WHAT HAPPENS IN THE ABSENCE OF GREGOR MENDEL?

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE ABSENCE OF GREGOR MENDEL?

The question of how one becomes alcoholic often comes up as to how much is nature and how much is nurture? After all, in the family where alcoholism is the forme fruste of family character dysfunction rather than by inheritance how does one sib become alcoholic and another remain normal?

We alcoholics often point to character defects as the basis for our alcoholism or the amplification of it and at the base of much of it is our over active egos, our overly grand sense of self. We are often born with genius or develop genius talents, and because of or in spite of these talents we find life for us often much too easy and unchallenging. In fact because it is easy we don’t like to be challenged by life.

Because of this ennui, laziness sets in and we do not try as hard at things and so we get frustrated when things are not solved very quickly. At times we skimp on the details. We become lax in attempts to get to the heart of things, get things done, finally delivering a slipshod product.

I recall that when I was young I studied classical piano, which I was very good at; so much so that my teacher and my mother had a performance career laid out for me. This did not jibe with my desires to play punch ball and stick ball on the Brooklyn streets, nor fungoing softballs in the school yard of PS 226 on spring afternoons with my brother. But it did serve my ego to enroll in the annual performance recording contests in which soloists from all over the nation competed to win recognition as up and coming talents. I was so full of myself that I never considered that others would be taking this competitive thing seriously and I proceeded to record my sessions on a 150 pound Webcor tape recorder that my father had. And I would insist on recording my pieces in single sit down sessions since I was too undisciplined to play pieces and then edit them. If I did not lay down a “perfect” performance, I would give up in frustration and then I would send in the “best” of the lot, mistakes and all. The result, brilliance interspersed with embarrassingly shrill clunkers. And I certainly look back on my pig headed hubris and think “just what was I thinking of ?”

Untamed ego, pride and laziness were prime examples of my early alcoholic character, even before I had started to drink. And this was a result of having been brought up where the only attention that anyone paid me was because of my piano prowess and for nothing else, not my scholasticism, not my athleticism not my looks or my grace or anything else.

For when I was growing up, most attention was focused on my brother, because my parents were told by some “psychologist” that he was performing below grade, (not below potential, because my parents were specifically told that he had no potential; that he would not go to college and most probably not graduate from high school). This was the current state of knowledge that my parents were led to understand existed about “highly nervous children” which my brother purportedly was.

And my parents accepted this diagnosis! Maybe they got a second opinion but I’m not convinced that they did but they swallowed the diagnosis hook line and sinker.

Which is not to say that they gave up. Not at all. My mother, as far I as I can tell, dedicated the greatest part of her attention for the next twenty years to the attending of my brother to make sure that he never reached excitability so that he was able to cope as best as he was able to do.

And it worked? I don’t know. My brother went on to get a PhD and an MBA, and was still hyperactive; but I think that although her attention helped him, he pretty much pulled himself to his own success because he channeled his prodigious nervous physical energies into productive avenues to focus his mental energies. My mother could not have done that for him. That was not her métier , nor would she have thought to suggest it had it crossed her mind.

She loved music, theater, art, literature. Not basketball, which was the avenue that he chose.

But she did not have the energy to shower attention on two children, not to the extent of sitting up at nights doing his typing, studying with him, making sure his work was finished, making sure his fever was attended to, making sure that his attentions were focused on the tasks that he needed to focus on when basketball was not enough to focus them.

I got attended to only at the piano, and I resented that!

Attentions not showered on people or even attended to often lead to at-drift children who are left to their own devices to figure out moral and ethical dilemmas of everyday life often to the detriment of the proper conclusion. And without proper guidance strong super ego development flags.

Our parents did not intend to rear their children in any way but the best that they felt that they could. And they did what they thought they did was the best. And they truly believe and believed that they did.

Parents, much to their surprise, find themselves at a complete loss when their child goes astray believing that they have given them the benefits of their wisdom when in reality they have “showered” them with only the minimum of attention that they thought they could get away with. And so parental behavior that may not be alcoholic in actuality may be alcoholic in its presentation (dry drunk) Just enough attention not to make a murderer but not enough to prevent producing a moral degenerate, alcoholic or juvenile delinquent.

So in the absence of a clear genetic lineage to alcoholism there is often direct parental nurturing evidence for producing an alcoholic through parental withdrawal of affection, attention, detachment and involvement. Otherwise ordinary childhoods in which both parent and child proclaim to have been completely normal, or in fact believe it to have been ideal, in a “Leave It to Beaver Childhood” way, were diffused with privation of love, inattentiveness and actual disengagement in the ordinary upbringing tasks of parenting.

Often not because the parents were bad but because they lacked the experience themselves of having adequate parenting, often from immigrant families forced to spend inordinate time to make ends meet away from the home to provide for family needs, or in other circumstances to care for large families or families struck by the illness of one or more family members, thus sidetracking the attention of the parents from the care or attention of some children to others or from the children to the affected spouse.

Parents with overly busy social or otherwise full lives do not necessarily share these wide experiences with their children to their betterment. Their self or selfish involvement excludes the child from the timely parenting needed for ordinary daily growth.

The child needs the daily input of an attentive parent not just for homework but to just acknowledge small triumphs as well as note small defeats and share the tears of fear, hope and joy. And the laughs as well. But if the parents are always going to “charity functions”, political events, or other society balls, or even just to work, the children become distanced and prepared to become poor parents themselves thus perpetuating the cycle of inattentive and inadequate parenting for the next generation.

But when this inattentiveness accompanies dysfunctional intrafamilial behaviors such as excessive drinking (purely as a social outlet or as a byproduct of skewed social status), it is this observed behavior that becomes imprinted on the children as a coping behavior for stress.

And all this is accomplished without the need for genetic predispositions. So at times it is difficult to distinguish between nature and nurture. In families with generations of rearing dysfunction, teasing apart the genetic components of alcoholic predisposition from the conditioning as a result of exposure to negative parental behavioral proclivities can be a daunting and perhaps futile exercise in logic and demology (the study of human behavior).

All of the preceding is in no way an excuse for any behavior that results in the alcoholic. It is just an explanation of derivation and maybe a salient to keep in mind when we return to the family to make amends and continue a more healthy relationship; when we have begun to recover from the ‘disease of self’. Where we have been guilty of being remiss in our attentions to our own children and spouses, we need to recommit ourselves to those relationships. Our love must be renewed and rededicated. Not just by words. We have said enough words. We need to demonstrate our intentions by actions. They are the actions of everyday life, uncomplaining, unprodded and unassisted actions that in the long run are the activities that will bring the rewards to us more than any longed for acknowledgment or praise but will be endorsement for itself and in its own right.

©res 4/1/2011