Being for Oneself; Being for Others by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
I’m interested in the problem of those who
live with the consequences of feeling they have to fulfil the needs of others
because of parental expectation. I’ve listened to the accounts of clients
who’ve expressed a certain resentment for this in their own lives, or know
someone who has been very damaged by such expectations. I’ve also been reminded
of rather extreme forms of this vicariousness in literature.
In order to have a sense of being your own
person, you need to have an independence of thought, feeling and action. Being your own person is having a sense
of authenticity, a willingness to stand your ground, self confidence, and a
willingness to experiment with new ways of doing things, tasting new things,
going where you’ve never been before, and playing with wonder.
You need an independence that isn’t heavily dependent on other people’s direction.
Obviously, when we are born we are dependent on the physical, emotional and
communicative support, nurturance,
and, hopefully, love of our caregivers. We need an education into the
cultural ideas and practices of our community and the development of knowledge
and the associated skills, as well as knowing the boundaries of self and
others. These are necessary.
Conformity, to a degree, is helpful, but when this dominates, then a
sense of self is compromised, so a balance between independence and mutuality
is really useful.
It’s
interesting that when people are brought up to be heavily dependent on others,
they often have a feeling of being out of control, confused, clingy, devalued
and easily manipulated. One of the most common emotions for these people is anger, depression and psychic collapse.
Many find themselves in the mental health system, being moved from psychiatrist
to psychiatrist and medication to medication. Where is happiness in this; where
is a sense of self?
Parents who bring up children to be so
needy tend to have children because they themselves haven’t
known much love and nurturance, for reasons as complex as war, abuse, abandonment,
or lack of consistent parenting of their own. They have the children to “fill a
hole” in themselves. Their experienced absence of love gets transferred to the
unborn child and the child is taught that independence is bad and wrong, but
these children feel the inner turbulence, as described above.
If the mapped life, the vicarious life of
the parent, is adopted (and many children find it practically impossible to
resist), their accomplishments are not sensed as their own, and underneath it
all, they can believe that the lie that they are living will soon be discovered
and they will be exposed as the fraud they feel themselves to be. The doctor,
the lawyer, the actor, the musician, the football player, the academic (I met
many when I was at university) can all feel these feeling of inauthenticity,
because they trained in these professions to fulfil the dreams of parents.
The need to have a child to fill “the gap”
can take certain parents to extreme places. I’m not talking about adoption
here, but biotechnological means whereby natural processes are bypassed. Now I’m not saying this is wrong in
itself, but I am keen to ask some difficult questions, like, for instance, what
level of sensed independence will the much longed for child have? Will their
sense of self be skewed to being dependent on the existence of the other
person? Will they know their separateness? It does, naturally, depend on how
the child is brought up and the values translated to them. Let me be clear here, I’m not saying
wanting a child by whatever means is always a consequence of a parent not
feeling loved; I am merely wondering about the child who came into the world to
fulfil someone else’s perceived need.
We live in strange times. Biotechnological
intervention in the design of children is reaching bizarre levels. In the late
1990s the first child was conceived for the purpose of harvesting cells in
order to save the life of his sibling. There have been several other cases of
this “saviour sibling” phenomenon. A novel has been written (“My Sister’s
Keeper,” by Jodi Picoult) and a movie
made of this semi-fictional account of such a situation.
The
“saviour sibling” is a child conceived in order to
provide an organ or cell transplant to a sibling who is affected with a
fatal disease, such as cancer or a fatal form of anaemia. So, in other words, the ne healthy human being is
there for the benefit of their brother or sister, and is supposed to willingly
undergo medical procedures and surgeries, whether they like it or not. This is
an ethical mine field that is still poorly understood.
I’ve been reading as
much of the literature I can get my hands on, including the accounts of the
donor’s themselves. Many papers quote a single account of an interview with a
child, who when asked what they thought about being alive just because their
sibling needed saving, said, they were glad to help. Another account is less
forgiving: this saviour sibling
“donated” (not voluntarily) spinal material to his brother who later died.
Their parents disowned the “saviour” and he grew up without the love of parents.
So how to love a
child for themselves, without them being there to fulfil our own expectations? I
guess much of this comes down to allowing, and playing with, our own desires
and ambitions to manifest in our own lives the things we haven’t yet fulfilled,
and to not attempt to transplant those desires into the lives of others. It
becomes a question of owning what belongs to us and what doesn’t. Counselling has a huge part to play in
the articulation and realization of our own ambitions. In the end, we are
responsible for our own lives and for creating the space for other lives to be
lived well.
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