D.C. Sniper killing spree was a plot to win child custody

Kim, you wrote that you feel sad and you feel like there is something fundamentally wrong with you.

I don’t know if you’ve read any of my posts about fugue states, but this sounds to me like a fugue state. An emotional state that recurs in certain circumstances that remind you of the initial time it happened.

What you wrote sounds like some really good work at getting to the bottom of it. When I was writing about fugue states, I defined them two ways. One is that is a neurological route — kind of like the old “Chutes and Ladders” game — that quickly shifts you from the current experience to the historical state. The other was that fugue states have their own brain chemical cocktail associated with them.

I’m getting pretty technical here, and I should probably step back and say that we all have them. And the particular one you’re describing is very close to one that I experienced most of my life. Feeling ashamed, inadequate, outside, not knowing how, and at base, feeling broken in a way I couldn’t exactly define or fix. I often experienced it as a panic attack after conversations or business meetings. (I remember sitting in my car with my forehead on the steering wheel waiting for the fe racing heartbeat and feelings that I should be embarrassed about something to recede.) I also experienced them as total meltdowns in my marriages, where I became panicky and desperate to be told I was okay or forgiven. (Not because I’d done something so awful, but because my sense of confidence or belonging had vaporized.)

You wrote that shaming is a powerful tool. I agree, but particularly in the hands of a parent who is the source of a child’s emotional and physical security. What shame says is “you are not acceptable to me.” It’s a old-fashioned way of teaching ethics to children before they are old enough to understand the principles involved, a response to when they lie or steal or fail to perform in some other way, that is the emotional equivalent of corporal punishment. But worse really, because corporal punishment is usually a repercussion that is clearly linked to a specific infraction. Shame, unless managed very carefully, can become a pronouncement on the character. It’s more vague and also more dangerous in the child’s perception, because it seems like evidence of a fundamental lack in the child. Something wrong with you.

Shame is a social feeling. It’s really important to remember that when we’re looking at our own feelings of shame. It has to do with not meeting community standards (or what passes for community when we get our first taste of it). If we do not meet community standards, we risk losing the security and benefits that come with being accepted.

That’s why shame is so powerful in terms of being internalized into behavioral rules. And why most modern parents use less heavy-handed techniques like time-out to communicate the same lessons, but in a way that allows the child to get the punishment over with and come back into the fold. In addition, modern parents (ones that have studied childhood development) also make an effort to provide alternative “okay” behavioral ideas to children who are too young to understand why they did that was not okay.

I think that a lot of our long-term damage, which I talk about as coping mechanisms that worked when we were children but not adults, boiled down into us taking a lesson from being shamed that seems to be what our parents want, but they’re based on expediency, not principle.

I talk about my iconic re-parenting experience on something that happened when I was three or four. (I say “iconic” because I’m not exactly sure of the time or details, but I’m very certain of the emotional content.) My father’s anger was terrifying. It was also unpredictable and unreasonable. When I first became aware of this, I went to my m other to complain about how my father treated me for no reason. My mother’s response was that it was my job not to make him. angry. I learned two things from that. One was that my mother was not going to protect me and I was on my own. The other was that I was going to have to be very clever to never make him angry.

Keeping my father from getting angry at me, my mother and the other kids became a big part of my life. I became the sacrificial child who took other kids’ beatings because I tried to defend them. I became my father’s “favorite” because I was so eager to please and acquiescent, and lived with the jealousy of my mother and siblings. My anxiety and resentment played out in relationships with my friends. Today I understand why so many of my teachers singled me out for personal encouragement, despite my mediocre performance at school.

For me, undoing this involved going back in memory to that event. When I tracked that fugue state back to its first occurrence in my memory, I was able to be with my small self, as something like a ghost from the future, and judge what was going on from a more adult perspective. I could tell my child-self that she was correct in thinking that my parent were supposed to protect her. And that she was a very smart little girl to survive so well, but now it was time to put that burden down. I would protect her, and she could get back to growing up. (The big tasks of this age should be “good guys and bad guys” play and learning the first social rules based on the dawning understanding that other people had different and separate feelings from ours.)

Talking about re-parenting is hard. It’s a very personal experience that happens almost in an instant, but it changes a fundamental belief about how the world works. It requires tracking an emotional state down to its source, interpreting and judging it anew, and coming away with a different lesson than we learned the first time.

This was not the only major trauma I had to revisit, but there were only a few. These exercises really worked. Each one released some part of me that had been trapped behind the defensive learning that I had survived on, but that had eventually proven to be so dysfunctional in adult life. The released parts were still as young as they were when they got blocked, so I had to live through them growing up. And for me, this explains the progression of the angry phase through its rough beginnings of blaming and outrage through more control and effectiveness as our boundaries and understanding of our needs become better formed.

In conclusion, I’m totally agreeing with your idea that this comes from your background. Maybe you can do something with that insight to untangle that old wiring that doesn’t serve you today. I find that I am still doing it as I discover new bits of vulnerability or dysfunction in myself, but getting those few big ones really changed my life.

Love —

Kathy