Survivor Guilt

On the evening of the 6^th anniversary of 9/11 I watched the heart wrenching television images of children of those whose lives were tragically taken on that ill fated morning in 2001.  These images stirred me to write about the topic of survivor guilt from my perspective as a psychotherapist and a trauma survivor. 

One doesn’t have to lose a loved one to a tragic and unnecessary death to suffer survivor guilt.  This symptom for lack of a better description is a recipe for chronic unhappiness.  It is in simplest terms feeling guilty about being happy with one’s lot in life.  It is not necessarily induced by the experience of a tragic loss of a parent or parental surrogate.  It is nonetheless, the legacy of what I do consider to be tragedies if the victims do not get help in adulthood to treat their problems.  They are tragedies because generations of family members may go through their lives with countless blessings from which to derive meaning, joy and happiness from and yet, not feel entitled to enjoy any of them.  They do no better than survive.  Misery is as much who they are as their right arms and they feel that they have no choice but to suffer if they are to have even a temporary respite from feeling guilty and experience some happiness.   

This article will explore the types of experiences that shape survivor guilt and what those of us who suffer from it must do to move toward overcoming it.   The formula I’m proposing for the transmission of survivor guilt from one generation to the next goes something as follows: 

1) A parent or parental surrogate wears his unhappiness and stress on his sleeve as a direct consequence of feeling stuck in their miserable existences.  They learn not to not trust themselves and to not take themselves seriously.  Consequently, they do not stand up for their rights to peace, joy and happiness.

For example, a wife and mother might let her immature and passive aggressive husband and father of her son get away with murder by opting out on his responsibilities to her and her son while she runs herself ragged.  She is so stressed out that the child’s normal needs are responded to as burdensome. 

2) The child is victimized as a direct consequence of a parent victimizing himself or in the case above; herself.    

An example of this is where a grandparent takes on the parenting responsibilities for a grandchild because his adult alcoholic child can no longer manage his parental duties and resents doing

so only to take it out on the grandchild. 

3) The parent or parental surrogate expects the child to be happy and happy with them despite setting the child up to be unhappy.  The parent typically cannot tolerate the child’s unhappiness anymore than his own.

A father says to his daughter:  “Why are you so unhappy in college.  You should be happy.  You’d think you were drafted and sent over to Iraq.  I’m the one who should be unhappy.  I didn’t get to go to college.  I wound up in Viet Nam.”  The child is shamed into silence.         

4) Meanwhile, paradoxically such a parent isn’t any happier with himself or his child when the child is happy.  The parent envies everyone who is happier than himself including his child.  He feels deprived, envious and sorry for himself as if he’s an undeserving “have not”  and those who are happy and deserving of happiness are “haves.”  So, even though, the parent is a  victim of his own envy he feels attacked by those he envies and retaliates.

Below, we can have what on face value seems to be a fairly harmless situation but, in truth is a crazy making experience for the child as he is made to feel guilty about being contented in his own right and left without anyway to make amends to his parent.

A mother is not satisfied with the fact that her child did not eat everything on his plate even though he enjoyed the meal she prepared and stopped eating when he became full.  She becomes irate when he doesn’t finish everything on his plate and while throwing what was left over in the garbage yells: “Do you know there are children starving in Africa?”

The children in these scenarios learn that when all is said and done they are to blame for their parents unhappiness and therefore, they are not entitled to any more happiness in their lives.  This translates to short lived moments of happiness punctuated by longer periods of pain and suffering either self inflicted or inflicted by others.  When they grow up they live at an impoverished level of happiness no matter whether or not they have 4 car garages or live in someone’s garage.  The best they can do is to please their parents by becoming their parents.  Again, misery loves company.  They feel they owe this to them.   

The way out of this emotional hell hole is for the children with survivor guilt to grow up and begin to observe, reflect on and challenge their irrational guilt feelings and the associated thoughts that pave the way for these adults to make their sense of badness a reality.  Their guilt stems from the rage, hatred, anger, spitefulness, vindictiveness, that are overly stimulated by the parents and parental surrogates depicted above.   These are normal aspects of all human experience that are not acknowledged, not normalized and regarded as characteristics of bad people.    So, those who suffer with survivor guilt and grow up in crazy making environments where they feel as if they are killed off as special, valuable people  learn that they are being punished for their badness and therefore do not feel entitled to complain.  In fact, when retaliatory hostile feelings and thoughts try to break into consciousness the guilt triggered results in misery generating ways of relating to self and others.   

Therapy provides a holding environment; an environment of acceptance, interest and concern for the client and his guilt provoking wishes, feelings, fantasies, etc.  The therapist nurtures the client’s entitlement to enjoy his life and to stand up against his self defeating and misery generating patterns of being.      

The therapist encourages the client to voice his hostilities, and accepts them without being killed off by them and/or taking measures of revenge. Within a framework of mutual respect and consideration the client gets what he can get in terms of re-parenting and learns tools to neutralize survivor guilt when it rears its ugly head before it has another opportunity to generate misery.  Forgiveness of self and parents and evidence that one is not a life long victim of survivor guilt mutually reinforce each other.  Thus, the survivors of survivor guilt learn to do better than just survive.        

Do You Become A Human Vending Machine When Your Button Are Pushed?  (More For Couples)

Have you ever noticed that we live in an era when it has become fashionable to self-righteously defend the right to behave like vending machines? Now, I imagine that many of you reading this article might take instantaneous exception to anybody who treated you like a vending machine or accused you of regarding someone else as nothing more than an extension of your wishes for immediate gratification. Yet, there are times when we and our loved ones invoke unwritten, unspoken agreements that if one picks a fight, the other when provoked will morph into a vending machine. Once we pay with a dollar’s worth of sarcasm, emotional withdrawal or threats and correctly depress the other person’s “hot button” the response we want(whether or not we are aware of desiring it or not) drops down, bounces out of the retrieval slot and hits us right between the eyes. And to add insult to injury we, who are having our buttons pushed and being degraded wind up making the degradation a reality by throwing respect and consideration out the window and returning the “vending machine favor.” I know. This is not a very flattering mirror to run and stand in front of and ask: “How do I look?”  Still, we all with varying degrees of frequency behave this way.

You may never have thought about a vending machine metaphor to describe or understand what happens when two adults regress to feeling and behaving just like small children arguing without an adult referee in the room. Yet, this glass slipper seems to fit all sizes of feet. Our values and ideals that make up our consciences may do an admirable job of checking inconsiderate and disrespectful behaviors when the tide of our emotions are not flooding our rational faculties. However, these checks on impulsivity can get swallowed up by intensely threatening feelings so that we temporarily lose the capacity for insight into our actions and empathy for how our actions affect others until our emotional flood waters recede. It is so, so easy at times like these to believe with religious fervor that we are innocent victims and the other person started.

We may be victims but, not victims of the infamous “button pusher.” Our “button pusher” so to speak, is nothing more than a trigger that pushes the “play button” for the recall of beliefs, feelings, impulses and fantasies that threaten our self esteem in a moment we become so identified with these threats that we cease to be able to regulate our self esteem. Thus, temporarily, the replay of” “You’re an idiot who deserves to be used like a pawn” is not observed as it should be; an illogical and false idea remembered in dialogue with a parent whose words were shaped by their own vulnerabilities and limitations. “No!!” This recollection becomes one that completely defines us as worthless. What we are dealing with are damaging recollections seen through the emotional eyes of our less developed selves. As is the logic of children: If a parent is supposed to love us and know how to love us says hurtful and hateful words then, we as children must be bad and/or defective; unlovable. Thus what we have here is the anatomy of the process by which we victimize ourselves when our buttons are pushed and then, feel justified to retaliate in kind.

In truth, we are all sometime victims of our own limitations, ignorance, lack of motivation and sharpened axes we still grind, which are our responsibilities to manage as much as we may find this to be a bitter pill to swallow. If you want a little dose of how “The Devil Made Me Do It,” is not a ticket to pass go and collect $200 just take a few hours out and sit in any criminal court in this country and see what happens in cases where threats of domestic violence are retaliated in kind. Both parties are likely to get arrested. “He or she demeaned me just like my father did and pushed my buttons” doesn’t mitigate the plaintiff’s responsibility for retaliatory actions. In most of these cases there are two rules that supersede all others when the combatants are stuck in the heat of the moment. These rules of engagement are certain formulas for regrettable outcomes: Two wrongs make a right, and the best defense is a good offense.

We all fall prey to moments when adult self restraint goes out the window in retaliation for being “the good victim.” Still it’s no accident that if we are likely to “lose it” on a regular basis we probably have found partners that have a mutual need to accommodate us because they too either “lose it” frequently or also have vested interests in being victims. Hopefully, when calmer heads prevail we are able to recognize the error of our ways.

If you want to know all you’ll ever have to know why it is so valuable to offer our children and ourselves time outs when we become nothing more than a feeling or a belief, please reflect on what I have been communicating over the preceding paragraphs. When we lose the ability to temporarily exercise benevolent authority over ourselves and our children, it is because of the fact that in the heat of the moment we degrade ourselves and our loved ones and replay the story of the consumer and the vending machine.

It only takes one degree of separation between the other person and ourselves, and one degree of separation between our beliefs and feelings, and our self reflective capacities to restore safety, security, peace and serenity to our lives and our relationships. That one degree of separation permits us to remind ourselves that just because someone labels us “X” or we label ourselves “Y” it doesn’t make it so. Therefore, none of us deserve the treatment we subject ourselves to. We are never as wonderful or horrible as we sometimes feel or believe about ourselves. The same pertains to others. No one deserves to be put on pedestals at others’ expense and no one deserves to be attacked and degraded.

Honor yourselves and your loved ones with regular time outs for self reflection. Most definitely, learn in the heat of the moment to retreat and simply sit and wait for the flood waters of intense emotion to recede before reengaging with a loved one. Once we regain our capacities to make a space to examine what’s going on between us and others and what is being reactivated inside ourselves we can then rediscover and appreciate ourselves and others as individuals rich in complexity with intrinsic value that cannot be wiped away. That intrinsic value is part and parcel of the potential to create meaningful changes. Regulating self esteem requires active thinking on our parts. We must remind ourselves that we have over arching value to ourselves and others no matter what might be happening in any particular moment. If we are behave like vending machines more often than not and can’t get a handle on what to do to change this pattern then, we owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to give psychotherapy a try. It may be a new lease on life for many of us. 

The Difference Between Irresponsible Exercises Of Parental Authority And Responsible Exercises Of Parental Authority: A Few Respectful Degrees Of Separation(More For Parents)

As a social worker I assess the mental health treatment needs of adults who get caught in the revolving door to a state criminal justice system in New England. In piecing together the histories of these clients I speak with their parents when these opportunities arise. What is often the case during these interviews is that these parents plead ignorance when it comes to how events in the lives of their families impacted their children. Clearly, these parents were either unwilling and/or unable to empathize and build bridges to their children’s rich inner worlds. This is why these parents remain at a loss to chronicle the emotional histories of their grown children. These interviews have been instructive in teaching me how these parents lost control of their kids when they were old enough to survive outside the home.

The desire to please their parents in order to receive valuable nurturance was extinguished early on. Their children may have paid lip service to them but, for all intents and purposes by age 14 or so most of these kids stopped listening to their parents altogether. By that time, as they probably saw it, they had nothing left to lose. These victims of parental indifference and abuse were soon primed to demand reparations from an unsuspecting community that was about to pay dearly for what these children felt robbed of growing up. One doesn’t behave in respectful ways as an adult when fed a steady diet of disrespect as a child.

As implied previously, the abdication and/or abuse of parental authority is an incubator for the development of antisocial traits.  The antidote to the behavioral viruses these traits spawn is a parenting philosophy built on a bedrock of benevolent authority. Benevolent authority is put into action as consistent and continuous dialogues with our children where we actively listen to and clarify what we hear, reflect back our understanding of what we hear and respond respectfully in our roles as leaders and teachers. This way, our respect and love for our children as separate people comes across loud and clear. Collectively, these interpersonal skills form a diplomatic initiative that opens negotiations to obtain our children’s cooperation through motivational strategies designed to get them on board with our vision for raising them. “We” stay in charge no matter how humbly we wear the title, “boss.”

This interactive and dynamic process requires a flexible vision. It is rooted in forging an alliance so that we can use our influence to leverage agreements. In truth, it is about as democratic an arrangement as The US Government in their foreign policy negotiations with third world countries who depend on our foreign aid to preserve their sovereignty. Benevolent parents not unlike benevolent superpowers, speak softly and carry a “big carrot.” To flaunt superior power is tantamount to baiting an inferior foe into a guerilla conflict. As parents we want allies of our children, not adversaries. Once we turn parenting into a battle of wills we may win some battles but, we will ultimately lose the war with enduring negative consequences.

It is my contention that we as parents must share authority with our children without abdicating the right to make the final decisions. This goal can be accomplished within the context of relationships that honor our children’s needs to keep their self respect and dignity in tact. If we treat our children as subjects rather than objects more times than not, we will in turn be accorded roles of co-collaborators and editors of our children’s story lines as they creatively unfold. To be kept outside the loop so to speak and have this precedent continue into adolescence sets the stage for losing our kids to the streets. I have heard countless times from clients in a million different ways how: “No one has the right to tell me what to do!”

To exercise benevolent authority it is imperative to frame childhood resistance to parental authority as efforts at self definition and not a referendum on the parent’s unworthiness of respect. If you’re over 40 and/or were raised in a foreign culture, it’s easy to have learned that “good children” are seen and only heard when addressed and, to regard willful behavior as signs of “badness” or “inadequacy.”

Single parents tend to be most vulnerable to misinterpreting such reactions as they more often than not feel over worked, neglected and unappreciated. If you are a single parent and take seriously the time and energy devoted to raising your children then, “I don’t have time to care for my needs is not a bumper sticker you can afford to have adorning your car. The price of doing so is to blame your children for the self inflicted wounds you suffered early on when they are being developmentally and age appropriately self centered, inconsiderate, demanding ingrates. It’s never their job to take care of you even if they are the least bit willing and able to do.

My parenting philosophy, borrowed from many sources is based on teaching children to feel entitled to ask for and negotiate their needs, to learn that the satisfaction of their needs may require patience, perseverance and resourcefulness over time. When we fail to care adequately for ourselves it can be unbearably painful to listen to our children ask for the sky and then, unrealistic that we praise them for doing so. We all know how to shame and guilt our children into silence but, this is a victory we and they pay for down the road. It’s difficult to take children to places we have never been before. So, make it a priority to learn to care for your needs so that you will find the intestinal fortitude to cope constructively with their resistance to unpopular but, important decisions that you know from experience are in their best interests.

Below is an example of the conditions that shape the process by which a normally benevolent single parent loses empathy for her children. Joan Taylor will tread on thin ice with her kids because fatigue breaks down her defenses and her resultant helplessness draws her into emotional time warp. Joan momentarily relives moments in time when as a child she felt wounded by her parents’ empathic failures. She becomes driven by aggressive demands for reparations and uses self righteous rationalizations to retaliate for grievances collected years ago. In this emotional space Joan’s children become unwitting and reluctant actors on the stage of Joan’s morality play. Lost in her own emotional blindness Joan both abdicates and abuses her parental authority. Her children are the real victims and react accordingly.

These are unavoidable normal occurrences. The frequency with which they occur is a yardstick of our emotional courage and commitment to our children. It is also a measure of our capacities to learn about how our past haunts us, make changes to reduce our vulnerabilities to such memories and grow beyond being wounded by them. Children are very resilient to a point. How we deal with such challenges to grow in our emotional intelligence will affect our children one way or another in the long run.

Inthe example below the results are predictable. As events unfold inside Joan that shape regrettable behaviors, please notice the opportunities Joan has to gently regain control of the parental reins. Let’s see what happens.  It’s the end of a long three day weekend. Joan Taylor, a single parent of two children, Amy age 9 and Jason age 6 feels as worn out as the frayed dish towel she holds as the last dinner dishes are washed and placed in the drainer. The kids are parked in front of the television and Joan wryly remarks to herself that the dish towel becomes an extension of her right arm by the end of her weekend with the kids. Joan observes herself and momentarily ponders with puzzlement why she rigidly pushes herself so unnecessarily to wash every last dish after each meal before she moves on to the next activity. She resents the helplessness such compulsiveness engenders.

This is a painful moment for Joan. Joan’s quasi dictatorial relationship to herself is no accident as both of her parents were quite the taskmasters. She envies and resents her children who are relaxing in front of the television set understandably unfazed by their own obliviousness to neglected chores. They are kids still growing in their capacities to retain and follow instructions and lack the strategies adults use to compensate for temporary memory losses.

Joan’s understandable weariness with her role as a single parent grows more palpable as fatigue overtakes her. She becomes filled with guilt and self recriminations in reaction to feeling burdened by her children’s dependency needs. Joan’s preservation of her identity as a “good mother” requires conscious energy she can’t muster to dispute irrational beliefs she hits herself over the head with.

The stage is set for her to play the “blame game” as it’s too painful for her to acknowledge that she is the author of her own misery. All Joan needs now is a flimsy pretext to complete her transformation from responsible parent to self centered, victimized child. This process is completely invisible to her tired children who are zoned out watching television and predictably oblivious to their mother’s incipient Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde transformation.

Meanwhile, despite their mother’s request they have not packed their suitcases or cleaned up their room in preparation to return to their father’s home for the school week. Joan’s fleeting insight that she is reliving something that may create problems for her evaporates quickly. Instead of calling her own time out to retreat to her bedroom to reflect on and process what’s going on inside of her, Joan’s self righteous anger becomes a moral justification to identify with her drill sergeant father and give her kids a dose of his medicine. Joan doesn’t know what’s driving her in the moment and doesn’t want to know because she wants to gratify her vengeful desires and wouldn’t permit herself to do so if she stopped long enough about what was driving her. Joan will pay in spades as her regression to childhood will leave her depressed the rest of the evening after the kids depart.

Joan barges into Amy and Jason’s bedroom after a perfunctory knock and demands that they turn off the television and pack their bags. Joan’s emotional blindness leads to the misinterpretation that her children’s passivity means they don’t respect her. In truth, this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy only because of the disrespectful manner she approaches her children. These kids unlike their mother who feels very guilty about acknowledging what she regards to be unsavory thoughts and feelings, are very comfortable in their self centeredness and ask in unison with obvious annoyance: “Why are you being so mean? We didn’t do anything. Can’t we watch the end of this show. It’s over in 15 minutes?” Joan is so angry at herself because she knows they are right and yet, her actions that follow reflect that she’s still battling parental ghosts her children now stand in for.

For Joan, Amy and Jason remain confused inside her head with her parents who she still regards as having been unnecessarily punitive and, at the same time passive; leaving her feeling overwhelmed with personal responsibility and both shame and guilt ridden for rejecting personal responsibility as she does now. Joan holds unrealistic expectations that her kids will volunteer to help her get ready to leave. They might have but, it is still Joan’s responsibility to enlist their cooperation with tact, consideration, authority and diplomacy. Joan ensures that they behave in a manner that is pleasing to her as she wants them to help her mimic the interactions between her self and her parents from decades ago.

At first, Amy and Jason refuse to budge and do their chores. What we witness here is the domestic equivalent of management and labor locking horns at the bargaining table. Then, Joan starts yelling and uses fear and intimidation to force her kids to submit. This is an empty victory as what Joan models she certainly doesn’t want her kids to learn in relating to themselves and others. In addition, Amy and Jason are temporarily abandoned as Joan loses empathy with her kids. Their safety and security are ignored.

The moral of the story is that much of the disobedience of our children can be avoided. The buck must stop with us. It’s our responsibility to model self respect, relate to our children with respect and consideration for their dependency needs, learning styles, strengths and weaknesses, talents, and to be sensitive and responsive to their difficulties functioning when in crises or just stressed out from their own daily grinds. We must be comfortable asking politely for what we want from them, make sensible and realistic requests we can explain, listen to their responses, negotiate mutually agreeable solutions when possible and, enforce decisions with unwavering resolve, compassion and kindness when negotiations breakdown. If we do we will perform the most important service to ourselves, our children and mankind; to groom generations of leaders equipped to tackle the great social problems of the world. Enjoy this most important and meaningful mission!

Tell Me Anything But Don’t Tell Me To Stop Training(More On Addictive Relationships)

Here you come with your signature limp and stifled grimace of pain. Your stark look of disappointment suggests that ice, anti-inflammatory drugs and electro stimulation therapy have collectively done little to alleviate your demoralizing leg pains. Your doctor, the reluctant physician, knows what’s coming next and how he would like to respond. However, fidelity to his Hippocratic Oath will not permit a surrender to the impulse to run and hide underneath his desk. The first imploring words out of your mouth are: “Doc, I’ve been training for six months to run/bike/swim/ a PR in this upcoming race. I’m soooooooo close to reaching my goal. I can’t stop training now. You’ve gotta help me.”

Meanwhile, you are walking on your injured leg as if it is a poorly fitted prosthesis. Common sense dictates that you wave the white flag of frustration and disappointment, ask for a hug and then, drown your sorrows in a few pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream until you can accept a few weeks of enforced idleness. Maybe then you will seize the rare opportunity to start reading those books you never found the time to pick up. Maybe perhaps, you’ll even learn to play that instrument your parents returned decades ago when you threw it at your brother in a moment of sibling rivalry.

Between the expletives you are probably muttering: “This guy is clueless. He doesn’t understand how hard I have worked to get to this point.” Your “clueless author” would ask you to consider that if there wasn’t some part of you that didn’t want to get off the “training treadmill” then, you wouldn’t be where you are right now. Furthermore, you wouldn’t now be looking to turn your physician into a “bad guy” when he plays Devil’s Advocate and asks you: “Would you like to rest for two weeks now or be laid up for six months later?” If being stuck between a rock and a hard place be your worst nightmare please keep in mind that whatever you hope to achieve in performing at your best may not in truth be all that it’s all cracked up to be in your fantasy life.

Your physician has already figured out after the third or fourth go around with you that he is wasting his breath asking you to consider the probable consequences of abusing your body and how you would feel if such a scenario was played out to its natural and debilitating conclusion. It’s amazing how deaf we can be when we don’t want to listen to what we most need to hear. Why even recommend non weight bearing aerobics when your physician knows that to belabor the point is to risk losing you as a patient. So, how is a health care provider to deal with patients like us when we feel in our hearts that a world without pumping endorphins is like a world without sunshine?

I’m thinking specifically about the injuries sustained by those of us who believe that “more training is better,” “too much training is never enough,” and that “less is more” is reserved for lazy underachievers. By training on the edge we repudiate the time honored notions of rest and recovery. Without them, our bodies break down instead of adapting to training stress, and instead of reaping improved levels of performance, our performances diminish over time and/or we get sick and injured. So, why then do we cut off our noses to spite our faces?

The answers are many and they are not mutually exclusive. Principally, owing in part to how our personalities develop we have varying degrees of trust in processes we can’t exercise omnipotent control over, i.e. creativity, emotions and the body’s performance improvements that require rest and recovery. “Doing” is valued and “being” is not. We may move so urgently toward our desired goals so as not even to question why we are in such a rush. Then, whether we are aware of it or not, we may rebel against the internal pressures to do, do, and do more by over indulging in passive pleasures such as eating, and drinking to turn of the compulsive power switch until the rooster crows the next morning. Then, it’s back off to the races.

Some of my clients describe themselves as “slaves” to their jobs, hobbies and athletic outlets without recognizing the poignant implications of this metaphor. We may kick and scream at the suggestion that we “shut it down” for awhile. Seldom if ever do we reflect on the evidence that such dramatic refrains as: “No pain, no gain,” may be nothing more than a defense mechanism against guilt provoking wishes to “take it easy.” In truth we may be begging for firm, benevolent paternal responses from folks like our trusted physicians such as: “I don’t want to see you in my office again unless, you stay off the roads, your bikes, etc., for _____ days.

Many of us are unaware that we may harbor fears that if we do not crack the proverbial whips daily we may never muster the motivation to train again. Such self doubts may originate in childhood with well meaning parents who unwittingly transmit through words and actions: “If I weren’t here to push you, you wouldn’t get anything done.” Others may have learned early in life that one is not entitled to enjoy any aspect of one’s life if one does not pay first with a “pound of flesh.”

If you are a workaholic on and off the athletic field it may be time to ask yourself why it is that my things to do list is perpetually filled with things to do and the unfinished business keeps me running even when the business isn’t urgent or important? Maybe, it’s time to consider that “less may be more” and will result in better performances, greater enjoyment and more time to nurture multiple sources of self esteem. We may underestimate our abilities to trust the messages our inner voices communicate to us. Our bodies speak volumes. Start listening!

Single Parents And Security Blankets(More For Single Parents)

Among other things, a good marriage is a salve against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It is also a shelter from the storm of Murphy’s Law and, a safe haven of mutual support and security where we insulate ourselves from the impersonal and frightening unknowns of life as we chart our courses toward the future. Marriage is the quintessential security blanket in that it makes real the illusion that we are important and special and thus, will be cared for until death do us part. So, we venture out into a world of exciting and frightening tomorrows armed with a protective mantra, “No matter what happens everything will be alright.”

In my private practice I have observed how marital crises that eventuate in separation and divorce rip these security blankets to pieces. In best cases, the loss of a spouse may for several years leave us at least, on occasion to re-experience ourselves as young children separated from our mothers minus our security blankets. Thus we can feel ill equipped to care for ourselves let alone to take on added responsibilities as a single parent.

The dangers of not creating adequate support systems for ourselves is that we may unwittingly project our insecurities onto our children and/or wear these insecurities on our sleeves so that our children get the message: ”Please comfort mommy and daddy.” The former pitfall may instill in our children the belief that the world of relationships outside the parent-child unit are dangerous and to be avoided. The latter may turn our children into our own security blankets and overwhelm them with obligatory responsibility to assuage our fears and insecurities. In either case, the inevitable outcome is that our children will be wracked by conflict over establishing separate identities from us and moving out into the world.

To avoid falling into this trap I recommend that we develop trusted, single parent support systems whose functions will be naturally internalized over time as the seismic shocks of separation and divorce subside. This way we can learn that we are not alone, these problems are universal and finally, there is hope in building bonds to others who may guide us on the road to new and satisfying lives with our kids.