TRANSCRIPT: Psychoanalyst’s Advice For Young Parents – Erica Komisar

And I guess starting to share some of the data and how this is impacting our kids, do you think?

The Loss of Empathy and Vulnerability

ERICA KOMISAR: Well, I mean, the other thing I’m going to say before we move on is that at some point, parents stop seeing vulnerability in their children, meaning what’s generationally passed down is sensitivity, meaning empathy, sensitive empathic nurturing passes down generationally sensitive empathic nurturing, meaning the ability to form deep connections with another human being and to feel their feelings and to see their vulnerability. And what’s happened now is, three generations in, is that parents can actually look at their incredibly vulnerable neonates and not see vulnerability and pain. And that’s frightening, actually. It can be turned back on, which is the hopeful part, but it’s sort of been turned off. It’s like an electric switch that’s been turned off. And so we need to turn it back on in parents so they can look at their babies again and see pain and see distress and see vulnerability.

Because if you see that, you can’t unsee it. And if you see that, you can’t leave them in the care of strangers.

INTERVIEWER: You also see that in other mothers who doesn’t matter how old they are, how old their kids are, they see a baby crying and it’s almost like an emotional response that it’s just a switch flicks and everything else stops. I have to go and attend to what’s happened there. And it does feel something that, I absolutely love my child. I think babies are great, but I don’t have that same kind of internal wrenching that happens that it must be something biological that’s happening there.

ERICA KOMISAR: The wrenching is called maternal preoccupation and the wrenching is healthy and normal.

And when you don’t have the wrenching, that’s when we worry.

INTERVIEWER: I think the other thing we’ve really noticed is just attention and how much our child, he responds to our attention. He wants us and even being so conscious around having phones around him, because actually that’s when he’ll start to act out. He’ll hit something or throw something on the ground, but then going to play groups and that kind of thing, the kids who are there with their biological parents versus the kids who are maybe there with a carer. And so often those carers just sitting there on their phone the whole time. And then these kids are sort of playing siloed and there isn’t that even that interactive feedback.

And I suppose on the other side of that, I’m seeing so many people who are trying to buy a house. They’re actually trying to get on the ladder and we’ve set up an economic system that’s dependent upon two parents working and they might be saying, well, this is great, but how are we actually meant to get by unless we sort of go with the flow where culture is going?

This is the only way we can even provide for our family.

Strategies for Balancing Family and Career

ERICA KOMISAR: We have to stop competing with other families and you have to think about the idea of sacrifice in the early years. If you’re very strategic about having children and raising children, I mean, I think children are kind of an afterthought for a lot of couples. They have fabulous careers, they get married, they say, right, maybe it’s time to have a baby. It’s sort of an afterthought. They don’t really think about it in advance because if you think about it in advance, what I tell young couples is, if you’re going to think about it in advance, you don’t make promises to each other that you can’t keep.

Meaning don’t make your wife make a promise that she’s going to go back to work. She don’t know how she’s going to feel and you don’t know how you’re going to feel. Don’t make promises that you’re going to be able to pay the mortgage on a house you’re buying. Maybe wait to buy the house and rent an apartment. But the idea that strategizing and sacrificing in those early years, it pays off big in the long run.

Whereas if you don’t think about it and it’s an afterthought, you’ve often, you’re often, it’s often the cart pulling the horse. You’re often stumbling after the fact instead of really being thoughtful about it. People have to be thoughtful about how they want to raise their children.

INTERVIEWER: There’s also, I suppose, the other side of it of lots of potential parents who say this all seems a little bit too hard. And so many families that choose not to have kids or maybe have one child and then stop so that they can get back into work and that kind of thing. What do you think’s going on with our cultures?

It’s all across the West, but even the developed world, our birth rates are well below replacement. That seems like a challenge to a society if it’s no longer propelling itself forward and replacing itself. Is that a society that’s buying into the kind of values and ideals that it’s passing on?

The Impact of Narcissism on Society

ERICA KOMISAR: Well, it’s narcissism, really. I mean, it’s the same thing that’s the engine behind things like addiction and a lot of depression and anxiety and eating disorders. So, the idea that I’m most important and my interests and my needs are most important, me, me, me, and I, I guess you could say I grew up in the 80s.

I was a young woman in the 80s. It was the me generation. And everything was me, me, me, me, me. And so, that’s really now lasted, unfortunately, because having children is not about you. It’s actually about them. And that gives you pleasure to actually lend them your narcissism in those early years because you get it back, you know?

You get it back when they need you a little bit less and then they leave one day and then you really get it back and you can take on the world and have a fabulous career again. But, you know, lending your child your narcissism instead of just, you know, that’s what’s happening.

It’s basically a generation that was told that their needs and their desires outranked everything else and everyone else. And it also has damaged marriage because marriage also requires that you put another person before yourself. So, yeah, and things like addiction are what we call narcissistic disorders, meaning an emptiness that comes from not having had your emotional needs met at a young age.

And then you form pathological defenses and many of those defenses are, I don’t need anyone, just me. And so, that’s damage, really. That’s many years and maybe three generations of damage and we have to correct that and we can. We can correct this, but it’s going to require that we really address what’s happening. Yeah, not see it as normal.

INTERVIEWER: It’s interesting you talk about addiction and that feels like a really apt metaphor because we recognize in the addict that in them getting their fix, it actually perpetuates a lifestyle and a behavior that actually really damages them more. And I recently lost a loved one and she had four kids.

She was one of seven brothers and sisters and just those last couple of weeks, having her family around her, her deathbed, having those moments of intimacy, of laughter, of emotional support around the family. It was such a difficult time, but also a time that brought out so much joy and memories and happiness. And it was a real time of deep connection bonding. I sort of had a moment where I looked around and realized this is going to be such a rarity moving forward. And as our families shrink, it’s not just children being born, but it’s brothers and sisters that won’t be able to laugh and play together. It’s uncles and aunts that won’t be able to provide emotional support.

And it’s family members that will be able to care for us as we care for them at the beginning of life, look after us at the end of life. And you don’t want to over paternalize people, but get them really to realize actually there’s something really good here that you’re missing out on. And that maybe it’s worth taking that plunge and that adventure of responsibility because there’s so much that you don’t even aware of how much it can crack you open and…

ERICA KOMISAR: The way I would describe it is if you go to a good restaurant and you have a wonderful meal, a really lovely, satisfying meal, you get up from the table, you say, I feel good and I’m not hungry anymore, and let’s go. But if you don’t get a satisfying meal, you sit there waiting for them to bring the next course.

The Cycle of Emotional Emptiness

ERICA KOMISAR: And that’s what young people are doing because they weren’t nurtured when they were young. They weren’t the focus of their parents’ interest when they were young because their parents are narcissistic. And so they feel empty inside. They feel as if they’re waiting for the next course to be brought to the table. And so they don’t have it in them, many of them, to give to children because they still feel like children. And so that’s the problem. We have to start giving to our young children so they grow into adolescents and young adults who feel full and can leave the table and then have the resources to give to their children.

INTERVIEWER: What do you feel the role of technology is to play in this? And you talk about the generation that are never satisfied, never fulfilled, looking for the next meal. And I just think about apps like Tinder. I think about how transient social media interactions can be and the difference between, say, a digital network and a real face-to-face relationship. Is it technology that’s accelerating the worst of our natures?

Or actually, is that a bit of a scapegoat for us not paying attention to the man on the plane? Do you know Tinder’s byline?

ERICA KOMISAR: I think it’s… I don’t use it, so, yeah.

INTERVIEWER: It’s “find the love of your night.”

ERICA KOMISAR: Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, the impermanence of it, the, it’s about, again, it’s about not knowing how to form real connections. And that’s one of the things that mothers do. So you asked me, what do mothers do?

One of the things that mothers do is through teaching children intimacy, real intimacy, breastfeeding, skin-to-skin contact, eye contact, what it does is it teaches children how to have loving and intimate and affectionate relationships. And again, it all goes back to the beginning. That’s what I’ll say. It really does all go back to the beginning. And people often say, well, I can’t remember what happened before I was three. And I say, well, you can and you can’t. You may not be able to remember the exact details of what happened, but you have feelings. They’re feelings of resentment. They’re feelings of abandonment.

They’re feelings of sadness. And those are feelings that are related to experiences that you don’t necessarily remember in fact, but you remember in feeling. And so, you know, the beginnings matter. And if we aren’t careful about how we raise our children in those early years, then we end up raising children who don’t have much to give to another person, whether it’s their spouse or their friends or a child. Asking a child to have a child is a tall order. But if you ask an adult who’s had a nice full meal and has been loved and nurtured, you know the expression that you are more excited on Christmas day to give a gift than you are to get a gift.

That’s a healthy thing.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, yeah. And most young people today, I hate to say it, but are more excited to get the gift than to give the gift. And having children is giving a gift. It’s giving a huge gift. It’s one of those things I’m evangelizing to all my friends about having kids because it just completely reshaped all of my priorities. And again, something so much more fulfilling than work or anything else that I could have done. But I guess I’m coming at this from a perspective that I had a lot of the things that you were talking about.

I did have two parents who were really intentional that spent that time. I grew up on a farm, which meant I saw a lot of my dad as well because he was always in and out of the house. I’d go and work with him down the paddock. And if I’m coming into this and I haven’t necessarily had that kind of background and I’m hearing what you’re saying, and I’m thinking, oh, okay, that’s me. I didn’t have that love and attention. I didn’t have that with mum. How do I break that cycle and break that pattern?

Am I broken? You know, is there a pathway back to these kind of deep bonded relationships that you’re talking about?

The Healing Power of Therapeutic Relationships

ERICA KOMISAR: Well, that’s why I do what I do. That’s why I became a social worker and a psychoanalyst, a therapist, basically, to help people to learn how to connect again. So you could say that it’s not what a therapist says.

It’s not the interpretation he or she makes. It’s actually the relationship that’s the healing part. So when you have a quote unquote trusting, caring relationship with someone who’s so interested in what you have to say and what you feel, and someone that, you know, not to say love, because I don’t think therapists generally love their patients, but who truly, deeply cares about you in that way.

And that’s when you heal. It’s the actual relationship. So people come in to see me, young people, lots of young people, and they say, you know, how many sessions?

And, you know, and I say, well, it doesn’t exactly work like that. Because it’s not, this isn’t cognitive behavioral therapy. This is much deeper therapy. And what it means is that it’s not like a few pithy things I’m going to tell you and you go away and you feel great. It’s actually developing a relationship with me. It’s kind of an emotionally reparative experience.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, and I suppose you talk about that necessity for care. And I guess if someone’s coming to you for therapy in the first place, there’s that recognition of brokenness. And a lot of, I guess what we seek is unconditional love, unconditional care and recognizing that actually, despite where I might have gone wrong historically, or my previous brokenness, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t redemption, or forgiveness, or something greater in my future as well.

ERICA KOMISAR: The healing for a broken relationship is a loving relationship.

The Role of Fathers in Child Development

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, we’ve talked a little bit about mums and how important they are in early development. But I’d love to talk a little bit about dads and I guess masculinity as well.

And when you’re talking about that lack of nurturing, that care, and I think about our cultural conversation around toxic masculinity. And I suppose part of my frustration of that is, well, if you haven’t had a dad to model sort of traditional or healthy masculinity, of course, you’re not necessarily going to have the relational sinew in order to really love and nurture. But there is also a role for traditional masculinity as well and having dads in the household and the different role that they play.

And where do you think culturally we’re getting the role of the dad wrong? And what do you think a more healthy model would look like?

ERICA KOMISAR: Well, traditionally, mothers were the love objects of attachment, security, and fathers were the love objects of separation. Both important. So John Bowlby, the father of attachment, wrote two books.

Well, he wrote more than that, but he wrote two books. He wrote a big book called “Attachment” and another big book called “Separation,” both worthy of reading. Meaning, you can’t have one without the other and be healthy. If you’re intensely attached to your mother and you never leave, I call it never leaving the basement, living in the basement. Now, we don’t want that.

But if you’ve never fully attached, but your mother is defensively independent and pushes you away, then you always are seeking that connection to her. So you have to have attachment and you have to have separation.

So fathers, traditionally, so let’s say mothers have provided that security, but they also provide what I said earlier, emotional regulation of certain emotions. So they regulate emotions like distress, sadness, fear.

Those are the emotions that mothers are very, very apt at regulating. Fathers regulate things like aggression and excitement. So what does that mean?

That means that if little boys grow up without fathers around or with fathers who are emotionally dysregulated and lose their temper and can’t regulate their anger, those little boys are more aggressive, often have behavioral problems and aggressive in sometimes physical, even violent ways. And so little boys look to their fathers to see how their fathers regulate their aggression. How does my daddy handle his angry feelings? And then in terms of excitement as well, the reason that fathers have a different reaction than mothers to oxytocin, they become this playful, they’re sort of the objects of play, playful tactile stimulation, throwing the baby up in the air, tickling the baby, chasing the baby around, wrestling with the baby, right?

And why is that important? First of all, play is important.

And mothers will often say, I can’t play, I don’t, I’m not good at play. I’m like, because mothers are better with soothing distress, fathers are better with play. It’s how hormones work. Because the kind of play fathers do with babies is preparing them to separate. It’s not yet separating, but it’s preparing them. It’s also encouraging them to explore because mothers, babies will stay close to mothers. The encouragement to explore the world and take risks, not too many risks, but some risks and be careful and take risks is a father’s role. And so there’s the excitement regulation. So, you know, we don’t often think about it, but babies get very excited.

If you see an infant, some of them will even shake, like, you know, they’ll get so excited, they’ll shake, their limbs will shake. They don’t come into this world able to regulate any of their emotions. And so again, fathers help them to learn how to regulate excitement, how to regulate aggression. Fathers are very important, but they’re just different than mothers.

INTERVIEWER: I think as you’re talking and this was never, we never talked about what roles we’re going to take, but the amount of times that my wife will be, and I’ll be like, no, just let him, he’ll be right. And let him climb up, let’s see how he goes.

ERICA KOMISAR: That’s right, that’s right. Because the mother would never, so that’s the problem. Then a little boy would never take risks. He would never explore. He would never separate. He would stay home forever, you know. So this is very important.

And you know, we live in a world where people are having children on their own intentionally. You know, we say that if you lose a spouse, they pass away, or there’s a divorce that’s unhelpful, you know, you can’t help. But parents are going out and having children intentionally on their own.

I call them single mothers and fathers by choice. First, they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into because it’s such an incredible behemoth task to raise a child alone.

But they also are doing it alone. And so, you know, when a mother has a child on her own, what we’re seeing is that some of those children don’t separate so easily from those mothers. Because again, it’s the yin and the yang. It’s the mothers are, you know, the soothing in distress parent, and the fathers are, as you say, the mothers are the, and the fathers are, no, he’s okay. And that combination is the right combination.

INTERVIEWER: And, you know, the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, but it’s been amazing how challenging it is just with one, and how much you’re dependent on other people.

And again, how much you need community, extended family support, and all of these things that you don’t really consider it. It sort of happens, you find out that you’re having a baby, and you’re just so focused on that moment that all those other systems and structures that actually support your own little unit, and they, you really come to appreciate how important they are. You mentioned before, you know, fathers who aren’t present, but then also fathers who struggle to regulate their emotions. And I guess one of the real trends of the moment we find ourselves in the moment is family breakdown. And a couple of the stats that we’ve been looking through at ARC is, you know, in 1960, 3% of kids were born out of wedlock. Now in the US, that’s 40%, or 60%, if you look at those who don’t have a college education.

The Rise of Children Born Out of Wedlock

INTERVIEWER: In the UK, as of 2021, it’s over 50%. I think it was 51%. So it’s becoming a social norm that the children are either born out of wedlock or marriages break down.

So often, when mum and dad are really unhappy, it’s often talked about, well, it’s best that we separate because we don’t want the kids to have us fighting and oftentimes it is out of genuinely thinking we’re doing the best thing for our child. Where would you kind of sit on that discussion?

Because it has become quite a contested space.

ERICA KOMISAR: So I’m writing a book on divorce now.

And I’m writing it because the old research by a woman named Judith Wallerstein, she wrote a book about how divorce is always bad for children. And it was time to write a new book and this new research came out that says that actually, divorce is never good for children. But in the case of irreparable conflict between parents, in the case of constant fighting and conflict, children do much better when their parents divorce than when they live in a situation where parents are constantly fighting and in conflict.

And so I think it’s sort of inevitable that there are going to be divorces. The question is, do couples make good choices today?

Do they work hard enough at staying together? That’s a different question, right? But inevitably there will be divorces and even though the children will suffer from those divorces, they’ll suffer less than if the parents stay together because the ideal is to have two parents who love each other.

That’s where the emotional security comes from. It does not come from two parents who hate each other. And we have a lot of parents living together who hate each other.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, you know what the difference between, I mean, the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference, right? We know that. So hate is unrequited love, is disappointed love.

And if you’re going to live in that kind of situation and have children, it’s much more damaging because those children then don’t, in the future, trust connections. They don’t trust relationships. Yes, there’s a permanence to the relationship between the parents, but it’s a kind of permanence that’s toxic. So yeah, there’s no good solution, but sometimes divorce is a better option for children where they can have peace and harmony and heal than if they live in those kinds of intransigent situations.

Solutions for Breaking the Cycle

INTERVIEWER: I guess I’d love to talk about solutions then because, again, if so many children are growing up in these either environments where mom and dad are together but not present or mom and dad aren’t together, that feels like a cycle that’s bound to continue unless we intervene, tell a better story and think more intentionally. What, in your experience, are some of the solutions that you think, either personally, institutionally, at a legislative level, where would you start to tackle this problem?

ERICA KOMISAR: I don’t think we talk about good marriages. I don’t think we talk about marriage at all. I mean, I don’t think we talk about the fact that if you marry someone before your identity is fully developed, there’s a great risk that you won’t grow in the same direction. And so the idea of waiting until you know yourself well, until you’re more developed as an individual, until you know what you want, and then making a choice of a person that you’ll love. And so I think we should educate young people about being thoughtful about marriage before they make those choices. You know, we say the most important choices you can make in your life are who you love and what meaningful work you choose to do.

I suppose the third one now is where you live, but that never was an issue until now, right? Because for thousands, for millennia, people lived right next door to their parents and their aunts and their uncles and their grandparents. But yeah, so I think we’re not really talking to adolescents about and young adults about what it means to be an adult, what it means to make those choices, that maybe you don’t make those choices until you know yourself well enough to make a better choice.

The better story comes from a better choice. So yeah, that’s what I would say.

Hope for the Future

INTERVIEWER: And just to close, Erica, what gives you hope about the future? Why are you doing what you’re doing and inspired that change can come about?

And then what does good look like? What is the change that you want to see that then you say, okay, my job’s done?

ERICA KOMISAR: I’m hopeful because I’m sitting here with you and you’re listening to me. And it’s been a lot of years that I’ve been running around, you know, waving my arms saying, somebody listen to me, somebody listen to me, listen to me, listen to me. So, and I wrote the book that I wrote “Being There,” the first book I wrote, oh, about eight years ago or nine years ago.

But I worked on it for 13 years before that. I was working on it for 13 years. So I saw a lot of changes in that time.

And even from eight years ago, when I first wrote the book, there was some interest, a lot of pushback, people calling me, oh, anti-feminist and misogynistic and all things that are completely untrue. And then something happened in the past, I don’t know, two or three years. Social media picked up on some of my podcast recordings and people, it kind of was like a stone that gathered moss as it rolled down the hill. Something is happening that’s making, and I think it’s probably that the mental health crisis in such young children is getting to such kind of a point where people feel at rock bottom. There are children who are two and three and four years old are being diagnosed in America with ADHD, like they’ve gotten a cold, like a head cold. And then they’re saying, put them on medication.

And I think people are kind of sick of this trope. And so I think at this point, they want to know what’s going on. All these children can’t be ill without some reason. This is not normal. So I am hopeful in that people are listening.

I’m hopeful in that you’re listening and the people that are listening to this interview are listening. And I do see some positive changes in parts of the world. My own country is still very intransigent in terms of listening. I always say you pay for what you value, right?

People come to therapy and sometimes they’ll say, I can’t afford you, but they’ll go on vacations and buy cars and I say, it’s what you value. You pay for what you value. In my country, in America, we have no paid family. We have no paid maternity leave at all or paternity leave provided by our government. So how important can children really be in our country?

Right? And so that’s rather discouraging, but I keep fighting. And my hope is that whatever’s happening here in Europe that feels like progress is going to make its way over the Atlantic to our country, so.

INTERVIEWER: Well, Erica, “Being There” has been so influential in our household and we’re so grateful for all that you’re doing and keep speaking up and more people will listen. Thank you so much for your time.

ERICA KOMISAR: Thank you.

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