Many children undergo experiences that place enormous obstacles in the way of the development of self-esteem. Everyone knows this. A child may find the world of parents and other adults incomprehensible and threatening. The self is not nurtured but attacked. The will to be conscious and efficacious is assaulted. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to understand adult policies, statements, and behavior, many children give up—and take the blame for their feelings of helplessness. Often they sense, miserably, desperately, and inarticulately, that something is terribly wrong—with their elders, or with themselves, or with something. What they often come to feel is: “I’ll never understand other people. I’ll never be able to do what they expect of me. I don’t know what’s right or wrong, and I’m never going to know.”
The heroic child who continues to struggle to make sense out of the world and the people in it, however, is developing a powerful source of strength, no matter what the anguish or bewilderment experienced along the way. Caught in a particularly cruel, frustrating, and irrational environment, he or she will doubtless feel alienated from many of the people in the immediately surrounding world, and legitimately so. But the child will not feel alienated from reality, will not feel, at the deepest level, incompetent to live—or at least he or she has a decent chance to avoid that fate. To persevere with the will to understand in the face of obstacles is the heroism of consciousness.
Often children who survive extremely adverse childhoods have learned a particular survival strategy. I call it “strategic detachment.” This is not the withdrawal from reality that leads to psychological disturbance, but an intuitively calibrated disengagement from noxious aspects of their family life or other aspects of their world. They somehow know, This is not all there is. They hold the belief that a better alternative exists somewhere and that someday they will find their way to it. They persevere in that idea. They somehow know Mother is not all women, Father is not all men, this family does not exhaust the possibilities of human relationships—there is life beyond this neighborhood.
This does not spare them suffering in the present, but it allows them not to be destroyed by it. Their strategic detachment does not guarantee that they will never know feelings of powerlessness, but it helps them not to be stuck there.
We admire such children. But as parents we would like to offer our own children happier options.