Saturday, February 26th, 2005

An Invalidating Environment

Seb over at Sadly No has a post about some right-wing commentors take on the problem of cutting and other forms of addictive self-abuse among female adolescents: basically, they say it’s Hollywood’s fault. Wow, what a great way to trivialize the emotional pain that causes a borderline personality disorder! The comments on this post are well worth reading, but the one that stood out was the comment by Eastiswest describing the research by Marsha M. Linehan, PhD. She has found one of the major causes of cutting is growing up in an invalidating environment.

An invalidating environment. That phrase hit me right in the third eye.

I could never live up to my parents’ standards. I can’t remember a single instance from my life where my parents said they were proud of me. If I got an “A” in school, it was greeted with “We expected nothing less.” If I got a 96, the response was “Why didn’t you get 100?” Second place? “Oh, well, next time you can try harder.” Win some kind of award? “That’s nice–your sister won that one, too.” That kind of thing. Anything less than 100% perfect had to “fixed” somehow, and there was no way I could ever live up to the achievements of six older, highly talented siblings. (To make it even more unfair, I got to compete with them separately in each category: I could never be as smart as one, as musically gifted as another, as popular as a third, as athletic as the fourth.)

Behavioral standards were even tougher. We were all born in original sin, you know, and the slightest mistake was merely proof of the Inherent Evil in our nature. The flesh was weak, and this weakness had to struggled against constantly. And worse was the “thought crimes.” You probably heard this one before: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. (Matthew, 5:28). This particular philosophy was extended beyond just lust and adultery. Thinking about any kind of sin made you just as guilty as if you committed it: More proof of the IE.* The only way to fight it, really, was to become so pure of heart that you never even imagine doing anything that could be considered wrong. (By the way, did I mention I’m a fiction writer?)

But even not making mistakes wasn’t good enough. A lack of sin at death would pretty much only get you into Purgatory. If you wanted to get into Heaven, you basically had to be a saint. Not a nice person saint. Not a sweet little old lady saint. A Catholic saint.

A sell all you have and give the money to the poor kind of saint.
A move into the desert and become a hermit, living only on communion hosts and water kind of saint.
A Bride of Christ virgin who chooses torture and death rather than marry the guy her parents picked out for her kind of saint.
A persecuted for their beliefs, patient in the face of unimaginable hardship, smiling under the greatest duress, causing pagans to spontaneously convert just by the strength of their convictions kind of saint.

If you went into the clergy, you might have a chance at heaven. But anything less than 100% commitment would leave in a cardboard box outside the pearly gates, begging for spare indulgences from all the godly people who made it in on their first try.

So, no, I could never meet my parents’ standards. Of course, no one could, not even my parents themselves. Looking back, I shouldn’t have been surprised when I grew up enough to understand the hypocrisy in my family and my church. With these impossible standards, everyone is a hypocrite.

Talk about an invalidating environment.

But I wonder if this is why so many people in the Dominionist religions seem full of hate and love to sit in judgment against their fellow man: they know, deep down, that they might not be good enough to get into Heaven, and the only way they can feel they might make it is to make sure they are better than the person standing next to them. If Win, Place, and Show, are Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, you damned well want to make sure come in first, no matter what it takes.

Or, in terms more like what Dr. Lineham might use, these people can’t express the pain of their invalidating environment directly, so they use addictive, destructive behavior to express it. In this case, though, the destructive behavior is focused outwards. In a sense, they are seeking validation by destroying the self-worth of others.

They feel horrible, so they can’t let anyone else feel good. Ever.

* It’s totally a coincidence that Inherent Evil and Internet Explorer are both abbreviated IE. Coincidence. Totally.

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