A BOYHOOD - THE BIOGRAPHY OF A SYSTEM

 

 

Paul McDermott has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

 

What follows are are two chapters from early in the manuscript ,followed by one from the Afterword - a social and psychological analysis of the normalisation of boys (most of which equally applies to girls).

 

1.              Calico

 

 

 

 

   Boxing Day was when dad would drive us down to Pop and Nan's in mum's gigantic Vauxhall Velox. My best friend Birdy said it was called Boxing Day because Mary and Joseph had this huge fist fight after Jesus was born. He didn’t know what about exactly. I didn’t believe him, but it could’ve been true. Who can say? My grandfather Pop didn’t believe in Jesus at all, but we had to. Maybe someone told Birdy he had to believe in the fist fight on Boxing Day. Birdy didn’t say who’d won. I reckon Mary must’ve, because you never heard about Joseph after Jesus was born, not after that fist fight anyway.

   Mum’s Velox was a sad sort of grey and the paint wasn’t shiny anymore and sometimes I’d find a bit of it lying on the garage floor. Before we were told to Get In Or You’ll Be Left Behind, I’d crouch down and look under. It was like the Velox was laying tiny steel eggs that never looked like eggs. If the piece was small enough, I’d put it in my time capsule in case the people of the future need it.

   Every summer holidays we’d go to Pop and Nan’s after Christmas. It’s two hundred and ninety-eight miles from our house at 62 Hawera Road in Auckland to their house at 72 Ormond Road in Gisborne. Nan hates my stinking guts. I don’t know why. She didn’t used to let Catholics come into their house ever, but now she does. Just my luck.

   Pop could walk on stilts, fix up almost anything he set his mind to, and spent most of every day shut up in his workshop. He was A Character. He’d been a prisoner in The Great War. That's what he called it, The Great War. It didn't sound so great. He'd been put in a special underground prison in France when he was seventeen, because he’d tried to run away from all the other prisons they’d locked him up in. You're not allowed to run away. Nobody is. But I couldn’t get why anybody would lock up someone as nice as Pop, even if he was the enemy.

   Another thing. Pop never ever owned a rubbish bin in his whole life, and he hadn't set foot in a shop since 1917. Nan said. She was really mean, Nan, but she wasn’t a liar.

   She whistled from the minute she got up and kept going at it all day long. You never heard anybody whistle so much in your life. She whistled while she made Pop his breakfast, whistled through the dishes and the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning, whistled all the way until lights out. For all I knew, she could whistle while she slept as well. It wouldn’t have surprised me, her not being a Catholic or anything. But she’d look after Pop when he woke up screaming and that, shells from the war whistling over his bed all night.

   If Pop hadn’t decided to give the shops a miss, I’d probably never have been born. I know everything all about it because it’s my first memory, and it was given to me by mum. It comes from the olden days when she was a baby, and that memory she gave me was given to her by Pop and Nan. That’s how it works.

   They were so so poor, Pop and Nan, and lived in an old wooden house in a small town by the sea called Napier. Every morning in summer, Nan used to take mum-the-baby outside and leave her there, in the pram, safe under the shade of the brick chimney that ran up the outside of that old wooden house. Brick is best, wood is second. I don’t know how long Nan would leave mum-the-baby out there, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if it'd been all day. I reckon mum would have felt real lonely and sad, even after two minutes.

   One morning - and I know which one exactly - Pop took off a shoe and a sock and Nan drew around his bare foot on a piece of paper. He would've had to keep still. There are hundreds of places you have to keep still, like in school and in church and at the table and in the back of mum's Velox and in the dentist's chair and that. You're not supposed to fiddle or daydream in any of those places either.

   Pop needed shoes, and shoes were one of the only things he couldn’t make himself in his workshop. He could make pretty much everything else, and he could roll a cigarette in one hand. That was the most magic thing he could do of all. He could roll up a cigarette and not even look like he knew he was doing it. And that cigarette would look just like a bought one from Mister Who-Dackie’s shop on the corner.

   Nan made that drawing of Pop’s foot and took mum-the-baby into town to get some shoes to bring back for him to try on. Mum said they’d only give Nan one of each pair in case she was a robber. That’s how Pop got shoes. Nan was always nice to him at least.

   The day was Tuesday the third of February 1931, and at 10:47 in the morning, two hundred and fifty-six people got themselves killed in the Napier earthquake. I'm good at numbers. Pop and Nan’s wooden house had wobbled around like a wooden house is supposed to in an earthquake, but all that wobbling pushed the chimney over. It fell onto the spot where number two hundred and fifty-seven would have been, squashed flat as a pancake.

   When mum told me that she might easily have been killed dead, I could see right off I wouldn’t've ever been born. It gave me the shivers, seeing I was just a fluke like that, like I was a balloon somebody could just let go of. After the earthquake, Pop and Nan moved to another small town by the sea - Gisborne. They must've been hoping like mad Gisborne was going to keep still.

   The car Pop drove them there in was a Scripps Booth, which turned out to be the first car he buried. When he couldn’t make it keep going anymore, he left it in the orchard around the back of their new old wooden house, and it had sat there, rusting under a pear tree while mum-the-baby grew into mum-the-little-girl. That’s when Pop had got it into his head to bury it. He said it'd make a good fertilizer for the fruit trees out back in the orchard, all that iron and stuff slowly going into the soil. He buried it whole, which must've taken some digging. Once it was done, he said he felt pretty good about the whole thing. Mum told me about it, making another memory for me - this one of Pop burying the Scripps Booth under the pear and apple and plum trees in the old orchard.

   Mum wouldn’t have ever been around to give me that memory if Nan hadn’t taken her to the shops on Tuesday the third of February 1931. And I wouldn’t’ve been around to hear her not telling me about it either. I don’t know where memories go if they’ve never been able to happen. But dad wouldn’t've ever got married, because he wouldn’t’ve been able to find mum anywhere, no matter how hard he looked. At least then he could’ve been more like that secret agent James Bond 007, like he wanted. 

   When dad took us to see Goldfinger, you could tell he wanted to be James Bond who didn’t have kids. James Bond didn't have anyone. If mum had been smashed to death under the chimney, then dad could’ve even had a silver Aston Martin with machine guns behind the lights and an ejector seat in case some kid got in by mistake. Then dad could’ve just pushed that red button.

   But instead of getting smashed to smithereens, mum grew into mum-the-girl, and that was when Pop shouted at her. Mum said, 'he raised his voice', which is shouting plain as day. He only did it once though. Once in her whole life. I reckoned that must've tied with Jesus for the world record - Jesus only shouted once, at those rascals selling stuff in the Temple. Only priests are allowed to do that, and they pass around a wooden plate to get the money. They are selling us all the way into heaven.

   What happened when Pop shouted was, he was mending mum-the-girl's bike with parts he’d made, and while he was fitting them mum-the-girl began yakking away, and that’s when Pop shouted at her to ‘put a cork in it’. Mum said she felt like her whole world had just fallen apart and that dads should always be gentle. My dad wasn't, so mum must’ve only meant gentle with her.

   When my dad was just a kid he lived on a farm with heaps of beds and dad-the-kid didn’t get his first pair of shoes until he was already at school. They were poor too, dad’s family. This is how poor. Those first shoes were plastic rugby boots. And he wore them to school and church and even to bed, he was that proud to have his first real shoes. Then he grew up to be a teenager and got himself put into a university. Dad never said anything much about himself, or about his mum and dad, or growing up or anything except the story about the plastic rugby boots. Maybe nothing else happened. He had heaps of brothers and sisters though. Nine. He didn’t tell me; I counted.

   When mum was a teenager, Nan said she was clever so could maybe even be a secretary. She told mum not to bother with trying to get into university and she'd be getting no help from them and would have to pay for it all herself and get a job and that. Mum went anyway. That was mum. She said she met dad there and liked him straight off and they wanted to get married, but Nan hated the Catholics more than she hated anything. She'd hated us Catholics from way before mum and dad even met, when they were still Gretta Patricia and Bryan Noel. Mum said she was named after somebody I’ve never even heard of called Gretta Garbo, and dad’s second name came from somebody else I’ve never even heard of called Noel Coward. She said they were movie stars, but I’d never seen them at the flicks.

 

   When mum told the bit about why Nan hated us Catholics, I couldn’t understand anything much of what she was talking about. It was something about Nan being an orange man and her dad was the grand master of the loyal orange. I just looked at mum when she finished.

   'Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.'

   That was a big fat lie for starters.

   When mum and dad got married, Nan wouldn’t let any of the Catholics into her house. Mum said, ‘It was Ridiculous. I was a Catholic by then. I had to be, to marry your father.’

   We have lots of rules, us Catholics. I bet you we have the most rules more than anybody else. But Mum and dad got themselves married in a church anyway. Mum said there was no music and no flowers, because people didn’t much like the idea of them getting married and having kids and that. They got married anyway, without colours and probably just the sound of people coughing like they always like to do in church so you know they’re there.

   Mum said the wedding do was in Nan and Pop’s backyard, which was where the longdrop was. A longdrop is a hole in the ground under a long board with a hole in the middle to sit on, and the long board with the hole is in a tiny dark shed with no windows. The door was rotten at the bottom and made a really loud creak. And there were heaps of flies, even landing on your bum. It stunk like mad in there, specially in summer, but it was the only toilet Pop would use. He wouldn't use the proper indoor one, not ever.

   I used the long drop too, except when it was dark with the spiders and that. It was scary, even in daytime, up there over that black stinking hole which you could fall into any second. But it was the best place to dig an escape tunnel – Pop said.

   ‘If we had dunnies, we’d start digging there. It was the one place Jerry Corp wouldn’t want to have a good look.’

   Sitting on the longdrop, you had to hold your breath most of the time, so you had to go pretty quick. Polar bears can hold their breath for three minutes. I can’t. Pop and Nan had the long drop and then the Catholics that Nan hated wouldn’t have to set foot in their house when mum and dad got married. I never knew what Pop thought about the wedding. He was always nice to us Catholic kids though.

   The wedding do was in a tent Pop and Nan had made when mum was little. Nan bought calico at the shops - canvas was expensive and they were as poor as dad’s family. Pop and Nan waterproofed the calico in their old tin bath, then put the tent together on a sewing machine you made work with your foot. The tent was a proper job and lasted. It’s another one of my memories that mum gave me, another one from before I was born, in a world I never knew, with people I hadn’t even met yet.

   The tent was made for camping. Nan didn’t know it would be for marrying their daughter to a Catholic, otherwise I bet she wouldn’t’ve ever made it. Pop and Nan had an old Plymouth when they made that tent - the Scripps Booth was busy rusting under the orchard. The Plymouth was loaded with the tent and the camping stuff and the kids and Nan and that, and Pop drove them out to a piece of land called the East Cape.

   It was a rough road. Sometimes Pop had to stop the car and get out and grab a shovel to fill in potholes or flatten the road a bit, or just go it alone in the car while the rest of them walked along behind, hoping he’d make it. At the end of the road camp was set up on the grassy banks of a river mouth, a stone's throw from the ocean. There, they could keep to themselves. Pop liked to keep to himself.

   Logs washed up along the riverbanks became firewood for cooking and diving boards for kids. At low tide each day, Nan would head out on foot around the rocks at the end of the beach, with a billycan and three pence. She'd walk the three miles to buy milk from the local Māori tribe. They had cows. Then she’d walk the three miles back, before the tide was far enough in to drown her.

   Food was found at low tide around the rocks - buckets of crayfish and shellfish - snapper were caught on the line, and mullet were shot out of the river. Everything was cooked on an open fire. When Pop came back from the war, one of the things he was carrying was a .303 rifle. He was carrying other stuff too, stuff that made him stay in his workshop all day and woke him up screaming at night. But like most everything else he’d ever owned, he still had that .303. If he didn’t fancy setting a line for snapper, he’d take that old rifle and go sit on a high bank by the river, from where he had a clear view of the mullet swimming by and minding their own business. If he’d hit any of those fish with a bullet from that gun there’d have been nothing left worth eating. So he’d aim near enough to stun the fish, then roar down the bank and grab them before they could figure out what the heck was going on. Pop and Nan could live on the beach like that, far away from everyone, and keep their family fed no worries.

 

   Anyway, everybody was real poor but mum met dad at the university and they said they loved each other and let’s get married and Nan hated the Catholics so much she wore black to the wedding. There’s this photo - which is another way to get memories put in you – from inside the that calico tent. You can see the tent’s already pretty old by then. But there’s the wedding cake, and there’s mum looking as beautiful as anything, maybe even like Gretta Garbo in a tent. And dad does look a little bit like James Bond 007. They’re right beside each other, smiling in black and white, a knife in their hands.

 

 

2.              Tassels

 

 

 

 

   On Boxing Day we all had to help pack the Velox and not be A Nuisance. Dad always wanted us to head off early to beat the traffic. He was always beating things, dad, like the traffic, the heat, the clock, and me. We packed our bags and took them down to the car, dumped them in the boot, and dad changed everything round so it was how it was supposed to be. But when he saw what we'd packed, we had to have another go because we’d mainly put in Christmas presents and not ‘underwear, beach wear, pyjamas, and Something Interesting to Read’.

   Plus, we were allowed one favourite thing each. Dad took his golf clubs; Mum took Liz, her new baby; John took a sheath knife to use on Uncle Ralph's farm for skinning possums; Anne took her new Christmas book called Black Beauty; and Cary took Magilla Gorilla, even though Magilla Gorilla was supposed to be Liz’s now. Magilla Gorilla was a cuddly toy from that cartoon on telly. It kept wanting to be adopted by someone, but he kept being sent back to Mr Peeble’s pet shop. It was pretty sad, but everyone was always laughing. The favourite thing I took was the so-called Lone Ranger outfit I got for Christmas. Mum and dad said it was a Lone Ranger outfit anyway. They wouldn’t’ve lied about something like that, even though it looked nothing like his real one. When I put it on, I wasn’t sure I was really him.

   That outfit didn’t even come with a gun, but mum said not to worry because Nan would give me a gun when we got to Gisborne. That made me worry. For the trip I put in a grey plastic spanner - it didn’t fall through the hole at the bottom of the holster like the pencil had. I knew having a spanner in my holster was going to be a problem, specially after dad said cowboys carried spanners in their holsters all the time and him and mum laughed. I’d never seen that on The Lone Ranger. Not even Tonto had to have a grey plastic spanner.

   Dad started up the Velox and said, ‘Everybody in?’ while we were still getting in. He did it on purpose. You could tell because he’d done it before. A lot. I can remember.

The second thing I can remember that’s my memory and wasn’t put in me: Dad picking me up out of the cot and rubbing his rough cheek against my face. I saw him do it to the new babies too. He always thought it was funny. It never was, even though he shaved twice a day.

After shaving he’d put on the aftershave and his hair was always neat and tidy with Brylcreem - Yes Sir! BRYLCREEM your hair for the CLEAN smart look. And he always did up the top button on his shirt and he made me do up my top button too, like him, especially for church, when we had to hang around him and mum and smile so people could see us all pretending, like you’re supposed to.

   At church I’d tell God I was a good boy and said my prayers and everything and I didn’t need to get belted, but He never did anything to stop it. And at church mum and dad were someone else anyway, so maybe God couldn’t tell who I was praying about. We all had to be someone else at church. We had to wear shoes. We had to dress up properly. Mum would check and check how we looked. And she'd take out her curlers, all of them, even the front ones, and wear makeup and carry a little handbag. Dad would wear a jacket and long trousers, and change his face by smiling, and use a cigarette lighter instead of the matches.

   I liked the matches, how you scraped them along the brown strip on the little yellow box with the beehive picture on it. And the way they fizzed into a fire. And how they curled up black while they died. You could probably even burn down a wooden house with matches, and then it would be on The News at Six.

   My dad watched The News at Six every night after work, and he listened to Radio 1ZB every day on the weekend. 1ZB had the races. They only raced horses, not cheetahs or anything. Dad always needed a bit of peace and quiet so he could hear all about the tracks and the jockeys and stuff. And he always needed extra peace and quiet when he rang up the secret man to put the bet on. I couldn't understand what he was talking about with the secret man. Just numbers.

   Once I was singing in another room and he shouted out, ‘Who’s making all that racket,’ and I stopped. He didn’t mean it. He didn’t understand I was just singing. But I never sang any more if he was there with the races on. Only when he kept leaving me alone. But when the horses were nearing the finish line he’d shout at us, really frightening to Shut Up, shout like a bomb to make everything around dead and quiet and still as anything.

   I wouldn’t look at him. I wouldn’t dare. I’d look down, staring hard at nothing, trying to be nothing, to be so dead I had never been born. Just in case. Except I could tell if he was staring at me with those hard eyes and those hard lips and those big black eyebrows going everywhere. He’d be staring at me or not staring at me, and I’d be as small as I could be and trying to disappear and not look at anything and not breathe and my tummy would be full of those butterflies making me queasy. And mum would keep eating her dinner and she didn’t mind us being frightened one bit, like she didn’t even care or anything.

   Sometimes I’d cry though. You’re trying to be dead quiet and you have to squeeze everything in real tight, but sometimes tears leak out. You can’t stop them. Then you everybody knows you’re such a weaking.

   ‘What’s got into him?’

   Everybody would keep not answering.

   I don’t know if dad shouted at other people, like at his work and that, or only at us. I never saw him shout at anyone at church, not at the priest or the nuns or at the other people pretending to be nice and holy and smiling. I even got shouted at by the teacher lady in kindergarten, when I was just a little kid before I went to school and that.

   At kindergarten we had Mat Time, Sleep Time, Lunch Time, Play Time, and Story Time. I don't know what the other times were called. At Play Time the boy with red hair was bullying the girl in the pretty dress. He was trying to take the three-wheeler with the rainbow tassels off her. But she was holding on like anything to those handlebars, her head jammed down into her shoulders like she was going to get belted too. The boy’s teeth were shut together hard with a creepy smile on his face, but the girl wasn't screaming or crying or anything - just holding on and him smiling down at her like that.

   When that boy with the red hair hit her, I couldn’t keep doing nothing. She could. She just sat there and took it. Sometimes you have to because you can’t do anything. I could see right off she wasn’t going to give up that tricycle with the rainbow tassels, not for anything, and my brain said to run straight at that ginger boy as fast as I could and knock him flat. So I did. He fell onto the concrete path and hurt himself pretty good.

   The girl got to keep that tricycle for the rest of playtime, and I got shouted at by the teacher lady. What Have You Got To Say For Yourself?

   Then they made me not sit in the circle at story time, which made the story sort of empty even though I could hear all the words. Then they made me sleep away from the rest of them at nap time, which made me not be able to sleep anyway. Then they made me wait inside so mum had to come in and get me when she got sick of waiting at the gate and all the other kids and their mums had gone, even that boy with the red hair and the girl in the pretty dress. And then I was to never be allowed back to kindergarten ever in a million years.

   Mum was Fed Up To Her Back Teeth with me and I was going to be Under Her Feet All Day. She had to start waiting for me to get old enough to go to school. She even had to take me on an aeroplane with her to Gisborne when there was an emergency and the Velox was broken down which was A Damn Nuisance. When we walked out onto the airfield the propellers of the silver aeroplane were two wavy circles bending the air, making a racket so loud it seemed there’d be no room for another sound in the whole world.

   She let me have the window seat. I did up my seatbelt real tight, just in case. Mum undid it a bit.

   'You won't be able to breathe.'

   You have to keep breathing and then you can’t die.

   Then my chair pushed me really hard in the back until the whole plane was flying and everybody was in it and nobody was left behind. Then a pretty lady in a uniform brought me a bottle of Fanta. Her white gloves opened a secret door that folded down over my lap. I sat up straight. The lady put a white paper serviette on top of the secret door, then a glass. But she put it upside down. Maybe she was new. Then she put the bottle of Fanta beside it. I turned the glass up the right way, to show her. She smiled, right at me. It was embarrassing.

   When the plane was about ready to do the landing, I could look down and see Pop and Nan’s town was like a giant chequered picnic blanket spread out beside the ocean. There were squares of different greens, and squares of red roofs, and the roads made even bigger squares, but some weren’t squares really so somebody must’ve got in trouble for that. The river didn’t have to make any squares.

   The pilot had to turn the plane around and around before we landed. It would have been like that for Laika, that space dog the Commies had, going around and around the earth. She never had a window seat like me though, and she was murdered.

   Mum waiting for me to be old enough to go to school took so long and all the days that I got old enough for a two-wheeler. Dad taught me how to ride my big brother John's old one, which I was pretty glad didn't have rainbow tassels. It was blue, so it was a boy’s bike. And it had a cross bar because cross bars are only allowed for boys. I kept getting John's old stuff, which was annoying, but we had to think about the poor people in China who were starving to death and didn’t even have stuff to eat, not even fish and chips on Fridays.

   Dad taught me how to ride the big blue two-wheeler with the cross bar. He held the bike steady for me while I climbed on. I was scared. Then he pushed me and the bike down our steep gravel driveway. When the bike took off, I looked back so I could see him running along behind me, keeping me safe, looking proud and smiling and calling out and everything. But when I looked, he wasn't there. You have to Stand On Your Own Two Feet and Pull Your Weight. He'd already turned around and was walking back into the garage.

  

 

 

And from the Afterword:

 

The Life Lie

 

 

 

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses respect for himself. And having no respect, he ceases to love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

 

   A child implicitly trusts his parent’s judgement, so when he is loved by them he feels he is intrinsically of value. This conviction naturally leads to him valuing himself, his space, his time, and his way of being. He becomes convinced by his parent’s treatment of him that he has inherent worth and that being himself in the world is desirable. All this is calibrated into his Me-O-Stat and will determine how he experiences life.

   Conversely, if a child is not loved by his mother and father, he will equally trust their judgement. This conviction naturally leads to him de-valuing himself, his space, his time, and his way of being. He becomes convinced by his parent’s treatment of him that he has little worth and that being himself in the world is undesirable. All this is calibrated into his Me-O-Stat and will determine how he experiences life.

    The idea that the mother and father cannot love because of their inadequacies is inconceivable to a child (and to most “adults”). The parent’s behaviour is taken as normal by their child, simply the way things are. Parents are rarely doubted and never have to explain themselves. Indeed, they usually convey to their child that they, their world, and their life choices are pretty much perfect.

   The child hoping to be loved by parents who cannot love is like someone demanding lamb chops from the baker – the baker isn’t withholding lamb chops; the baker simply cannot bake dough into lamb chops. If the customer takes that personally – this baker (parent) is withholding the lamb chops (love) because I’m not a good enough customer (person) - then they are not recognising that bakers can only provide bread. But because the child cannot conceive of his parents as incapable of providing what he needs, what is left for the child to conclude other than there must be serious and unforgiveable deficits in himself?

   From touch to sight to mobility to words, the child’s ability to comprehend and communicate moves on. Words facilitate more complex interactions and processes, and one of these is the ability to create within himself distortions of reality such as fictions, delusions, fantasies, and lies. The child can begin to, in a word, gaslight[1] himself.

   In order to create the illusion of a functional family environment, one he can understand and therefore begin to cope with and perhaps even influence, the child must manufacture a new coherent narrative to explain his experience. If the child is creative enough, and suffering enough, he will use his new skills with words and ideas to create his “life lie[2]”. And the life lie that most often comes through my consulting room door is precisely this:

 

I have brought about my own rejection.

 

   Having concluded this, the child develops a heightened sense of responsibility for any negative event within the family – it is not the parents who are responsible, but he the child. Vulnerable and highly impressionable, he internalises the struggles and conflicts within the family unit, perceiving them as a direct result of his own actions, inactions, thoughts, and inadequacies. The child has adopted a self-blaming narrative. He convinces himself that by taking full responsibility for his situation he can somehow rectify or mitigate it. The flawed logic of his position is:

 

I am rejected because I am not enough.

 

   The intelligence and creativity behind this lie is impressive, because if the child can convince himself it is the truth then it must be within his powers to do something about it – in other words he creates hope in a situation where there is none:

 

If I can become perfectly whatever my parents need me to be, I will inevitably win their love.

 

   But in order to believe his life lie, the child must attack his perception of reality to the extent that he is no longer able to perceive the actual cause of his suffering – his parent’s inadequacy and dysfunction. He attacks his perception of his own direct experience of them, and his ability to use language facilitates this. Now, ideas can be superimposed over reality, creating the illusion of coherence and the hope of change, where previously there was only hopeless suffering.

   Any crumbs of warmth, support, kindness, interest, or affection are inflated into proof that there is a veritable banquet of love available on the parent’s high table if only the child can raise himself up to the required level to participate in it. Through this gas lighting of himself, it isn’t long before he can no longer trust his direct experience of reality, because he can no longer trust himself.

   But the payoff of the false hope (I can improve my situation) generated by manufacturing the false problem (I am not enough as I am) is that it is preferrable to a reality which is precisely despair[3]. Yet the child has not avoided his despair at all - he has only avoided having to pinpoint the root of his despair: his parents’ inability to love him for who he is.

   Having convinced himself he is the problem by lying to himself that he is intrinsically not worthy of being loved, that he himself created the abyss between himself and his parents, the child has turned away from his own nature just as his parent’s turned away from him. This is a double blow to the child’s psyche[4], as his new dysfunctional relationship to himself comes into alignment with his parents’ dysfunctional relationship to him. In the psychoanalytic lingo, this is termed “siding with the aggressor”.