Three Legged Stool

[I wrote this essay two years ago; it’s alternately pleasing and chagrin-ifying to read it now. Lots of healing waters have gone under the bridge since then. Enjoy!]

My name is Ben, and I've been enmeshed. At forty-eight years old I don't know if I'll make it out in time. I'm trying hard, because I'm responsible for someone else now too. 

That’s us

I spent eighteen years with my parents in a psychic igloo, taking care of their emotional needs, and providing them with entertainment. As they grow frail now and are most in need of me, I find I can no longer perform my role. The curtain goes up to an empty stage. I don't know exactly why I can't do it anymore, I just know that one day I could not suit up. 

I know they love me; they are elderly and time grows short. I wanted to unravel the reasons for the mess of feelings I have about my folks, but I find they won’t unravel. That would be too orderly, too rational. No, my relationship with them is like a sticky invisible web, devious in the way the attempts to escape it further ensnares me. Enmeshes me, even. 

There is no way to extract God and Born Again Christianity from the mesh, for one thing. It permeates all; it’s the protein that forms the web itself. My parents’ biographies too, those are inextricable. The stories they told me of the old days were the mythology that gave meaning to my life. They suffered so much. It was really the least I could do to understand the reasons behind their volcanic moods and unmeetable shifting standards and their thorough reliance on shame and banishment as effective behavior modifiers. 

I found if I could keep them in a good mood, my life was easier. This meant constant emotional meteorology on my part. It’s not that they ever asked me to do this; quite to the contrary. They constantly extolled the virtues of plain talk and square dealing, and being truthful and telling things like they are. Except that in practice, any rebellious thoughts were punished with overt hostility followed by emotional banishment. Noah put two of all the animals on the ark, eh? You’ll agree he did unless you like to look at the inside of your room until you get a driver’s license.  

By the time I’d been doing this for twelve years or so, It became literally unthinkable to do anything else. It’s just who I was with them. And I was with them all the time. It felt like work, pretending to believe in God. Pretending everything. I never really broke out of my dynamic with them. I went off to college. They stayed they same. I talked to them about things I was learning. None of it sounded like Born Again Christianity. They smacked me down. I remembered my lines, and smacked myself for improvising. Back to the Pacific Theater of World Ward Two, a reliable source of pleasant conversation. For thirty years. Then I turned to stone. I want to turn into myself.

***

I came across the concept of Enmeshment on the cover of a book at a twelve-step meeting. Then it was called ‘Co-dependency.' 

'Enmeshment' was a term that came along later. In between coffee and cigarettes on a break I asked my fellow twelve-stepper what it meant. It sounded awful, something only a weak-minded person would allow themselves to endure. I am a rugged individualist and I am a red-blooded man. I am not at all in any way the sort of person to get involved in the kind of trouble that needs so many self-help books to get out of. 

But it turns out I am exactly that sort of person, and I am in exactly that type of trouble, and it does in fact take exactly that many self-help books to get out of it. Ouch. Some days I think I am why they invented the word 'Chagrin.'

I don't remember exactly the answer my fellow traveler gave, but it would have been a parking lot version of this definition from Wikipedia:

"…families where personal boundaries are diffused, sub-systems undifferentiated, and over-concern for others leads to a loss of autonomous development."

Bah, what shameful lack of dignity would lead to all that, I thought? I thought differently later as my marriage fell apart. That was for sure a teachable moment for me. ‘Enmeshment’ sounded a wee little tiny bit like something I could relate to, but I didn't really understand the definition when I looked it up. I learned to read slowly from my folks, to not go on until I understood each part. That's how they read the Bible. 

That's how we do it in my family, the three of us.

"Personal Boundaries are Diffused"

Personal Boundaries…that's a nice idea. Here's how I understand them:

Let's say we have two folks living together. Those folks might sometimes do things together, and then sometimes each of her own accord they do things separately. They may see eye to eye on some things, and on others have different views. They each have different notions of what's private and what's not, and what's annoying and what's not, but in general they attempt to at least give some thought to their housemate.

Something like that would be good 'personal boundaries', right? Regardless, it would have been explicitly rejected as a flat out assault on the family. For starters we were Born Again Christians, an offshoot of evangelical protestantism. It is less commonly heard about now, but it had its day in the sun.

Only the Born Again will enjoy an eternity in the presence of God. All others will suffer an eternity of separation from God and damnation in hell. 

Baby Boomers are getting a bad rap these days, but the ones I knew were raised by the starved and feral survivors of the Dust Bowl and should have some slack cut for them. 

Their psyches were so brutalized they didn't know which way was up. They regarded children as sinful work animals made of modeling clay, sometimes fun to play with. That's how my parents started out in life. They had no baseline of human treatment to guide them. They tried with me, and they made a mess in some ways.

It would be too hasty by far to pathologize an entire religion based on that. I think it's more accurate to think of it a different way: 

If the idea of boundaries is foreign to a person, Born Again beliefs give that person ample rationale for going ahead and barging right on in to someone else's mind, whether they like it or not. 

"Sub-Systems Undifferentiated"

If the three of us were the family, then I must have been the prime subsystem. My father and I, we were a subsystem, my mother and I, we were another. My father and mother a subsystem with each other. Was I undifferentiated? It's a word that appears to have an obvious meaning that I as an educated person am meant to know. Undifferentiated.

I think in my case it means something like 'Did I have my own separate identity outside my identity with my folks?' Separate identities, that’s how I would put it. 

I had so many separate identities it become a problem when I was around too many people who each know their own Ben. Those Bens were all part of me, and none of them were all of me.

I overheard a classmate's mother at a school play rehearsal one evening: "Benji's parents are so strict with him that it's made him totally two-faced." Hey lady, yeah, but in the first place, Ouch, and in the second place it pretty well wrecks my whole two-faced strategy for you go around talking about it.

I was two-faced because the only way to live in anything like peace was to keep my folks happy. They just would not tolerate opinions different than theirs, nor behavior that strayed from the narrow, winding, and rocky path, nor an attitude that betrayed anything connected with the family of responses broadly known by my people as “Sass.”

I learned well. I learned what kinds of entertainer they each liked me to be, and what kinds of attitudes they loved to see reflected in me. I repeated back the various family myths. I listened with sympathy and understanding to the tales of their own woebegone childhoods of abuse and neglect. They used them to explain themselves when they were aware they'd got out of hand.

I was grateful they treated me so well, so very much better than they were treated. Yet still they assured me they loved and cherished their own parents so much, after they'd grown up and learned to appreciate why it all had to happen. Yes, yes, I'm getting the clear idea that I should be progressing along those same lines. Thank you for the notes.

And so I performed simultaneously for two audiences on one stage, seven nights a week, matinee shows on weekends. I was an only child, you see. There was no understudy, and no scene partner to help me prepare, and yet the show must go on. That sounds so victimy no matter how many ways I rewrite it. I’m just going to own it. My psyche was damaged by all this, and I feel victimized. There’s no healing from the damage until I admit I’ve been hurt.

I had an onstage face for parents, teachers, and preachers, and a backstage face for my friends. My backstage face was the opposite of the onstage face in every way I could contrive, like drama masks. If onstage Ben was always cheerful, backstage Ben was a moody brooder. If onstage Ben never used slang language, backstage Ben said the most objectionable things he could contrive.

Even the most dedicated performer grows sullen and resentful over time when the audience just keeps demanding curtain calls and never takes the night off. "Because of them I have to stay in this wardrobe and makeup all the time, and I'm always having to hit my marks." It's just wearing, and one craves any chance to relax. Again, poor me, but please note my admirable fortitude.

My only real complaint against the lady at the rehearsal was that she did me an injustice. I had more than two faces but less than three. I had my onstage face, my backstage face and my nostage face. That was me when I was alone, finally. No one to perform for, no face, no persona. Just me. Whoever that might be.

Were our sub systems undifferentiated? Hard for me to say. If they were differentiated, it’s because I split into a different Ben for each subsystem. The subsystem that was supposed to be just Ben, that one was neglected.

"Over-concern for others leads to a loss of autonomous development"

Well yeah, that's the point. I wasn't really meant to develop autonomously. "Train up a child in the the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it."  That Bible verse that struck fear in the hearts of all us kids back then. 

The religion I was part of did one of the most important jobs of any religion: they taught us how to be human.

I don't really like the recipe they gave, but there was one, and it was the parents' job to mix and knead the ingredients into us and cook us until we were done. As Born Again Christians, to an alarming extent, we were meant to think only certain kinds of thoughts and not others. You can't see thoughts, can you? The only way you can examine thoughts is through interrogation. Autonomous development was rejected out of hand and it was the goal of the close, tight-knit community to take, sink, burn, or destroy any intellectual vessels that might be attempting to smuggle in forbidden thoughts.

I hear an echo between that thought-controlling dynamic and the soul-saving dynamic. I think it is fair to say both give a person with a weak sense of boundaries plenty of reason to go ahead and curb-stomp them.

The very safety and soul of your child is at stake, and of course they're not going to like it! Does a dog like to be trained! No! But are they better off in the long run? Yes! Do you love your child more than your dog? Yes! So why are you going to let your child grow up like a stray?

Something like that is how I heard preachers and teachers admonish parents to go ahead and push past the obvious suffering they were causing. "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you" was a real sentiment. Well, those parents who were concerned along those lines can relax now: those spankings certainly hurt the children more than the parents.

I have four children that I love more than anything else, and yet I am meant to allow their 'autonomous development'? Yes, because thanks to my parents’ dedication I had a far more wide-ranging education than my folks did. I understand that the thing I might actually be able to give my children that will really do them a solid, better even than a new pony, is something like their very own, independent, autonomously developed….wait for it….Ego Structure! Something they can really call their own.

I didn't even know I'd been running without one at all for almost forty years, and I've been making it a decade on an ego fashioned of bubble-gum and bailing wire wrapped in neuroses while I try and resuscitate the weak little one that’s in me somewhere, with a lot of help and unwanted humility.

I already witness these obnoxious autonomous selves appearing in my kids. It takes the form of a willingness to tell me what they think of various things I've done. They don't quite know why I stop in my tracks for a moment at anything that sounds like … sass, or like something that never could have happened when I was a child. 

A Three Legged Stool: Damage, Needs, and Love.

That's what brought them together, kept them together, and wedged me away from them and apart from myself. 

My folks must have both been extensively abused and neglected. I don’t think you’ll argue too much with my armchair diagnosis. They made it through poor schools in the 1950's, and that was the extent of their education. Born Again Christianity showed them theology, and philosophy, and history, and morality, and way to live, and way to transcend their pasts. There was no widespread access to therapy for them, nor anyone else they'd ever met.

They might have not even tried to better themselves, but instead they searched and they searched and they found God, and God showed them how to raise their son so he would not have the pain they did, they were sure. They were abused so thoroughly they had little but rage and fawning in their emotional tank anyway when it came to children.

Well, they were human, and they loved, and they wanted and needed to feel loved, and they wanted a child together. But it is so very hard when you find yourself becoming the ogre you thought you'd never see again, the echo of your parent. I don't think they were ready for that. They had been saved. They did their part: They gave themselves to God, and He was meant to take care of the rest, supplying peace and whatnot. They were faithful. The God they believed in was not.

I knew sanitized child-friendluy versions of their biographies through early adolescence, scattered anecdotes, and a void. God washed the rest away, and I wasn't gonna dirty things up again by making them talk bout it. 

But I really wanted to know what they were like as humans, before they were saved. I could see what God meant to them, but to me they were always play acting at some level. I got scattered details that were juicy even as a child, but my inquiries were met with militant resistance, then with orders to cease and desist. They were new creatures in christ, and old things were passed away.

Old things are the things that do stay in your mind. They stay for a reason, and they stay whether you look at them or not. Here I am, writing this now. I almost smell the honeysuckle outside my window and the cattle across town at the stockyards, from 1984. None of this has passed away. It is all in the present.

Our family was made of Damage, Needs, and Love. My folks struggled to take care of themselves, and they just didn't have enough capacity for the proper care of a child.

Benji was my name then. It's the name I give now to the parts of my psyche now that although they are clear enough to many who know me well, are barely visible through my eyes, just gray on black. Those shadows in my mind sometimes seem to run the whole show. 

Benji has been screaming for my attention, and now I give it to him. When I don't listen his screams reach such a pitch that I’ve turned to self-destructive behavior to drown them out. 

I've learned that if I tell him I am listening, I can hear his voice when he speaks more quietly. He and I are growing quite close. In fact, sometimes talking to Benji feels almost like talking to myself.

Benji is my responsibility now, not my parents’. I will take care of them as best I can, but he's the one I'm gonna make sure gets home safely. I'm his bodyguard now. 

My shrink is happy at this general idea, but will eventually find a diplomatic way to suggest that one day I might just think of this as taking care of ‘myself’, and not need a special name for the part of me I take care of. Hey that’s great, but I need to get Benji home first. Back off, old man.

I hope Benji is able to eventually feel safe getting emotionally close to my parents. I'll let him if he does. Maybe it will happen before they die. I am trying to help Benji get there. But it's his call. They didn't respect him back in the day, so I respect him now. We go toward them at his pace, not theirs.

I muse out loud, very lightly to him that perhaps it's we who will find some peace if he can see them as being really little more than screaming children, just like he was. Only they never found a way to heal and grow. They were only just barely able to crawl to a pacifier. They had so little help in life to get even that far. They crawled with their damage and their needs, but they crawled with love for their son.

They wanted so badly to give him what they didn't have. But they didn't know how. And so here we all are. I can bawl at the sentiments in the preceding paragraph, and then find myself outside their house in my truck not wanting to go in, because it all just starts buzzing in my head.  My little ego is enough to maintain genuine human contact for a short time, and then we go.

I think I will make it back to them. I am close. I want to engage with them as nostage Ben. They’ve never met him. I love them, I want to be able to offer them friendship and forgiveness and understanding. I’ve had to distance myself from them for a time. Their ravenous needs just made them too hazardous for me while I looked for Benji. 

I see their humanity, and I know they feel for me what I feel for my children. I want to give them the warmth they long for. I needed the space to be able to give, rather than have them take. 

I'll get closer to them as Benji is good and ready. He’s counting on me to look out for him.

But more important, I have to take care of myself.