Children abhor an emotional (and intellectual) vacuum

In progressing through my recovery journey, and looking back at my parents, I have regularly contrasted dad's emotional fire (mainly of anger management issues along with emotional and physical abusiveness) with mom's emotional ice of not being there.

But, in some recent poolside meditation of sorts, or at least pondering, between pages of a re-read of Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Knows the Score," about which I have previously blogged, I had some new insight.

Ice is still something "positive," in the sense of actually being there, and actually having empirical, sensual evidence it's there.

A vacuum? It is nothingness.

What led me to that was, after a bit of my pondering, I started doing something Gestalt-like, which van der Kolk talks about a lot. I started having a dialogue with an image of mom.

After the dialogue was done, as I noted previously in my most recent post before this, I realized that I didn't hate mom. I didn't really even loathe her.

Instead, I abhorred her, or more accurately now, I abhorred her emotional vacuum. From there, I jumped to Harry Harlow's experiments with rhesus monkey babies and maternal or pseudo-maternal bonding.

I know mom bottle-fed me, but that was normal in the 1960s. She didn't have much tactile interaction with me otherwise, nor a lot of emotional interaction either on "positive" or "negative" emotions. I did see her once or twice in fear of dad's anger when directed toward me, but I have no idea if she ever talked to him about it further.

Anyway, this carries on to mom divorcing dad.

She claimed that she was tired of him trying to force us into religious careers. (I have proof of this; my dad apparently destroyed a partially completed application of mine to New Mexico Tech, and I know this because after I was put on academic probation at his religious alma mater after my first semester, he wrote me a letter to "shape up" or I'd never get into it. I found the letter back almost 30 years later, going through a box of old items of mine he had in storage. J'accuse!)

And yet? She never fought in court to have primary physical custody of me and my sister, as far as I know. I do know the court said we could make our own custodial parent decisions as long as we didn't bounce around too much and show detrimental effects.

Unlike dad, who for surface appearances (and maybe some stress relief, but I don't mean to buy his explanation that mom "caused" his temper let alone his acting out on it) did change for generally the better (setting aside "grooming" me to move with him — not sure how much of that he did with sis), mom never did that. It's like, even given the truth of what she claimed about dad, she was still telling a story more than a reality, and that the focus remained solipsistic.

(More on that word below.)

Because of who she worked for, and my SAT results, I got a corporate National Merit Scholarship, which actually pays more than the regular ones, even if a half-cut lower in prestige. Years later, she told me that she had considered writing her corporate headquarters to see if it would revoke the scholarship because I was attending my dad's religious alma mater.

And, no, she'd not contacted me at that time. She wrote me ... half as often, or less ... in college as dad did.

Let's see.

Knocking the props out from under me financially would have done what? Make me even more distant from her, for sure. Angry, even if I didn't realize it at the time. And hence, the "(and intellectual)" I just added to the header.

I mention the word "solipsistic" above. I used to think of mom as "narcissistic," but at that previous blog post, I realized that's not right, either.

I think a true narcissist, whether conscious of it or not, has different internal motivations than mom did.

The "solipsistic"?

By the time I was 12, this abused and emotionally whipped pre-teen, and "old soul" of sorts (no, not in any metaphysical way, New Agers) from that abuse, realized emotionally and psychologically that he did not want children when he grew up. In part, I knew that my mom was mentally ill in some way and I didn't want to pass that on.

It is an "old soul" of sorts that feels that way, and that accepts that stance as necessary, just as it's a similar old soul who can think in his mind of peace-promoting bible passages when his dad thinks he should attack the leader of neighborhood bullies because the rest of them will all cave in.

There's many more ways in which I simply had no connection with mom. Part of that, per van der Kolk, of course may be being "shut down" in some way. But, already when I was 5, I had issues of physical and emotional abandonment from her.

And, the apparent mental illness (neurotic, not psychotic level) behind that is another reason I abhor, but don't loathe.

Dad, on the other hand? Genetic tendencies to anxiety, as well as to anger management, are mental health issues. But, they're not mental illness.

While there are several good things he did for me throughout life, ultimately, while I don't hate him, and I don't think I loathe him as a person, I do overall loathe how he was as a father.

Powerless vs made a decision

Alcoholics Anonymous, and the 12-step movement it launched has been chock full of logical (and arguably, ethical) inconsistencies from the start.

Beyond that, the religious angle (it is, because it mentions a deity and because courts have said it is for First Amendment issues) is off-putting to the non-religious and to many religious people that don't agree with its particular religious take.

Beyond THAT, the "powerless" issue is offputting to women, minorities, abuse victims and others.

Step 1 of AA’s 12 steps says:

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

But Step 3 says:

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

See, in religion, Lutheranism recognizes this problem and Martin Luther says that people by their own power cannot come to faith in God. 

But, AA hoists itself in its own petard. A decision is an act. Power, not powerlessness.

Of course, Lutheranism has its own problems. It essentially reduces a human being to an automaton, like Buddhism's claim that there is no individual soul, just a life force. And so, Lutheranism has its own petards.

The way to reject this is to reject an omnipotent deity (and an omnipotent karma), and accept a humanistic world. That world may still have an imperfect deity that some call god, though I don't see that, and that in turn raises philosophical issues about what creature would merit the term "god."

In any case, "powerless" is an absolutist word. Good humanism rejects that. And good sobriety rejects that, too. No need to hope for a "daily reprieve" from the AA version of a Calvinist double predestination tyrant.