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Survivor Siblings
140 Plays10 months ago
In this episode of the Doorknob Comments podcast, we are thrilled to be joined by psychoanalyst and author Johanna Dobrich.
In our conversation, Johanna discusses her book "Working with Survivor Siblings" and her research into the unique challenges faced by individuals who grew up with chronically or severely disabled siblings. The conversation examines the profound impact these sibling relationships have on personal development, the influence of parental dynamics, and the necessity for therapists to understand these complex peer relations. The episode also addresses the effects of medical trauma on families, highlighting the importance of increased awareness and therapeutic support for all members affected.
Key Takeaways
- Sibling relationships significantly influence personal development, especially when one grows up with a sibling who has chronic or severe disabilities.
- Survivor siblings face unique challenges, including balancing their own needs with the demands of their sibling's disability.
- Therapeutic approaches should be more nuanced and tailored to address the specific needs of survivor siblings.
- The resilience and strength of survivor siblings highlight the human spirit's capacity to cope with and adapt to challenging circumstances.
In This Episode:
- [01:46] Understanding sibling relationships/sibling rivalry
- [14:43] Defining survivor siblings
- [16:34] Impact of chronic medical conditions
- [22:20] Sharing life with a sibling
- [26:00] Siblings who disrupt family dynamics/troublemaker siblings
- [30:08] Transmission of trauma and attachment
- [33:24]The importance of children feeling delighted by their parents
Resources and Links
Doorknob Comments
Johanna Dobrich
- https://www.johannadobrich.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannadobrich/
- Working with Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis: Ability and Disability in Clinical Process
Dr. Fara White
Dr. Grant Brenner
Recommended
Transcript
The Journey to Becoming a Therapist
00:00:00
Speaker
I wanted to understand autobiographically more about that experience, but also its specific relationship to becoming a therapist. Maybe you're not only trying to cure your parents, maybe you're trying to work out what happened or didn't happen with your brothers and sisters. Hello, I'm Dr. Farawayt. And I'm Dr. Grant Brenner.
00:00:20
Speaker
We're psychiatrists and therapists in private practice in New York.
Understanding 'Doorknob Comments'
00:00:24
Speaker
We started this podcast in 2019 to draw attention to a phenomenon called the doorknob comment. Doorknob comments are important things we all say from time to time just as we're leaving the office, sometimes literally hand on the doorknob.
00:00:37
Speaker
Doorknob comments happen not only during therapy, but also in everyday life.
Expressing Deep Thoughts and Feelings
00:00:41
Speaker
The point is that sometimes we aren't sure how to express the deeply meaningful things we're feeling, thinking, and experiencing. Maybe we're afraid to bring certain things out into the open or are on the fence about wanting to discuss them. Sometimes we know we've got something we're unsure about sharing and are keeping it to ourselves. And sometimes we surprise ourselves by what comes out.
Introducing Johanna Dobrich and Her Work
00:01:05
Speaker
Hi, thanks for joining us for this episode of Doorknob Comments. I'm Grant Brenner here with my co-host Farrah White. And today we're interviewing our friend and colleague Johanna Dobrich.
00:01:15
Speaker
Johanna is in private practice in New York specializing in the treatment of dissociative disorders in addition to other conditions. She is the author of the book working with survivor siblings in psychoanalysis for which she received the 2023 Sander-Ferenzi Award from the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. Johanna has authored articles on dissociation, loss and mourning, and conducted workshops on childhood trauma survivorship.
Impact of Siblings on Personal Development
00:01:40
Speaker
Johanna teaches and supervises therapists in training at a number of wonderful institutes. Welcome, Johanna. Thank you so much. It's great to be with you guys. Thanks for being here today. And I know that we're all really excited for this for this conversation. I thought, you know, we definitely want to get to your book and hearing about survivor siblings. But I thought maybe we could start with just the idea of siblings in general and how
00:02:10
Speaker
You know, they shape our lives. We sort of know that we inherit certain things from our parents, like narratives, whether they're conscious or unconscious, about what we were like as kids growing up.
00:02:26
Speaker
And I do think those things carry over into adulthood. Can I frame that question out a little bit as well from my own point of view? So, you know, what I've heard a lot about sort of growing up, right, there's a lot of kind of pop psych about siblings just to
00:02:41
Speaker
to add on what you're saying Farah. So sibling rivalry, right? That used to be a really popular term. Like, you know, people throw it around like, Oh, they would assume that certain things came out of that sibling rivalry or birth order. Like does birth order really matter?
Sibling Relationships Beyond Parental Influence
00:02:56
Speaker
Is the youngest really have a certain personality, et cetera? So I think, I think people still have a lot of those ideas, but it's maybe time for an update.
00:03:04
Speaker
That's a great way to link the questions. And I'm going to work backwards and say that my book was about a very specific sibling experience. But one of the things that's come out of that is the awareness that the sibling experience in general is often, especially in therapeutic communities, defined by the parents' wishes and limitations.
00:03:26
Speaker
And these pop psychological terms of rivalry for attention and competition are really told from the vantage point of the parents giving or not giving an experience. And there really hasn't been a lot of space, I think, for therapists in general to develop sort of an autonomous line of thinking about peer relations and connections.
00:03:48
Speaker
independent from the framework of what parents give children to inherit, the family story about this is your brother or this is your sister and you guys are close because my siblings were close or you guys have a sibling because I was an only child. It's always through the lens of what the parents are passing that we haven't had a lot of space to
00:04:09
Speaker
I guess formulate and narrate for ourself what being a brother or a sister means. And the parent relationship is often a primary focus in our therapeutic knowledge and experience. And sibling and peer experience is filtered through that lens rather than discovered on its own.
00:04:28
Speaker
Sometimes it's underplayed. Where I trained in psychoanalysis, there was a lot of attention to what was kind of in a funny kind of way called chumship. And this sort of reminds me of how people talk about the families they discover, like friends giving.
Creative Dynamics in Peer and Sibling Relations
00:04:44
Speaker
And I think there is a lot more wiggle room. It used to be I think the idea used to be that if you had certain types of experience, it would like determine things a lot more than it really does. On the other hand, some things are really telling. Like, for example, if you're if someone had parents who compared
00:05:00
Speaker
their kids to one another. Why can't you be more like your sister who plays the piano? Why aren't you more studious? You know, that definitely can have an impact. And that may sometimes, for example, drive people away from the family and toward their friends who may give them a better sense of self or something like that.
00:05:18
Speaker
But that's the important point, right? Like if chumship is just an afterthought instead of its own thing, we don't get to examine what peer connections offer a person. Not absent the effect of parents, but alongside with equal weight and attention.
00:05:35
Speaker
Like if you're methodical, if you're methodical, you'll say, let's look at these several different domains of experience, the experience in the family, the experience with friends, the experience with teachers and mentors, and the relationship with oneself. And let's kind of give them all equal weight, just in a diligent way. Right. And in a way that allows for
00:05:57
Speaker
like some of the positive experiences or strengths or skills a person has may be from their experience of being a friend. And if you don't focus on that and you only like focus on say a misattunement that they had with their parents, then you're actually missing a huge resource. And one thing I've really come to appreciate in particular about sibling-peer relations is actually I think it's a hotbed of creativity.
00:06:25
Speaker
I think a lot of creative ideas, art making, creation, right, is generated by what you do with and in your cohort experience. What if sibling dynamics are coming up during our podcast with the three of us?
Parental Atmospheres and Sibling Creativity
00:06:41
Speaker
They very well, maybe. They are. I want to grab the remote from Grant. That's like my old childhood is fighting over the remote. Perfect. So we're right on task. You want to grab the mic?
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, because I think, Johanna, what you're saying is that these creative moments, they come, at least in my mind, out of a sort of collaborative play.
00:07:06
Speaker
And I know that that, you know, ideally, children will have that with their parents and feel so free to express. But there's a lot of talk these days, you know, especially in terms of parenting about like self directed play sort of allow
00:07:23
Speaker
the child to develop and fantasize and just imagine things without a grown-up sort of saying, and then what if we put this in the house and oh, well, we have to, you know. Right. Like the one that brings in the real and the authority aspect of something. And look, obviously authority and power dynamics get played out in peer relations, like in the joke that we just made about who has the remote.
00:07:48
Speaker
But the element of play is different than when you actually have an authority who has power over your development in your life. There's a greater degree of freedom for expression in the best case scenario that may be absent in more hierarchical relations.
00:08:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's confusing to me. I was thinking not so much fighting over the remote, but fighting for the parents' attention and resources. And to the point of your book is about when one sibling is disabled, right, and one sibling as well.
00:08:22
Speaker
And, you know, this is of interest to me because my own family configuration, I was the youngest of four, but I was the youngest by a big margin. And so in some ways, I felt like an only child for a good part of my childhood. And my memories of living in a home with siblings are really from relatively young age. There were other circumstances as well, like parental loss. But my oldest sibling is pretty
00:08:46
Speaker
developmentally disabled. And I've spoken with him, he's given me permission to talk about it a little and currently, you know, lives in a group residential settings about 10 years older. And I think it shaped the whole tenor of the family has problems as well. But it doesn't have to be developmental disability. It could also be a physical disability or like a birth injury, like related to something like cerebral palsy. So I did want to bring it back around. Speaking of the remote to your book.
00:09:13
Speaker
Yes, great. Thank you for that pass. Let me just clarify because you did say that was confusing for you and it helps me to formulate out loud what I mean. I think we can put together that a certain kind of parental atmosphere of openness might allow for a sibling dynamic of creativity to emerge and a parental environment of scarcity and trauma might actually foreclose it.
00:09:39
Speaker
And that's how, you know, so we can actually look at the peer experience independent of the parental environment. But we could try to see what happens under optimal utopian, maybe even, possibilities. Or good enough, maybe. So by creativity, one of my associations is it'd be nice for siblings to get along and have adult loving relationships and not be sort of driven apart by factors and actually hang tight and feel good with each other.
00:10:08
Speaker
But guys, antagonism is a great source of creativity. And I think what I'm trying to say is you can have an antagonistic loving relationship with your peers that feels a little more freeing than an antagonistic loving relationship with a parent. And in that sense, it serves creativity. Yeah, conflict is okay, but it's kind of like how it plays out.
00:10:30
Speaker
Right, right. If you're not getting your primary attachment needs met, you can take greater risks with pushing back in the push and pull of development. I have seen a little bit maybe on social media or just in the news about how those sorts of negotiations
00:10:50
Speaker
right? And maybe it's boundary setting or certain conflicts, right? That we resolve with siblings and peers really contributes in a healthy way to development. That like this sort of social, emotional, you know, peace is predominantly formed through those relationships.
Changing Sibling Relations Over Time
00:11:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:17
Speaker
So, but that's kind of my point is to like also say that our sibling pure selves are not static things. Only history makes us think they are, they're changing, they're evolving. An experience that we don't have in autobiographical childhood could be born
00:11:34
Speaker
like right now through our chummanship here today, talking about this, you know, something new is possible, something new is happening for me and just formulating my ideas, talking to both of you, right? And we're all therapists too. So we're all fighting to get therapy as well as give therapy, probably. It reminds me of something I read on social media about an idea called narrative fallacy, what you were saying about not having too rigid a story and sort of realizing that there's a lot of wiggle room.
00:12:03
Speaker
Right. Right. Yeah. There's more there's more room for self-determination through insight and exploration. Right. Right. So that's a nice segue back to my book because it actually is it's about an experience that often hinders getting to a place of finding self-exploration because of because of an overwhelming experience in childhood.
Survivor Siblings Concept
00:12:26
Speaker
So my book basically
00:12:28
Speaker
I was trying to work out what I didn't have in my sibling experience, if I want to sort of frame it that way. And so the motivation for writing the book for me came from not feeling that whatever pop representations of siblingship there were, however limited they were.
00:12:44
Speaker
None of them spoke to my experience. I couldn't relate to rivalry in the traditional sense of who has the better talent at such and such a thing. I didn't relate to birth order because the severity of my sibling's condition meant that even though I was in the middle, I was experienced as the eldest because of certain things I could do that he couldn't. But technically, I wasn't the eldest. So I was looking to create a universe where I could understand
00:13:14
Speaker
how to categorize my siblingship experience.
00:13:21
Speaker
What I did was I interviewed other psychoanalysts who grew up alongside a chronically disabled and severely disabled sibling. So we can broaden our focus to just general differences in sibling. But for the purposes of my research, it was really limited to siblings that would require institutionalization or lifetime care. They were not capable of independent living. And I wanted to
00:13:51
Speaker
understand autobiographically more about that experience, but also its specific relationship to becoming a therapist.
00:14:00
Speaker
Maybe you're not only trying to cure your parents. Maybe you're trying to work out what happened or didn't happen with your brothers and sisters. So I interviewed 15 psychoanalysts at various stages of their career at various locations. It was very cool. I had a couple international participants in the sample. I'm feeling jealous because you didn't interview me. I don't know if we really knew each other at the time. We didn't know each other yet. It doesn't matter.
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, I should have known, right? I think I was maybe I remember that that was the moment that I thought, Oh, you guys need to connect in some way when you were doing the interviews, but I'm sure whether Yeah, right, right, right, right. Well, it's never too late, grand, I'm happy to sit down and have that experience with you.
00:14:49
Speaker
But for the purposes of the book, let me just define what I mean because what I ended up doing was referring to the profile of myself and others, other subjects as a survivor sibling.
00:15:02
Speaker
And I defined a survivor sibling as someone for whom the medical history of the compromised sibling was chronic and had a serious and lifelong effect on psychological, physical, and social development. Okay, so in social media now, there are so many
00:15:20
Speaker
good nuanced categories for neurodiversity that I'm afraid that if I don't specify the parameters of who's in the study, one could read the book and think the experiences that are described in it are generalizable
00:15:36
Speaker
to degrees of difference that are less severe and frankly don't involve medical trauma. The population that I'm working with involves medical trauma. The sibling was given a limited lifespan and the quality of their life was going to be very different than everyone in the family had imagined. So I had to be very specific and narrow in that lens because while I think some of the
00:16:01
Speaker
the broader ideas of siblingship and really getting in there to examine the effects are applicable to all. The specific experiences that were relayed to me are about instances of growing up developmentally in a context of chronic medical trauma, essentially. So that's why I use these big fancy terms, but I'm really just trying to say someone that has ADD is not, a sibling with ADD is not what this book is specifically speaking to.
00:16:30
Speaker
What are some examples of medical conditions that would be included?
00:16:34
Speaker
cerebral palsy, Down syndrome. Again, those conditions are on a continuum. So someone with CP or Down could live independently. But the folks in my study didn't. About a half ended up in an institution. And of those half, half of those passed prematurely. And the other half were with the parents and remain an open question, what will happen for the survivor sibling when the parents pass? Who will be responsible for the care?
00:17:03
Speaker
So cerebral palsy often resulting from damage to the brain due to low oxygen that sometimes doesn't result in mental retardation but can. Down syndrome which is having three copies of chromosome 21 instead of two. Maybe medical conditions like a cystic fibrosis probably. Right. Yes, actually someone in the sample.
00:17:28
Speaker
It's known immediately at birth, but its severity and what it means for the family is not known. It's a big deal, but how big a deal it is can only be revealed in time. There's a lot of uncertainty, so you might know that a kid will have some level of cerebral palsy, but they might be completely intact intellectually.
00:17:46
Speaker
Right.
Personal Experiences with Disabled Siblings
00:17:47
Speaker
So for example, my mother and father were told, my brother Teddy did lose oxygen during birth. My mother and father were told that it was likely he wouldn't live past age five when he was born. He's alive. He's 42. My mom has passed.
00:18:06
Speaker
It just goes to show you it's just a guesstimate of what will happen and nothing's definitive. But what happened rather quickly was that he started having frequent seizures between the ages of birth and five that really were life-threatening situations.
00:18:24
Speaker
I am one year younger than him. So my earliest childhood is pockmarked by the landscape of medical emergencies, essentially, right? And then eventually the doctors put him on Depocaine and they were able to stabilize the seizures.
00:18:40
Speaker
So we got out of the nightmare of him dying and had to face the practical reality that he wasn't able to walk. He wasn't developing any verbal skills or capacities. His, his musculature was not, I don't know what the medical word is. He had spastic cerebral palsy, so he couldn't move his body parts independently, you know? Like his muscles were contracted chronically. Yes. And still are. I mean, they have this fancy device at the institution he's in to like force his fingers apart. Yeah.
00:19:11
Speaker
Yeah, this is hard to talk about, so now I'm aware I've lost my train of thought, so go ahead and ask something else.
00:19:20
Speaker
I'm sorry for that experience. I can relate to it as well. I spent a lot of time visiting institutions and some of what I saw as a youngster also kind of haunts my memories, but I'd love to hear what Farrah has to say as well. Well, I was just going to ask, you know, and you sort of touched on this, but a little bit, you know, about
00:19:42
Speaker
why now for the book and what you hope people in our community, in the analytic community, or let's say like in our listenership, what do you hope people will get from it? Well, let me just start with the listenership because they're such different communities. I hope who's ever listening who can relate to this experience knows they're not alone. It's really isolating to grow up with this kind of
00:20:12
Speaker
ongoing uncertainty and possible medical disaster There isn't even room to name what you're missing not having because it's just you know, it's it's a really Intense situation and it's prolonged and it's during a time your brain is forming Right like so it's not an ideal time. You're not an ideal person to be faced with this kind of
00:20:36
Speaker
Challenge, challenge. Do you think, is it often the case that the unaffected sibling doesn't get as much attention or resources or that stigma makes it harder to share that with friend groups or have them know what it would mean?
00:20:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think all of the above. I think that what I'm trying to say is like following a child's normal normative development is hard enough. And if you add in something that requires this degree of attention and care, the unaffected sibling is going to be going without a lot of attention and care. That's not about a fault finding mission. It's not like bad parents, you know, it's just a fact of this extraordinary experience.
00:21:22
Speaker
Yeah, but I always say therapy isn't really about blaming the parents for what happened. It's about understanding what their role was. It's more about blaming the grandparents in my view.
00:21:33
Speaker
It's more about blaming the ancestors. Many don't know. No, actually it's not about blame, but the reason I bring that up is because I, as a survivor sibling, I have such a sensitivity and I have developed such a need to empathize with what must have been my parents' plight that I feel almost treasonous to say, oh yeah, I didn't quite get what I needed. It feels like I'm pointing a finger to acknowledge that, and I think that's part of
00:22:01
Speaker
Being a survivor sibling. So I hope people listening will feel less alone if they're coming to terms with Things that they didn't get from their parents and then the whole other layer which is things that they might not have gotten from their sibling Because they're you know, I'm I have a practice. I'm out in the world. I and my brother's in an institution how much of our life do we really get to share and
00:22:24
Speaker
Right, that's profoundly, profoundly unfair. And then that can make it feel really shameful to have any needs. Right, right, right. Which is why I'm trying to use the sort of analogy of survivorship because a lot of the PTSD literature for war veterans grasps that complexity that those who come back
00:22:46
Speaker
on the manifest level may be lucky, but on the psychological level, it is really hard to just feel lucky without feeling guilt and shame.
00:22:56
Speaker
I was also thinking, Johanna and Farrah, I'm curious what you think about this, is the idea of kind of like, why him? Why not me? Or this feeling that it could have been me. And when you say survivorship, that sort of fear that it could have been me. Well, I can only really wonder because I don't have
00:23:18
Speaker
that experience for myself. I think one of the things that's been coming up a bit in my practice and that I'm curious of, you know, whether it plays into this a lot is this feeling that when things aren't going well, a feeling really doomed. You know, one thing that I've
00:23:39
Speaker
seen really in survivor siblings when I do work with them is they are cut off from their own needs. They have trouble sort of accepting and seeing their strengths. And I wonder how much of that
00:23:54
Speaker
comes out of childhood, sort of doomed if you achieve and become a superstar and also doomed if you don't because you may be the one who needs to, who has a very heavy lift in caring for a sibling or managing that. So maybe the doom is something to examine and interrogate.
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah, you're making me flash to my seven-year-old son. He said, I'm really not good at taking compliments when I was like, oh, I love something he did or whatever. And he went, you know, he, oh, I mean, it was like a physical reaction. Like, I don't know. It just, it makes me.
00:24:35
Speaker
And I saw reflected back that that that's really that's a shame process, right? Like, oh, I have something good and it and you're seeing this good thing I have. And oh, no, how does that leave me less safe, either in myself or with others? Right.
00:24:52
Speaker
So I think Grant, you're raising a really important point. And I don't know that this works. I mean, I know this doesn't work for everyone, but I'll speak for myself in saying I have to have a larger spirituality to ground myself into the question of why me or why you or
00:25:09
Speaker
how or I have to approach hardship as the legacy of things that come before and not see it as a closed door but as an opportunity to be worked out of over millennia. I have to look at consciousness as the answer, changing consciousness as the place for change or else I get too damn depressed.
Siblings Challenging Family Narratives
00:25:30
Speaker
What about siblings who aren't sort of medically profoundly different in that way, but like say troublemakers, you know, what if you have a sibling? I have some people in my family who are real rock on tours back a couple of generations back and.
00:25:47
Speaker
You know, I remember one time I was in medical school, someone recognized my last name and referenced one of my older relatives who had, reputation had followed him to me for several decades. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:26:03
Speaker
The troublemaker is usually the person who's trying to call attention to what's getting repeated. The person that's rebelling is usually trying to wake others up to the problem that's not being faced or named or formulated, right? I mean, I always feel that way when I encounter
00:26:22
Speaker
the sibling in the family that takes the projection of being the bad one, that they are disrupting the family psychological defenses. And that's why they're bad. They're bad because they're disrupting something, some homeostasis. Right. Maybe the parents emphasize being good in a controlling and rigid way. And it's hard to argue with it because of X, Y and Z. Farrah, what's your take on this? I think that as
00:26:48
Speaker
as these narratives get created, right? And I guess I can't see it so clearly with my own kids, but I definitely see it in my family of origin that certain talents, certain abilities, let's say one kid is really, really shining, right? In one way or another. Then the kids who are left over
00:27:15
Speaker
have to sort of find a way to shine that's different. And that might leave them feeling like a little bit, well, if that's their thing, then what's my thing? And really questioning that if their sense of self is not as clearly delineated because they don't show an aptitude for something early on,
00:27:40
Speaker
Or they don't have it yet. So that's different from having a medical problem or a developmental problem. It's different from being a troublemaker. That's kind of surviving having a gifted sibling.
00:27:54
Speaker
Yeah, but you guys I want to just say that one thing One other place where I think this really matters is that and I've seen this happen in my personal life and patients lives Sometimes the prior generation sibling experience is what is transferred on to the next generation Who is good and who is bad has way more to do with the parents lived history than it actually has to do with the actual aptitudes or proclivities of those children and
00:28:23
Speaker
There's a lot of projections from the past and also the dynamics get carried forward too. Like a lot of times that's one of those rigid narratives is my brother and his brother didn't, my father and his brother didn't get along and we don't get along because it's a family thing. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And it's, um, often it's unconscious and it doesn't erupt until later.
Intergenerational Trauma and Resilience
00:28:45
Speaker
And that's what a good therapy can do. It can help you make those connections. Like who's history am I living?
00:28:51
Speaker
I thought you were saying a good therapy can cause it to erupt later, which in a way is also true. There's an idea that you have to bring out the problem in order to deal with it. There's a term I've heard, you know the term intergenerational transmission of trauma, of course, and probably most of our listeners have at this point. There's also something I've heard intergenerational transmission of attachment.
00:29:11
Speaker
which is the relationship patterns that kind of live on in the family. I tend to think of the family as the identity over time. And we're all kind of facets of the family personality. That's a little bit of a systems way of thinking about it. But if we talk about dissociation and dissociative identity, then we all have kind of different parts of ourselves. But at a higher level, we're all different faces or parts of our families.
00:29:36
Speaker
Right. And so you get that, oh, you're just like your uncle. He was really good at crochet. You know, it's amazing. Right. Right. And let me add to that just to complexify it. There's concentric circles. So the inner one is family, and then there's social group, and then there's like cultural group, and then there's country, right? So it's just it's our if you think in systems, we're part of more than just our own family system. And that's true.
00:30:02
Speaker
But intergenerational trauma is passed through the attachment. So I don't even think of those as separate. I think we get our intergenerational trauma through the attachment style that we have. That's part of the conduit is through disorganized attachment. But you can also have intergenerational transmission of resilience. Totally. Sorry. Go ahead, Farrah.
00:30:23
Speaker
Can you just break down, I guess, a little bit more, I mean, these are sort of buzzwords from within the field. And I wonder what it means to the listenership, right, if they can even. Right, right. So let's take a contemporary example.
00:30:40
Speaker
like people who belong to a group with a history of persecution may in their parenting style exhibit either avoidance as a way of coping with the pain of the past and the ancestors experience of persecution. And so a child in that situation may feel their parent is cold or not available or kind of ambiguous or not able to articulate an emotional story, right?
00:31:08
Speaker
So it's not only a disorganized situation. It could be an avoidance situation. So this is what I'm saying. I hope I'm answering the question. It gets very nuanced. So the real trauma, the research I've seen, what disorganized attachment means that when a parent feels frustrated and they don't know what to do with a kid, they become either helpless or hostile.
Attachment Styles and Child Development
00:31:32
Speaker
and then they just get dysregulated and that can really transmit a problem and then i think what you're talking about is important and adjacent to it which is kind of like socially learned patterns but but you're pointing out something specific which is that a parent who is detached or withdrawn.
00:31:50
Speaker
is going to be perceived by the average kid as not being very warm or present. And that is going to give the kid a certain feeling about who they are. Maybe they're not going to feel very good in the world because they're going to feel like there's something wrong with them because I wasn't lovable. But the real attribution is my parent didn't kind of deal with this.
00:32:10
Speaker
Well, that's where the intergenerational trauma perspective comes in. That's where that buzzword matters. It's not that I'm unlovable, it's that my parents never had a chance to grieve such and such an experience of their parents, right?
00:32:23
Speaker
And there's often a disconnect, I want to add, between what is said and what is behaved. So the parents say, of course we love you. We'll do anything for you. And they do. They often compensate or they really do love them, but you don't feel it, especially from an early age. I think one of the things that is so important in development is that little kids really need to feel that someone is able to delight in them.
00:32:52
Speaker
you know, if you see like toddlers, they like dance, they're super cute, and they kind of know they're being cute. And they see that, you know, everyone is just so enamored of it and so delighted by it. And I think if kids do not have that experience, they say, well, there's something wrong with me. I didn't, I wasn't funny enough or cute enough or I didn't dance well enough to make my parents smile.
00:33:19
Speaker
Right, I wasn't entertaining enough to treat my parents' depression. Right, to capture their attention. Right, really what we're saying is that if parents are inattentive. Whatever the reason. Right, whatever the reason, depression, postpartum depression is a big reason why, you know, and something that prevents bonding. Yeah, there's only, that's really something that we don't know until later in life, until we sort of develop this awareness or get into therapy or read about these concepts, right?
Honoring Psychoanalytic Pioneers
00:33:49
Speaker
It's a good link back to Sandor Forenzi. Guys, if I can just put a plug in and say he's a Hungarian analyst who basically, oh, I'm sorry, he's alive in my heart, so I make him alive, who basically is able to speak from within the mind of that developing child in one of his most famous papers called The Confusion of Tongues. He translates the experience from inside a child who has this unoptimal
00:34:19
Speaker
environment of a disorganized detachment, where the parent is sometimes hostile, sometimes helpless, and sometimes loving. And he speaks from within that experience. And then he draws the parallel to what happens when that child is an adult in therapy, how they come to experience the therapist
00:34:36
Speaker
as similar to the parent, tantalizing, frightening, seductive, and all these maneuvers. So it's such an honor for me to have gotten an award in his name, because I'm just delighted to be in his lineage. I feel like he's the first person I was introduced to in training who really was speaking from the place of the child, not on behalf of, but from within.
00:35:02
Speaker
For therapy geeks, Sandra Firenze was my analysts, analysts, analysts, analysts. But for therapy geeks, we'll be interested to see. That is so cool. You've got to put that on your LinkedIn.
00:35:17
Speaker
Well, you know, it's pretty usual. You know, it's like six degrees of separation. I don't think I'm connected to frenzy and frenzy in turn was analyzed by Freud. So he was great, great, great. But for for therapy geeks frenzy was very close to Freud, but he diverged, particularly in acknowledging the role of trauma and the importance of the relation, what we call relational, the connection with the therapist.
00:35:38
Speaker
much more Intimately connected and people can can find this this book his clinical diaries of Sandra forensic And there's a picture of him and he kind of died tragically at the end of his life, you know and quite sadly was very much ostracized so there's a bit of a movement in our field to kind of honor him and
00:36:00
Speaker
Yeah, reclaim him and honor him and and also the trauma in the field of a lot of these analysts who were cutting edge and who were cut out.
00:36:09
Speaker
Right, right. And I think we have to link that into our understanding of the persecution of Freud's environment and his need to hold to and move to an objectivist, hard science sort of standpoint. That in itself was a defensive response. His identity as a Jewish doctor and all that. Who fled Europe and got out a survivor's sibling, if you will, right?
Book Promotion and Episode Conclusion
00:36:35
Speaker
Well, this is so, I feel like we could talk for hours about this, but I know we have to end. Is there anything that you want to say about where people can reach you or where they can get your book? Oh, sure. Let me just hold it up just so folks can see what it looks like. This is the book and it's available at all your usual book places. The publisher is Rutledge, if you want to publish through the publisher. And you've got the three monkeys, speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil.
00:37:02
Speaker
exactly, or don't write, or that that's the survivor sibling experience. I will not name this. I will not see this. I will not hear this. Yeah. And you can find me, you know, on my webpage on the internet. Just JohannaDrowbridge.com. Super easy.
00:37:22
Speaker
It'll be in the show notes too. And as always, thank you for listening and Farrah, you wanna close things out? Yeah, we hope you enjoyed this episode and would appreciate a rate and review. You can find us online at doorknobcomments.com and on Instagram and maybe where else?
00:37:41
Speaker
Yeah, we're on social media. You can find us. And I'll say that Johanna's book is very accessible, even though it's written for psychoanalysts. It's written in a very accessible level, and it's not too long also, so thank you. You're very welcome, and thank you so much for having me on. You guys are terrific. Thanks for coming. Remember, the Doorknob Comments podcast is not medical advice. If you may be in need of professional assistance, please seek consultation without delay.