Children’s compliances and identifications – how pathogenic beliefs are formed

CMT notes how much children are highly motivated to be liked, to obey, and to be accepted by their parents. Children must maintain their tie to their parent to survive.  Children will develop unconscious guilt about wanting to pursue any developmental goals that they perceive as weakening their ties to their parents – by, for example, harming them or provoking punishment from them. Children greatly exaggerate how their impulses, feelings, thoughts, and actions affect others or bring harm to themselves. Because they are egocentric, children have difficulty understanding that the people around them have feelings, attitudes, and behavior patterns, which have reasons independent of them.

They accept and believe they deserve the treatment they receive.  They try to fulfill the expectations they infer their parents have for them.  They take responsibility to care for and cure parents.  They blame themselves for failures to succeed and develop deeply held and often-unconscious beliefs regarding why.  If they can’t make a parent happy, they may come to believe they don’t deserve to live.  If their parents seemed unconcerned about them, yet demanding, they may come to believe that they must give a lot without any expectations of receiving.  If they are criticized, they come to believe they are not a good person. An alcoholic home can produce rejection, worry, and shame.  A vicious and capricious parent can lead a child to be hyper-vigilant, always fearing danger.  A child who is unprotected may be subject to panic attacks and not feel as though they deserve to be protected. Sexual abuse often leads to shame and impaired reality, and a need to not remember that can result in dissociation. Children are developing hypotheses for why they are treated the way they are. Weiss calls these “pathogenic beliefs”.

Pathogenic beliefs stem from a number of sources including identifications with a parent’s pathogenic belief or in compliance with a parent’s interpretation of reality. The kind of beliefs a child develops depends on the nature of his specific motivations at the time the beliefs were created. It also depends on how the child believes his parents reacted to his motivations. For example, it depends on which of the child’s traits or attitudes seemed to upset his parents, and how they displayed their displeasure. The child’s beliefs may be incorrect inferences about their parents’ motives, misunderstandings, or they may be accurate assessments and perceptions of the real situation. For example, an ill child who is kept in may incorrectly infer that his parents want him to remain dependent on them. PB’s aren’t the only factors in a person’s symptomatology or character development and distortion. One has impulses and goals, which are also playing a part as well as the gratification that a person might receive from adhering to the compliances from his family.

Examples of Pathogenic Beliefs:

Several examples of pathogenic beliefs are presented below. Each example, however, reflects only one of the many, varied beliefs a child may develop. Guilt based on a person’s fear of harming others in the pursuit of his or her own goals may be divided into several distinct, although related, types of guilt. Of special importance are survivor guilt and separation guilt, both of which involve an exaggerated sense of responsibility for others (Modell, A. (1984a) (1984b)).

a) Separation guilt – Consider for example, a child who observes his parents becoming depressed or worried after he becomes more independent or displays more strength. That child may develop the pathogenic belief that his parent would be upset, hurt, or depressed if they were to become still more independent or feel even stronger. They might develop symptoms, such as a phobia, which would require them to stay close to home. In Control Mastery terms this person would be conceived of as suffering from Separation guilt. This stems from the belief that a parent would be hurt by the child’s attempts to separate and have an independent life. Separation guilt is another type of guilt arising from the fear of harming others as the result of pursuing one’s goals. Separation guilt was described by Modell (1965) as “the belief that one does not have a right to life . . . For the right to a life really means the right to a separate existence . . .” In some cases, according to Modell, “separation is unconsciously perceived as resulting in the death of the object” (p. 328). Weiss (1986) and Bush (1989) expanded this to include the guilt that people may feel, not only for separating, but also for being different from an important person in their lives. Separation guilt is characterized by the belief that one is harming one’s parents or other loved ones by separating from them or by differing from them and thereby being disloyal.

b) Survivor guilt– A child whose parents deprive themselves and appeared to become upset if the child achieves things for himself, might come to believe that his parents do not want him to have more in life than they did. He may deny himself good things in life so as to avoid getting more than his parents. In Control Mastery terms, this person would be conceived of as suffering from Survivor guilt. This is based on the belief that there is only a certain amount of the good things in life to go around. Therefore the child fears that his achievements are stolen from his family members.

If a child’s parents have experienced very little career success, the child may develop the symptom of a work inhibition. He fears that his family would be hurt if he were more successful in work than they. Freud referred to survivor guilt in the wake of his father’s death, in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, in which he noted “. . . that tendency toward self-reproach which death invariably leaves among the survivors . . .” (Freud, 1896; cited from Ernst Freud, 1960, p. 111). Survivor guilt was described by Neiderland (1961, 1981) as a psychological state common to people who survived the concentration camps of World War II. These survivors suffered from feelings of guilt for surviving loved ones who were killed in the camps. Years later, the survivors were noted to be experiencing depression, anxiety, and somatic symptoms. Neiderland described survivors as behaving as if they themselves were dead. Modell (1971) extended the discussion of survivor guilt to include more subtle forms. He described patients who inhibit themselves from success, or who engage in self-destructive behaviors, in response to unconscious survivor guilt for a parent or sibling whom they believe to be worse off than themselves. He suggested that people have “. . . an unconscious bookkeeping system, i.e., a system that takes account of the distribution of the available ‘good’ within a given nuclear family so that the current fate of other family members will determine how much ‘good’ one possesses. If fate has dealt harshly with other members of the family, the survivor may experience guilt as he has obtained more than his share of the ‘good’.” (p. 340). Weiss has suggested that survivor guilt occurs when people believe that they are—simply by furthering their own cause—experiencing good things at the expense of others, and that their success will make others feel bad by comparison. They assume irrationally that the attainment of good things is unfair to those who have not attained them, or is at the expense of those who have not attained them (Weiss, 1986).

c) Depletion Guilt- If a child’s parents seemed drained, burdened or overwhelmed, following the child’s attempts to be close, or get help, the child may develop the belief that there was something wrong with him that caused his parents to be drained, burdened or overwhelmed by him. He might develop the symptom of a reluctance to complain or express his needs for fear of draining his parents.

d) Omnipotent responsibility guilt – Omnipotent responsibility guilt also arises out of altruism. This guilt involves an exaggerated sense of responsibility and concern for the happiness and well being of others. This person might worry a great deal about the other person or his impact on the other person without having any power to do anything about it. This kind of guilt intensifies when a parent acts weak and vulnerable or behaves in a way that leads the child to feel overly powerful or responsible

People who feel survivor guilt and/or separation guilt invariably feel omnipotent responsibility guilt. However, there are instances in which a person may feel omnipotently responsible for others without specifically feeling survivor guilt or separation guilt. Omnipotent responsibility guilt may be seen as an exaggeration of adaptive guilt, which concerns feeling anxious and disturbed about real and specific wrongful behaviors and the desire to make reparation.

e) Adaptive guilt is associated with good social adjustment and healthy personality development (Tangney 1991; Zahn-Waxler & Kochanska, 1990). In contrast, survivor guilt, separation guilt, depletion, and omnipotent responsibility guilt are often highly irrational and potentially pathogenic.