Our deepest survival need is to feel that we are cared about.
While taking a freshman collage course, I looked in the back of the text where there were definitions of some basic psychological terms. These were obviously lay, not professional, definitions. The text defined schizophrenia as, “emotional disorganization with relative intellectual preservation.” I immediately felt that that described me.
I am deeply indebted to both my parents. Each of them had very real virtues from which I have greatly benefited. They each had some emotional scars left over from their childhoods that kept them from becoming fully developed emotionally healthy people. Most of us are in this same situation; not yet what we could be.
My father was 23 years old and a junior in college when he met my mother, who was 16 at the time. When my mother was in her seventies she did some journaling as a part of an “inner child” workshop. In her journal, she stated that what happened when she and my father first met would, today, be described as a series of date rapes. She was soon pregnant.
My mother was the youngest of eleven children. One of her older brothers was my father’s mentor, college advisor and chairman of the Division of Sciences at the college where my father was majoring in zoology. I don’t think my father had any desire at all to get married, but felt he had no other choice. He resented it deeply it and held on to that resentment for a long time. I remember at least three times, during my later elementary school years, that my father used the exact same works. This usually happened when he was leaving the house, walking out to the car to go someplace. I would be following behind him, yapping at his heels about something. He would turn, pointing his finger at me and say with some real anger, “One thing you had better remember Ted is that the three of you kids are nothing but a God- dammed drain on my time and finances and I can’t wait until you are old enough to hold down jobs, pay your own way and move out.”
My father felt no significant desire to invest in family. His primary investment was in teaching at the college, which made him feel valued. Many of his students, who majored in biological sciences, loved him dearly, because he was a very dedicated and effective teacher. Non-majors, who were taking his classes to fill a requirement, often found that he had very little interest in them. They, also, often found that he could be hypercritical and extremely sarcastic. His other major investment was in his many extra-marital affairs. My father and I were never close and I know very little about his early years and upbringing. As the years have gone by, I have come to see that my father was deeply insecure, and that it was fear that kept his view of live so narrow. I have forgiven him and developed respect for the way he plowed through life in spite of his fears.
During my age from 25 to 50 I had minimal contact with either of my parents. I had yet to learn how to overcome resentments. In my later years, my mother and I became mush closer. I found her quite capable of introspection, and of acknowledging her shortcomings. I learned a lot about her early years and upbringing. When she was six years old, her architect father abandoned the family after being caught sexually molesting her. A year later her mother was run over by a truck and killed. After that she was raised by her oldest sister. She ran away from that home, to live with one of her brothers, when she was fifteen. At sixteen she was not prepared to raise children.
When she got pregnant and married, a woman friend of hers, whom she really respected, made the unfortunate statement, “It is a shame that you’re pregnant, because you will be a terrible mother.” No doubt that was very hurtful. (It has been said before, “With a friend like that, who needs enemies.”) As the months went by, raising my older brother, she told me that she had felt that she had made a pretty good show of herself as a mother. Twenty months later, I was born. Many years later, my mother said that, when I came along, I behaved differently from the way than my brother had behaved. She said that, in hindsight, she took this personally and as a threat to her self-image as a mother. She said that this made her uncomfortable and caused her to hold back emotionally. My mother said that it wasn’t until I was five old that she had the realization that, as two different people, of course, we behaved differently and that this difference was not a reflection on her. By this time I was already very insecure.
When my brother was born, my father bonded a little bit with him. Still, the early months of this marriage was not an environment in which my brother could have felt very secure. When I came along, it was not a happy event for him. He saw me as a threat to his getting the love and affection he needed. For my first five years, before my sister came along, I was the identified problem in the house, with my brother following me around pointing out how I was screwing up the household. My parents often sided with him. My father was hypercritical in general and my mother felt more comfortable with my brother than with me. My brother and I have never been close. As older adults we have an amiable relationship, though I think he still carries too much guilt for the way he treated me as we were growing up. I do not and, obviously cannot blame my brother for attitudes he developed and decisions he made when he was that young.
My sister, five years younger, and we always had positive feelings toward each other. I was too timid to be much of a brother to her. I think she always felt somewhat an outsider in the family. I think that, in many ways, emotionally, she got the worst of it. We are not close, but in our few letters or emails she seems to feel that she is doing well enough.
I am grateful that both of my parents were intelligent, educated and well-read people. Politically they were of humanist leanings. I am deeply grateful for the expressed values that they were committed to. Somehow, in spite of all the things that didn’t go right in my life, I have always had a deep, deep faith that the universe is rational, that answers can be found and that people can be caring.
The point of all this is to establish my credentials to talk about what happens if you grow up feeling not truly cared about. I most often use the word care rather than word love. The word love is very important, but has too many varied and some often miss used definitions. One could never get away with saying, “I care about you so much that, if you leave, me, I’ll kill you.” That statement just wouldn’t ring true. You do not have to admire someone to care about them. I know many people who would never say, “I love everybody.” I believe it is possible to say honestly, “I care about everybody.” and mean it.
Our country has launched many scientific experiments out into our solar system and beyond. I remember reading some articles about guidance systems for these satellites. It seems that all motion has to be relevant to some firm reference point. For these satellites their reference point is a star known to be the brightest star we can see. I read that each satellite has within it a small tube or telescope that is always fixed on that star; otherwise it will not know where it is going. If something happens to somehow turn the satellite so that it loses its fix on that star, the satellite will shut down all but its most essential activities and devote all available energies into a predefined search pattern until it is again locked onto that reverence star. None of its designed experiments will have any meaning without a fixed reference point. Only then, can it resume its’ research projects and measurements.
It seems that all my life, I have been without that essential point of reverence: feeling truly cared about. This has, most of the time, kept my mind is search mode, full of monkey chatter. “Is this the right thing to do?” “There is something else that I should be doing!” I have never had self-image that I felt I could safely run out in public and feel ok. While attempting to go to college, I could never decide on a major. I changed my thoughts about this often. When Kennedy was running for the presidency and was so admired, I learned that he studied economics. I decided, “I know, I’ll major in economics.” Soon my inner voice was saying, “No, there is something else that I must be doing.” Then I would think about some other possible major. This went on and on, and I could not focus on a career path. There were 2 semesters when I dropped out and got ‘W’s for the entire semester.
But, all is not lost. Being given the gift of a live gives us an opportunity to experience many interactions with the universe. If we can learn from our experience, we can learn to understand the principles of the universe. The most important thing we can do in life is to learn from our experience, and to share what we think we have learned with others. Dialogue is a mutual effort to make implicit truth explicit. A person must be willing to modify their point of view to be successful at dialogue. A person must also feel secure that they are part of a caring community and that they are worthy of being cared about in order to not feel threatened by a change in their point of view.
(I plan to continue to expand and improve this introduction.)
______________________________________________________________________________________
Unfortunately, there are far too many politicians today who can only have conversations (not dialogue) with others that they know, ahead of time, agree with their point of view and share their worldview, thereby shoring up their shaky self-images. One of the primary charactoristics of Republican lawmakers these days is their deep fear that their Republician colleagues will turn on them if they dissagree with party leadership.
______________________________________________________________________________________
When it comes to feeling safely cared about when young, I think that most people come up a little bit short. I think most people today seriously doubt that they are living in caring communities in the here and now, and doubt that they will feel cared about in the future, the here that arrives after some time. I think that most of us these days have a vague, nagging feeling that something is missing or that they must do. One way to satisfy that nagging feeling is to eat. I think this is the primary reason that our nation is becoming more and more overweight. We need to work toward being a more caring nation today and have a clear, believable vision of and goal of a more caring world in the hereafter (the future).
