James Dobson, who died recently, may be credited with having the biggest hand in producing the greatest amount of trauma among USian families in the past century or so. He convinced parents to abandon their common sense, their hearts, their compassion for their children. He advised them to be unresponsive to children’s emotional and companionship needs. He advocated instead that they follow reactionary interpretations of a few Bible passages advocating child manhandling so as to make them and their children fit into Christ’s graces. The result: traumatized, impaired offspring and morally injured parents.
When my mother absorbed Dobson’s recommendations after her children had left the house and eventually gotten divorced, she wondered if she should have spanked us more.
Spanking has the same effect on the child as severe child abuse (Gershoff, 2013). Neglect or undercare undergrows the brain, hampering capacities lifelong. See brief overview here.
Dobson advocated harsh parenting, breaking the spirit of the child when young (advice the Nazis gave) to show that adults are in charge. Thus is human nature shaped by fear instead of love (Maturana & Verden-Zoller, 2008). The child’s personality becomes twisted toward egoistic self-protection which is easily manipulated, and their worldview develops rigid scripts and us-against-them ideology.
Dobson did not perceive himself to be promoting evil, but he was. Evil, the harming of wellbeing of another (Suchocki, 1995), has long been endemic in authoritarian talking points and behavior, with its roots in the intergenerational trauma that Dobson advocated.
As I point out repeatedly in my writing, the inner compass of the child is warped or broken by harsh (unnested) treatment, leading to a reliance on innate, pre-human primate dominance-submission tendencies—survival systems that help keep us alive. With harsh treatment, survival systems are enhanced, and holistic right hemisphere development is undermined during its scheduled development in early life. With schooling emphasizing intellect instead of intelligence, the child learns to follow the narrow, abstracting mind governed by the left hemisphere which can easily subscribe to ideologies of one kind or another.
Preconquest Indigenous people of the world knew that interfering with a child’s development through punishment or warnings or verbal putdowns would induce ‘soul loss,’ the dissociation of the child from their inner wisdom, their purpose, their wholeness.
Look at the list of effects of harsh early treatment from this site and consider the adults around you, the adults in charge of our communities and societies, the adults in charge of our world:
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“Potential effects of child abuse and brain changes include:
- Hyperarousal and Hypervigilance. Being unable to relax. Always alert, no matter what the situation.
- Excessive and Constant Fear. Struggling to tell the difference between danger and safety. Constantly on the lookout for potential threats. More emotionally reactive, even to seemingly harmless situations.
- Challenged by Social Situations. Difficulties relating to other people and reading social cues.
- Attachment Difficulties. Unable to form healthy relationships. Struggling to trust other people or becoming too dependent on others’ approval.
- Learning Difficulties. Abuse can lead to diminished executive functioning. Poor memory and cognitive flexibility can reduce academic and professional performance.
- Delays in Developmental Milestones. Children who experience abuse often reach developmental milestones later, including those related to motor skills and language ability.
- Low Self-Worth and Self-Esteem. Children often blame themselves for abuse. This self-blame may lead to ongoing feelings of shame and guilt.
- Development of Mental Health Disorders. There’s a significant link between child abuse and the development of mental health disorders. Common disorders associated with abuse include social anxiety, depression, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
- Unresponsive to Positive Feedback. Child abuse can lead to difficulty with reward processing. This response can interfere with motivation.
- Altered Sensory Experiences. Physical and sexual abuse can alter physical sensations and perceptions. Can also cause changes in pain threshold, particularly in areas of the body affected by abuse.”
These characteristics represent different manifestations or forms of soul loss. These are not species normal. But in the US which is harsh with its children, these characteristics—various forms of dysregulation and underdevelopment—are considered normal human nature, the cost of doing business, the collateral damage of inevitable progress towards full domination of Nature.
The authoritarian worldview considers humans to be basically evil, not attending to the fact that their mistreatment of children brings about the characteristics they label evil. The list of impairments above are considered just par for the course that require further punishments to keep people in line (supporting the status quo).
We have multiple generations of adults with impaired human nature.
Because so many of today’s adults were raised harshly, following Dobson’s advice, we can say that he helped normalize hypervigilant distrust in our communities because. instead of thriving, wise adults, we are surrounded by dissociated, robotic conformists who are disconnected from heartmind and the sacredness of living beings. The pervasive feeling is I’m never good enough; if I disobey I will be disconnected and fall into the abyss.
Dissociated adults often embrace or accept the authoritarian treatment of others, based on the treatment they themselves received in childhood. Cruelty is normalized. You must follow the script! If you are biologically diverse from the authoritarian ideal, watch out.
Many of the mistreated live with locked up soft emotions, unable to express their grief at the loss of expected loving treatment. Instead, they are encouraged to direct their feelings, their anger, not at their parents or communities who let them down, but to ‘those others’ who offend the rigid scripts they’ve been raised with.
I experienced some of this from being raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, though we were unusual in spending half my childhood in other countries, which gave us the needed multicultural experiences that keep one from locking down into the rigid scripts of authoritarianism (Devonshire & Narvaez, 2023; Narvaez & Hill, 2010).
To break the dissociated trance of those raised by Dobson-like mistreatment, we need to restore our hearts, re-grow our right brains through play and the arts, awaken our connectedness to the spirit of oneness that the right hemisphere recognizes. Re-nesting ourselves individually and together moves us in this direction.
References
Devonshire, J.M., & Narvaez, D. (2023). Childhood and adulthood predictors of critical consciousness. Social Justice Review, 36, 160–191. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-023-00409-7
Gershoff, E. T. (2013). Spanking and child development: We know enough now to stop hitting our children. Child Development Perspectives, 7 (3), 133-137. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12038
Maturana, H.R., & Verden-Zoller, G. (2008). The origin of humanness in the biology of love. Imprint Academic.
Narvaez, D. & Hill, P.L. (2010). The relation of multicultural experiences to moral judgment and mindsets. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 3(1), 43-55. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018780
Suchocki, M.H. (1995). The fall to violence: Original sin in relational theology. Continuum.
