Why Are We Different? Protective Factors, Family Roles, and the Guilty Conscience.

[Three]

​Why Are We Different?
Protective Factors, Family Roles, and the Guilty Conscience.

By Joel Patterson






There’s an incredibly compelling question, one that is often asked by those who are going through the process of self actualization, which is “Why me? Why have I retained my curiosity as well as this seemingly rare ability to observe myself from the third eye, to self examine, self analyse, to self critique and as a result grow accordingly. And not only that, why have I retained my authentic Self, the aspect of my personality that hasn’t developed as a result of trauma, to the extent that I am willing to make nurturing my True Self a priority of utmost importance?” This is especially pertinent for those who have siblings that have eschewed the path toward psychological growth, who’s choice might give rise to the equally interesting flip side of the original question that is, “Why not them?” Why do they avoid self reflection as if It were a plague?


Perhaps, due to the sheer enormity of the combination of events and decisions that shape our personalities throughout the years, many of which being forever lost to the sands of time and inaccessible to conscious memory, that this question will remain unanswerable and thus, doesn’t deserve an obsessive level of thought, much like unfruitful questions like, “are we alone in the universe?” or “who built stonehenge?”




Or, perhaps not. Perhaps the question isn't that difficult to answer and does not require a mile high catalog that documents every personality shaping experience of our life since we were in the womb. In addition, perhaps there are ways of answering the question that are necessarily speculative, yet good enough.

 

To demonstrate what I mean, let's look at a real live speculative account to the real live difficult question of how life originated. By definition nobody was around to document what happened, so many details revolving around this event are forever lost. For example, we do not know exactly what chemical materials were abundant on earth, but some plausible possibilities are water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia, all of which are simple compounds known to be present on some of the other planets in our Solar System.

 

In the lab, researches have put these substances in flasks and supplied a source of energy, like electric sparks or ultraviolet light in order to imitate the chemical conditions of the young earth. The result after a few weeks of this is usually a brown soup containing molecules more complex than the original ones, even one of the great two biological molecules- amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.



 

What these experiments tell us about the origin of life is that processes analogous to this must have given rise to the so called 'primeval soup', which is what constituted our seas nearly four thousand million years ago. In other words, however amino acids arose naturally, they most likely arose in an environment wherein volcanoes, sunlight, thundery weather and an atmosphere containing a few simple gases were present.

 

The key take away principle from this example, which we shall use to help answer the question "why did we come out of our childhoods with our true Self relatively intact compared to our siblings", is that the existence of our ‘True Self’ implies the presence of specific factors in our childhoods that must have been conducive to its growth and/or preservation, much in the same way the existence of amino acids implies the presence of elements which make the existence of amino acids possible. Thus, the question then becomes, what might those factors be that either preserve or erode the True Self?


First, we know for sure that what is called the “False Self”, a fragmented personality, develops from significant caregiver abandonment, neglect, and abuse(abuse.) In other words, it is these harmful factors that damage our authentic self. However, in the midst of even the most low nurturing environment, there are indeed little islands of experiences that provide protection, warmth, relief and hope that can also leave a lasting impact growing up.

These experiences are known as Protective Factors. I was first exposed to the idea of protective factors by John Bradshaw having mentioned it in his book, “Healing the Shame that Binds You.” Here is a definition I found on the internet, “Protective factors are conditions or attributes (skills, strengths, resources, supports or coping strategies) in individuals, families, communities or the larger society that help people deal more effectively with stressful events and mitigate or eliminate risk in families and communities”.

Simply reviewing and comparing the harmful and protective factors between yourself and siblings can be powerful tools to help answer “why we are different”, even without access to factors which preceded birth or are inaccessible to memory. I’ll demonstrate this by sharing a few examples from my own history.

For instance, I have a sister who is a year and a day older than me.  We couldn’t be more different now, although I do have positive memories of playing with her as a child. We did things like , build forts, play dress up, watch Disney films and collect Beanie Babies. Our favorite Beenie Babie was a Dachshund named Weenie because it reminded us of our actual pet Dachshund. He was the cause of much debate since we both owned a copy of him and at times we’d get them mixed up.



Much to my heartbreak, this delightful playtime mostly came to a halt shortly after my sister began her first year of Kindergarden, leaving me to spend the vast majority of my days alone. This was even true when after she arrived home, as now she was not just my sister, but also a student and had the additional responsibilities of homework.

Nothing was quite the same after this point and slowly but surely, like the continents we drifted further and further away from each other. Before adolescence was even over we connected about as much as you would connect with a neighbor you see in passing on your way to work. You might wave or even stop to ask how the day has been if you have time, but that is the extent of bonding that occurs in such an interaction.  In addition to becoming more and more distant from each other, over time we became more and more distant from ourselves. What I mean by that is, our true authentic selves became usurped by rigid roles necessitated by the needs of the family system and thus, individuation was replaced by the need to balance the family system.

To borrow directly from Psychologist John Bradshaw,

“Families are social systems that follow organismic laws. The first law of social organisms is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A family is defined by the interaction and interrelationships of its parts, rather than the sum of its parts. As social systems, families have components, rules, roles and needs that define the system.

  The chief component in the family system is the marriage. If the marriage is healthy and functional, the family will be healthy and functional. When the chief component of a system is dysfunctional, the whole system is thrown out of balance. When the system is out of balance, another law comes into play: the law of dynamic homeostasis. This is the law of balance. Dynamic homeostasis means that whenever a part of the system is out of balance, the rest of the members of the system will try to bring it back to balance. The children in dysfunctional families take on rigid roles necessitated by the family’s need for balance. For example, if a child is not wanted , he or she will try to balance the family by not being any trouble, by being helpful perfect, super responsible or invisible. This is the Lost Child role.”






Another example given by John Bradshaw is of the child named Ralph, whose role was to be the family Star of Hero. Ralph super achieved to give his shame-based, alcoholic father a sense of dignity. As Ralph’s father became more and more alcoholic, he eventually abandoned his children. Because the family had no marriage, Ralph became his mother’s surrogate spouse. Another common role is that of the Scapegoat, the purpose of which is to lessen the pain all the members are in. Usually the most sensitive family member ‘takes on’ this role when the fear, hurt loneliness of the shame in a dysfunctional family reaches high levels of intensity.





Later on in this example, Ralph became the scapegoat due to his active alcoholism in his teen years, but eventually repented and went into the ministry. As a result, the role of Scapegoat went to his younger brother, Max. To borrow John Bradshaw’s words again

“Max started his drinking and running away at age fifteen. Max’s first major disappearance was for four days, winding up on a beach in New Orleans. As his bizzare runaways continued, the family focused more and more on him. By discussing and obsessing on Max, everyone in the family system could avoid their own pain.

Max became like the sacrificial goat in the Jewish atonement ritual. In the ritual the goat is smeared with blood and sent into the desert. In this way the scapegoat atones for the people’s sins. Max became the sacrificial goat. He literally went to his death carrying the shame of several generations of his family.”


As we can see, roles in a dysfunctional family have a profound impact on our psychological development and influence so many of the decisions we make throughout life. The skills and behaviors a person learns who spent the vast majority of his childhood as the Hero will be quite different from the specialized behaviors of the Lost Child and the childhood of the ‘Scapegoat’ will be very different from both of these. In addition, because these roles get imprinted and ‘assigned’ to children unconsciously, without intervention and self knowledge one can operate under the premise of “balancing the family system” and thus, still be living their life within their family role well into adulthood like Max. We also saw with the tragic case of Max that, not all roles are equally detrimental.


It is here that I want to go back to the question, “Why are we different?, and apply the information we do have available to us about Family Roles and Protective factors to my own history in an attempt to give a decent answer. Remember, this is necessarily speculative since there’s no way of me knowing the intricate details of how my sister and I might have been raised differently as infants, so I’m aiming for a “good enough” answer allowed by such limitations. This is not hard proof.







My sister undeniably, due to the needs of the family system,  filled the role of the Star or Hero. From elementary to high school, she did gymnastics, played soccer, ran cross country, played piano, played clarinet, sang in choir, made straight A’s, twirled her batton and flag in the color guard, was a girl scout, excelled in swimming lessons, wrote poetry, made beautiful drawings. I, on the other hand, filled the role of the invisible Lost Child. I felt like a net negative to the family, especially in comparison to my sister, so I spent the majority of my time alone, in my room with video games. This was my plea to be allowed to exist. If I did ever make my presence known, it would only be by being helpful and “good”(obedient). Thus, while we lived under the same roof and shared the same DNA, we lived very different lives.

With hindsight, I believe I got the better end of the stick. Not to say any of these dysfunctional roles are ideal, but between the two, I wouldn’t have had it any other way besides being the Lost Child. The Hero entails, besides the benefits of adulation and attention, more parental involvement and more interaction with peers. This sounds like it would be a protective factor, but in my view it was the opposite. My mother was incredibly toxic and many of the kids that my sister had to interact with, who were also Stars, through sports were not bastions of acceptance and authenticity.  Being around such kids demanded much more conformity and self erasure.  Because of this, being around these types of people probably increased the risk of being bullied, making it a harmful factor.



I, on the other hand, was spared from interacting with these people. Video games did not hold high expectations of me, did not demand conformity, and was not critical. In other roles, I could be authentic in front of the TV in ways my sister couldn’t be around my mother or those other social groups. I know this because the older we got, the less I could be my authentic self around her and she had to have learned this meanness from somewhere. I’ll never forget the day when she told me to  “Shut up.” when I was 5 or so. I had never heard these words come out her mouth before. This bullying only worsened over time, which brings me to another risk factor that erodes the true self, which is a guilty conscious.





Another key factor between siblings, which I think is worth exploring when trying to answer the question, “why have I retained my true, authentic, curious self and they haven’t?”, is our moral decisions. Granted, I don’t think you can assign too much moral responsibility to children who are in a state of nature and who trying to survive. However, when somebody is persistently cruel well into adulthood, by the time that person reaches adulthood, the cost of self reflection becomes that much greater. Especially when there is a guilty conscience. Self actualization for the guilty conscience then involves the painful act of looking behind you at the trail of destruction you and hurt you have inflicted on others as well as the lies you’ve told yourself. And because humans and cost/benefit analysis machines, if the costs of that kind of self reflection are that painful, then such a person is far less likely to want to change.  






To recap, we started this piece with the goal of discovering a way to find a satisfying answer to the question, “Why are we different?” Or more specifically, “How did our true selves survive and with all of its compassion and curiosity, while others apparently did not?”. We set about this task accepting the limitations of not knowing every single variable. I then suggested a speculative answer that involves a combination of factors. One being risk factors- this might have been a traumatic event such as a molestation or other stressors such as divorce . The second being protective factors, which are things which help mitigate the effects of these stressors-you might have had a close relationship with a benevolent aunt and spent an awful time with her, while your sibling did not ) We also looked at family roles and how these roles fundamentally change each sibling’s experience of the family and how some roles can be inherently more or less harmful to the long term mental health of the child. Finally, we looked at the conscience and how a guilty conscious and how avoiding guilt could play a huge influence in our choice to self reflect or not.

To borrow a quote from Stefan Molyneux, “It is always better than to have harm done unto you than to do harm to others because the victim can always recover, whilst the perpetrator cannot.”


Because we’ve all had unique experiences, the answers we will discover will vary, which is why I hoped to provide tools for discovery above all else that would help other come to a satisfying answer of their own. I hope this has been of value and if so, please share. Also, if you like what I wrote here, you might also enjoy some of my videos on my new youtube channel called Becoming Untangled.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq60FZi48OeHw_TfZP1aGww


As always, thank you for taking the time to read.


Take Care,

-Joel

[Matthew Ed Moran]

This is fantastic, excellent, wonderful analysis.

 

Of course it is also tragic. I'm sorry to hear about your personal experiences with your sister - it was truly heartbreaking to read. Thank you for sharing it, because it really helped me connect with your analysis.

 

I think my personal experiences may also provide empirical evidence which aligns with your theory. I think it is sign of a good explanation when upon considering it I am almost immediately drawn to think about a very particular time in my life which may have proved to save my authentic self.

 

For many years of my childhood I was extremely peer-bonded. How much I relied on my friends to feel worthy, to find pleasure in life, to seek an escape and distract myself from the truly terrible things that were going on in my household seems evident from at least age 8. I did consistently horribly in my academics, but I was constantly motivated to go to school to make people laugh. If I was sick, home from school, or for any other reasons removed from my friends for a few days, I would be confronted with very powerful feelings of dread, of unworthiness, of non-existence. It was like when I wasn't around my peers for just a small amount of time, there was no me at all remaining (at least nothing I liked). I had nothing inside which I could turn to to feel proud of. I remember vividly the feeling, and I remember most how it was so, so different from the constant high I could get from being around my friends, making them laugh. It was definitely scary when I experienced it, so I tried to avoid it at all costs.

 

One constancy I experienced during these times of peer-bonding was a disruption on the part of my mother to separate me from my friends. I won't go into details, but I would basically have to fight every single day with her to stay outside playing for as long as I could, rather than be isolated at home. This went on for years. Probably from age 8 to age 16.

 

But something changed around age 16. I didn't want to be around my friends anymore. And I also didn't want to be at school. I remember being absent about 1/3 a semester of high school. And rather than play with my friends when they came home from school, I'd play video games. I would still hang with them a lot, but perhaps 20% of my time I now spent playing video games instead of being with them.

 

And then, when my mom offered to move to North Carolina, I said "yes, I want to do that." I wanted to leave all my friends. I remember the feeling was so different from before. Instead of wanting to be around them as much as I could, now I wanted to escape them. They felt like a burden to me. So we moved to NC, and long story short, I could not adjust to make friends. And importantly, I almost didn't want to. I had an unwillingness to. I dropped out of school, became the most isolated I had been in my life compared to my peer-bonded past, and.. I think without coincide, I found philosophy/economics soon after. And I think it was this isolation which I felt I had to confront which provoked a permanent change in my life.

 

And my turn to isolation was definitely, at least in a very significant way, a "Protective Factor." I had to "protect" (not sure if I'm framing this correctly) my mom's insistence on ripping me away from my friends, and relentlessly verbally abusing me when I hung out with them. I think it was this pressure from her which made me think I shouldn't even have friends. Instead, I played a lot of video games, and watched a lot of Ron Paul videos, learned some economics and philosophy, and forever was changed. It was the most brutal period of my life. But from that brutal isolation the real me was birthed and discovered after being hidden in a protective womb for years and years and years.

 

Also, as my mom used me for a surrogate friend and husband, from a very early age I was often forced to deal with abstract topics; to help her with relationships, to help her avoid conflict, to help her achieve happiness and fulfillment. This may have been some of my first contact with "philosophy" and "psychology" albeit for twisted, wrong reasons.

 

So I think my "story" very much testifies to the validity of your theory. Thanks very much for your analysis, Joel, as painful of thoughts it did bring up.

 

Edit: I think I may have actually misunderstood your explanation in some ways, but I will keep my post as is since I think it highlights some of the reasons I think my true self is here now.

[Bouncelot]

Very interesting! Thanks for this!

 

 

I can definitely relate to the relationship you had/didn't have with your sister. Most people look at me strange and don't quite believe me when I tell them that my sister is a stranger to me.

 

I like the concept of the protective factors, I think that may have a lot to do with things. Most of them seem to be (at a high level) just by chance however. It's hard to look back and say what prompted one coping mechanism over an other, for example.

 

Looking back at my own past, I remember always being aware of my false self. It was a mask I put on, but was able to take off when I was alone; and I always approached each new person with it off, in hopes of finding a real person, a friend. I am not sure what gave me that, I am not sure what gave me the strength to defy my parents teachings, to "know" they were wrong, and conversely to have my own sense for "right". This is going back as early as age 6. 

What created that ability is a question I have been trying to answer for a long time.

[Three]

 

 

Edit: I think I may have actually misunderstood your explanation in some ways, but I will keep my post as is since I think it highlights some of the reasons I think my true self is here now.

That was a really fascinating, albiet heartbreaking story of what you had to endure. I think your change in behavior would certainly fall under a coping strategy which was really helpful. Had you, for what ever reason, took on the role of a scapegoat, I would imagine the defiance would have resulted in more harm. I think your coping strategy and the isolation, while not an ideal situation, possibly could have been a protective factor with hindsight. 

 

Thank you so much for sharing and taking the time to read my post!

 

 

Best Wishes

 

-Joel

 

 

 

 

Looking back at my own past, I remember always being aware of my false self. It was a mask I put on, but was able to take off when I was alone; and I always approached each new person with it off, in hopes of finding a real person, a friend. I am not sure what gave me that, I am not sure what gave me the strength to defy my parents teachings, to "know" they were wrong, and conversely to have my own sense for "right". This is going back as early as age 6. 

What created that ability is a question I have been trying to answer for a long time.

Well, for what it's worth I think its great how you managed to retain that awareness. I'm also super glad that you found my post valuable. Thank you for taking the time to read! Take care.

 

-Joel

[Kurtis]

From one 'lost child' to another, I wanted to thank you for your post. I now have that book by Bradshaw on my list and am looking forward to reading it.

 

I experienced much more severe traumas than my younger siblings and yet am the only one, so far, that has been able to find my way to the truth and a whole, authentic self.

 

As a child I coped by seeking isolation, and these times were the sources of my happiest childhood memories. Reminds me of a concept I learned in therapy, which is that of being your own "competent caretaker". I credit those alone times for allowing me to retain my true self, which enabled me to eventually begin the healing process.

 

Thank you again for your post, it certainly resonates with me and was very interesting!