Emotional Consistency
On something I saw on reddit.
On one of those drama subreddits I saw a post like the following. I can’t actually find the link to it again, but that doesn’t matter really, I’ll just paraphrase:
I have been the maternal figure in my tweenage stepdaughter’s life for a long time and her mother has been absent. She has called me ‘mom’ and I have called her ‘daughter.’ Her mother recently came into town and they started spending time together. My stepdaughter came at me one day and said ‘You’ll never be my real mom’ and I responded ‘well, then I won’t consider you my daughter anymore.’ Am I in the wrong?
To which, predictably, every response is of the form:
No, you’re not in the wrong! You’re just treating her how she’s treating you. Totally justified.
You see what’s wrong with this picture?
The daughter is functionally abandoned by her birth mother, and even with loving care from her stepmother she must have that worry that she wasn’t good enough for her bio mom. When she reappears the daughter has the urge to “make up” for some earlier perceived “failure” that sent mommy away, which takes the form of declaring loyalty to birth mom against her romantic rival the stepmother.
This is sad. This is a child that’s hurting and lashing out. And the collective’s response is: lash out right back! It’s only fair!
It is not fair. Maybe it would be fair if stepmother and stepdaughter were equals, but they are not. An adult is not equal to a child, and in interactions with children it is imperative for the adult to play the adult. Children are flighty and prone to give in to every emotional urge; adults are far more capable of both reason and emotional regulation, self-control.
What should stepmom have done? See the relevant The Last Psychiatrist quote about therapists working with borderline personalities.
That’s why the therapist has to maintain such neutrality, consistency in the sessions. It’s not just to avoid conflicts; by being the most dominant (read: consistent) personality, the borderline can begin to construct one for herself using the blueprints of yours as a guide.
In exactly the same way, a parent has to be the most dominant/consistent personality in their child’s life so that the youth can develop his or her own identity instead of an identity contingent on someone else.
The stepdaughter plays the (paradigmatic, not clinical) borderline role in her relationship with her mother (who plays the paradigmatic if not clinical narcissist). This is normal enough for a young person, they’re not supposed to have things figured out yet. But the stepmother, too, plays the paradigmatic narcissist: she plays the main character who’s a great stepmom, and when anything in reality apparently violates that self-image she reacts with rage.
The higher personality adopts of some Krishna’s do-your-dharma-without-attaching-importance-to-the-result; the stepmom might have responded with hurt but understanding that she has been a loving stepparent regardless of if the daughter loves her back. The irony, of course, is that this emotional detachment from outcome would make her infinitely more lovable to the daughter than the reactive child she instead becomes.
But that’s just one case, for all I know written by AI as many if not most of these engagement bait posts are nowadays. The pitiable thing is the comments. There is a real belief among respondents that the adult and child are moral equals. There has been this lovely movement over the past two hundred years to assert that black and white and male and female are moral equals: it is a wholesome attitude in line with Paul’s “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”1 But note what Paul doesn’t say; he does not say there are no old or young. A bondman and a freeman are moral equals, spiritual equals, but they are not to be compared with a child.
And yet this notion of equality has gone so far as to place children in moral equivalency with adults; we see this in the proliferation of parenting styles that “want to be the kid’s friend” or refuse to enforce consistent boundaries, consequences, or disciplines. Godly parenting emulates the parenthood of He who sends rain both on the just and the unjust—God’s love is constant and He does not respond in anger when yelled at, for He is the ultimate dominant/consistent personality.
Too, the moral equivalence of children and adults for the commenters we are considering does not even require of children adultlike behavior: no, it permits of adults childlike behavior. Perhaps this is also the phenomenon of the Disney adult and the grown Lego collector.
Awful stuff. But the notion that an individual has a dharma, a duty, a given role in the cosmic order—American society is allergic to it. It’s all the societal narcissism that Alone in TLP spends a decade examining. Where is the consistent, dominant personality that America can use to reassert its own independent self? Perhaps none remain, in the public sphere.
Galatians 3:28, KJV.