There is no way to know whether my incipient acting out precipitated my parents’ judgment of me as the “problem” child, or whether my early unconscious perceptions that I wasn’t good enough for them spurred my anger and acting out. These family dynamics evolved dialectically, each influencing the other directly and indirectly, until both of them became “true.” Like all self-fulfilling prophesies, this scenario was the product of an interaction between beliefs and behaviors, wherein how a situation or person is characterized evokes attitudes and actions, which bring that characterization to fruition. Like a snowball rolling downhill, as the process continues, it gathers speed and momentum, going faster and becoming harder to stop.
“It takes dynamite to get me up
Too much of everything is just enough”
JOHN BARLOW, I NEED A MIRACLE, GRATEFUL DEAD
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Everyone has a certain personality style that includes core traits. When these constitutionally endowed qualities combine with the roles we adapt in our family system, it contorts the lens through which we see ourselves and we get a distorted view of who we are. This misshapen self-perception impacts how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world.
We learn to view ourselves in a way that mirrors how others seem to view and treat us. Unconditional positive regard refers to the elemental acceptance and emotional support of a person regardless of what he or she may say or do. It describes the simple but potent actions, in words, attitudes, and deeds, of accepting someone for who he or she truly is—with all of his or her mistakes and imperfections. Carl Rogers, the founder of Client-Centered Therapy—a humanistic approach that undergirds many contemporary forms of counseling and psychotherapy—considered unconditional positive regard requisite to healthy psychological development and made the therapeutic application of it a cornerstone of his model of helping people.
For most of us, the acceptance and positive regard granted us by others has been conditional. In other words, they are commonly attached to various conditions of “worth.” Growing up we were shown acceptance and positive regard when we demonstrated that we were somehow “worthy,” rather than unconditionally because we deserved it simply by virtue of our humanity. Many of us have had the experience of getting positive attention, acceptance, affection, and love if, and sometimes only if, we behaved to the satisfaction of others.
Because we have natural human needs for acceptance and positive regard, the conditions under which they are given exert a persuasive influence. We tend to mold ourselves into shapes determined by family and social expectations—expectations that may or may not align with our best interests. Over time, this results in conditional positive self-regard/self-esteem, where we may like or even accept ourselves only if we meet the standards others have applied to us. And since these standards are generally disconnected from our individual needs and differences, often we find ourselves unable to meet them or unwilling to accommodate them, and in turn, unable to maintain a coherent sense of self-worth.
Having to hide a part of oneself in order to be accepted and considered good enough on a consistent basis is a form of emotional rejection and abandonment. D. W. Winnicott was a British pediatrician turned psychoanalyst who wrote extensively about this process and how it can affect the way people relate to themselves and others. According to Winnicott, the need to effectively dance to the tunes of others, especially primary caregivers early in life—in denying our own genuine individual needs—obstructs the development of a healthy and congruent “true self,” and results in the formation of a “false self.”
The false self can be compliant, reacting to environmental demands by accepting them willingly and uncritically, or rebellious, opposing, and aggressively rejecting those demands. In either of these configurations, a false self creates an inauthentic set of relationships, even though they have every appearance of being real. Because this is a wholly unconscious process, the false self comes to be mistaken for the true self by others, and even by oneself. Although this false self persona serves a useful defensive purpose, it becomes an enduring mask, obscuring our real nature and creating considerable internal conflict (often underneath the surface of conscious awareness). It can also greatly increase one’s vulnerability to the significant psychosocial problems. Did someone say addiction?
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I was in fifth grade when the Nassau County police visited Vernon Elementary School, going classroom to classroom with a large display case filled with different types of drugs, all neatly laid out and labeled. We were treated to all of the horror stories steeped in the zeitgeist of the late 1960s. I promised myself that day I would NEVER do drugs—any of them. Bit by bit and substance by substance that promise—which I absolutely meant at the time—disintegrated. I started drinking toward the end of sixth grade, rationalizing that alcohol was different, and that I wouldn’t ever use “drugs.” By seventh grade I was smoking pot.
However risk-laden the path I was on might have been already, seventh grade marked a turning point into darker territory. The three local elementary schools fed into Oyster Bay Junior High School, which placed students in one of four levels based on a combination of grades and standardized test scores. “Honors” was the top of the line, for the brightest kids; “College” was the designation for those considered above average; average students were placed in “Regents,” and then there was a level for kids who were assessed as being below average. It was a curious form of academic segregation—students attended classes almost exclusively within their designated level.
There were approximately three hundred kids in our seventh grade, and only seventeen of us were placed in Honors. I found myself in the midst of the nerdiest, geekiest kids in the entire grade. Even though some of them were friends from elementary school, and as a group they were certainly nice enough, I was in shock; surely there had been a mistake—I didn’t belong there! Most of my close friends were placed in Regents, with a few in College. My sense of being different and of not fitting in discovered a new source of nourishment.
I spent the school year proving to myself and everyone else that I wasn’t like my brainiac classmates, culminating with getting caught in possession of a Scotch-filled water pistol. I created enough havoc that at the conclusion of the school year I was “invited” to leave the public school system—an exceedingly rare occurrence in 1972.
In eighth grade I became acquainted with pills, notably barbiturates. It was also during eighth grade that I was introduced to the wonderful world of opioids, by my mother. We had gone to visit my aunt and uncle for a long holiday weekend when I came down with a skull-imploding headache. Over-the-counter pain relievers had no effect. The pain was so searing and unremitting that my mother decided to give me half a Percodan. As the adults left to go out for the evening, she left the prescription bottle on the night stand next to me with instructions that if the pain didn’t get better I could take another half a pill.
I was still in the infancy of my drug use, but I knew enough to know that if half a pill could be helpful, than