Notes

The Absence of Categories

There's a cluster of ideas I've been circling, poking and prodding and feeling like the blind men trying to describe an elephant. The core of the idea is inchoate, but somehow, all of these concepts and observations are linked.

This section is exceptionally fragmented. Bear with me.

Forums for people who deal with toxic personalities develop systems of categorization. Toxic vs. non-toxic, engulfing vs. neglecting, narcissist or histrionic or borderline or sociopath, alcoholic, junkie, pothead, pillhead. The categories both define the past ("You say he's just a social user, but hon, if he's stealing to buy drugs, he's a straight-up addict") and predict the future ("Watch out, your junkie ex's enabling mother is going to back him financially in the divorce so she can get access to your kids"). They help members understand why things happened, why their troublesome boss/boyfriend/teacher/parent/child does what they do, how to stop them from doing it again, and how to protect themselves. They make members feel better: less crazy ("It's not you, it's him"), less guilty ("He'd be an asshole no matter how good a girlfriend you were"), less out of control ("When you do X, he's going to do Y. Here's how you counter it"). They tell members how to make things better, if things can be made better. They comfort members and tell members how to get out of the situation they're in. In short, categories do everything members of estranged parents' forums need.

So why don't members of estranged parents' forums create categories for their estranged children?

Oh, they toss around words like "narcissistic" and "borderline." But their understanding of these personality disorders is sketchy, derived mostly from one another's descriptions of a web page somebody read somewhere, and rarely does any member feel the need to do real research. Their use of the concepts is sketchy, too. On forums for people dealing with the personality-disordered, members post descriptions of toxic people's behavior and ask, "Do you think this person is a narcissist?" "Is this BPD [Borderline Personality Disorder] behavior?" They often get even more specific: "Is it common for BPD's to move too fast in relationships and corner you with questions?" On forums for parents of estranged children, the same conversation can be paraphrased:

"My daughter is mean and disrespectful. Is she a narcissist?"

"Yes, she's a narcissist, just like my evil daughter-in-law."

"All estranged children are narcissists. It's because we raised them with too much self-esteem."

"It doesn't matter what label you put on her, the important thing is that she's mean and disrespectful."

A month later, the same member might entertain the thought that her daughter is borderline, or addicted to pills, or projecting her problems with her controlling boyfriend onto her mother, or just like her evil dad.

Which highlights another complication: Forum members don't appear to feel the need for classifications. They rarely have a clear diagnosis for their estranged children, and they rarely stick with a single diagnosis. They prefer what I call "soft diagnoses," a set of a couple dozen one-size-fits-all reasons for estrangement:

We spoiled them.
This generation is narcissistic.
They're punishing us for imagined "crimes."
They want to control us.
They're using us as scapegoats for their personal issues.
It's trendy to be estranged.

These reasons absolve the parent of all fault, except perhaps the fault of being too good a parent, and remove all agency; there's nothing the parent can do except wait. They're also short on psychological depth. For example, if a child is punishing their parents for imagined abuse, why is the child doing it? Why did they imagine that particular abuse? Are they suffering cognitive distortions because of borderline personality disorder or uncontrolled bipolar? If they're doing it out of a need for control, why do they feel threatened by their parents? Members rarely go past the surface.

Nor do they show much allegiance to one particular diagnosis. Often parents will agree with whatever diagnosis comes up in conversation. A thread on narcissistic millennials gets a long string of comments from people whose estrangements are due to their narcissistic millennials; a thread on children who scapegoat their parents gets a long string of agreement from many of the same people.

Weirdly, that group of people includes members whose children have hard diagnoses: formally diagnosed personality disorders or mental illness, addiction, etc. A significant minority of the members of estranged parents' forums arrive with tales of children whose disorders are a complete explanation for estrangement, but the parents seem no more certain about the cause of the estrangement than the other members. They often double dip: even when they give a clear diagnosis ("My son is bipolar and refuses to medicate"), they tack on additional diagnoses ("...and I gave him too much when he was a boy, so now he's spoiled, and he's also addicted to control and he enjoys punishing me for imagined wrongs"). They mention things that in other forums would be an immediate diagnosis ("My son is an alcoholic") but, to both themselves and the rest of the forum, it's just one more complicating factor in the unfathomable stew of nastiness that is their child's brain.

Categories in Other Forums

In most other groups whose members deal with addicts, the mentally ill, the personality disordered, etc., members:

Develop a detailed schema of the behavior expected of people with the particular disorder.
Distinguish between behaviors that can't be changed, that can be changed, and that aren't a part of the disorder.
Learn not to take disordered behaviors personally. (Addicts don't act entitled because their targets owe them, they act entitled because addiction makes them selfish.) This is a vital step in learning to cope with the disordered person.
Use the schema of expected behaviors to predict the disordered person's future behavior and develop a plan for dealing with them in the future.

Certain disorders are "hard stops" for members of other groups. They override all the disordered person's other issues. If someone is a drug addict and also can't hold down a job and has a tense relationship with his grandmother, members are likely to recommend that the grandmother reduce contact with him for a while and that the parents stop worrying about his job prospects, because nothing is going to improve until he's sober. Drug addiction is a hard stop.

Members of estranged parents' groups don't routinely do any of these things. A member will say her adult son is bipolar and refuses to take medication for it, then list off behaviors that can be expected of unmedicated bipolars as though they were her son's free choice, orchestrated to hurt her. She may give lip service to the idea that she can't have a good relationship with her son until he's medicated, but both she and the other members proceed as though advice for people with mentally healthy children is applicable to her unmedicated bipolar son. Members who have had education in dealing with addiction (say, through Al-Anon) aren't noticeably better at seeing the boundary between disease and personality.

The Most Important Thing About You Is Me

As I read parents' attempts to understand their children, I can't escape the feeling that members of estranged parents' communities define a thing by how it affects them. A daughter-in-law who makes them feel bad is a daughter-in-law who makes them feel bad. Asking them why she does what she does is like going into a clothing store and asking the staff to categorize the shirts by whether they came to the country by truck, by ship, or by plane. How are they supposed to know? Why would they care? Someone might look up companies' shipping policies on their smartphone and make some educated guesses about how a shirt was shipped, but it's not going to be a meaningful distinction for them, and they're not going to remember it the next time someone comes in looking for a shirt.

This style of thinking is reflexive, unconscious; people who think this way don't know that they think this way, and they don't know that they don't know that they think this way.
This mindset is devoid of insight, but rich in sources of pseudoinsight. Members ruminate obsessively about their children's state of mind, and mention this as proof of how deeply they think about their children's thoughts and feelings, but there's a difference between taking something as a topic and taking it as a subject. To put it another way, I can obsess for the rest of my life over the glory that is Benedict Cumberbatch without ever having an insight into the man himself.
This mindset is actively encouraged by the members. Experienced members routinely cut off other members' musings with statements like, "It doesn't matter why they did it, the important thing is that you were a good mother and they threw you away."

The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment discusses this mentality. The author, Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, uses "narcissistic" to refer not to narcissistic personality disorder, but to a family in which "the needs of the parent system [take] precedence over the needs of the children." The children's needs aren't only secondary to the parents, "but are often seriously problematic for the latter."

In the narcissistic family, the child's behavior is evaluated not in terms of what it says about what he or she may be feeling or experiencing, but in terms of its impact on the parent system. For example, in a healthy family, a child's receiving an 'F' on a report card alerts the parents to the presence of a problem. this situation is then examined in terms of the child's needs and development: is the work too hard, is the child under stress, does he need help, tutoring, support, or the like? In the narcissistic family, though, the same problem is evaluated on the basis of difficulty presented for the parent: is the child disobedient, lazy, embarrassing, or just looking for excessive attention?

In this example, the healthy family would react by expressing concern for the feelings of the child and presenting his 'F' not as a personal failure, but as a problem to be solved. In the narcissistic family, however, the reactions of the parent(s) indicate to the child that his feelings are of limited or no import. The child does not have a problem, he is a problem. [Emphasis added.]

Donaldson-Pressman says parents in narcissistic families would rather label their children than understand them. Based on my own observations, as the children grow up, the "lazy, stupid, class clown, screwup" labels Donaldson-Pressman quotes morph into "ungrateful, spoiled, selfish brats," and "he's failing because he wants attention" becomes "he won't call me because he wants to control me." Labels, yes, but uselessly generic labels; explanations, yes, but explanations with no concept of the thing they try to explain.

Notes on Categories in Estranged Parents' Forums

Absence of expected categories, including basic ones like mentally ill|addicted|in an abusive relationship.
Absence of categories like financially abusive|violent|manipulative, behaviors that the child performs toward the parent.
The deciding factor is, "How does the child make the parent feel?"
Only one answer: "Rejected, abandoned, tossed aside, grieving, insulted, angry." One answer = one category. Further categorizations are unnecessary.
- Further categorizations risk creating divisions in the support group, which is profoundly sensitive to any kind of conflict.
The first type of category is irrelevant because it describes traits inherent in the child (mentally ill, alcoholic, drawn to abusive men).
- Members of estranged parents' forums speak about their children as though they're black boxes. ("There's no understanding the incomprehensible.") What understanding of their child's mind they do have is wavering, changes constantly with the parent's mental state, and is easily overwritten by whatever ideas are current in the forum. No clear or persistent concept of the child's mindset = the child's inherent traits are neither readily observed by the parent, nor central to the parent's understanding of the relationship.
  - Even when parents ask themselves "Why does my child do what he/she does?" and make a concerted effort to analyze behavior, the analysis founders through lack of data; through lack of tools for analysis; through other members' attempts to divert the discussion away from "useless" topics and back to the parents' feelings.
  - When parents come to conclusions about their children's mental state, their deductions are so weird, paranoid, off the wall, unconnected with any known reality ("My child moved without leaving an address and then lay in wait so she could have the pleasure of calling the police on us when we found her new address and tried to visit"), that they don't predict children's future behavior. When a type of analysis doesn't produce valid results, you abandon it.
    - Counterpoint: The inaccuracy of members' deductions doesn't stop them from teaching others to make them and basing life-changing decisions on them.
The second type of category (financially abusive|violent|manipulative) is irrelevant because... Why? Because it describes behaviors emanating from the child?
- Wait, what?
- The child's behavior affects the parent, so this should be a central concern to even the most self-centered parent. What's going on?
- Theory: Different behaviors can produce the same feelings in the parent, therefore the child's specific behaviors are irrelevant.
- Theory: Parents have such difficulty recognizing patterns emanating from outside themselves that they can't sustain even categories like "children who hit their parents."
- Theory: Parents are so self-centered that they don't bother comparing their violent child to other people's violent children. They'll compare their child to another member's child during a thread discussing the other member's child, but they don't sustain the comparison across enough threads to gather a data set.
- In the end, I have no idea why members of estranged parents' forums don't use this type of category.

Exceptionally Tentative Conclusions

Labels can be a way to confine a person and deny their individuality, but labels can also be recognition of essential differences. A person with untreated borderline personality disorder, for example, views the world through a distorted lens that becomes more distorted with stress. She has trouble moderating her emotions, so her cognitive distortions and her resulting fears feed off one another, leading to explosive downspirals. Her tendency to see things in black and white means the people around her shift from angel to demon in a flicker. In short, her unpredictability is... predictable. If you want to understand your relationship with her, you have to understand her, and to understand her, you have to understand her disorder, which is partly her and partly a thing apart. Labeling her BPD strips away some of her individuality, but it also reveals the bones of her disorder, the skeleton on which her personality is shaped.

Members of estranged parents' forums resist probing for the skeleton. They prefer explanations that reflect their experience of their estranged child, rather than their estranged child's experience of herself. This is true even when their child has a medical disorder that completely explains her bad behavior. Parents prefer "soft" reasons that don't make demands on the parents' insight: My child is estranged because it's trendy. My child is estranged because I didn't spank her enough to make her respect me. (9/11 happened because terrorists hate freedom.)

These soft reasons don't result in a deeper understanding of the estrangement, much less a chance at reconciliation. So why do parents prefer them? There are a number of possibilities, starting with:

The parent genuinely lacks the ability to see any deeper.
The parent can't afford to look deeper because looking deeper makes her feel guilty, and that's the last thing she can bear.
The parent feels that she's under attack by her child, and empathizing with the child would weaken her defenses. (A result of the distorted belief that understanding equals agreement.) Some parents are indeed under attack; others are hypersensitive to conflict, to the point that they experience a child's mild remonstration as a screaming fit; and still others are so enmeshed that the child's normal individuation feels like the child is tearing away parts of the parent's being.
Authoritarian personalities feel a powerful desire to punish people who buck authority. The forums are full of authoritarian followers, who do indeed give copious and joyful demonstrations of how much they want to punish their spoiled little brats. When you're thrumming with desire to punish someone, you don't want to stop and try to identify with them. You'll lose your buzz, you'll start to feel bad about yourself, and--a serious problem for forum members--the righteous rage may be the only thing keeping you from suicidal despair.

This is doubly true in the case of parents whose children have mental health or addiction issues. Authoritarians are black-and-white thinkers, so they can easily get caught between "my mentally ill child isn't responsible for anything he does, so I have to accept all of it" and "my child is completely in control of himself, so I don't have to put up with any of it."

Updated 1/26/2016

This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is being made available in an effort to advance the understanding of psychological issues. It is believed that this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

The analyses on this page are my own opinions and should not be construed as medical advice or statements of absolute fact.