The Fallacy of Proximal Cigarette-Bumming?
Last night I was watching Monday and Tuesday’s Dr. Phil–I do all my psychological research with only the best accredited resources–and it occurred to me that there’s a phenomenon that either needs a name, or has a name and I need to know it. One guest was a young woman who lost her baby to social services in her mid-teens because, as she put it, “I stepped out to bum a cigarette.”
So. The story as presented is: When she was 15, she, her baby, her mother (also a guest), and her 12-year-old sister (in the audience) were living in their car for a while because her mother couldn’t find work. When CPS found out, they stepped in and took the kids into foster care. It wasn’t clear to me why CPS did that–drugs weren’t an issue for any of them, the mother says the kids were going to school, etc. What is clear is that CPS muffed the case royally. They put all three children into different homes, separating the teen mother and her baby and putting the 12-year-old with a foster parent who didn’t speak English. What follows is the usual mess: bouncing between placements, running away, getting back on their feet and then falling down again, court hearings, requirements, a morass of legal paperwork.
At one point the teen mother had custody of her baby, who was now 2 years 9 months old. An event happened that caused her to lose custody temporarily, and it snowballed into permanent termination of her parental rights and adoption by the baby’s foster mother. This event the young woman and her mother described as, “They said I left the baby alone. For two minutes! With a friend!”
Dr. Phil asked for more details. All the quotes are paraphrases because I can’t replay the clips right now, but the mother and daughter said the daughter was at a friend’s with the baby, and she left the baby with the friend so she could run out to get a drink from the corner store–Dr. Phil interjected, “The police report says you were buying cigarettes.” “Yes, okay, fine, I was buying cigarettes. I’m a smoker. it’s legal.” She stepped out to buy cigarettes, or bum a cigarette, and a police officer saw her and said, “How old are you?” She was underage; he got suspicious; he arrested her and called CPS, which took the baby. The mother and daughter had a couple different theories about why he was on her immediately, involving various people with an interest in getting the daughter’s “beautiful baby” away from her so CPS could make a ton of money from the adoption.
Other details that the mother and daughter were less forthcoming about: It was a school day; the daughter was skipping school (“because I wanted to be home with my baby”), which had been a chronic problem; the daughter had custody of the baby on condition that she attend school. A detail contributed by the adoptive mother: The daughter was having psychological problems because she had borderline personality disorder. Evidently this was an official diagnosis, not the adoptive mother’s diagnosis, because neither mother nor daughter disputed it.
The picture that emerged, as tangled and gap-ridden as the timeline was, was a teen mother who couldn’t take care of both herself and her baby, and who was on a predictable downward spiral. CPS chose to save mother and child separately rather than together. A painful call, but a good one, at least for the baby: She had only one foster home, with a woman who adopted her as soon as she was available. The mother has since finished school, is working, has an apartment, and has had another child. She’s on her feet.
She’s also borderline as hell. Just like her mom.
Throughout the two-part show, both mother and daughter referred to the cigarette-bumming event as the reason the daughter lost custody. The terms they used changed as Dr. Phil dug down into the story: “Because I left my baby with a friend for two minutes.” “Because I stepped out to buy soda.” “Because I stepped out to bum a cigarette.” But their sense of cause and effect didn’t alter a whit. Ignore the downward spiral the daughter was on; ignore all the hearings she’d been through where she was told what she needed to do to keep custody; ignore everything except the one thing the daughter was doing at that very second.
That’s the phenomenon that needs a name.
The Fallacy of Proximal Cause? Cigarette-Bumming?
ETA: Blog posts the birth mother wrote about the show before and after watching the show.
ETA 2: Miscellaneous quotes from the show. These aren’t from the same exchange.
The birth mother, Olivia: “I asked my friend if he would watch Evelyn really quick while I go across the street to the Jack-in-the-Box. A police officer stopped me and asked me how old I was. The next thing I know, I’m in the back of a cop car.”
The adoptive mother, Jyllian: “Olivia’s parental rights were taken away because she had been leaving the group home. She was diagnosed bipolar and borderline personality disorder.”
Add a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
I can’t yet phrase it, but this has to do with fundamental misunderstanding of cause and effect. Picking only what happened directly before the CPS involvment as a cause, and ignoring the long-term situation. Emotional immaturity, basically.
With an adjustable focus. When it came to the daughter, only what she was doing at the moment mattered. When it came to the police officer, conspiracies were involved. Ignore the fact that she was a school-aged girl in public during school hours. (And getting cigarettes, which AFAIK isn’t legal under 18.) The lens is widened or narrowed depending on what makes them look the best.
An aperture fallacy, then? Expanding or narrowing the FOV for the perceived cause and effect?
Given how much GLADOS sounds like a toxic parent, “aperture fallacy” is apt.
Do I get any cake?
I think we all know the answer to this.
Relating this to estranged parents, this seems similar to the cases where parents say “My child estranged me because I insulted their dog” or because “we had a fight at dinner one night” or something like that. The recent incident may have been the final straw that broke the camel’s back, or opened the camel’s eyes, but I can guarantee it was not THE reason. I think the person who is claiming they were picked on is trying to make the other party seem as irrational as possible. They may be stating facts, but WAY out of context.
Well, of course! It isn’t like anything had been wrong before the Curious Incident of the Dog at Dinnertime!
Preeeecisely.
Maybe something like the Microscopic Focus Fallacy? It’s pretty common when abusers try to invalidate their victims. They insist on the victim providing an example of a time they were abused and then focus down on that one incident as if it’s the only complaint that the victim has. They will then argue and nitpick at details for as long as they possibly can to exhaust the victim and try to get them to minimize the event. In the end, the abuser may or may not concede that this ONE thing was bad, but clearly it’s just one thing and now that they’ve talked it over they can move on now. When the victim tries to say “no, that’s just one example of many” they abuser will start the cycle over, demanding extremely pointed specifics and working that one thing over again until the victim is too exhausted to continue because submitting every incident to the abuser’s Microscope takes too long and never leads to the abuser understanding or accepting the larger picture and context in which each event happened.
This is really interesting. I didn’t know this was a thing, despite it being something I experienced from both my mother and my ex.
I will say that the primary emotion I feel at the thought of dealing with any conflict with either is exhaustion, so this technique likely works to also condition a victim against saying anything.
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s something that has any sort of official name, but I have been caught in this cycle all too often. It’s like trying to nail jello to a wall. My mother gave me some sort of false hope that she was interested in listening to and trying to understand my claims that she and my dad had been severely emotionally abusive upon my coming out of the closet as a lesbian (later transman). But any time I would try to explain why their behavior was unacceptable, I’d get sucked into the unending microscope-trap of “give me a specific example” followed by a solid hour of back-and-forth about whether or not she said exactly those words and whether I had just misunderstood and how she doesn’t really remember it happening the way I described and how actually she really meant something else and I just was twisting her words, and how I misled her and made her do it, etc etc. In the end, she would usually say “okay, well I’m sorry I did that one thing, but it’s not like that makes me abusive.” At which point I’d say “well, no, but it wasn’t just that one thing. That was one thing of literally hundreds of things that all added up to severe abuse!” Which of course just brought me back to square one: “well you’ll have to give me an example. I just don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Of course, being a person with a life, I didn’t have 8 hours every day to spend on the phone trying to rehash every single event I could remember that exemplified her behavior. Besides which, my memory of the time that I was all but falsely imprisoned in their home (from which a lot of the most egregious examples occurred) is not that great. I remember some things very clearly, but others are lost in this horrible haze of being unable to sleep or eat properly and being frozen in this dizzy, altered state of mind from emotional and physical exhaustion. That’s the thing about emotional abuse: you can’t boil it down to just one or two incidents. It’s a pattern of behaviors that strip down your humanity and sense of self. Trying to sum it up in one example is impossible.
But of course, that’s why abusers demand an “example” from you. Because they know, if they’re given the opportunity to argue with and dismiss your narrative, they win. It’s chillingly effective. I always stepped away from those conversations with her, doubting myself. Was I really abused? Was what happened really as bad as I feel it was? Am I just making mountains out of molehills? That’s the point. Abusers know perfectly well (when it suits them) that abuse is not just a single incident but a pattern of behaviors that damages and destroys the victim. They employ The Microscope because they know it will invalidate the victim’s story and trivialize their experience while the abuser gets to pretend that they were “just trying to understand” and play the part of the reconciler. The victim is then given the choice to either accept reconciliation despite the fact that the abuser has not changed, or to refuse to reconcile and then be painted as being unreasonable and bitter by the abuser.
There is no winning the Microscope game, in my experience. I finally tried to circumvent it by sending my mom a loooong letter detailing all of the patterns of abuse and their repercussions in full. The response, of course, was no better. I was blamed for being cruel, my mom claimed the letter said things it didn’t (she didn’t realize I had saved a copy for myself), I was accused of making her suicidal, and I was told not to talk about it anymore because “that discussion is just not productive.” The next time I tried to bring anything up from it? I got the Microscope again, as if nothing in the letter had ever been written. It’s like clockwork.
Welp. That was a long reply. Hope maybe something in it is helpful for understanding your own situation?
It is. I have some processing to do. Both of them are in my thoughts right now (custody litigation in which my mother has involved herself). I may be back with a longer response. Thank you for describing your experience.
Now that I think about it, my daughter has described this being done by ex, specifically as to appearance and expression. She’s feminine now but was experimenting with androgynous presentation (there’s a lot of fluidity in that generation, at least in our area and among my daughter’s friends). She cut her hair short and my ex told her it was ugly because she looked like a boy. When she brought it up later as an example of how he was disrespectful to her, he employed this technique and then listed all the things he had “done” for her (of course, the list was comprised of the standard roof over head, food, etc., which are the bare minimum to be expected of a parent). Just a single comment, right? Totally ignoring that he sent the message that she is ugly based on who she is, i.e., the very essence of her is ugly because her essence included being gender nonconforming. But boys aren’t ugly just because they are boys. It is only because she was a girl presenting boyishly. It was such a huge huge message, but dismissed as a one-off, because as her father he has the right to comment on her appearance (he’s remarried ladies, so too bad, he’s taken). Not that that is a great message either.
Of course this was complicated by the fact that my daughter couldn’t fully articulate why the comment hurt her so much. She’s smart, but the abstract concepts of gender aren’t anything she’s thought about in depth. She’s just exploring at this point based on how she feels. So she really has no response except for, “you hurt my feelings,” but when pressed, she has no ability to actually explain why. Ultimately, the why underlying that statement shouldn’t matter, but it does to the abuser and they come out of it looking like the “thinker” rather than the “feeler,” when that distinction is neither important nor honest. This has triggered some interesting thoughts about things so thank you. I’m still working through my interactions with him while co-parenting.
I’m sorry that you and your daughter are dealing with this. What an ass! I’m not surprised that your daughter is struggling to explain the hurt… because there’s really nothing else to explain besides that it was hurtful. That might seem simplistic, but honestly, there is absolutely no reason to make a statement like “your hair is ugly” besides just to hurt someone, to undermine their confidence, and to assert control over them. It is indicative of the malevolence he was feeling towards her and his utter disregard of her feelings.
I bristle a little extra at this because, as a transgender person, I feel like I can really empathize with the discomfort and shame that can result from people criticizing or belittling your gender or expression. He likely targeted her gender presentation precisely because he thought that she might feel uncomfortable trying to defend herself on this subject due to the stigma or shame that can often exist for young people experimenting with gender or gender expression. It’s possible that I’m reading too much into it since I wasn’t there. But the pattern feels very familiar to things I’ve experienced from people who knew they could use my insecurities, shame, and fear surrounding my identity to exploit me.
Asking for basic human respect was always treated as unreasonable, as if I was being overly sensitive, needy and demanding by just asking that people not persistently demeaning and scoffing at my identity. Because of the persistent cultural narratives backing that up, it was very easy to succumb to these messages. I’d keep thinking “maybe I’m being unreasonable. Maybe I don’t have a right to feel offended or hurt since I’m being so inconvenient by being something other than what is expected.” Of course, that’s all bullshit, but it’s very hard to avoid internalizing it. I’ve heard from many other transgender or gender non-conforming people who have felt the same way. Abusive people know this and they exploit it.
Sometimes it helps just to hear someone say “it’s totally reasonable for you to feel upset about this.” Abusive people want us to be unable to trust ourselves (which is of course why they apply The Microscope). Having my wife and my therapist combating those messages made a huge difference for me.
No, you are not reading too much into it. He is very attached to traditional masculinity. He expected me to defer to him on all things in marriage and he told me that us being married meant that I had to have sex with him whenever he demanded it. Having his masculinity undermined is an enormous source of insecurity so it’s probably natural that he would immediately see that as a vulnerable point in another person.
That’s a great point there.
I appreciate how you decided to do a blog post about me, and my life, while linking my blog which I have taken down from all the hate I have been receiving from your viewers. Is this what you call psycho analysis? I have never met you in my life, yet you’re writing about me. Wow.
This is the real story, that you clearly didnt know about because, like I said, you have no idea who I am.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN7fSN6xd-w
I’m sorry you felt the need to take your blog down, and I hope you can return to it later. Evelyn will appreciate it someday.
In the Google cached versions of the two linked posts, taken on August 23 and 24, I didn’t see any comments tied to my blog or any commenters I recognized as regulars here. That said, if there’s a comment you suspect was inspired by my blog, send it to me and I’ll take measures.
I am sorry about the hate, but honestly, I think it’s much more likely that it’s the fact that you were featured on a very prominent television show that played into that, rather than a fairly small blogger writing a blog post about your appearance on the very prominent television show.
Yep, that was my thought. Her blog got a spate of comments after the first airing, after the rerun (when I saw it), and last week after the show ran in Australia. She said in the sidebar that she’d been on Dr. Phil, so her blog was easy to find, even with nothing but first names to go on.
I’m sorry you got hate, and I’m sorry I missed the posts. I would have certainly liked to get your perspective on the situation. I don’t really do videos. I don’t have the patience for them and I would have preferred to read the explanation.
For what it’s worth, it doesn’t sound like something the regulars here would do. I know for me, I feel comfortable posting here because it feels pretty safe and there’s a level of discourse here that is really helpful to me in that it stays pretty abstract/clinical. We’re not a super emotional or impulsive bunch here, that I’ve noticed. I certainly don’t feel anything like “hate” for anyone like you. I feel badly that you were dealt whatever hand you got that resulted in you losing your child. That is sad and tragic, no matter the reason behind it. I’ve looked over the discussion above, and it seems typically (for us, anyway) abstract and focused on the behavior and not on you, yourself. I wish the best for you and hope that your life has improved and will continue to do so from here on out.
I cried and loudly agreed with almost everything you said. Can we talk? I’m the grandma like your mom and haven’t seen my grandson in 3 years and the adoptive person promised us we would be able to be in Jaxons life and as soon as adoption was final she disappeared.. girl, there’s too much similarities to even list here but here’s the BIGGEST one of all… DCS kidnapping IS REAL . I’m so broken hearted my life has gone to severe depression and Jaxons mom, my daughter, her life is destroyed. DCS destroys lives the lives and families that they should have helped. “ family reunification “ is a bunch of bullshit. I realize this is a response to your post from quite a few years ago and maybe no one will read it idk but it feels damn good to say something.. respond to someone who knows so well what this is like. Ignore the ignorant judgy people. God bless you Olivia and your family. I sure would love to talk to your mom as well. Grandma to grandma. I feel so incredibly alone. How do I get back to what I used to be.. how do I undo the damage DCS did to me , my family .. sorry for rambling. This is completely fresh and I’m still got tears in my eyes. Is there hope for us? It’s been absolutely traumatizing since Jaxon was kidnapped November 22 2016 from his safe loving home .. ……… no one will probably even read this but I’m scared to put my name. I’m still terrified.
Not sure if this is the best place to comment on this, but since this post is about logical fallacies, here we go. On one of the estranged parent forums today, someone posted a link to the story about the UCLA undergrad who pre-emptively threatened her roommates regarding bed & closet assignments. The poster used this as an example of the Millenial generation & their entitled attitude, which, apparently is why she can’t get along with her kids. She completely missed the fact that this story has gone viral specifically because it is so shocking and unusual. “Hey, let’s take this complete outlier and make her the poster child for that generation, thereby letting me off the hook.”
And it was an email communication between her and her two roommates, who don’t seem particularly entitled. So right there it only represents a third of the Millenials that are part of that story.
In any case, it seems like a lot of us are Gen X. I’m really close to being a Boomer.
Apparently, the skewed pop sociology on narcissism [Tom Wolfe; Lasch; Twenge and Campbell] says that the culture (and therefore individuals’ personalities) have been getting more narcissistic for decades. So “entitled” and the like are easy insults, ready-made for anyone to throw at members of a younger generation, confident they’ll stick. >> And even think it will stick to the *whole* generation as a generalization, as you pointed out, even though “‘minority of the worst’=whole group” fallacy is patent.
I’m willing to believe the culture has gotten more narcissistic, but it affects everyone in the culture, not just the youngest members. Let me tell you, it ain’t the Millennials who made “glamma” a word or invented grandparent showers.
On a darker note, the estranged parents who say they cut off their own parents don’t report that their parents hounded and harassed them. Are they omitting that part of the story, or has there been a shift in how gracefully people take rejection?
I find many Boomers to be far more entitled, with all their talk of bootstraps when their opportunities were undeniably better than for the generations that followed. Even on that board, the population seems to be primarily Boomer, with the kids mostly Gen X. So many of them talk trash about Millenials, when their kids don’t even fall into that category.
Probably not coincidentally, the latest burst of skewed research was millennial (2007 on) – Twenge and Campbell’s. They reduced narcissism to inflated self-image. Said it could be created by child-rearing: fostering “self-esteem” regardless of the kid’s behavior. Very broad brush-strokes. (Completely missing the fragile ego of narcissists. The inability to admit wrongdoing because they can only be spotless and wonderful or evil and worthless, no middle ground.)
Perhaps it was harder for their parents to hound and harass them once they’d managed to leave home.
No mobile phone or possibly landline. Maybe fewer people with their own car. Most importantly, no internet.
Ah – remember the good old days when you could just take the phone off the hook if you didn’t want to be disturbed, and you would have no idea who tried to call in the meantime?
The “pets before relationships” business they’re harping on now makes me roll my eyes. Many of the members now say that if they could do it all over again, they wouldn’t have kids, and not a few of them have pets who are their kid substitutes. If they now think having kids was a mistake, why be upset that their kids learned from their mistakes?
Right now I’m just trying to figure out how one of them ended up on the “askgaybros” subreddit.
HA HA HA!!!
…The hell?
Maggie, please link. We must know.
I’m not going to post the link because it is to one of those forums. It’s the thread “some people get it.” It might be gone by the time you read this as I suspect the all powerful one there reads this blog.
It’s still there. The comments are meh–pretty much what you’d expect, happiness that the forum pushed the guy to spend a token couple of days with the parents who made him miserable.
It’s the thread titled “What will consequences be to THEM??” that has my jaw dropping. They’re discussing what consequences their kids will face in the future for being estranged, the assumption being that serves them right, their own kids will be estranged from them. The members also assume their kids are in denial about the real causes of the estrangement. Here’s a game for you, especially if you can see the Google-cached versions of the old website: Pick out which members are themselves estranged from their parents.
Yes, the glee with which the posters await consequences (which seemingly haven’t materialized for a lot of their kids) is disconcerting. Unconditional love and all of that.
I do have the reddit thread bookmarked if that happens though. They just really really don’t get reddit, I think. They seem to think it’s a site for estranged kids so I have a feeling they search it/include it in their search terms, without understanding the concept of it generally.
Astonishing. Well, off to Google “how deep the rabbit hole” I go.
Quite deep. I waybacked the page. The hatred in the comments is astonishing.
Because there’s a significant difference to a person’s pride between “I made a mistake,” and “you made a mistake.” One is an accusation, the other is not.