— The Drama of the Gifted Child (Miller 2008)
In my experience, depression is accompanied by the feeling of being trapped — i.e., without alternatives. Of course, there are always alternatives, but where the solutions to whatever interpersonal problem we are currently facing are forbidden to us by our parents, what are we to do if not resort to chemical release from our entrapment? We may fall into a malaise, given that we perceive any investment of energy as likely to make matters worse before anything gets better.
The problem originates, according to Miller, in exploitation of our childhood — when children are treated as possessions in the service of a parent’s emotional agenda, rather than the other way around.
The fountainhead of all contempt, all discrimination, is the more or less conscious, uncontrolled, and covert exercise of power over the child by the adult.
— The Drama of the Gifted Child (Miller 2008)
Although depression and addiction may be the symptoms that call our attention, there are two obstacles to recognition of the emotions that are denied and the process of relearning how to feel them.
The illusion of love
The first of these obstacles is the need to maintain the illusion that we were really loved by our parents. The lengths to which we are willing to construct rationalizations (e.g., “the beatings were good for me”) make us vulnerable to the worst kind of gaslighting from our abusers — whether those abusers are our parents, or the romantic partners whom we cast in the role of surrogate parents in an effort to heal our childhood wounds.
Almost any explanation for “Why have they treated me so badly??” is an improvement on the fear that there is something about our nature that is so defective that even our parents could not bring themselves to love us.
Finding the Truth in our repressed and manipulated emotions will require us to express the same negative emotions we became so expert in suppressing. Chief among these will be pain, anger, grief, and sorrow. Thus, healing requires a period of mourning for those aspects of our childhood that were taken from us, and compassion for our former selves. Relearning to express these emotions will repeat the experience of pain and alienation we encountered when we were so young that we no longer have a conscious memory of it.
This is not to say that our parents did not love us, or consciously abused us. The point is that, despite whatever sentiments of caring or affection our parents held for us, they remained incapable of fulfilling our needs without placing conditions or expectations on our behavior.
Most (but not all of us) need not grieve our childhoods in their entirety.
How might we access truth?
The second obstacle is that realizing the truth of our parents’ manipulations is complicated by the fact that, until we reach a comparable age or state of parenthood ourselves, it may be impossible to comprehend what was really happening to us in childhood because we lack the empathetic capacity to understand it from the parent’s point of view. The truth is not that we were neglected and exploited because we were defective, but because our parents treated us instruments in their own effort to avoid feeling the negative emotions they were prohibited to express in their own childhoods. Nevertheless, we cannot access this truth from the perspective of childhood, because the child’s perspective is too small, narrow, and self-absorbed to access a reality that has intentionally been hidden from them.
The problem is that even when we do become parents ourselves, we are rarely conscious of our hidden agenda. Many people, including me, rush into parenthood in an unconscious attempt to seek gratification, if not resolution of their unresolved trauma, through a relationship with their own child. In my case, the birth of my Son brought with it relief (for me) from my own fears of abandonment.
Critical to this was my selection of a mate who would soon become financially, emotionally, and physically dependent on me. Only by securing the commitment of a woman incapable of surviving independently could I be certain that she would always be available to me in a way that my mother scarcely was.
My Son served to further assuage the feelings of loneliness and isolation that were the residue of my childhood, while binding his Mother all the closer to me.
This is a painful admission.
Although I do not consider myself a bad Father and my parenting must be understood in the context of compensating for a Mother who was debilitated by alcoholism, I remember that time in my life well enough to confess that I felt a great deal of satisfaction in the fact that my Son was always at my disposal. While I was determined to overturn my own Mother’s proclamation that she “did not like children,” it was a comforting to realize that my Son was centered on me.
It helped that when I arrived home at the end of my work day, my wife would hand him off to me so she could “have a break.” I was delighted to walk him up and down the hallways in a vain attempt to sooth his inconsolable crying. I was gratified by the quieter times when he was curled up on my chest or we were crawling around together on the floor.
As he grew, we became increasingly inseparable. This helped us both, in a way, by assuaging his social anxiety and mine. His Type 1 diabetes diagnosis at the age of 6 years old deepened our bond by increasing his dependency on me. What had previously been psychological or emotional was now hormonal, because he relied on me to calculate and administer his insulin doses.
Had you asked me, I never would have admitted that my own behavior was unconsciously designed to maintain a co-dependent relationship with him. I would have protested that I wanted nothing more than for him to become his own person, and that I was proud of the successes he achieved independent of me and that I supported his interests.
In fact, I was so interested in his success, that when he became a young adult, I introduced him to the woman whom he would eventually marry and coached him on how to successfully woo her.
She was my doctoral advisee.
What I can see now is that by coaching him into a relationship with her, I was keeping him close — i.e., within my sphere of influence — at a time during which he might have benefited more by dating outside my own social and professional circle.
But how could he have, given his introverted nature and the way that I embedded him in all of my personal and professional affairs?
I haven’t seen or talked with my Son in over a year. The fact that he is a Father of his own does not make me feel like a Grandfather, because I have no relationship with his little daughter. He and I are estranged.
In this way, my worst fears of abandonment have been realized.
The story that I tell myself is that his wife, my former student, has insisted that he sever his ties from me so that she can extend her control over him, thereby assuaging her own insecurities. There’s probably some truth to that.
On the other hand, I have been forced to confront the reality of how he was manipulated and coerced as a child — even as an infant — to meet my emotional needs. In other words, the way he was raised made him more vulnerable to manipulative machinations in his romantic relationships. It’s what he knows.
Nevertheless, he was not neglected in the way that Spitz describes. Had Spitz spent time in our home, he would have found a Father that doted on his children, showering them with attention, organizing himself around their activities, and empathizing with every developmental challenge in their lives.
As I reflect back on my strengths and limitations as a parent, Miller might challenge me to consider, “Which were the emotions that my children learned they could not express, lest they risk losing my love?”
I don’t have the answer. In my memory, my children had the freedom to be sad, joyful, afraid and angry — even at me. Had I suppressed their emotional expression, Miller suggests that they would have been at risk of depression, and despite episodes of acute anxiety, I cannot recall a time when it seemed to me that my Son was depressed.
However, if he was, Miller would recommend that he identify those feelings that he was prohibited from expressing as a child, and learn to express them.
One of them may very well be rage.
Some day, my Son may place me in the target of his anger. He may ventilate the emotions he learned to suppress by raging against his childhood exploitation.
What shall I do then?
I will tell him, “Thank you Son, for your anger.”