Split Loyalties

The angular setting of the nail phalange as seen here identifies Split Loyalties.

History:

Without exception, this construct when identified by its morphological signature is the result of the parents of the young person living on two separate planets, as it were. This is often manifest in their loud, endless and tempestuous bickering. Not quite as often but equally damaging is their life together spent in an atmosphere of a rigidly enforced and heavy silence with each demonstratively ignoring the other. Then, of course, are the marriages that come apart ending in the physical separation of the mutually antagonistic partners. As for the failed marriages that are sustained, if my memory still serves me, it was the late comedian Alan King who gave one explanation when he had the husband admit: “I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.”

When a child comes into the world to Inuit parents at the icy north, or to isolated village Indians on Brazil’s Amazon River, in an amazingly short space of time that child becomes one with its environment. This environment delivers a central pattern to the tapestry that becomes its entire world. Its very identity extends from this environment.  The parents are also very much in the weave of this tapestry. The child, finds itself linked to the two dominant images in this world that introduce it to the culture, the language, the gods, the foods, the values, and all else that deliver this identity. However, we are now asked to consider a home environment wherein the parents collide on almost every issue. The child was meant to have found itself as an integral constituent of a secure, containing and enveloping family unit, but this family unit utterly and cruelly fails the child.

This is not without a price. Imagine this child perched atop a tall tree, when suddenly the earth shakes and this once sturdy tree crashes heavily to the ground. Imagine further what terrors overtake the child as it falls when it knows that in another split second it will be crushed on the rocks. That terror persists through adulthood. It never leaves the individual. It is this that explains the dark and heavy weight in their hearts that we described at the outset.

Add to this a repertoire of references this person would have to himself or herself – references that are rarely defined with any degree of clarity. Between the ages of two to seven, again in line with Piaget’s magical thinking, the child cannot but see the parents as idealized images. Whatever is right for them dictates what must also be right for the child and what that child would do well to emulate. There is little room for choice or selection here.

This has us consider the circumstances of the individual that, as a child, never had access to any consistent references to values of any order. It is here that we find the trunk of the tree growing at a distance from its roots. The crushing dissonance that described the child’s mother/father experience allowed for no anchor in an identity that would normally have extended from the home.

The difficulty for therapists in such instances is the adjustments time would have effected. With the years the adult might be moved to enlist a good measure of rational thinking matched to a more mature and considered understanding of the parents. That history would now have lent itself to explanation. With understanding invariably comes forgiveness and this, surely, is all for the best. However, the therapist should not expect every client to contribute to any therapeutic program that would judge the parents negatively – this inasmuch as these people continue to suffer badly the consequences of their stressful exposure to the difficulties their parents had had with each other.