Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: October 26, 2020 02:26PM
Oh boy, you stumbled on Alice Mueller/Miller. She's the bomb.
From the 1950s through the 1980s two or three different people/groups stumbled from very different vantages on what are now known as the personality disorders: psychopathy, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, and avoidant personality disorder.
The first was John Bowlby, who in the 1950s was researching adolescent psychopaths and discovered they had virtually all had the same childhood. [Compare Trump's infancy.] Deciding that that childhood experience--separation from parents during the first 2-3 years of life due to hospitalization, maternal depression, drug abuse or other factors--increased the frequency of adolescent and adult dysfunction massively, Bowlby fought a fierce battle against Britain's hospital establishment to test what would happen if you let the parents interact daily with the isolated kids. The results were so spectacularly good that the experiment was not completed: the hospitals pre-emptively switched to a child-friendly system throughout the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Bowlby is one of my greatest heroes: he literally changed how pediatrics function throughout the Anglophone world.
He went on to research this phenomenon in great detail and thus engendered "Attachment Theory," the notion that how you treat a child in its first three years determines how your human relationships will function throughout life. The field expanded dramatically and produced incredible predictive and explanatory power. There is a great book on Attachment Theory, written by a psychologist/expert in the field called Robert Karen. I strongly recommend his book, Becoming Attached, to you. It's a simply written but highly regarded volume that will break your heart many times. I gave a dentist friend a copy of the volume and he came back and said, "now I know why my family is as it is and why I am as I am." It is the Rosetta Stone of human social behavior.
Meanwhile there was a frumpy psychologist in Switzerland who independently made many of the same discoveries. That would be Alice Miller. She noticed commonalities in people who had had similar backgrounds and reached some very powerful conclusions. In The Drama of the Gifted Child she noted that German parents taught their kids to use the toilet at very young ages, made them start reading by 3 or 4, etc., and that while the kids could do that the psychological damage was profound and permanent. In The Body Never Lies, she says much what Bowlby did: that trauma early childhood create brain patterns that dominate the child's later life even if the mind has no memory of those events. If you look at her list of books, you'll see several that will appeal.
There are elements of her analysis that she presents from time to time as asides that I at first found eyebrow-raising. For instance, she said that Nazism was a result of abusive child-rearing techniques. I thought the connection to national politics was liberal self-indulgence. But as I read more of her work, I realized she was on to something. There are differences in child-rearing techniques between different societies. As Bowlby's acolytes discovered, in Kenya children breastfeed until age six or seven or eight and quit when they want. Ask a Kenyan if a kid is a bad kid and she will answer, "how can a kid be bad?" The point being that if the child is given a sufficiently loving and supportive experience, they simply don't become what Westerners would call narcissists and psychopaths.
What Miller was saying was that many of the common child-rearing techniques employed in the Germanic cultures contributed to Nazism. Parental distance, "seen but not heard" demands, etc., produced adults who were much more alienated and self-harmful than in French and Italian societies and much more inclined towards larger movements in which the individual could find meaning. Expressed that way, the point makes sense. To a significant extent your culture determines your childhood, which determines your adult life.
You can see where I am going with this. I believe that Mormonism changes the way people parent their children, that that results in systemic problems for Mormon adults, and that the damage is passed on from generation to generation. Like you (but at less vertiginous heights) my families have long been Mormon and, in my view, suffer from Mormon practices that caused systemic and predictable damage to both the families and the individuals.
That will make sense to a man of your emotional sensitivity and intelligence. With you in particular in mind, I couldn't recommend Miller's books more highly--and the same is true of Robert Karen's seminal Becoming Attached.
https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Attached-First-Relationships-Capacity/dp/0195115015/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Robert+Karen&qid=1603736162&s=books&sr=1-1