Virginia’s Dilemma

The man I would marry took me to meet his family for the first time on Virginia’s fifth birthday. She had long blond hair, was small in stature with skinny little legs. She was sixteen years younger than my fiancé, who was the oldest of five children. When we arrived, she bounced into her brother’s arms, cuddling and giggling as he tickled her. But during the day, I noticed a sad longing that betrayed her birthday celebration.

I was happy to meet the family and their mom, Fran. Five years before this, the family lived in Indiana. Walter, Fran’s husband, was a Methodist minister. His doctors advised him to move to Southern California for his health. He got a job as an associate pastor in Bakersfield, and the family needed to move. However, Fran was pregnant and due any time. Walter drove their four children to California, but Fran stayed behind to have the baby. She developed toxemia and was swept into the emergency room where her labor was induced, and Virginia was born. Alone, struggling to heal, and nursing a newborn, Fran flew to California with her baby girl to join the family.

Walter was the lynchpin of their family with a warm and strong personality. Ginny was one year old when Walter received the diagnosis that he had leukemia. Perhaps Walter had already been fighting leukemia when his doctors told him to move to California; no one knows for sure. His survival became the primary focus for everyone in the family. Under these circumstances, Ginny didn’t receive the love and tenderness that toddlers and young children require to develop a sense of security. Fran spent time at the hospital supporting Walter with her heart-love, but this meant she had to sacrifice her children’s needs. In caring for her husband and five children, Fran was not able to give them the attention they deserved and craved. When Walter could be home, he was in bed, and little Ginny was his delight. He invited her to climb on his bed to cuddle and play, and they treasured these precious moments. Ginny’s memories of time with her dad gave her an inner knowledge that she was loved and welcomed. In his last days, Walter told Fran that his greatest regret was not being there to help raise his darling baby girl, Virginia. He died when she was only three.

During the time of Walter’s illness, Ginny’s sisters, fifteen and eleven, were relegated to the responsibility of taking care of their younger seven-year-old brother and toddler Ginny. Women in the church volunteered to babysit Ginny while her sisters and brother were at school. Day after day different women came to take care of her or sometimes she spent the day at the caretaker’s home who were strangers to Ginny. I could relate to her insecurity in these circumstances and understood her emotions because, when I was a child, I was also put aside and neglected. I knew the suffering this causes a child. Ginny needed more than to be ‘looked after.’ Was there anyone who addressed her need to learn language, to feel valued, or to play with her? Ginny knew it: Ginny perceived that she wasn’t worth anyone’s thoughtfulness, time, or energy, except to get her diapers changed. Walter needed Fran and she wanted to be with him, and the children were worried about losing their father. They too were trying to survive while helping out at home, but they were hurting and young for such responsibility.

Ginny’s needs went unmet and her fear and anxiety became internalized: I cause people problems. My mom isn’t around so I guess I am alone. Her view of herself was damaged, and seeds of loneliness and worthlessness sprouted. Although Ginny was too young to recognize these feelings, neglected children often surmise that they don’t deserve attention and love.

Walter’s death left the family without a secure lifeline. Stress became the norm and fear, heartbreak and grief overwhelmed everyone. The surrounding chaos caused stress, which affected Ginny’s ability to learn. The consistency she needed to thrive was unavailable to her, and thus, she was unable to develop a sense of confidence or to see herself as a person with value in the family. This translated and generalized to her view of the world as she fit into it.

Walter died at age forty-two, Fran was thirty-nine, and Ginny was three. Fran was angry; she felt alone and overwhelmed by the thought of raising the four younger children without Walter. Grieving and in anguish, she told me, “I miss him so much, I just want to die.” I had heard this more than once, and this day she said this with Ginny in the room. She pointed to six-year-old Ginny, “But I can’t die because I have to take care of these kids.” I nearly gasped. I glanced at Ginny. Her face plummeted; her eyes widened as tears ran down her cheeks. She froze and my heart broke for her. This was not the first time Ginny had heard this desperate complaint from her mother and its meaning was not lost to her young brain. She was in a world where she had lost her father, who was gone forever. She knew the ramifications of death. Her quivering lips and sad eyes said it all: What will I do if my mother dies? Don’t you want to stay and love me, Mom? Don’t you care enough about me to live? Please don’t leave me alone, Mom. I need you. I want to grow up and I can only grow up if you help me.

So Ginny’s six-year-old brain took charge of making sure she survived. I’ve got to help my mother stay alive. Ginny did not have a clue how to help her mother in this way or any other, but she began to try. She did what she could to please her mother, repressing her own core needs and believing that she did not deserve to have them met. Suppressing these core feelings left her in an emotional void and she suffered with invisible internal stress. Ginny surmised that what she did to please and take care of her mom must be working because her mother was still alive. I’ve got this figured out. Unconsciously, ensuring her mom’s survival became her life’s purpose and journey. If Mom is alive then I will make it. This was her mind’s construct, her ‘take’ or perception from which she made, and still makes, her life’s decisions. She continued this pattern until her mother died at eighty-nine.

Ginny’s children suffered; at times they felt neglected because of her perceived requirement to meet her mother’s needs. Did Fran decide she would need care later in life and subconsciously make Ginny her security blanket? People with a weak sense of self often have an unhealthy fusion with others, according to Gabor Mate, M.D., who wrote When the Body Says No, Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection. It is safe to say the two of them had an entangled relationship and excessive emotional involvement. They were enmeshed partners in their efforts to survive. The blurring of psychological boundaries leads to permanent stress, neither person knowing where one begins and the other ends.

Evie, a good friend of the family and church leader, took much of the responsibility of caring for Ginny throughout her early childhood and she was one person Ginny trusted. Evie said to me when Ginny was six, “We must be sure we do a good job of keeping Ginny stable now because she has a heart of gold. She is so tender-hearted, and we don’t want her to lose that.” I knew this to be true and was glad for thoughts of intentionality toward sweet little Virginia.

After my marriage to her brother Ginny and I became close. We played with dolls and cuddled on her bed while I read stories to her. One of her favorite games was pretending to be a waitress like her seventeen-year-old sister. Ginny put on an apron like her sister’s. She invited her siblings and mom to play so she could serve them, but I was her only steady customer. She brought me pretend tea served with her tea set and cookies to eat. I invited the waitress to sit with me and we visited and ate together like grownups in a small cage. This small gesture meant so much to her; I didn’t understand why no one else would join us. They seemed oblivious. I was trained in child psychology (psychology was in its infancy in 1970) and teaching, so I was the natural person who was happy to meet her needs. I was also new to the family and not embodied in the family dynamics.

I read stories to Ginny, her favorite being Oscar Wilde’s, The Selfish Giant. This is a lovely story about a Giant who Jesus helps learn to love the children who play in his beautiful garden. When the Giant is near his death, Jesus takes him to Paradise ~ where Ginny’s father lived too. I may have read this story to her a hundred times and it always made her feel better. It gave her a measure of peace and faith knowing that her father was alive somewhere with Jesus.

Mister Rogers Neighborhood was a favorite TV show for children at the time. Fred Rogers became her father figure. This was who she imagined her real father would be. I sat with her to watch the show, amazed at Mister Rogers’ compassion for the children to whom he ministered. He knew what bereft, lonely and forlorn children like Ginny needed.

I was aware of Ginny’s desperation. Her yearning to belong and feelings of unworthiness followed her into adulthood. She tried to fit into the family unit as a child, and later as an adult, but she could not work her way out of the unhealthy family system.

It was discovered when Ginny was six that she had a stigmatism and needed glasses. She was six and told me, “I remember the first day I looked at the trees with my new glasses. I was so surprised that trees were not just green blobs in the sky, but that they had leaves! The sky was bluer than I had ever seen it. I always thought the sky was mostly bright white.”

I have wondered how her poor eyesight affected her learning and especially her relationships with the family. Could she read facial expressions? She struggled in kindergarten, so in first grade, her mom took her to a special school, which Ginny did not want to attend and did not like. This school practiced a new philosophy that children learn best when given leeway to do whatever they please. After two years, Ginny returned to regular school but was significantly behind the other children.

When Ginny was fourteen, Fran learned she was drinking with her friends. Fran wanted her safe at home so bought alcohol for Ginny and her friends. This was faulty thinking on Fran’s part and revealed what Fran feared ~ that she was lacking the skills to finish raising her children well without Walter.

Unknowingly, Fran allowed her daughter to escape from loneliness and emotional pain by using alcohol. This was quite a contradiction since she and Walter were teetotalers. Ginny’s addiction to alcohol lasted fifteen years which robbed her of normal adolescence and lasted until she was thirty. Ginny’s two sons remember her alcoholism. Once Ginny called me, “I slept so long this morning. I couldn’t wake up and I had to hope and pray that my boys could take care of themselves.” Her oldest was four and responsible for his brother who was two. When she told me about this, I admonished her severely. After a few discussions, she was able to stop doing that, or at least I hoped.

When Ginny was sixteen and my sons were seven and three years old, we stayed for a two-week vacation with Fran and family. When we arrived, Ginny, was in her bedroom and would not let us in to see her. She said she was extremely sick and could not see anyone, but that did not make any sense. She locked her door and told us to stay out, so we didn’t see her on that visit. I can’t imagine what it was like for her to be shut out, alone, as if in prison, like in a modern-day London Tower, while her beloved brother’s family was home. She needed our love and care, our understanding and encouragement, but she wouldn’t/couldn’t be with her family, and we didn’t know why. As we waved goodbye to her through the window, deep sorrow in my gut told me something was terribly amiss. We learned two years later that Ginn had a baby girl and Fran had insisted she be adopted. No one was to know, not even us, because in Fran’s mind, putting the child up for adoption saved her from disgrace and shame. My husband and I would have gladly adopted Ginny’s baby, as would have others in the family. When I learned of this, my heart broke again for my little sister, Ginny.

Throughout Ginn’s life, she has lamented the loss of being mom to her daughter. However, Ginny couldn’t allow herself to be angry with her mom. They were enmeshed; not knowing where one started and the other ended. She locked her anger somewhere deep inside, unable to find the key. Survival meant she must serve her mother. Whatever that meant was an unconscious secret understanding between Fran and Ginny. In Ginny’s mind, she must do whatever was needed if she hoped to survive. The price of survival is never too high for the limbic brain. For Ginny, stuffing her anger and hurt into that irretrievable cavern meant a deeper loss of self.

Ginny’s uncompromising sense of duty played out twenty years later when Fran’s second husband, Ginny’s step-father, developed Parkinson’s Disease and lived in a convalescent care facility. Ginny took her mother to visit him every Sunday and also Wednesday night for eight years, but she didn’t just drop Fran off; she stayed the entire time. Her boys informed me that they had to stay there too, at least until they were teenagers. For Ginny, there were no boundaries in tending to the perceived needs of her mother.
We know that we act and make decisions from a place in our brains that we cannot access. Abandonment, rejection, unworthiness, isolation, anger, fear: these feelings are addressed by the brain, and this is a part of the brain we have little control over. It’s known as the limbic brain. Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., who wrote the book, The Body Keeps the Score, explained that it is the limbic part of the brain that “runs the show.” This limbic brain’s job is survival, and it sets up an extravagant biological, physiological, and mental network based on its bias from past experiences. It patrols for survival: it does not recognize or analyze present day reality or new concepts. This is so much so that it drives our decisions and can send our body’s responses into overdrive actions that we seldom can understand. Fear, stored in the body, muscles, bones, and brain, keeps the body on high alert. There is no sense of internal rest, no respite. Ginny took responsibility for assuring her mother’s survival, and therefore her own. Her childhood experiences and perspectives built patterns and belief systems called ‘constructs.’ These constructs continue to drive Ginny’s thoughts and behaviors because our human childhood constructs, our foundational building blocks of what the world means to us, stay in place for a lifetime.

Throughout Ginn’s life, she has tried to repair the damage with her sisters, but she had no social skills or personal information to manage her outreach. When Fran became elderly, Ginny was desperate to have control over Fran’s living arrangements, which her limbic brain deemed assurance of her own survival. No one could be trusted for this outcome except herself. She and her sisters fought about arrangements for Fran’s care. Ginn yelled and jockeyed for equal position in the family. She often became aggressive and unkind in her effort to be honored for being the main caretaker of their mother. Each sister had beliefs about the other, developed from their experiences from childhood. Their arguments cemented into place their established ideas of one another.

To this day Ginn is hurt and sad that although she has a family, she doesn’t have a family. Unfortunately, when offered a relationship by those who love her, she is convinced that no one likes or appreciates her and will not venture to trust them. She ends up rejecting the family. We love her and want to include her in family gatherings, but the girl with the heart of gold, her true personality, isn’t readily available to her or us. Her fear and anger lashes out and so she is also not trusted. Now and then her sweet little girl sneaks out to say hello. She is an example of a child whose normal development was stifled and delayed. As a parent, and as an adult caretaker, Ginny’s child stayed in charge. This made for multiple challenges for her sons and everyone in the family.

Those who attempted to meet her needs often experienced the insecure feeling of ‘walking on eggshells.’ No one knows what might cause the angry winds to blow. When Ginny’s mind perceives rejection she runs away, angry and hurt, as a child would do. But in her normal human longing and need for family, occasionally she reaches out. I’ve learned to count on short times of a seemingly normal relationship with her, but also am aware how easily she is hurt and offended, reacting as a child: I’m going home with my toys. I don’t want to be your friend. And so it goes. The whirl of the hamster wheel exasperates everyone in the family.

Ginn feels that she belonged to no group of people. Lonely people often choose avoidance through alcoholism, drug abuse, work, or vigorous religiosity. Initially, Ginn used alcohol, but finally, after AA, she turned to God and the Bible. Ginny was brought up in the church setting and knew it was a place people could go to find love and support. God helps us with our problems and gets us through unendurable pain. A healthy church family is where a person can develop a moral compass. Ginn overcame alcoholism through AA, help from the church, and believing in God’s love.

It is challenging to navigate a relationship with an adult who exemplifies five-year-old behaviors, such as blaming others, making assumptions, and needing to be right. Ginny’s adult mind is stuck in the past and anything outside of her early childhood paradigms is off-limits. This makes conversations and interactions confusing and guarded. It also leaves her unable to trust others, having few friends, and alone.

As an example, one night my younger son, Noel, then 43, was passing through town, and came in the late evening. He planned to stay two nights, spending one day with his older brother, Abram, and me. As it happened, the following morning she dropped by with a package in her hands for Abram at the same time I arrived. When Noel opened the door for her. The second she saw him, she burst into an angry tirade. Noel and I were startled. “You didn’t even call to tell me you were in town? Why didn’t you call me? You don’t care about me. You are so mean.” She shoved the package in Noel’s arms, “Goodbye!” We stood there flabbergasted, and as Noel followed her trying to explain the circumstances. She fired back, “Don’t talk to me. I know when I’m not wanted.” She bolted to her car and drove off.

Her assumption was that Noel did not value her and did not want to see her. This childhood construct became her life-time behavior pattern with most people. Can she analyze her thoughts with compassion for others who endure her anger and criticisms? No. Can she ask herself, “Is this thought true? Does Noel really dislike me or is this thought from another time in my life? Is this what is happening now?” No, she cannot accept a different mind construct. In keeping with trauma research, Ginny’s limbic brain is in charge. She cannot or will not risk her survival mechanisms being challenged. Counselors might propose an alternative viewpoint, but she would interpret any alternative input as external or internal threats. False assumptions leave her lonely and unforgiving. I am seventeen years her elder and a person she trusted as a child. I know Virginia. As a child, she was the little girl with a heart of gold. My assurances of love remain steady no matter the situation. Nevertheless, she can be offended if I leave a Christmas card on her door.
Our minds are a labyrinth of places unknown to our awareness. Survival is the primary motive, and each person develops his/her own survival strategies. Whether they are beneficial to our overall well-being is not the point for the limbic brain which has the duty of regulating survival mechanisms. Ginny lives with her dilemma of trying her best to meet the internal demands she perceives as absolute, often to her detriment. Each of us is internally confronted with conflict and if we are to develop healthy give-and-take relationships, we shall be required to resolve our unwanted feelings and learn to navigate our mind’s and emotional labyrinths.

I hold out hope because Jesus stands at the door and knocks. (Revelation 3:20) And so must we.