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My friend Alan was talking about his brother. Vance, at 40, is a year younger than Alan and still lives with their parents, but he isn’t grateful for the shelter. On the contrary, he constantly criticizes and blames them: If it weren’t for them, he could have become a champion chess player. If they had only done what he asked when he was fifteen, he would be a success now…
His parents absorb the vilification and try one scheme after another to help him get started in life: paying tuition at various schools, giving him start-up funds for unlikely businesses. For a while they paid his rent in a nearby apartment, but Vance was so miserable they invited him back home. He returned and resumed his blaming. “People get ahead in life through their connections. I’m a failure because you didn’t put me in touch with people who have power. What’s wrong with you, anyway?”
The parents, far from protesting this mistreatment, make excuses for him. His father insists, “Vance just can’t make it on his own.” When Alan remonstrates, their father says, “We need to help him just one more year.” Alan has heard all these excuses many times. Disgusted with the drama, he calls these self-deceiving handouts “lessons in being an emotional cripple.”

This recital opened my eyes. I have a relative who operates the same way. On learning that my relative was not unique, I began to tell other therapists about this pattern at conferences, case groups, and marketing visits. Often another therapist would say, “I know someone like that,” “I have a client whose sister is like that,” or, poignantly, “My brother is like that.”

What’s going on here? Are these just a few ne’er-do-wells that I encountered by strange coincidence? In fact, I found them everywhere: in the professional practices of therapist colleagues –or in their families; in stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and O. Henry; in the literature of alcoholism; and in the news headlines. I found there were several kinds of dependent children: some were angry, some were passive, some were self-destructive. All of them found family members willing to go along with their scripts.
In this country, we expect young people to grow up, learn to take care of themselves, leave the family nest, and create a home of their own. They might go to work for Dad or Mom, but they pull their weight. By contrast, the people I’m studying can’t-or won’t–make it on their own. They become the family passengers.

The refusal to grow up is not a charming Peter Pan story, nor does it take place in a vacuum. Take Joe, 28. His best friends are cocaine and gin, and he drifts from one situation in life to another, blaming his mother Phyllis for his troubles. He amasses huge medical and psychiatric bills, which she pays. Phyllis is worried, and seeks the opinions of friends, brokers, and therapists, but she doesn’t take their advice about setting limits with Joe. A gullible person, she is exploited by contractors and merchants. Her stock-broker makes frequent purchases and sales in order to generate commissions for himself. Her son is just one of many who bend her to their will. Until she gains some backbone, he will continue to have a free ride.
Another passenger, Al, was born with a small neurological disability and was always given extra help. Though his disability responded well to treatment, his mother, Joanne, recalls: “I wasn’t sure he could make it on his own, so I tried to compensate for his difficulty. I was always trying to fix it.” It’s as if the memory of his early impairment made his parents continue seeing him as unable. Then their marriage fell apart and Al became the battleground, in the way family therapists know too well. He threatened suicide at 14 when his mother remarried a man he didn’t like, and he sought refuge in drugs and alcohol during high school. A stint in the military seemed to signal a turning point, but since discharge he has not taken any steps to create a life. He lives with his sister, sitting on the sofa drinking and watching television. This precipitates arguments between this tolerant sister and her husband. Al doesn’t know how to budget money, and doesn’t contribute to household expenses. Joanne has finally seen the situation clearly, and comments, “Al always has a thousand excuses why he shouldn’t grow up.”

Joe and Al are versions of the family passenger. They live off the people around them and never get started with their own lives. They do not have serious physical disabilities which would justify such extended assistance, nor are they in a momentary crisis, returning home temporarily after a divorce or during an economic downturn. And I’m not referring to subcultures with a strong clan identity, in which family members work and live closely together with more or less healthy interdependence. I am referring to children of normal capabilities, who, for reasons of their own, do not develop into mature autonomy. These adult dependents receive unending financial and emotional support- money, cars, tuition, clothes, housing–everything you give children or teenagers, except they are “on an allowance” until they are in their 30s, 40s, and beyond. Their styles range from simple passivity, to insistent demands and persuasive pleas, through ruthless manipulation and deceit. In my family’s case it includes lies, a religious cult, alcohol, and lawsuits. Some other cases include child abuse, drugs, and crime. In many instances huge sums of money are involved. There are thousands of these families.

Family therapist Jay Haley identified two types of passenger, the apathetic and the troublemaker, and proposed strict behavioral-systemic treatment. Ten years later Stockman and Graves identified three kinds of parent that contribute to this problem:

* the authoritarian parent, whose child becomes submissive or who rebels against the excessive expectations by failing;
* the overprotective parent , whose continual rescue missions prevent the child from facing the consequences of his or her actions;
* the permissive-insecure parent , who is terrified of losing the child’s love.

This problem can go on indefinitely – for decades, even a lifetime. Haley remarked, “The therapist must be willing to go to the mat with a family until either the offspring is functioning normally or the therapist is eighty-five years old, whichever comes first.”
If you have someone like this in your family and would like advice, check out Stockman and Graves , Adult children who won’t grow up (Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1990). I have studied quite a few families with this pattern and would love to hear from you.

 Cults and the Closed Mind

            What do you make of the following?

    * Preacher Jim Bakker, arrested for embezzling his followers’ donations, claimed that he had been sincerely creating a devout community of the faithful, but a diabolical enemy had destroyed it: “Something so beautiful was being built, the devil got mad.” The very holiness of Bakker’s intentions, in this light, provoked his downfall.

     * Self-proclaimed messiah David Koresh had a similar excuse: when confronted with his misdeeds, he said that he was the perfect savior, but he had to partake of sinful human nature in order to be on earth at all.

    * Hobart E. Freeman preached faith healing even though he himself limped from childhood polio. This discrepancy was dismissed by his followers: “He has been healed,” said one member, “but God has just not chosen to manifest that healing yet.”

    *  Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh taught love and compassion, but his religious community in  Oregon was violent and paranoid, equipped with watch towers and a 150-member police force armed with semi-automatic weapons. Followers told themselves these were intended by Rajneesh to make them aware of their aggressive impulses and show them what could happen if they didn’t follow his advice.

            In short, everything is a teaching, and the master is never wrong.

            To people with closed minds, it’s impossible to disprove their cherished theory – no evidence is good enough or ever will be, because they can cleverly turn any evidence around to prove their original belief. The closed mind means never having to say you’re wrong!

            This can be rather hilarious when someone has predicted the end of the world on a certain date. Next morning dawns…. what do the believers say NOW ?

            “Our clock was wrong.”

            “God was just testing us.”

            “God changed His mind because our group is so holy.”

One of the greatest masterpieces of human rhetoric came from Thomas Jefferson, who was on the committee appointed by Congress to prepare a statement explaining the colonies’ decision to revolt. To this day, we cherish some of the ringing phrases of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

However, even Jefferson, the great thinker, writer, and revolutionary, had his prose revised by others. First, let us remember how Jefferson came to be the principal author of the Declaration. History moves in strange ways. It was due to personalities and politics that Jefferson was chosen as the primary author of the document; it was by no means inevitable that his flights of rhetoric and oratory would be the ones to guide the rebels and inspire the new nation. Said John Adams of the events that led to Jefferson’s appointment (quoted in Colbert, 1997, p. 80):

The committee met, discussed the subject, and then appointed Mr. Jefferson and me to make the draft, I suppose because we were the two first on the list. The sub-committee met. Jeff­er­son proposed to me to make the draft. I said, “I will not.”

“Oh, you should do it,” he said.

“Oh, no!”

“Why will you not? You ought to do it.”….

“Reason first – You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the

head of the business. Reason second – I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third – You can write ten times better than I can.”

“Well,” said Jefferson, “If you are decided, I will do as well as I can.”

Jefferson accordingly wrote up the ideas which had been discussed among the delegates for the previous several years. Changes were made by Congress to Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, and he found it hard to stomach some of them. Some of the proposed changes concerned style, and others concerned substance. Below are two cases in which wordiness was removed:

TJ: To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world for the truth of which we

pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.

Edited version: To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

TJ: He [King George III] has suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in

some of these states.

Edited version: He has obstructed the administration of justice.

What is your opinion? Do you think that the changes improved the text? The most famous edit of all was made for political reasons. It concerned Jefferson’s condemnation of the slave trade, for which he blames George III in a passage that begins:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.

This long passionate passage was entirely deleted, “struck out,” said Jefferson, “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others” (quoted in Gottesman et al., 1979, p. 494). Of course, the supreme irony is that Jefferson himself had many slaves and conducted a long affair with one of them, fathering several children with her.

So console yourself. Even the greatest writers have faced the wicked pen of the editor – or even a group of them!

John Adams’s account appears in The Works of John Adams, 1856, excerpted in Colbert, D. (Ed.). (1997), Eyewitness to America. New York: Pantheon. p. 80. Franklin’s anecdote originally appeared in Hazelton, J., The Declaration of Independence: Its History (1906), also excerpted in Colbert, pp. 81-82. Thomas Jefferson’s autobiography is excerpted in Gottesman, R., Holland, L. B., Kalstone, D., Murphy, F., Parker, H., & Pritchard, W. H. (1979). (Eds.). Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1. NY: Norton. pp. 495-500 .

The Cosmic Kangaroo is named for a magic trick performed by kangaroos. A pregnant kangaroo can, when necessary (such as during a drought), stop the gestational development of her fetus – and resume it when conditions are favorable again. To me this is amazing. A tiny proto-kangaroo, floating around in mom’s innards (don’t ask me to describe the marsupial reproductive system) can remain there for weeks or even months, not growing, but…. alive!

Well, I’m an author with many half-gestated projects in my computer, not to mention embryos in my notebooks, ova scribbled in the margins of other people’s books…. you get the idea. The problem is that I keep getting new ideas before I can finish the old ones. New ideas are seductive because you haven’t hit the hard part yet. I used to think of the neglected half-written projects as moribund or dead, but one day I read about the kangaroo trick, whose scientific name is embryonic diapause.

[Since we're referring to a pause in the action, not a cessation or death, this word makes more sense than the similar word "menopause." That symptom-rich doorway to liberation should be called "menostop."]

I also started this blog. Some of the best entries come from the “previously dead” files. What a joy to resurrect them! It was like hunting for Easter eggs in my hard drive.

Here’s an even more amazing feat: Let’s say Mom Kangaroo finishes building her baby (the internal phase, that is). It moves to her pouch and begins nursing. If some time later a second kangaroo baby is born while the first is still nursing, the mother kangaroo can simultaneously produce two different formulas of milk, one to suit the needs of each offspring.

Now that’s what I call multi-tasking.

The writer in me rejoiced. There’s a precedent in nature. My staccato writing process is not a sign of failure, but DIAPAUSE! Like a good kangaroo (or armadillo, or badger, or roe deer*), I can time the births — pet my outlines, wrestle with almost-finished chapters, set one idea aside so I can pay attention to a newer one — knowing that all of them are alive and there’s enough time for them all!

* Believe it or not, about a hundred other mammal species can do the same thing–and some people have the nerve to call them “dumb animals”! If genetic engineering were up to me, we’d insert some Diapause DNA in our own genes.

There are even types of diapause. My favorite is obligate diapause (obligate means they have to do it). That’s the trick I’ve been describing – the creature can wait (or shop, if you prefer) for favorable environmental conditions. So when I’m dawdling and my husband wonders if I’m producing anything, I can always moan, “Geez! I’m having obligate diapause!”

If you have some half-developed projects partway down the authorial fallopian tube, halted in mid-gestation, welcome to the world of cosmickangaroo!