by Steven Stosny
Families do not communicate primarily by language. That might surprise you, until you consider that humans bonded in families for millennia before we even had language. Even today, the most sensitive communications that have the most far-reaching consequences to our lives occur between parents and infants through tone of voice, facial expressions, touch, smell, and body posture, not language.
Though less obvious than interactions with young children, most of your communications with your older children and with your husband also occur through an unconscious process of emotional attunement. You psychologically and even physically tune in your emotions to the people you love. That”s how you can come home in one mood, find your husband or children in a different mood and, bam! – all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you”re in their mood. Quite unconsciously, you automatically react to one another.
Emotional attunement, not verbal skills, determines how we communicate, from our choice of words to our tone of voice. If attuned to a positive mood, you are likely to communicate pleasantly. If you”re in a negative mood, your words will be less than pleasant.
Now here”s the really bad news. Due to this unconscious, automatic process of emotional attunement, your children are painfully reactive to the walking-on-eggshells atmosphere between your husband and you, even if they never hear you say a harsh word to one another.
Everyone in a walking-on-eggshells family loses some degree of dignity and autonomy. You become unable to decide your own thoughts, feelings, and behavior, because you are living in a defensive-reactive pattern that runs largely on automatic pilot. No fewer than half the members of these unfortunate families, including the children, suffer from clinical anxiety and/or depression. (“Clinical” doesn”t mean feeling down or blue or worried, it means that the symptoms interfere with normal functioning. You can”t sleep, can”t concentrate, can”t work as efficiently, and can”t enjoy yourself without drinking.) Most of the adults lack genuine self-esteem (based on realistic self-appraisals), and the children rarely feel as good as other kids. They are ten times more likely to grow up to be resentful, angry, or abusive adults. If the family is violent, children are ten times more like to become abusers or victims of violence as adults. They are also at increased risk of alcoholism, criminality, mental health problems, and poverty.
The most common symptom of children in families who walk on eggshells is depression. But the signs can fool you; childhood depression looks different from the weeping, withdrawn, or sullen adult version. In children the disorder resembles chronic boredom. Children normally have high levels of interest, enjoyment, and excitement. If your child is not interested in the things in which children are normally interested, lacks enthusiasm, and is seldom excited, he or she is probably depressed. Another common symptom of these children is anxiety, particularly worry about things that children do not normally worry about, like how their parents are going to get through the evening with each other. Many kids have school problems, show aggressive tendencies, hyperactivity, and either over-emotionality — anger, excitability, or frequent crying that seem to come out of nowhere — or the polar opposite: no emotions at all. In the latter condition, they can look like little stone children; you could slice up a puppy in front of them and they wouldn”t care. They have turned off all emotion to avoid the pain of walking on eggshells.
One piece of research on children in abusive families might startle you. Witnessing a parent victimized is usually more psychologically damaging to children than injuries from direct child abuse. In my own family, that was certainly true. I have only the faintest memories of child abuse – a small hole in my skull and a knocked-out front tooth – but I have vivid nightmares of seeing my mother ignored and dismissed as well as demeaned and terrified. Seeing a parent abused is the more profound form of child abuse.
When it comes to the more severe forms of destructiveness, purely emotional abuse is usually more psychologically harmful than physical abuse. There are a couple of reasons for this. Even in the most violent families, the incidents tend to be cyclical. Early in the abuse cycle, a violent outburst is followed by a honeymoon period of remorse, attention, affection, and generosity, but not genuine compassion. (The honeymoon stage eventually ends, as the victim begins to say, “Never mind the damn flowers, just stop hitting me!”) Emotional abuse, on the other hand, tends to happen every day. So the effects are more harmful because they”re so frequent.
The other factor that makes emotional abuse so devastating is the greater likelihood that victims will blame themselves. If someone hits you, it”s easier to see that he or she is the problem, but if the abuse is subtle – saying or implying that you”re ugly, a bad parent, stupid, incompetent, not worth attention, or that no one could love you – you are more likelyto think it”s your problem.
All Forms of Abuse Have in Common a Failure of Compassion
Whether overt or silent, all forms of abuse are failures of compassion; he stops caring about how you feel. Compassion is the lifeblood of families and failure of compassion is the “heart disease” of a family”s emotional life. It actually would be less hurtful if your husband never cared about how you feel. But when you were falling in love, he cared a great deal, so now it feels like betrayal when he doesn’t care or try to understand. You feel as if he’s not the person you married.
It may not seem it from your day-to-day interactions, but your husband probably loves you. His emotional reactivity indicates that a strong bond still stirs the guilt and shame that, tragically, he blames on you. The fact that he loves you is both good news and bad news. Love by itself is so focused on how we feel that it masks the differences between people. The very intensity of love can make the person you love seem like little more than a source of strong emotions. In other words, it seems to him that you cause his emotions. If he feels good, you”re on a pedestal; but if he feels bad, you”re a demon.
Compassion makes us sensitive to the individual strengths and vulnerabilities of other people. As he learns to feel compassion under stress, your husband will see that you are different from him, with your own temperament, sensibility, experiences, longings, hopes, and dreams – all of which he probably did see when you were falling in love and his level of compassion was naturally high. Love by itself buries differences in the shadows of how strongly we feel. Compassion shines light on our differences and lets us appreciate and sympathize with loved ones. Love without the sensitivity of compassion is: rejecting (of who you really are as a person), possessive, controlling, and dangerous.
Dr. Steven Stosny has demonstrated his highly successful recovery program on such national television programs as “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “CBS Sunday Morning,” and CNN”s “Talkback Live” and “Anderson Cooper 360″ and has appeared on numerous radio talk shows. He has been quoted by, or been the subject of articles in, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Chicago Tribune, U.S. News %26 World Report, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Mademoiselle, Women”s World, O, The Oprah Magazine, Psychology Today, AP, Reuters, and USA Today. His website is http://compassionpower.com
