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Feb. 8, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:48
2322 Reactive Attachment! Dr Faye Snyder on Freedomain Radio

Stefan Molyneux, host Freedomain Radio, interviews Dr. Faye Snyder.

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Hi everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I am enormously delighted to have Dr.
Faye Snyder on the show.
Dr.
Faye is a psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and forensic evaluator, so clearly she's going to be able to help me find my keys.
I'm really looking forward to that part of the show.
She's the founder and clinical director of the non-profit Parenting and Relationship Counseling Forum in California.
She has taught developmental psychology at California State University, and she's the parent of Daytime Emmy-Awinning Emmy award-winning Scott Clifton, and that's her son.
So thank you, Dr.
Faye, for taking the time.
It's a real pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me.
So as we were talking about before the show started, I found your work because I'm going to be interviewing a parental...
A parent effectiveness training counselor later this week, because I'm really trying to make sure that people have really good information on how to raise children.
My goodness, what could be more important?
I think sometimes people take more time researching how to buy a used car than they do on how to raise their own children.
And I came across your article, I am Adam Lanz's Therapist, on a PET blog and read it, and we've been in contact since.
Thank you.
you know, four out of the five missions I have in my life.
So I thought it would be a good and worthwhile conversation.
But I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your history as a therapist and your growth as a therapist and how you came to, I think, be focusing more on the environment than on the, I think, rather eugenics and slippery slope arguments of the geneticists.
Oh, boy, that I didn't, I don't think I put that question on the list only because it's a long answer, but I'll try to make it short.
I used to be in dire need of therapeutic help.
I had a pretty rough childhood, not as bad as many, but I just intuitively felt that therapy had to be someone that would finally guide me out of the woods.
And it would help me make sense of my own past.
But I kept running into therapists who were nodding their heads, you know, and going, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And so to make a long story short there, I spent 16 years in therapy with 11 therapists that I saw at least a year.
I wasn't really therapist-hopping.
And I just got progressively worse until I finally got one good therapist and he turned me around and six months, I terminated three months later.
I then met the love of my life and we married.
We had a baby and I had some feelings about having a baby that I wanted my child to have the childhood I didn't have.
And I went to graduate school in large part to find out why it took 16 years to get good therapy.
I wanted to know, by this time I was kind of angry, and I wanted to know what was wrong with the way they were training therapists.
And lo and behold, I started hearing a lot about genetics and then every now and then they'd throw in John Bowlby and students would talk about Alice Miller and I started watching John Bradshaw and so I started to get a sense that there was a war, a theoretical war in the field and that the dominant theory was genetics.
As a matter of fact, It wasn't known at that time.
I uncovered it later, and it became more known later.
But Freud, the very same thing happened to Freud.
He was a causal therapist, which is what I consider that I am, meaning that it's all environmental.
You can look for causes.
They're right there before you.
And to me, genetics is a little bit like believing in a god on the throne in the sky or something.
But anyway, so I just lost my train of thought.
Oh, you were talking about the war, and you're in Corsal, and concerned about the fact that there's this genetics, which I think is, I don't want to put words in your mouth, kind of seems like an out for some moral responsibility with regards to environment, both social and familial, that can be quite dangerous, I think.
Yeah, I think what I was going to say is that Freud came out with a causal theory.
He thought you could explain the histrionic personality with parental explanations and he was thrown out of the field for daring to say that he enraged a lot of his colleagues so he went into despair and he revised his theory and came back with an inborn theory which is called the internal drive theory so the pressures have
been ruthless Against the medical model.
And the medical model is rather behind, you know, the genetics position.
And there's a lot of money.
The pharmaceutical industry is behind it.
There's just so much backing.
It's like David and Goliath, really.
And the problem is...
Actually, I wish there was a class action lawsuit because...
On massive levels, children are getting the short end of the stick because the dominant theory is that the way a child is born is pretty much the way the child is going to grow up.
I call it the tulip theory.
When my husband and I were gardening, One time we sent away from California for tulips, if you could believe that, and we bought 100 tulips and they arrived and I was reading the instructions and they said, everything that is needed for the tulip is in the bulb.
It's already there.
And you don't have to water them.
You don't have to fertilize them.
And I said, oh my God, I was raised on the tulip theory.
And I started seeing that, you know, even children's service workers treat children a lot like the tulip theory.
You know, you hear people say all the time, children are resilient.
You know, and...
Some of them really are after they've had really good bonding and attachment and they've been adored.
After the first five years, they are resilient and they can handle almost anything.
But if they don't have that bonding attachment in the first five years, they're not.
So, like I said, it's a war of the researchers.
The more I look into Where, you know, where all this research comes from, the more I see tainted research, fraudulent research, misrepresented research, research that hasn't been replicable ever.
We learn of journals that won't publish pro-parent research, I mean, pro-child research.
I've also got some terminology here that's, there's a way of thinking that's pro-parent and there's a way of thinking that's pro-child.
And that's how I pretty much see the two camps of psychology divided up.
I had a psychotherapist from New York on my show yesterday.
He was answering questions from the audience.
And I posed a question to him that I thought would be an interesting question that branches into a number of the topics that you focused on.
Do you think that childhood in America is getting better or worse over time?
Wow, what a great question.
I belong to the...
International Psychohistory Association, and I keep seeing that they write articles about how childhood is getting better.
I think it's getting worse.
I think it kind of depends a little bit of what you're looking at where.
If you're looking at Germany before World War II, it was Horrible for children.
Especially after Freud recanted, it got really, really bad.
There was a man named Dr.
Schreber who recommended that babies be put in ice water and that children be kept in wooden contraptions when they ate and slept.
And they raised a nation of sociopaths, which history calls Nazis.
But right here in America, for sure, since this pains me to say, but since the feminist movement and mothers went to work and babies started being raised in daycare, they've gotten worse and worse and worse.
I wish I could find out what Adam Lanza's first I'd like to see a law pass that would require parents of any child or any grown child who takes a gun into school or maybe even to McDonald's or the post office And I would like to find out
what percentage of them were in daycare within six months of their birth.
I think they're worse.
Yeah, there is.
I mean, I think that there's been some improvement.
Corporal punishment is slowly beginning to recede.
I mean, still 80 to 90 percent of parents are spanking their kids.
As another therapist who did on the show pointed out, it's not with a stick as much anymore, and there is more focus on non-violent methods of punishment, though punishment is still considered to be an absolute, and that, of course, is, I mean, certainly nothing I practice as a parent is no punishment in my household, good heavens, I mean...
But, so I think in some ways, some of the aggression against children is receding, but the attachment seems to be so fundamentally broken early on in life.
And I think that attachment, again, I'm certainly no expert, it seems to me that children are less resilient with regards to attachment than they are with something like spanking.
Well, I would rather treat a child who had been physically abused or sexually abused than treat a child who was unattached.
Because, you know, Oprah Winfrey, I believe, has had one or two guests on her show that were put in a closet for like nine months or a year or something at the age of five or six.
And everybody talks about how amazing it is that these young adults or late teens come onto the show and they seem forgiving and understanding and they seem almost peaceful.
I, you know, and then there's The Boy Called It.
There's a book called The Boy Called It.
And he had a good mother for the first five years.
You know, it is amazing what we can handle at five years old.
Now, I'm not saying that it's okay ever, ever to physically, you know, abuse a child, to hit a child or to molest a child or any of those things.
I'm just saying that attachment is more primitive and primary.
Bessel van der Kolk did some research or reports some research that If a baby is insufficiently attached as a soldier later in war, they will be more prone to PTSD. And then as a matter of fact, most of the soldiers who have PTSD had weak attachments.
Yeah, and there are, of course, the horrifying stories after they banned abortions in Romania.
There were 100,000-plus unwanted children put into the state orphanages who were adopted rather enthusiastically after the fall of the Iron Curtain by people in the West, in particular in France, and they found that these children would throw cats out of the window, would scream when touched, and were unrecoverable from a psychological standpoint.
And I think that's something that is...
It's so chilling for society as a whole to think that its practices, however benevolent in theory, might actually be breaking children beyond repair, I think is such a heartbreak.
I think this is one of the reasons why people push back against these kinds of realities.
Yeah.
Boy, you said about three things that I think I got on overload.
Yeah.
Well, the first was, I think, the example of the Romanian orphanages where kids were just left in cribs to watch Lion King all day and they had like a 50 to 1 ratio.
Of course, this is not daycare in the West, but the kids who grew up isolated, much like the experiments with the monkeys, it does not appear to be, at least I don't know, of any treatment that can reverse the early attachment disorders, I mean, as fundamental as those.
I remember what I wanted to say.
One of the tragedies to me in my profession right now is that a lot of these children are being diagnosed and treated for ADHD. And a lot of professionals in my field think that the only people who get reactive attachment disorder are children who have been in foster care or orphanages.
But if you put your baby in daycare and go off, I don't care if Mother Teresa is there taking care of your child.
It's not you.
The baby needs the same continuous caregiver.
And so physicians all over the place and psychologists and marriage and family therapists are seeing these children and diagnosing them with ADHD. They can't tell the difference, although it's just a continuum of, you know, attachment.
ADHD is more like daycare at three years old, whereas RAD is more like daycare at one or, you know, maybe two.
And then there's this...
Pediatric bipolar disorder now, which is really the result of daycare as an infant, you know, the first year.
But I'm such a tangential thinker.
I did it again.
That's all right.
This is really the format of the show is that we must follow every thought and bring it down like a wolf after a hare.
Now, you've talked about the roots of bullying, and I think the phrase you've used is time bombs.
One of the things that, of course, I think is so fundamentally tragic is the degree to which problems in the environment are ascribed to either personal flaws or biological causes within the child.
I mean, The one thing, of course, it's horrible is these psychotropic meds don't seem to do any better than placebo and certainly no better than diet and exercise, and they're not treating any identifiable or measurable physical disorder.
You know, this chemical imbalance just doesn't seem to show up anywhere.
So, as children have more problems, because when you put them in daycare, they socialize Oh, they socialize horizontally rather than vertically, right?
I mean, children, I think Dr.
Philip Zimbardo was writing about in the past, there were about four adults for every child with extended families and so on, and children were socialized through exposure to adults, whereas now we have, you know, one daycare provider for five or ten children, and so the children are socializing horizontally, which means they're not getting a sort of mature brain structure drifting down onto their heads, so to speak.
This produces, I think, a fair number of problems with concentration and so on, which we then medicate, which causes further problems.
And then, of course, the bullies come in who would have had even more dysfunctional or non-attachment-based early childhoods.
Is that a fair approximation of your theory?
I'm sure that's, you know, very, very bare bones.
But what are your thoughts about the origins of bullying?
Okay, I have a couple thoughts here, and now I'm taking notes.
There will be a test later.
Well, I think time bombs have been bullied, but not all bullies are time bombs.
And so I think there's about three primary causes for bullies, which are different.
A lot of times, bullies are the result of either a physical abuse at home or Neglect at home, especially, and here's the third cause, weak limit setting.
So I just wanted to be sure that at some point we talk about limit setting because the new trend that I see a lot is parents are so guilt ridden for putting their children in daycare And for not knowing how to parent, that they're setting very weak and inconsistent limits and have a very low bar for ethics.
And so they're raising narcissistic children who think they're entitled to look down on other people, be superior to other people, and put people down.
But then on the other hand, then there's the bullies that have been So, time bombs are slightly different.
Time bombs are, or not slightly at all.
They're profoundly, exquisitely, excruciatingly neglected in early childhood.
And they're very self-conscious.
They feel really flawed.
They're very introverted.
And they're very angry, and they tend to orient around video games that are angry, and they can be a predator on the video game, and they begin to formulate revenge.
But I also wanted to say one other thing before when we were talking about the continuum and ADHD being on the continuum.
The trouble with children being diagnosed with ADHD and medicated is we miss the window where we can correct the attachment.
So if a child comes to me at seven years old, it's much more difficult to correct that attachment than it is if the child came to me at three years old or even four years old.
We can regress a child, and they want to regress.
They want to be won over.
They send these little signals that, please dominate me, please protect me.
They fight the parent as if the parent will grab them, contain them, and hold them, and then they can finally surrender.
They put up a fight, a fake fight, and then they surrender, and then they go into a state of grace, and you can re-bond.
But the older they get, the more it's just not in them to surrender and become a baby again.
It is sort of tragic when you see the defenses that are designed to protect the personality become the personality.
And in a sense, there's no center left anymore that it's protecting.
It's like an empty castle.
You should have been a psychologist.
Too much work to me.
I like to skate through on amateur hour.
So, I'm sorry, and I interrupted you if you were in the middle of the thought.
I really want to make sure you have a chance to complete it.
Well, I just want to reiterate one more time that we can't confuse the diagnosis of RAD with ADHD anymore.
And even ADHD is really a modified version of RAD. We really need to have more attachment therapists, and we need to recognize these children sooner.
I wish I could say daycare providers would identify the symptoms and send the child for attachment therapy, but of course, they're at opposite ends of investment.
You know, the daycare providers want daycare children.
They want children in their schools.
That would be counterintuitive.
Yeah, and I mean, I worked in a daycare for some years when I was younger, and it is really at opposite ends of the education and expertise spectrum.
I mean, obviously, they're, you know, mostly minimum wage, and just there's a lot of turnover, which makes, of course, attachment even tougher.
And so it's not, I mean, I don't think you could really expect them to pull off what a lot of therapists with years of training and experience find very challenging.
You know, like I said, even if Mother Teresa was a daycare provider, she would still be taking weekends off and vacations, Christmas vacations, and so there still would not be a continuous...
I mean, I don't care how perfect the daycare is.
The child can't bounce around like that.
The child needs one or two primary caregivers, ideally in the same home.
It makes more sense for a mother and father to share the primary role and then the dad or the mom goes off to work.
The dad could stay home and perform the maternal role.
But a daycare provider where you take the child and you drop your child off psychologically and you leave your child with somebody else.
Like, how would an adult feel if...
How would a woman feel if her husband took her someplace and dropped her off with another man and then came and picked her up again?
It's, you know, it's like...
It's a very confusing message and children can't digest it.
I would like to very soon get started training therapists about at least diagnosis or how to recognize a child with an attachment issue and how to identify RAD. Actually, it's not even that hard.
Even if the child has ADHD, the treatment would be pretty similar.
You would basically need to reduce the amount of breaks away from the child.
The child with ADHD needs to be able to express their feelings more.
The child with RAD needs to learn to be vulnerable more.
I just don't think there's enough experts on childhood conditions at this time.
Too much influence from the pharmaceutical industry.
Yeah, there's a tragic amount of profit in excusing environmental factors.
I mean, the people who may have harmed children, advertently or inadvertently, are desperate for that excuse.
Of course, there's a lot of profit in medication that doesn't require soul-to-soul expertise, empathy expertise, and so on, and it's all quite tragic.
And I was just thinking about this, and I've thought about this since reading more about radical Attachment disorders.
It's a puzzle of mine.
Of course, my family has mental health problems like coming out of the woodwork.
And I'm quite different.
I hope, I think.
I'm quite different from everyone else in my family.
And one of the things that is true, which I think ties into your theory, is that my mother, who was a very unstable and violent woman, After I was born, she was hospitalized for mental health issues for quite some time.
And I was placed into the hands of a woman who had an incredible attachment to me, apparently.
And I was there for, I think, four to six months.
And this woman had such an attachment.
When she had children years later, she named her firstborn after me and all that.
And I was just, I mean, it seems to me that there must be something around that particular incident which would be different from everyone else in my family who all had these, you know, chaotic and absent and distant and violent and confusing and chaotic environments that I would have had some really strong bonding very early on in my life that I think has given me quite a lot of fuel.
I mean, it's amazing just that one top-up early on in life can really literally last a lifetime.
Well, were you the firstborn?
No, second.
And how much older, do you mind me asking you this?
No, no, it's fine.
How much older than you was your older sibling?
Two and a half years.
What was your relationship with your older sibling?
It wasn't great.
It wasn't great.
I found him to be quite cold and cruel.
He had a terrible habit of teasing mercilessly.
And teasing is the wrong word because, you know, it just sounds like na-na-na-na-boo-boo, but I mean, it was pretty sophisticated and ugly stuff.
But he didn't go through the same bonding with any particular caregiver.
I don't think my mother was capable of it.
But I think that the woman who bungeed into our family for me, certainly, I think, changed the course of my life in some very fundamental ways.
How old were you when she came into your life?
I was a newborn, almost.
Oh, see, that's what I... The caregiver that came into your life took you when you were a newborn?
Yes.
Okay, that was what I put together because I thought you were saying that it was like later, like when you were...
For some reason, I pictured you saying like two or three years old.
Yeah, if you had a loving caregiver in the very beginning, even if you were returned to your mother later, you would have had the experience of...
Attachment.
And how old were you when you were returned to your mother?
A couple of months.
I'm not sure exactly.
You know, like most family history, there's a lot of overlap.
But yeah, I was definitely a couple of months old before I was returned to my mother.
Okay, that's still an attachment break.
So I would imagine that...
That shows up somewhere in your adult life, not wanting to be left by somebody that you've invested in.
Well, yes, I think like you, I was very happy to meet the love of my life after going through therapy.
So I did three hours of therapy a week for years and journaling and all that kind of good stuff.
And now I've been happily married for over 10 years.
I'm a stay-at-home dad.
I have a wonderful relationship with my daughter.
We have a Non-violent, non-spanking.
I've never raised my voice to any of them.
I mean, this is what is the happy soup that we stew in these days.
But I mean, the therapy, this is why I'm constantly and annoyingly recommending therapy to everyone who listens to my show because it's just such a powerful thing.
Yeah, you know, the thing about treating a rad kid is that they have decided that no one's ever going to touch their heart again.
And they make a choice and a decision, whether it's six months old or three years old, that is a personality decision.
It becomes, they don't even remember making the choice.
It becomes their default approach to relationships from then on.
And in order for a healing to happen, they have to make a conscious choice to become a vulnerable person.
And one time I was working with a child who was around four years old, and I was telling him that he had to become sweet-weak.
And he said, No!
I will never, ever, ever become sweet, weak!
Never!
And that was, I mean, he knew what I meant.
I made the word up on the spot, and he knew exactly what I meant.
And about two years later, he was healed because he did make the choice.
But it's the same choice for an adult.
And I think anybody can heal, that's the only, it's the resistance, that's the only obstacle to healing, I believe, is that choice to become vulnerable and to surrender and to really want it.
Yeah, and I think to recognize as well that, I mean, I like you, and I think like most people interested in these subjects, thought a lot about Adam Lanza and, you know, with all of the conjecture and projection and who knows what, because the information is generally not pursued that's necessary.
Thinking about, you know, every time you make the choice to plunge into a video game rather than to go out into the world and socialize, you develop more skills in that which is bad for you and you develop fewer skills or your skills erode in that which is good for you.
And those individual choices, you know, we think that life sometimes, you look back and say, oh, there were these big forks in the road.
But, I mean, every moment of every day is a fork in the road.
And you can either step towards the light or you can step towards the darkness.
Yeah.
I think trying to convince people to put aside whatever it is that they're self-medicating with, whether it's drugs, alcohol, sex, video games, media, whatever it is, sports, to step away from the self-medication and to step towards the thorny road of self-knowledge is a real challenge because it's so easy to just slip and turn away from that every day.
There's so many distractions in the world.
I was reading a Dr.
Philip Zimbardo, I'm sure you know, he wrote a book called The Demise of Guys.
He was saying that the average young teenager boy, the average young teenage boy, plays more than 13 or 14 hours of video games every week and has less than 30 minutes conversation with his father every week.
I mean, that's just the skills that are being lost and the not useful skills that are being gained is truly tragic.
Well, also that just shows up in the personality as an adult.
There is something so profound about...
I like to watch the news on TV sometimes just to watch adults interact or interviews and watch adults interact.
It seems like the higher functioning people are, the more they're able to have dialogue about important things and they have good grammar and they can track a conversation.
But people who get interviewed a lot on TV, they're around for a crisis or You know, they're regular people in the world.
It seems like you can tell the difference in how much dialogue they've had on what level about things.
And we need those dialogues with our parents.
We need time.
And, you know, one of the things that I notice about grownups is they tend to think a child can't be talked to in a meaningful way until the child grows up.
I was talking to a dad last night, and he's got a pretty serious situation.
The mother was taken away from the home, and the dad's been the one who worked, and so now he's got to step in as the He's a primary caregiver and he just doesn't know how to talk to his kid.
And I keep telling him, talk to your child like you would talk to an adult.
If they're missing the vocabulary, you teach them the vocabulary so you can talk to them because I have found that it's so much easier to talk to a child than it is an adult.
They're ready to be in any conversation about any experience that they've ever had.
They can talk about it.
And the more we teach them to self-represent their experiences and what they're thinking, the more intelligent they get.
Yes, and I'm a big fan of internal family systems therapy.
Dr.
Schwarzer, he's been on the show as well.
And so my daughter has just turned four, and her favorite word at the moment is ambivalent, because I really want to teach her that she is an ecosystem of various competing impulses.
You know, her tongue wants sugar, her bum doesn't want sugar.
You know, her bum wants vegetables, her tongue doesn't want vegetables.
And so, you know, how are you feeling?
I'm ambivalent.
I do and I don't.
I mean, that to me, I'm completely amazed at what is possible for, you know, a just newly minted four-year-old brain to be able to talk in incredibly complex and abstract ways.
So I think that we do, you know, there is this idea that children are just retarded adults, but frankly, I think that most adults are just broken children.
I think we should give much more respect to children than we do to most adults.
Yeah, that's so true.
We teach our children words like 12 o'clock and 6 o'clock.
They can picture it like 12 o'clock is in power, 6 o'clock is out of power.
Because we notice that children will try to dominate each other, and they're in power struggles all the time, and so we want them to become self-aware about when they're dominating and when they're...
Not dominating or open to learn, and that there are states of dominance that are leadership, and there are states of dominance that are mean, and there are states of surrender that are the primary state to be in to grow and learn and to receive, and then states that are shame-based.
So we're teaching this to like three-year-olds, four-year-olds, five-year-olds.
And they get it.
They get these complex concepts.
It's phenomenal.
Now, I'd like to touch also on...
What is, of course, a highly contentious topic, which is the question of autism.
Of course, those who listen to the show know, of course, the diagnosis has just skyrocketed over recent decades, and the idea that it comes from some sort of immunization seems to have been thoroughly discredited.
But you've, of course, written alongside with ADHD some of your thoughts about autism.
I was wondering if you could share those as well.
Well, I believe autism is environmental.
I'm not sure that some cases aren't environment in terms of, you know, Toxins in utero or maybe inoculations, but I certainly do know of a number of children,
probably 80% of the children that I've met that had autism, where something happened in the attachment phase I think one of the best kept secrets is mothers who have postpartum depression Staying home with their child,
putting the child in a bedroom, closing the door, and then when dad drives up in the driveway, they go and get the child and then turn the child over to the dad and say, I've been with him all day long, it's your turn now.
Boy, have I heard that story.
And it doesn't come out right away.
It comes out After a little while, sometimes it's just a preoccupied mother who's with a child.
Maybe she puts the child down, you know, in some kind of bucket.
You know those buckets that they carry babies around in, you know, maybe sits the baby next to her or puts the baby on the floor and then gets on the telephone or reads a book or whatever, but Autism seems to be an extreme lack of engagement, like a lack of eye contact, a lack of touching, cuddling, being held.
Autistic children are comforted by being, you know, wrapped up or held, and at the same time they don't want to be touched.
They really have difficulty with a warm exchange of engagement.
I got into an elevator once with a father and son when I had my office in a high-rise building.
This child was autistic and we got into the elevator and the child I think the father said, what floor are we going to?
And I said, ninth floor.
And then the child reached up to touch the button nine.
And the father said, no, don't touch.
You can't do that yet.
And I said, how come?
And he said, he doesn't know how to count.
So I asked the child, or I said, would you count to ten?
And he said, one, two, three.
And I said, okay, now would you count fast?
And he said, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
It was like he was being what he thought his father needed him to be.
And there was, of course, a theory which was floating around, I think, in the 50s or 60s with regards to schizophrenia back then, which was—and this is a pendulum that swings back and forth, if I understand the history of the community precisely—the idea that there was a refrigerator mom, I think was the phrase that was used in the 50s and 60s to describe the mothers of schizophrenics.
And this was recently repeated in a book I've just finished called The Science of Good and Evil by Baron Cohen, where he makes the, to me, tragically glib statement of, well, we've all known families where the parents were wonderfully kind, generous, supportive, empathetic, and connected, but still raised a sociopath or a psychopath.
And it's like, but how do you know?
I mean, you don't know.
There's no recording of what goes on in the household when the child is, eh.
Anyway, to me, having a psychopath without any environmental cause is like having a broken bone without any environmental cause.
They don't just break on their own.
But this oscillation between blaming or making parents responsible for the development of children and then swinging back to these genetic or medical causes...
It is such a battle, and it's not even a conscious battle, because people don't fight fair, I think.
At least, I think the people on the genetic side don't fight fair.
They'll simply quote stuff without any backup.
They'll quote twin studies without any of the caveats that go along with twin studies, like the fact that they share a womb with the same epigenetic phenomenon that is occurring with maternal biochemical influences in the womb, the fact that most twin studies are based upon twins who are separated years after They're born and share the same environment in their early childhoods and so on.
It's not a fair fight, and it seems to be consistently swinging back and forth, you know, from Freud to Skinner to, you know, back to the question of refrigerator moms, now to this idea that it's genetic or there's a chemical imbalance that's just a medical issue and so on.
It's not a clean fight.
It's not a fair fight, and I think there's a lot of...
Manipulation on the side of people who are focusing on the medical or genetic model.
And I can really feel the emotional pressure behind it because, I mean, I think one in five moms don't even want their child.
But I think the majority who do don't think of, let's find the best way to harm the child, of course.
But if through the advice of people they do, I can really see how it would be just like Like, trying to grasp a log in a stormy sea to try and find some cause other than your own misguided behavior.
But it just doesn't seem like there's a lot of honesty on the side, a lot of self-criticism on the side of people who are focusing on the genetics.
Sorry, that was a long rant, but what are your thoughts on that?
Okay.
It's called resistance, it's called denial, it's called defense, and what's interesting is that people who are pro-child tend to be self-aware, empathic,
they're other-oriented, they're perceptive, they're not as argumentative, they're not as brittle, whereas people who are pro-parent They have a cause that's like an unconscious cause.
It's almost like racism or something.
It's a drive.
It's because when they were very young, they got it.
They became enlisted, as I call it.
The parents finally got them to see that you look through my eyes.
You don't look through your eyes.
You look through my eyes.
And that's another decision that the child makes that lasts for a lifetime unless they ever reverse it.
And so, they grow up defending parents, you know, and it can become, there's a lot of therapists out there that became therapists almost as if they needed to defend all parents.
I mean, it becomes a highly unconscious, driven, dominant, you're right, unfair, blind position.
I also wanted to say that the research shows that about 50% of identical twins Are not the same.
Because, you know, and here's the explanation.
They are each other's environment.
If in the womb, one is on top and one's on the bottom, or one's bigger, one's smaller, then they get, you know, and then they begin having a battle for mom's attention.
When mom doesn't have a lot to give, then they see each other as adversaries, and then one of them becomes a dominant, and finally one of them learns to submit.
And then, you know, one has the environment of a weaker passive twin and the other has an environment of a stronger dominant twin.
And so about 50% of these kids grow up to be quite different.
And that is an argument for environment right there.
Right, right.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the twin stuff is...
And the other thing, too, even if there was a genetic factor, and there does seem to be, you know, environment plus particular genes seems to provoke more aggression in some children, it's sort of like, well, there probably is a genetic component to whether you're going to be more susceptible to diseases from smoking.
But you don't know all of the complexity of what your genetics and your cigarettes are going to do together, so just don't smoke.
I mean, that's the solution.
So, I mean, we have to treat our children as well as possible, even if there is a genetic cause, because we simply don't know, and we probably will never know as a species, all of the effects of influence of environment over genetics.
So you simply treat your kids as best as possible.
But this parent...
This parent forgiveness thing is something that drives me a little batty, and I'll try not to go on another rant because you are the expert, but the parent forgiveness thing is really tricky because you'll always hear from a lot of psychologists and other people in the mental health profession, you'll hear, well, the parents did the best they could with the knowledge they had, or, well, your parents had tough childhoods and so on as well.
But the problem with that is that The parents hold the children to a standard of accountability and responsibility and punishment.
And so, you know, you smash the lamp, you told a lie, you're going to get spanked or something like that, or a timeout, or, you know, you didn't share your toy or you grabbed something and therefore you don't get any dessert or something.
The adults, when their parents punish the children for, obviously, relatively minor infractions from an immature and developing brain, but then when the child becomes an adult and then the child says, look, I had some problems with the way I was parented, suddenly everything becomes different, and suddenly it's all like, ah, well, you see, I was doing the best I could with the knowledge that I had, and back then everyone else was doing it.
But, I mean, if the kid had tried making those excuses when they were a kid, they wouldn't.
I mean, when I was a kid, if everyone else was doing it, they'd say, well, if everyone was jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do that too?
I was supposed to think for myself.
So it seems that there's this reflex.
I don't know if it comes out of the Judeo-Christian, honor thy mother and thy father.
I mean, we used to have that with the patriarchy, and thank heavens we took that to task.
But there does seem to be a reflex around finding excuses for parental behavior that fundamentally means that we have higher moral standards for children than we do for adults, which seems entirely upside down.
Thank you.
Boy, I've written about this.
I absolutely agree with you.
It's backwards.
It's as if the child is supposed to be responsible for the parent's identity and the parent's ego, and the parent is not in the business of building the child's identity and the parent's ego.
So the child is raised in an environment that's other-oriented, that I have to always live...
It's almost like, why do we have codependent personalities?
There are people who have been raised to think in terms of the other person's point of view and not their own.
And in many cases, like I said, have been raised to defend their parents.
Almost to the point that they would give up themselves for their parents.
I had a client once who was taking our required parenting class.
Before we do therapy, they have to take a parenting class so they can learn about their own childhood.
And he came to the class and he started to get a handle on that we were saying that it wasn't Genetics.
It was environment and parents and childhood.
And he got up and he went to the door and he started to shake and he stood in the door and he said, I want to stay, but I don't think I'm allowed to listen to this.
I can't listen to this.
I can't hear what you're telling me.
I think it's wrong, but I don't know if it's wrong.
And then I had another client who was schizophrenic and he had a similar situation.
Long story, but I had an empathic father, I thought.
I don't think you can work with a schizophrenic client unless the parents are completely out of the picture or you get them to get off of their position that they're the dominant one and that they define things.
But anyway, he had a breakthrough.
And he was riding in the truck with his dad going to work and he started to tell his dad his feelings.
And his dad pulled off the side of the road and he said, if this is what therapy is, you're not going anymore.
So, you know, over and over and over, I've had that experience where we get the person to a point where they're ready to see and they're ready to be their own person, and then the parent steps in and it's a taboo.
You do not go there.
You don't say that.
You don't take that position.
Parents are sacred.
This is a one-way street.
And all the parent has to do is say, wow, I am so sorry.
Yeah, or tell me more, the magical words of curiosity.
You know, tell me more.
Help me understand more.
I had Dr.
Robin Grill on the show.
He's an Australian.
Australian!
Sorry, I always want to do that accent.
He's an Australian psychologist, and he's written about the studies which show, and I was reminded of your 16 years of indifferent therapy, the studies that seem to show that, in fact, seem to quite conclusively show that the best way to avoid repeating the cycle of abuse is to get angry at having been abused.
And The problem is that when therapists then say that the first place to go is understanding and forgiveness with the abuser, well, that's the wrong answer.
That's the wrong thing to do.
That's giving sugar to a diabetic.
That's the wrong answer.
And it may be something you get to over time, but the original experience of the child is outrage and anger.
And to say, well, no, skip over that entirely and get to this Zen Buddhist floating on a rainbow cloud acceptance of all things human...
I think is only a way of ensuring to the best of the therapist's ability that the abuse is most likely to recur rather than to interrupt and interfere by engaging the animal pride of anger at having been hurt.
It is so exciting to talk to you.
Alice Miller wrote about a client who was in therapy with another therapist and the therapist said, when are you going to get over this?
And he went home and put a bullet to his head.
You know, you can't skip that step.
You're absolutely right.
And if you go through it properly, the person comes out the other side with empathy for their parents and their childhood.
Yeah, because they've had empathy for themselves as a child.
I mean, you can't have empathy for someone else's childhood if you don't have empathy for yourself.
It's like asking to understand somebody else's Mandarin when you've never studied it.
I mean, you simply can't learn that language unless you speak it yourself first.
Anyway, it's frustrating.
But then, of course, I mean, I think about some of the financial incentives.
I mean, the ones with psychiatry, as you've mentioned, is pretty clear.
You know, having someone in for 10 or 15 minutes and pushing some meds on them and, you know, ka-ching, as opposed to really getting into stuff.
But, of course, I think that the psychological profession as a whole probably has some anxiety about...
You know, whether it's within the profession or repercussions from the parents to therapists, you know, like, I mean, I don't think any therapist relishes the idea of having some adult child of an abuser and saying, well, yes, you were abused.
It was immoral, it was evil, and it was a terrible thing.
And then, of course, you know, maybe the patient goes home and says to the parent, my therapist says this, this, and this, and it's like, oh, here comes the phone call.
And, you know, I think people...
I'd like to skip over to the step of forgiveness because it's less confrontational as a whole, but I do think that there is kind of an oath that you take to protect people's health and to do everything you can to prevent the recycling of abuse.
And if the step of anger is necessary, I think that's something the profession should be a little bit more engaged with.
Again, sorry, I don't mean to tell you all about being a psychologist.
These are just my thoughts over the years.
Yeah, I saw an interview with the Iceman by a forensic psychologist and he went through the whole interview and disclosed all about his childhood and all about his crimes and all about his thought process and at the very end the psychologist says to him, is there anything that you want to ask me?
How did I get this way?
And the psychologist said to him, well, it's about 50% genes and 50% your childhood.
He told of a horrible, horrible childhood.
I mean, horrible.
I went and got the book.
And read about his childhood.
It was really, really embarrassing.
He watched his father kill his brother and then they kept it a secret.
And how can you be a forensic evaluator?
This is one of the same evaluators that evaluated Jeffrey Dahmer and concluded that there was nothing wrong with his childhood.
But how can you be a forensic evaluator and believe that 50% of your behavior is genetic?
That's just...
Nothing was wrong with Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood.
I mean, he came home and his mother had simply moved, but leaving no forwarding address.
You don't think that may have some indication of her level of bonding to her son?
That may have been throughout his entire...
Anyway...
Well, actually, I have some more inside knowledge because I knew well the author of the book on his life, and he told me quite a bit about his childhood from what he was able to uncover.
She didn't touch him.
She didn't want to hold him.
And the father was at work for 12 to 14 hours.
And he was starving for touch.
His crimes were not violent crimes in terms of motive.
His crimes were ways to keep people from leaving him because he wanted to continue cuddling.
He wanted more touch.
He wanted skin to skin.
And the first years of his life, the only memories that he had that he shared with one of the evaluators was that his mother taught him to impale butterflies, his father taught him to gut fish, He went for a hernia operation when he was around four years old.
And nobody walked into the surgery with him.
Nobody was there from his family.
When he came out of it, nobody was there.
And he thought that he was being castrated.
He didn't understand the surgery.
And then one other memory was he was allowed to put his ear to his mother's belly when she was Pregnant with his younger brother.
So, the only memories he had of any human contact were of innards-oriented memories.
He did not have a normal childhood.
No, good heavens.
I mean, that's, yeah, I mean, that's wretched.
But again, this is the kind of thing where, you know, we have to create, it's almost like, I mean, it is medieval that we invent these mystery devils called genetics that are responsible for what people do, rather than, to me at least, looking.
Scientifically, we know how to create angry, violent monkeys.
It's very simple.
You simply remove them from their mother.
And you raise them alone, or even if you raise them with a fur-lined simulacrum of a mother, they still turn out to be aggressive and antisocial.
I mean, that's not a mystery.
You can make them like you make a car.
You can make them according to plan.
And the idea that it's somehow wildly different for human apes is just, boy, it just shows you the plausible deniability of those who want to protect humans.
Parents who've done unfortunate, tragic or malevolent things.
There's a forensic evaluator who was molested as a child.
She remembers being molested but she doesn't remember by whom, which usually implies that what's more traumatic is who.
I don't know another way to turn this off.
Oh, no, no problem.
Don't worry about it.
Okay.
Forensic evaluation.
Yeah, and so she doesn't remember who did it, which implies that it was somebody she knew.
And she works for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation taking referrals, and out of all the cases that she's ever testified for, they have all been on behalf of the accused.
So, she's never once said that she thought that the accused could have been the perpetrator.
She's always saying it's a concocted memory, that it's not real.
Now, that's very bizarre.
This is a woman that has been, you know, she acknowledged that she's been molested, can't remember who, but still, in every case that she's ever testified for, in over 110 cases, She testifies on behalf of the accused.
I mean, it runs deep.
This whole thing about defending parents, it runs so deep.
We cannot see clearly as long as we're seeing through our parents' eyes.
We can't be perceptive.
We can't call shots.
But she's what I call acting out.
She is acting out through her profession.
And a lot of people grow up to and choose professions where they can act out And do in that profession either what was done for them or what was mandated for them to do.
Like a lot of times prosecuting attorneys or cops who beat up, you know, I think it happens more here in the United States and in Europe, but who beat up perpetrators.
You know, there's acting out.
Not that we shouldn't have cops, that we shouldn't have prosecuting attorneys, and not that we shouldn't have forensic evaluators, If you aren't in touch with your own childhood and what happened to you, and if you are in denial about what your parents have done, you can't see clearly.
And once I was teaching a class, the very first thing that I did was I wrote across the board The degree to which you believe in genetics is the degree to which you cannot see clearly.
I could have written, the degree to which you protect your parents and give them special dispensations that you would give to no one else is the degree to which you cannot see clearly.
They go hand in hand.
It's like believing in genetics is the belief of a pro-parent person.
It's an excuse that obviously serves the interests of destructive parents at the expense of not only the child, but the future children, because it bypasses.
It means that any anger is immature.
Any anger is irrational.
And that, I think, is a very dangerous thing.
I mean, I think anger is an extremely healthy emotion.
It is the immunodefense system of personal integrity and safety.
And when we tell people to not get angry, and to get angry at genetics is like getting in a rage that your father was short or bald.
I mean, that doesn't make any sense.
So it's a way of diffusing people's legitimate anger, which of course serves the interests of people who've done them wrong, because then you can continue to gain resources from people you've wronged, and they don't have the right to get angry at you, otherwise they're immature.
And I think it really does tragically set the child up as an adult when they become a parent of being inhabited by the parental alter and recreating that which they were prevented from getting angry at.
Listen, I want to make sure that my listeners in particular get the chance to obviously visit your website and also know about things that you have coming up.
You said that your son is going to be working with you on some training.
Also, I'm sure your son's channel, the Debate Channel, you think you said it's got 30,000 subscribers, would be worth mentioning as well.
If you'd just like to give out your vital statistics so that people can come and get a hold of your books and any other material you have.
Okay, fantastic.
Thank you so much because...
I am trying to do whatever I can to get the word out.
This is the manual.
I have another version around here.
This is a paper bag.
It's a hardcover.
This I recommend as a shower gift.
And it comes with an autograph and comes wrapped with a bow.
And it's the manual.
It's a definitive book on parenting and the causal theory.
And then I have three other mini-books, which all of these are downloadable as well, and a very reasonable price, especially for the mini-books.
One is called ADHD, A Diagnosis and Denial.
Another one is called Healing Your Rad Child.
And then a third one is called The Politics of Memory, which is...
About the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the politics of how therapists have been put on the defense.
If we have clients that are, you know, that recall being molested while they're in therapy with us, we are often accused of having brainwashed, you know, based on all the propaganda that these people put out.
And my son, his YouTube video is theoretical bullshit.
And he is...
Well, I'm a Zen Buddhist.
And he is an atheist.
You know, what can I say?
But he's really smart.
And he debates really good stuff.
And he's a natural skeptic.
And I love that about him.
And...
And we teach the Intelligence Lecture together at the Parenting and Relationship Counseling Foundation, aka PARC with a C. And it's the most fun I have all year long.
It's an eight-hour lecture, and we do it together, and it's all about how to create intelligence for From infancy on up to becoming a skeptic and how to question.
It's really a lot of fun.
Go ahead.
Okay.
And if anybody wants to come to our facility in Granada Hills, they have to take the parenting class first, which is available on CD or DVD, although the book would suffice, the manual.
And And then after that, they qualify to do the therapy.
But it's in Granada Hills and we have four causal therapists now.
Fantastic.
And I will put the links to all of these below the video and on the podcast notes.
And I mean, I feel like we could chat all day, but in the interest of my listeners perhaps having to have other things to do with their lives, you're certainly welcome back any time.
Obviously, as a citizen of the human planet, I thank you enormously, enormously, enormously for the work that you're doing.
I hope it's not confirmation bias for me to love what it is you're doing so much.
I don't think so.
But obviously, you've done amazing things as a mom.
And as a thinker and as a healer, I really, really appreciate everything that you've done.
And I'll do what I can to help get your material out there because I think it's essential.
To save the world, it's one child at a time.
I wish there was a shortcut.
I wish there was some magic rainbow we could draw over the world to make it cry its necessary tears and move on to a new dawn.
But it does seem to be a one-child-at-a-time phenomenon, and I think your work is very essential with that.
So thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
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