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The Rise and Fall of the Dysfunctional Ego
The Rise and Fall of the Dysfunctional Ego
The Rise and Fall of the Dysfunctional Ego: How the Continuum Concept nipped a Childhood Neurosis in the Bud:
by Jim Giorgi
I have a very dear friend who is a Kiwi. No, I don’t mean he’s a small, odd-looking flightless bird or a fuzzy, juicy green-fleshed fruit. Richard was born and raised in New Zealand. I met Richard during an extended trip to Maui in 1996, where he was studying to become a Feldenkrais (a form of bodywork) practitioner, and we have been friends since. At the time he was a professional musician, a tympanist (kettledrum player) in the Auckland Philharmonia. In 1998, the Philharmonia hired a new concertmaster, a French-Canadian violinist (and what a marvelous musician she is) from Montreal named Marcelle. Richard’s and Marcelle’s professional relationship in the orchestra grew into a friendship and very quickly from there they realized they were meant for each other.
In January and February of 1999, I was again on Maui, and so were Richard and Marcelle. While they were there, Richard popped the question to Marcelle, and Marcelle joyously assented. It was a beautiful moment. Because all of Richard’s family were in New Zealand, and all of Marcelle’s family were in Quebec, they did not want to “choose sides” as to where they would get married. So, they decided to marry right there and then on Maui. Since I was the only close friend at hand at the time, I had the honor of being Richard’s best man. It was a joy for me to do so, and one of the most beautiful weddings I had ever attended. Can you imagine getting married, barefoot on a beach on Maui, at sunset, just after a rain shower, with a brilliant orange sun peeking between the clouds as it dropped into the ocean, a rainbow in the sky, hearing the gentle sound of the surf and watching whales jumping out of the ocean in the distance. I have a hard time imagining a more perfect wedding scenario.
Shortly after the wedding, Richard and Marcelle returned to New Zealand and their professional lives as musicians. They remained another year in New Zealand and then Marcelle had a job offer in Australia, so they moved there. While they were there, I received the news from them that Marcelle was pregnant. Their daughter, Danielle, was born in mid-2001. Knowing both of them as I did, I was sure that they would be wonderful parents for Danielle. They gave Danielle all the love and attention that every child needs and deserves.
In the summer of 2002, Richard and Marcelle visited her family in Montreal for a month, and since I was living in New York, I visited them there for about a week. It was there that I met Danielle for the first time. She was fourteen months old at that point and just beginning to talk, and her parents were exposing her both to English and French so that she could be bilingual. She was a delightful child in every way and we all had a good time together during my visit. I saw no signs that anything was amiss in her development, cognitively, emotionally or socially.
During the summer of the following year, I received word from Richard that Marcelle had been offered work in Montreal. Her almost five years in New Zealand and Australia had made her homesick for Quebec and her very large and close-knit family. After discussion, Richard agreed that they would move to Montreal, a major life transition for him since he had spent all of his life, and all of his family and friends were, in New Zealand. They moved to Montreal in September of 2003. Within a month, I went to visit them, driving from New York to Montreal. They had just moved into their own apartment the week before, so it was quite sparsely furnished, and my “bedroom” during my visit was an air mattress on the living room floor. The apartment had two bedrooms, one for Richard and Marcelle and the other was Danielle’s. At this time, Danielle was just short of two and a half years old.
I had arrived late in the evening, and we had a hasty dinner together, shortly after which Marcelle excused herself and Danielle, put Danielle to bed and went to bed herself. Richard and I sat up for another couple of hours, sharing a couple of beers and catching up on our respective experiences during the year’s time since we had last seen each other. It was during this discussion that Richard asked if I would give him a little professional advice regarding Danielle.
He described a problem that he and Marcelle had been having with Danielle since they arrived in Montreal. Danielle seemed unsettled, and was having trouble sleeping at night. Marcelle or Richard would put her to bed and sit with her, reading to her or telling a story, until she fell asleep, but within an hour or two she would awaken and call to them to come to her, or to bring her a glass of water, or go into their bedroom and crawl into bed with them. They would allow her to stay for awhile but then encourage her to return to her own bed “like a big girl” and go to sleep. Or else they would allow her to fall asleep in their bed and then carry her to her bedroom, tuck her in and return to their own bed. Danielle would sleep for awhile, but then awaken again and repeat the process. Both Richard and Marcelle were becoming somewhat exasperated with the situation, as they could see no apparent reason for Danielle’s sudden increase in attention-seeking behaviors. Still, they were sympathetic and never chastised Danielle. They did their best to reassure her but also to encourage more “mature” behaviors.
I asked Richard if these behaviors had manifested while they were still in Australia. He said that they had never observed this type of behavior there. Danielle had been sleeping in her own bed and in her own room for over a year. She seemed comfortable and secure and slept soundly through the night. When I inquired if there were any other problematic issues that Danielle may have been manifesting at other times during the day, Richard responded in the negative. Her emotional and behavioral development until they left Australia seemed to have been relatively smooth and trouble free.
Based on this information, it became apparent to me that Danielle was going through a significant adjustment reaction to the major transition she had just undergone in the previous few months. Purposefully, I approached my interpretation obliquely, because I wanted Richard to understand Danielle’s situation viscerally rather than just mentally, and thereby be better able to enlist his empathic support for the remedial steps I had in mind. I asked him how he was handling the move himself. After all, I quipped, here was a guy who was born and raised and spent his whole life in a “faraway corner” of the world (at least in comparison to North America) and was living a comfortable, enjoyable life there with his family and many friends and a career. Suddenly, he was faced with the prospect of relocating halfway around the world, to a place with a totally different climate; where a different language was spoken by the majority of people (Richard started learning French when Danielle was born, but he had not even come close yet to a basic level of mastery of the language); which had a different cultural background; where the only people he knew were his wife and child; and where he did not have a job or other means to support his family (Marcelle had assumed that responsibility since she had all of the contacts in the musical world there, and Richard, as a “foreigner”, could not legally work for almost a year). In short, all of what was familiar and secure in his life was stripped away, possibly for the rest of his life, within the 24 hour period it took for them to fly from Melbourne to Montreal.
I asked him if any of these factors had caused him any stress or anxiety, either while making plans and arrangements in the months building up to the move and/or after their arrival and during the immediate month preceding my visit, while they were living with Marcelle’s relatives and were looking for and finding a place to live, moving in, buying furnishings, and establishing a new routine at home and with Marcelle’s new work schedule. I could see in Richard’s increasingly furrowed brow that I was on target, and also that he was seeing the implications of my descriptions in reference to his concerns about Danielle. He said that, of course, there was considerable stress, more so on his part than Marcelle’s, since for her it was “coming home” while for him it was leaving it. I continued by referring to Danielle, asking him to imagine what it must be like for someone who did not have either the experience or the reasoning ability that an adult had to process and comprehend all of the turmoil that was occurring around her in the past few months. She was sensing her parents’ emotional disquiet and anticipation, watching unusual, disconcerting events going on around her, traveling for 24 hours on an airplane, and arriving in a place as unfamiliar in as many ways to her as it was to her father. And she was only slightly more than two years old. I facetiously asked Richard if he thought that all of these events might be just a little overwhelming for her and he readily agreed that they undoubtedly were, despite the absence up to that point of any overt signs of anxiety on Danielle’s part. I continued by saying that her new environment of the previous month and all of the changes it had brought had prompted a regressive reaction. Her visits to her parents‘ bedroom was the expression of her ongoing sense of insecurity and her need for the physical reassurance and security of direct contact with her parents during the night, which was the time that her anxiety apparently became most insistent. I knew that Richard had read The Continuum Concept and was familiar with its principles, and told him that he should speak with Marcelle about our conversation. If Danielle repeated this behavior, they could both reassure her that she was welcome to join them in their bed for as long as she wished.
It was getting well past midnight, we had finished our beers and decided to call it a night. Richard went to his room and I camped out on my air mattress in the living room. The air mattress was not well inflated nor very comfortable, so it took awhile before I drifted off to sleep. I awoke while it was still dark, having slept perhaps a couple of hours, when I saw a light coming from the bathroom down the hall from me and next to both bedrooms. I heard some muffled speech for a minute or two, and then the light switched off and and it became silent again. Closing my eyes, I dozed off again and slept until first light.
At about 7:00 am, Richard came into the kitchen, which was adjacent to the living room, to begin preparing breakfast for Danielle and Marcelle. I got up, greeted him with a “good morning” and joined him in the kitchen with an offer to help. He asked me if the light in the bathroom during the night had disturbed me, and I said that I had noticed it but that it did not disturb me. He said that something had happened apropos of the conversation we had the night before regarding Danielle’s situation, and he wanted to talk to me about it. I was all ears.
Their bathroom has two doors, one which opens to the hall and another which opens directly into Richard and Marcelle’s bedroom. During the middle of the night, both of them were awakened by the bathroom light shining beneath their door. They assumed that it was Danielle needing to use the bathroom. They had begun toilet training with Danielle while they were in Australia, and at this point she was able to toilet herself without constant assistance. But when the light remained on for more than a few minutes, they became curious and went into the bathroom, where they found Danielle appropriately sitting on the toilet. They asked her if she was O.K. and she responded yes, she just needed to use the bathroom. When they asked if she was done, she also said yes and got up from the seat. Danielle then went into her parents room instead of returning to her own room. Richard, recalling our conversation of just a couple of hours before, suggested that she stay with them instead of expecting her to return to her room. Marcelle turned to flush the toilet and noticed that there was nothing in the bowl but clear water. Predictably, she found this curious, since Danielle had insisted that she needed to use the toilet. They all went into the bedroom, switched off the light, and fell asleep.
I suppose Richard could see the increasing look of amazement on my face as he recounted this seemingly insignificant incident, and when he finished he asked me what I thought about it. My growing sense of amazement derived from my realization that I was vicariously a witness to the polar equivalent of watching a baby take her first steps or say her first word. This seemingly insignificant event was potentially the seed incident of what could have become a distressing, or at the least annoying, neurotic symptom later in life had it been addressed in a less than appropriate manner. I referred to our conversation of the previous evening and said that it was clear that Danielle’s behavior was due to her need to “raise the stakes” on her attempts to get their attention and physical and reassurance.
I continued that it was now very clear to me that Danielle was indeed still experiencing the stress of the recent transition, and that her calls to her parents or visits to their room in the middle of the night were not successful in obtaining the response that would viscerally soothe her and return that sense of “rightness” that she had enjoyed prior to the planning and execution of the move. Verbal reassurances were not working either. She needed to come up with a new plan to get them to treat her like the “littler girl” that she felt she had once again become on the emotional level. My surmise was that she recalled the focused attention she had received surrounding her recent toilet training experience, which had just about passed its endphase. She then speculated that if she created a scenario in which she appeared to be at a less competent stage than that which she had already achieved, she might be able to arrest her parents attention to a degree that previous strategies had been unsuccessful in achieving. So she got out of bed without really needing to use the toilet and instead of directly appealing to her parents for their attention and comfort, switched on the bathroom light, sat on the bowl and waited for the response that she knew had to come sooner or later. Being the good and sensitive parents that they were, Richard and Marcelle always left both their and Danielle’s bedroom doors ajar and were very attuned to her during the night and responsive to any calls for attention. So I was sure that Danielle felt certain that they would come to her in the bathroom in short order.
I stated that their letting Danielle join them in bed together for the remainder of the night was the perfect response, and jokingly quipped to Richard that it seemed that my arrival and our discussion about Danielle had occurred “in the nick of time” to catch this situation before it escalated into a more troublesome, longer term issue. This, I explained, was a classic turning point, and had they not responded appropriately to Danielle’s underlying need, she undoubtedly would have, in short order, devised another, even more inappropriate response to get what she needed. This unfulfilled sense of separation, I emphasized, is the motivating factor in how the dysfunctional ego forms, develops, and is solidified by the time later childhood and early adolescence is reached. At that point, there have developed so many layers upon layers of inappropriate responses that it would be extremely difficult to address and resolve them without professional intervention. In a strange way, I said that I felt privileged to be there at that critical juncture to be able not only to witness its genesis, but more importantly to give them the means of nudging it back into a positive direction.
At that point in the conversation, Danielle and Marcelle emerged from the bedroom, ready for breakfast. We sat down and enjoyed both the breakfast and each others’ company after nearly a year of not having seen each other. The remainder of the weekend was spent enjoying the ambience of Montreal, quiet time together at home, and even one evening attending a concert in which Marcelle was performing. At the end of each evening, at bedtime, I noticed that Danielle accompanied her parents into their bedroom without a second thought by any of them. And even though I was still relegated to that uncomfortable air mattress in the living room, I closed my eyes with a satisfied smile and a happy heart that at least one little girl was receiving what she so clearly needed.
When it was time for me to take my leave, Richard and I reviewed the fun we had over the weekend and of course brought up the situation with Danielle. Richard said that Danielle had been much more comfortable, and much less anxious since being allowed to sleep with her parents. I reassured him that this was exactly “what the doctor ordered” and suggested that they allow Danielle to sleep with them for as long as she felt necessary. My estimate was that it might take about a month for her to regain the same level of security and maturity that she had achieved before the move. He assured me that both he and Marcelle were committed to insuring that Danielle made a successful and happy transition to her new home. Even if it took more than a month, he said, they would make it work. I appealed to Richard to call me and let me know how the situation was progressing and especially if they noticed any further regression or problem, and he readily agreed. With that, I took my leave for the long drive back home.
The following day, a Tuesday, I was teaching my three introductory psychology classes at the college where I was an instructor, and in all of the three classes I recounted the story of what had happened that weekend to give my students a real-life example of the principles we were covering. I ended by saying that I would let them know how things turned out when Richard called in two or three weeks.
Two days later I received a call from Richard, who told me with a sense of astonishment that the previous night, Danielle informed them that she would not be joining them in their room because she wanted to sleep in her own room and her own bed. And she did, for the first time since they arrived in Montreal without interruption, peacefully, and without any indication that she needed or wanted their attention or intervention. I heaved a sigh and shook my head “Wow, Richard..”, I said in reciprocal amazement, “...like a charm. Like a charm.”
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