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Alice Walker has become famous for her writing, especially for The Color Purple, a novel which tells of the difficult early life of a woman of colour. She was married to civil rights lawyer, Mel Leventhal, for ten years and a daughter, Rebecca, was born of that union. Mother and daughter are now estranged.
Rebecca Walker, the daughter, became a mother when she gave birth to her first child, Tenzin, a boy, in December 2004. She has published a diary of her pregnancy, which is also an account of her attempt to come to terms with the maternal and paternal ambivalence she experienced as a child, an ambivalence which infused her beliefs until she decided to move from a scarcity model of love to a model of love which presupposes love being present in abundance.
Baby Love, the title of the book, grated, until I realised that this short phrase encompasses her own experience as the child of her mother, as well as her experience of having a child of her own. The book is both about being the baby, and having the baby.
Rebecca Walker’s estrangement from her mother begins towards the end of her pregnancy, at the point where she decides that if her mother is unable to apologise for her maternal neglect then she is “too emotionally dangerous to me and my unborn son”. Alice Walker doesn’t say sorry. Instead she writes that she won’t miss what she doesn’t have , that their relationship has been inconsequential for years, that she is no longer interested in the job of being a mother, and she ends her letter with her name, not her role-title, mother.
Despite the absence of the mother, the mother is everywhere in the pregnancy:
“because mothers make us, map our emotional terrain before we even know we are capable of having an emotional terrain, they know just where to stick the dynamite. Decades of subtle undermining can stunt a daughter, or so monopolize her energy that she in effect stunts herself. Muted, fearful, riddled with self-doubt, she can remain trapped in daughterhood forever, the one place she feels confident she knows the rules”.
In Rebecca’s case, the ambivalence of her mother toward childbearing was sufficiently chronicled in her mother’s writing – specifically in a poem and an essay written around the same time, the former of which compares a child to the calamaties that befell other women writers and impeded their writing.
It appears to have been an ambivalence that Alice Walker was unable to resolve, and which fed through to Rebecca’s sense of who she was:
“Ambivalence itself is rarely positive. Ambivalence about one’s offspring is a horrific kind of torture for all involved. It affects me to this day, stealing my certitude at critical moments. I have sat with others and said, Well, of course my mother loves me. But in the very next moment I will purse my lips and squint my eyes and tilt my head back and remember all of the indices of ambivalence, and the thought will arise with an even greater clarity: or maybe she does not.”
What hope then, that a woman afflicted by such ambivalence could master the role of mother herself? The ambivalence described runs deep and has consequences that spread not in ripples, but like a tidal wave, for it is accompanied by a misguided insistence on independence. The feminist, the womanist, cannot allow herself to depend in her maternity on her male partner with the result that she cannot afford to be a mother at all. For being a mother involves spending time with your child, being invested in your child’s welfare, being dependent for your happiness on your child’s happiness, allowing your partner to play a role in the child-rearing, sharing the parental role. Losing the ambivalence involves abandoning self-sufficiency as a goal. Mothers are not meant to be mothers alone, but alongside fathers.
Rebecca experiences “a letting go into inseparability”, a realisation that “I was not autonomous and never would be”, and she reflects on the self-sufficient career women that she sees around her and how they radiate to their menfolk an emasculating lack of need, as if men can be rendered obsolete by having enough money and a few good girl friends. And she reflects how utterly devastating it would be to be told by the person you love that you are not necessary to them:
“Because the fact is that we do need each other, and we are locked into this dance with the whole frickin’ world whether we like it or not. This lack of separateness is awful and terrifying, amazing and exhilarating, and just plain true. It seems to me that men and women both need to come up to speed on this, instead of competing for the prize of who can do without whom, for longer. There is power in partnership…”
And how she has never felt so dependent as during her pregnancy. She knows that she needs “someone who will show up”, but at the same time she needs to be someone who will open up, and she is worried that the inherited ambivalence will mean that she cannot sustain it forever, which is how long she wants the partnership to endure, but she has never felt so motivated to try.
Except, when it comes to it, it doesn’t need any effort. It just happens. Rebecca’s mother told her that she chose to love her, that the decision could have gone either way. Looking at her baby, Rebecca writes “There is no choice in my love for Tensin, and if there were some secret place where I wondered, and there isn’t, I would never tell him about it.”
The ambivalence is gone, and with it the scarcity model that had governed her relationships. A few days before the expected date of birth she muses on these two sides of the coin – scarcity and abundance:
“For my whole life I have operated as through there isn’t enough love to go around, that love is something that must be stockpiled, hoarded, guarded for fear of losing a few precious drops. But lately, maybe because I’ve been contemplating what life would be like if I had, gasp, two or even three children, I have been thinking about how, while there may never be enough time or money, there will always be enough love. What if everyone could let go of the fear and territoriality that comes from trying to control the love supply? What if everyone realised that love is about giving, not getting? What if everyone realised all of these things before it was too late? What if it is true that when you believe in abundance, what you have multiplies magically?”
The move from the scarcity model to abundance is not one Rebecca could have ever made alone. Glen, her Buddhist rock of a partner, is the foundation of the new model, upon which everything else is built. Or perhaps their faith underpins it all.
The book is a celebration of unambivalent maternity, but it is equally a celebration of fathers, of how they are essential, and how the success of the two parents is contigent upon their mutual dependence and, ultimately, their love for each other and their lack of ambivalence about what matters most. The baby, not the career.
[Thanks to C Jones of Malepositive whose comment on this blog a while ago pointed me in the direction of this book.]
by Karin Mackay Feb 2008
“Any woman who does not have their mothers support during the crucial transitional stage of becoming a mother is bound to feel vulnerable, insecure and have a sensation of missing out on something whether it be real or imagined. They do not have the benefit of experiencing first hand the ancient wisdom that is surreptitiously stored in their mother’s actions, verbalizations or body language that has been passed down from thousands of generations before.
If the link to the birth mother is broken, a woman can feel a profound sense of loss, loneliness and isolation particularly when they experience any major life events such as marriage, the birth of their first child, their first child stating school or any other time when sharing joy and pain intimately is needed. Motherless daughters just don’t have that someone who supposedly loves them unconditionally that they can lean on. Even if the daughter has a surrogate mother who loves them dearly it is not the same as the bond between blood mother and daughter. The new mother will find her way but this is often at great personal cost as she may also be left with feelings of not being good enough, low self esteem, being over motherly and feeling overwhelmed when she has no back up support that many other mothers may take for granted.
One characteristic is that unmothered mothers are often very independent and have difficulty asking for help as help has possibly never been there for them in any reliable way. They may display outward strength but you can bet that inside they are very soft and vulnerable
The unmothered mother cannot intimately watch and know from one who has “done it before” even if she would have wanted to birth and mother very differently “her way” and change it all anyway. She still doesn’t have that knowing which is not spoken of or taught or read about in books but is absorbed through watching, feeling and sensing. She feels she has missed out on crucial information, even if she hasn’t, and will attempt to make up for it by wishing to be the perfect mother………., all loving, kind, caring, the cleanest, the best cook, and produce children that prove that she is doing all the right things or by reading everything she can get her hands on about “how to mother” and so on and so forth…….. She may even seek out other mothers, grandmothers, aunts of blood or in name only, to help her with her task. And she will find answers, and she will be able to be the almost perfect mother for a while but there will be a gap, a missing piece to the puzzle, a hole in her heart. She may feel “if a mother can’t love me then who can?”
She will want to be the perfect mother so she does not repeat the same mistakes with her own children, hoping desperately to break the cycle but there is an innate danger to her personal wellbeing because she carries the burden of the generation before her and the one that is to follow. She trying to be the bridge that closes the gap and creates connections and this may prove to be an arduous journey. In her perfect mother quest she is doomed to fail as she can never live up to her own expectations.
One day she may wake up and realize that to make up for her own lack of mothering she is mothering everyone else – her husband, her friends, her children and even acquaintances but she is not mothering herself. She has tried to gain love through mothering but cannot find it until she learns to mother herself. This can be an extremely painful realization because no matter which way she looks whether it is up the line to her elders or down the line to her children and grandchildren she has been the mother. This may be especially so if her mother was there physically but unable to be there emotionally, a double blow really because she is playing the mother but is really the daughter and may have had this relationship with her mother from a very young age.
The unmothered mother needs to accept that there is no such thing as the perfect mother, that she is loveable and worthwhile and deserves to be mothered herself, to be respected. She needs to find a way to heal the pain and the grief so that she can find within herself the nurturance to love herself, give time to herself and follow her own passions. She can do this by seeking other understanding women to share her story with respectfully, who will listen to and acknowledge her challenges without judgment. She needs to find another way to access her stored memory of the grandmother and mother memory through other mothers or older women to learn that they are probably not doing such a bad job of mothering their children after all and to just relax a little.
She needs to learn to give herself time to grieve every so often the loss of never having a mother, for the pain will never go away completely; but she also needs to learn that there is no need to carry your pain like a flag that identifies you. It may be time to move on from that so you can experience life more fully wholly and to allow yourself guiltless pleasure in filling your own cup to the brim with the amazing love and acceptance that you have been giving to others but now need to give to yourself.
And finally to appreciate your women friends that truly accept you as you really are as they are precious indeed.”
Toni Morrison, in an interview [with Bill Moyers in 1989]:
“There was something so valuable about what happened when one became a mother. For me it was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me. . . . Liberating because the demands that children make are not the demands of a normal ‘other.’ The children’s demands on me were things that nobody ever asked me to do. To be a good manager. To have a sense of humor. To deliver something that somebody could use. And they were not interested in all the things that other people were interested in, like what I was wearing or if I were sensual. . . . Somehow all of the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me -– whatever that was -– but somebody actually needed me to be that. . . . If you listen to [your children], somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity and all sorts of things, and deliver a better self, one that you like. The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want.”
othersThere is a core aspect of a woman’s psyche called the Mother Complex. This complex includes the Ambivilent Mother, Collapsed Mother, and the Unmothered Mother. They represent the internalized versions of our own mother and the cultural ideas of motherhood. We each have an unbroken chain of what it means to be a mother/woman within us. Part of our process as women is to identify, embrace, and claim our own individual female nature.
Juan Carlos Garelli, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Buenos Aires
Department of Early Development
Hello again Dr Garelli,
I am currently writing an newspaper article about anxiety in children and why, in this country, we often tend to overlook the chronically anxious child.
I know you are very busy but if you have the time to respond, I would be most interested in your succinct opinion of how anxiety in children develops. Thank you.
To which I replied:
Anxious children are overlooked because they are seen as overdependent, spoilt, jealous, possessive, greedy, immature and many similar names.
Viewed in the perspective of the Theory of Attachment, children described by clinicians as dependent or overdependent are ones who exhibit attachment behaviour more frequently and more urgently than the clinician thinks proper. Inherent in the terms, therefore, are the norms and values of the observer using them. As you may be aware, this leads to so many difficulties that it renders impossible to explain the child’s behaviour in objective terms.
Overdependency, therefore, is not the term to be used. I prefer to use “Anxious Attachment” in its stead, especially because it enlists our sympathy: it respects the child’s natural desire for a close relationship with an attachment figure, and recognizes that he is apprehensive lest the relationship be ended.
The thesis espoused by the Attachment Theory is that, even though other causal factors may play some part in the development of this condition, those about which by far the most evidence is at present available are experiences that shake a child’s confidence that his attachment figures will be available to him when required.
The main cause of anxious attachment lies in mother’s accessibility to the child’s needs to achieve and maintain an optimal degree of physical and psychological proximity, from birth onwards.
Lack of mother or parent accessibility occurs all too often in an environment of distortion and falsification of the family context which leads to more anxiety and cognitive disturbances.
As Diana Baumrind has repeatedly stated, parents can be categorized as either authoritarian, permissive or authoritative. Authoritarian and permissive parents tend to be inaccessible and give the child a misleading account of what is going on in the family and the reasons for his anxious behaviour. This leads to serious consequences.
In the first place, no child cares to admit that his parent is gravely at fault. To recognize that mother is exploiting you for her own ends, or that father is unjust and tyrannical, or that neither parent ever wanted you or cared for you, is intensely painful. Given any loophole, therefore, most children will seek to see his parents’ behaviour in some more favourable light. This natural bias of children is easy to exploit.
Not only are most children unwilling to see his parents in too bad a light but there are parents who themselves do all in their power to ensure that their child does not do so or at least that he does not communicate an adverse picture to others. This develops a state of mind whereby the child faces a dilemma: is he to accept the picture as he sees it or is he to connive with his parents’ version?
Thus, the data reaching a child from his own experience and from his parents’ view may be regularly and persistently incompatible. to take a real, though by no means extreme, example: a child may experience his mother as unresponsive to him and unloving and he may infer,correctly, that she had never wanted him and never loved him. Yet his mother may insist, season in, season out, that she does love him. Furthermore, if there is friction between them as there inevitably is, she may claim that it stems from his having been born with an ill or contrary temperament. When he seeks her attention, she dubs him unsufferably demanding; when he interrupts her, he is unbearably selfish; when he becomes angry at her neglect, he is held possessed of a bad temper or even an evil spirit. In some way, she claims, he was born bad. Nevertheless, thanks to a good fortune he doesn’t deserve, he has been blessed with a loving mother who, despite all, cares devotedly for him.
In such a situation, as I said above, the child is faced with a most grave dilemma. Is he to accept the picture as he sees it himself? Or is he to accept the one his parent insists is true? to this dilemma there are several possible outcomes. One is that the child adheres to his own viewpoint, even at the risk of breaking with his parent(s), which, as you may easily surmise, increases anxiety, due to fear of loss of attachment figure.
A second and opposite outcome is complete compliance with the parent’s version at the cost of disowning his own. This leads nowhere in terms of decreasing anxiety; on the contrary, the child is constantly trying to placate his attachment figure, and damaging his perception of the world.
A third, and the most common outcome is an uneasy compromise whereby the child tries to give credence to both viewpoints and oscillates uneasily between them.
A fourth outcome is when he desperately tries to integrate the two pictures, an attempt that because they are inherently incompatible is doomed to failure and may lead to cognitive breakdown.
And then this companion piece, written by Arthur Becker-Weidman, an experienced psychotherapist practising in the area of attachment problems:
Attachment is the base upon which emotional health, social relationships, and one’s worldview are built. The ability to trust, and form reciprocal relationships, will affect the emotional health, security, and safety of the child, as well as the child’s development and future inter-personal relationships. The child with disordered attachment may be impulsive, doing whatever the child feels like, with no regard for others. This child may be unable to feel remorse for wrongdoings, mainly because the child is unable to internalize right and wrong. The child may tell you that something is wrong, but that will not stop the child from doing it.
Children, who are adopted after the age of six months or so, may be at risk for attachment problems. Normal attachment develops during the child’s first few years of life. Problems with the mother-child relationship during that time, or breaks in the consistent caregiver-child relationship, prevent attachment from developing normally. There are a wide range of attachment problems that result in varying degrees of emotional disturbance in the child. The severity of attachment disorder seems to result from the number of breaks in the bonding cycle, and the extent of the child’s emotional vulnerability. Emotional vulnerability can be affected by a variety of factors including: genetic factors, pre-natal development including maternal drinking and drug abuse, pre-natal nutrition, and stress, fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol effect, temperament, birth parent history of mental illness (schizophrenia, manic depressive illness, etc.) One thing is certain; if an infant’s needs are not met consistently, in a loving, nurturing way, attachment will not occur normally.
So how can we tell the difference between a child who “looks” attached, and a child who really is making a healthy, secure attachment? This question becomes important for adoptive families, because some adopted children will form an almost immediate dependency bond to their adoptive parents. To mistake this as secure and healthy attachment can lead to many problems down the road. Just because a child calls someone ”mom” or “dad,” snuggles, cuddles, and says ”I love you,” does not mean that the child is attached, or even attaching. Saying, “I love you”, and knowing what that really feels like, can be two different things. Attachment is a process. It takes time. The key to its formation is trust, and trust becomes secure only after repeated testing. Normal attachment takes a couple of years of cycling through mutually positive interactions. The child learns that the child is loved, and can love in return. The parent’s give love, and learn that the child loves them. The child learns to trust that his needs will be met in a consistent and nurturing manner, and that the child “belongs” to his family, and they to him. Positive interaction. Trust. Claiming. Reciprocity (the mutual meeting of needs, give and take) these must be consistently present for an extended period of time, for healthy, secure attachment to take place. It is through these elements, that a child learns how to love, and how to accept love.
Older adopted children need time to make adjustments to their new surroundings. They need to become familiar with their caregivers, friends, relatives, neighbors, teachers, and others with whom they will have repeated contact. They need to learn the ins and outs of their new household’s routines, and adapt to living in a new physical environment. Some children have cultural or language hurdles to overcome. Until most of these tasks have been accomplished, they may not be able to relax enough to allow the work of attachment to begin. In the meantime, behavioral problems related to insecurity and lack of attachment, as well as to other events in the child’s past may start to surface. Some start to get labels like, “manipulative,” “superficial,” “sneaky”. Sooner or later the family may decide that this kid is all “take” and no “give”. The child “gives” only when it is to his own benefit. The child can seem to be very selfish and controlling. On the inside, this child is filled with anxiety and fear. The child has not developed the self-esteem that comes with feeling a valued, contributing, member of a family. The child cares little about pleasing others, since his relationship with them is quite superficial.
First Year of Life Cycle
The first year is a year of needs. When the infant has a need, it initiates attachment behavior in order to summon a nurturing response from the infant’s attachment figure. The need-gratifying response usually includes touch, eye contact, movement, smiles, and lactose. When gratification occurs, trust is built. This cycle occurs hundreds of times a week, and thousands of times in the first year. From this relationship, a sychronicity develops between parent and child. The caregiver develops a greater awareness of their child and learns just how to respond. The child develops good cause/effect thinking, feels powerful, trusts others, shows exploratory behavior, and develops empathy and a conscience.
When the first year of life cycle undermined, and the needs of the child are not met, mistrust begins to define the perspective of the child and anxious attachment results. The cycle can become undermined or broken for many reasons:
- Multiple disruptions in caregiving.
- Post-partum depression.
- Hospitalization of the child causing separation from the parent and/or unrelieved pain.
- Parents who are attachment disordered, leading to neglect, abuse (physical/sexual/verbal), or inappropriate parental responses not leading to a secure/predictable relationship.
- Genetic factors.
- Pervasive developmental disorders.
- Caregivers whose attachment needs are not met, leading to overload and lack of awareness of the infants needs.
The child naturally develops mistrust and shuts down effective attachment behavior. The developmental stages following the first year continue to be distorted and/or retarded and various symptoms emerge, such as (note this listing is NOT a diagnostic criteria. Diagnoses can only be made by trained and licensed mental health professionals) :
- Superficially engaging and charming. [phoniness]
- Lack of eye contact.
- Indiscriminately affectionate with strangers.
- Not affectionate on parental terms.
- Destructive to self, others, and material things.
- Cruelty to animals.
- Primary process lying (lying in the face of the obvious*)
- Low impulse control.
- Learning lags.
- Lack of cause/effect thinking.
- Lack of conscience.
- Abnormal eating patterns.
- Poor peer relationships.
- Preoccupation with fire and/or gore.
- Persistent nonsense questions and chatter.
- Inappropriately demanding and clingy.
- Abnormal speech patterns.
- Sexually inappropriate.
Parenting
Parenting children with attachment difficulties is a job that requires a great deal of patience, understanding, courage, solid support systems and personal fortitude. Children with attachment difficulties rarely and only superficially return love. Therapists, teachers, child protective services, and even spouses often do not understand the challenge and deception an AD child displays toward an adoptive/foster parent in charge of primary care. Often times the child will project the greatest amount of pathology towards the mother-figure in an attempt to make the world believe that if the mother was not so harsh and controlling, the child would be as lovable as it superficially displays.
Therapists often times are introduced to AD cases witnessing a burned-out parent in their office who is angry, resentful, and full of blame toward their child. Unfortunately the therapist may react by thinking (and sometimes saying) “if this mom would just lighten up on this kid, she would not have so many problems’.” This can lead the therapist to scolding the parent much in the same way the therapist experiences the parent scolding the child. Many well intentioned, but naive, health care workers believe that “all this kid needs is love” and end up creating an alliance with the child against the parents that furthers the family getting the help they desperately need.
Therapy
The basic purpose of attachment therapy is to help the child resolve a dysfunctional attachment. The goal is to help the child bond to the parents and to resolve their fear of loving and being loved. A high percentage of the children that I see are foster or adopted children who have lived in one or more foster homes and have suffered from loss, neglect and/or abuse. Often the children come with a diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder [ODD] or Conduct Disorder [CD]. Many have a secondary diagnosis of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The child’s symptoms could also be understood as a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Depression stemming from a delayed grief reaction in response to one or more significant losses early in childhood. Whatever the diagnosis is, it is important that the developmental history receives the consideration required to provide the appropriate treatment. Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy is an evidence-based treatment that is effective for treatment of Reactive Attachment Disorder and Complex Trauma. There have been two empirical studies published in professional peer-reviewed journals regarding the efficacy of this treatment.
Because attachment is developed in the first years of life, often times the trauma driving the child’s pathology is pre-verbal. The child needs a solid educational component of treatment for the child to understand what force is driving the feelings and controlling the child’s behavior. The parents also need the education and understanding that the child’s behavior is not caused from their parenting, but from past traumas. From this base then, new parenting interventions can be designed from a cooperative relationship to fit a child with special needs.
A major dynamic in the treatment, is the affective work needed to heal the emotional wounds that drives these children’s behavior. A corrective emotional experience is orchestrated allowing the child to express these feelings, recognize and recall them and identify the events and the people involved. In essence, the child going through this experience with their parents allows for resolution of old pathological emotions while simultaneously creating powerful new bonds. As with any good trauma therapy, revisiting the trauma in order to integrate the fragmented and overwhelming experiences is crucial for healing. The revisiting must be done in a sensitive and titrated manner to avoid dysregulating the client.
©Copyright 2008 by Arthur Becker-Weidman, Ph.D.. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org.
From Wikipedia
Secure Attachment: Securely attached people tend to agree with the following statements: “It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I am comfortable depending on others and having others depend on me. I don’t worry about being alone or having others not accept me.”
Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment: People who are anxious or preoccupied with attachment tend to agree with the following statements: “I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I am uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others don’t value me as much as I value them.” People with this style of attachment seek high levels of intimacy, approval, and responsiveness from their partners. They sometimes value intimacy to such an extent that they become overly dependent on their partners—a condition colloquially termed clinginess. Compared to securely attached people, people who are anxious or preoccupied with attachment tend to have less positive views about themselves. They often doubt their worth as a partner and blame themselves for their partners’ lack of responsiveness. They also have less positive views about their partners because they do not trust in people’s good intentions. People who are anxious or preoccupied with attachment may experience high levels of emotional expressiveness, worry, and impulsiveness in their relationships.
Dismissive-Avoidant Attachment: People with a dismissive style of avoidant attachment tend to agree with these statements: “I am comfortable without close emotional relationships. It is very important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient, and I prefer not to depend on others or have others depend on me.” People with this attachment style desire a high level of independence. …Some may even view close relationships as relatively unimportant. Not surprisingly, they seek less intimacy with relationship partners, whom they often view less positively than they view themselves.
Fearful-Avoidant Attachment: People with a fearful style of avoidant attachment tend to agree with the following statements: “I am somewhat uncomfortable getting close to others. I want emotionally close relationships, but I find it difficult to trust others completely, or to depend on them. I sometimes worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to others.”
…secure attachment styles are by no means a guarantee of long-lasting relationships.
Nor are secure attachment styles the only attachment styles associated with stable relationships. People with anxious-preoccupied attachment styles often find themselves in long-lasting, but unhappy, relationships. Anxious-preoccupied attachment styles often involve anxiety about being abandoned and doubts about one’s worth as a relationship partner. These kinds of feelings and thoughts may lead people to stay in unhappy relationships.
…Differences in attachment styles influence both the frequency and the pattern of jealous expressions. People who have anxious-preoccupied or fearful-avoidant attachment styles experience jealousy more often and view rivals as more threatening than people who have secure attachment styles. People with different attachment styles also express jealousy in different ways. One study found that:
“Securely attached participants felt anger more intensely than other emotions and were relatively more likely than other participants to express it, especially toward their partner. And although anxious participants felt anger relatively intensely, and were as likely as others to express it through irritability, they were relatively unlikely to actually confront their partner. This might be attributable to feelings of inferiority and fear, which were especially characteristic of the anxiously attached and which might be expected to inhibit direct expressions of anger.”
[And I wrote this a couple of weeks ago]
Jemima is a sweet little girl. Brown hair, brown eyes, clear skin, freckles, and a lovely smile. She is small, but perfectly proportioned so that people do not always notice that she is small. She is quite shy and likes to stay in the background. She is very honest and kind. She is so eager to please, so willing to help anyone who asks. She lights up when someone pays her attention, and then she can become very playful and full of joy. She is not attention-seeking. Quite the reverse. She chooses to wait until someone approaches her and she is so glad when they do. She spends most of her time in her bedroom. She reads stories aloud to herself as if someone were reading her a bedtime story. She talks to her dolls and dresses and undresses them and looks after them, pretending to be their mother. She writes stories, and sews a lot, and draws. She’s a girly girl – she likes pretty dresses and beautiful things.
I know that she is very frightened of being rejected which is why she hides away so much, to keep herself safe, to protect herself from the pain of knowing that someone does not love her. I can see a look of fear come over her face when she thinks the rejection might be about to happen. Sometimes she is so frightened that it almost as if she is not inside herself, as if she has made herself invisible. She thinks that she is not loveable, and however many times I tell her that she is wrong, she just shakes her head and disagrees, politely with a smile on her face. She thinks she knows better than I do whether she is loveable because she knows what she is like inside.
Besides, she says that she knows that her father does not love her, and if he does not love her (and he must know her better than anybody) then we should all follow suit. I am not sure that her father does love her, so I never know what to say at this point. If he doesn’t, I don’t understand why not. I am not sure he knows what love, that outpouring of affection that Jemima gives so many of us, is.
I watch her. I can see her talking to somebody who I know is so fond of her, but afterwards she will tell me all the reasons why they should not like her, why they would not like her if they knew what she was really like. People will compliment her on her appearance and she will bat the compliment back like a tennis-pro before the compliment even registers. People will tell her that she has done something well and, for a brief moment, she loves the praise, but then she furiously chips away at it, until the praise lies in razor shards like a broken mirror. People will tell her they are fond of her and she finds all sorts of reasons why they should not be telling the truth, or she imagines all sorts of scenarios in the future that will mean that they will discover the real Jemima and will stop loving her. It’s so sad because people sometimes get really tired of telling her over and over again that she is wrong, and then they do go away, and the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling and Jemima reinforces her belief that she is unloveable.
It is so easy to crush her too. I have seen her smiling, enjoying talking to someone, and then someone more assertive comes along, and she will allow herself to be pushed aside. She keeps a smile on her face, but I can see that there are tears welling up in her eyes as she creeps away, hanging her head. She does not seem to be able to fight back, to stand up to bullies. In a way she is just too nice.
She’s explained that this is because it is wrong to be horrible to people and, besides, even if it weren’t, she is worried that what little love that comes her way will be lost if she is not always kind and loving and forgiving. So she tries so hard to love even those people who are unkind to her, who want to hurt her, or seek to overcome her. I can see her brows furrow and the tension in her eyes as she tries to find love for these people, to smile at them. I can also see that terrible fear when she thinks she has found final incontrovertible proof that she is unloveable and then her whole world comes crashing down on her and she sinks into black despondency. She tends to act very irrationally then and needs time and space to find herself again.
She does have a sister. I am not sure what the sister is really like, but everyone says she has a terrible temper like their father, and she is very, very good at getting attention. In the evenings when the girls are sent to bed, her sister will lie in her bed and shout over and over again “Mum-meee, Mum-meee” until their mother comes to see her and spend time with her, and the sister and the mother nearly always end up sharing a bed because she just will not let their mother go away. The sister has lots of tummy aches which need a lot of attention. I know Jemima is frightened of her sister’s temper. I’ve noticed that she stays out of her way, hides in her room. Her mother seems to try to protect her, but she doesn’t have much time, and she needs Jemima to be good.
I wish Jemima would shout at Them, tell Them where to go. But she has got in the habit of not doing that because early on, when she was little more than a baby, they were the only people in the house, the only people there were to love her, and so she could not have afforded to shout at them if that meant losing the tiny crumbs they’d leave for her occasionally. I can see that it really irritates them that she doesn’t get cross, and her sister can try to goad her more and more, just to see if Jemima’s smile will crack. Her sister hates her for being so good, so perfect, but she’s too young to see that Jemima feels she has to be like this, that it doesn’t feel like choosing to be good, but instead having to be good.
Except she doesn’t need to behave like this any more because she does not need their love to survive because she has all of us – the real family that matters, her friends. I wish she’d realise that we all love her so much, and that we do know what she’s really like, and we love her as she is, and we’d forgive her for being cross and tired and fed up, because everyone is cross and tired and fed up, and we are not going away whatever she does. She always forgives us when we are like that, so why can’t she see that? She wouldn’t be so nice, perhaps, but neither are we, and she loves us … I’d like her to feel what it’s like to be loved as you are, as she is, accepted as she is, not just with a smile on her face. I love seeing her face when she does sometimes allow herself to feel that. I keep encouraging her to do it more often, to let us in. She’s getting a lot better, growing in confidence, learning that it is OK to lean on us, to trust us, that we won’t let her down.
I get exasperated with her too, and keep telling her off, telling her to open her eyes, but this is making her feel bad because then she takes this as proof that I don’t love her as she is, when I really do. One day recently I decided to tell her off every time she talked herself down; I found myself having to speak every two minutes or so. I just want her to be happier, and to be able to feel the love that people have for her run through her veins, warming every extremity, and to know that it will not go away. She is making lots of progress, and I can see that she is trying really hard to listen to us when we tell her how things really are. I think she knows that she is quite pretty now, and I love seeing her enjoying clothes. She bought a pair of outrageous pink shoes a while ago and I’d like to keep them on the fireplace as a reminder of how far she has come. She can also see that she is not fair to herself, although this is still more of a thought than a feeling as yet.
She has friends who really love her. Even she knows this if she thinks about it. Quite a few of them are quite similar to her. She has some fair weather friends – just as the rest of us do – but most of them have been her friends for a long time and would do anything for her, if she dared to ask them. They tend to be nice and kind like her and they know what it’s like to be Jemima, even if only deep inside where nobody else can see.
Feelings when your needs are satisfied
| AFFECTIONATE compassionate friendly loving open hearted sympathetic tender warm CONFIDENT empowered open proud safe secure ENGAGED INSPIRED
|
EXCITED amazed animated ardent aroused astonished dazzled eager energetic enthusiastic giddy invigorated lively passionate surprised vibrant EXHILARATED GRATEFUL |
JOYFUL amused delighted glad happy jubilant pleased tickled PEACEFUL REFRESHED
|
Feelings when your needs are not satisfied
| AFRAID apprehensive dread foreboding frightened mistrustful panicked petrified scared suspicious terrified wary worried ANNOYED AVERSION CONFUSED
|
DISCONNECTED DISQUIET EMBARRASSED FATIGUE
alienated aloof apathetic bored cold detached distant distracted indifferent numb removed uninterested withdrawn |
PAIN agony anguished bereaved devastated grief heartbroken hurt lonely miserable regretful remorseful SAD TENSE VULNERABLE YEARNING |
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I’ve created a new category for posts with some connection to Asperger’s. I wanted to include this unusual article from the Guardian G2 today, which takes Asperger’s Girls as its subject.
Here’s a small piece of the article, about the experience of Robyn Steward, one young woman with Asperger’s:
“Steward, though, is full of hope for the future. She understands her condition and is adamant that it gives her some advantages. Some women, she says, are just too focused on contact with other people and on the ins and outs of human relationships. “Relationships are important, but to be a really self-reliant individual you need to be the sort of person who can cope alone. I think autism gives you that self-reliance, and I think it makes me strong – it helps you know your own limits.””
“Some women, she says, are just too focused on contact with other people and on the ins and outs of human relationships” … Mmm. I think I know what she means… I wish I didn’t sometimes.
Oh dear. I’m not looking forward to collecting Lola B from school and telling her that the Tawny Owl chick that she had insisted we name “Twiglet” has died. I expect wails of grief. The Wildlife Centre rang to tell me. His body condition was very poor, apparently. On a scale of 1-10, it was only 1. Indicative of not being fed for a while, suggesting that either his parents had stopped feeding him days ago and were concentrating on other chicks, or that he had fallen out of the nest days earlier and we had not been there to spot him. Perhaps we should have left him where he was, and let Nature take its ugly course.
I’ve been impressed recently by Lola B’s ability to find creative ways of dealing with difficult things. Next to our little nuclear family and Wolf, the most important thing in her life is Diamond, her pony. Lola B is, despite her best efforts, growing out of Diamond and, sooner, rather than later, she will have to give Diamond up to a smaller rider. The mere mention of Life-after-Diamond used to reduce her to tears, but after a recent episode, we made some progress. She wanted me to name a date, insisting that it would make it easier for her. I understood that it made everything more certain: it was a known horror that had to be faced rather than an uncertain, unimaginable happening that might creep up at any moment. The known rather than the unknown.
Then, only hours later, she came down stairs, having talked to a friend on Messenger. She looked much happier, composed. She had worked out a solution. Her friend also has a pony, and is also growing taller. They agreed that they would both move on together so that they could share their grief …
Just one of the many times when I’ve looked at my children in amazement and wondered how they seem to be about thirty years ahead of me.
There it was, sitting as still as a statue on a woodpile. I whispered to myself. It’s an owl. And, slowly, slowly I edged closer to the bundle of fluff. A bundle of fluff about the same size and shape as a hairy coconut, but lighter. Any moment I expected it to fly away, so I took photographs with every cautious step, but it let me get closer and closer until I was less than a metre away.
It was a baby owl, its beak tucked forlornly into the soft young feathers on its chest. Only around the end of its hunched up wings were there any adult feathers at all. Perched on top of the logs it was a sitting duck, if ever there was such a thing. Wolf had been hot on my heels and was inquisitively sniffing around, wondering what had caught my attention.
I ran back to the house, dragging Wolf with me, hearing my husband’s car on the gravel, and together we returned to look at the owl baby again. It hadn’t moved. Occasionally it opened its circles of eyes, but mostly it kept them tightly scrunched closed as if it wanted this nightmare to go away.
We ransacked our bird books, looking for pictures of baby owls, and thought it most likely to be a baby tawny owl or perhaps a small owl. Both were likely to be found in our neck of the woods. I rang the RSPCA for some advice. They said that we should try to return the chick to its nest. Impossible because the only potential nesting place we could see was a natural hollow directly above the woodpile in the candle-covered chestnut tree, and impossible to reach. We were advised to “contain” the bird so that one of their collection officers could take it to their wild life sanctuary in the next county. Together we returned to the bird, my husband holding a wicker basket he had found.
The bird stayed still, like a Furbie with flat batteries. With a beating heart, I closed both hands around the bird. It struggled, but only half heartedly, and seemed to fall over when I placed it in a corner of the basket. We retreated out of the sun to the cool of a shed, optimistically left the owl with a small bowl of water, and covered him with a dark tea towel and sought more advice.
This time, the bird safely contained, we were asked if we could take it to a local RSPCA office about half an hour’s drive away. By now the baby owl had placed its bottom over the bowl of water, but otherwise was much as before. With the basket on my husband’s lap, and Wolf constrained by his lead in the boot of the car, we drove to the centre which houses all the abandoned dogs and cats that the RSPCA is seeking to re-home.
Tom, the bird man, took our owl away to a chilled room where he prised the young bird’s talons off the wicker basket and, wrapped in a towel, placed the bird in a plastic basket, the sort in which you transport small cats and dogs. With a syringe he fed the grateful bird drops of water. The beak opened and I saw the strange angular folded tongue before the beak closed and the water was swallowed. Later it would be offered small dead rodents to tempt it to eat. If the bird survived the night it will be taken tomorrow to the wild life centre from where it will, when it has grown adult feathers, be released into the wild.
Owl babies are pushed out of the nest when the mother and father cannot manage to feed them all. It was probably Nature’s way that this baby owl should die, leaving fewer mouths to feed. There are about 600 pairs of tawny owls in our county, a small enough number for it to make it worth while trying to save this baby.
Our daughters are away this weekend, staying with their grandparents. They wanted to know all about the owl and are anxious to know whether it will survive. We remembered how both of them had grown up on the story of Owl Babies, of three baby owls whose mother has left them. The two younger owls, Percy and Bill, are very anxious that she may never come back, repeating over and over again “I want my Mummy”. Sarah, the oldest owl, seeks to reassure them that Mummies always come back. It was a favourite book, with beautiful illustrations. This Mummy Owl came back, of course. The ending was different for our real little owl. When his Mummy came back it was more of as case of “Percy, you’re one mouth too many too feed. I cannot be doing with catching mice and birds for you any more,” and a big push out of the hollow in the tree. All his inadequate wings could do was to break his fall.
Tawny Owl Chicks
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