This seminal work by Alice Miller, which first appeared in German in 1979, has been published under various names: The Drama of the Gifted Child, Prisoners of Childhood, The Drama of Being a Child, Das Drama des begabten Kindes. The adjective "gifted" does not translate well, as Miller uses it to describe a young person who was able to use his/her own limited resources to adapt to and survive a difficult or even abusive upbringing. The book is only about a hundred pages, but I ended up with six pages of notes!
Miller makes the argument that every child has a legitimate need for the full range of his emotions and sensations to be acknowledged and respected. When a child is trained early, deliberately or subconsciously, to not reveal, or even experience, certain intense feelings, that repression stunts the child's emotional development. The result is that the individual is alienated from parts of his own self. This self-alienation will eventually come to the surface as depression, rage, guilt, psychosomatic complaints, compulsive or provocative behavior, unhealthy relationships, etc.
The adult child may still have a need to idealize her parents, in which case denial proves a useful tool. But until she can confront the difficult parts of herself (which may in fact be her greatest strengths!) that her parents rejected, she will be continue abandoning her true self. The key to reclaiming personal autonomy and a complete sense of being alive, according to Miller, is acknowledging the parts of one's self that were "split off", as it were, and recognizing the needs of the child that the parents were not able, for whatever reason, to adequately meet. When one is able to properly mourn what was lost (irretrievably for the child at that point in his development), one can regain the ability to experience all the instinctual desires and responses of the human psyche without hiding the "bad" ones behind a thick wall.
Both Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery and Pete Walker's Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving built on the concepts Miller introduced regarding childhood trauma and emotional development, and I found it useful to consider some of their later terminology in place of the denser language of this 1980s translation. (The current version available from Amazon was revised more recently and is hopefully more readable.)
Miller walks the reader through a healthy counseling relationship and points out the challenges and potential sloughs along the way. Anyone who is a parent, or who is a counselee, could certainly benefit from this book.
This week, embattled IBLP founder Bill Gothard received aid from an unexpected quarter--homeschool mom and popular author Debi Pearl.
In the past, self-confessed "old hillbilly" Michael Pearl has sometimes himself been critical of Bill Gothard for helping create the excesses of the homeschooling patriarchy movement--a highly ironic observation coming from the father of patriarchs! But this week, Debi came out swinging against IBLP victims who have gone public with their stories on "Recovering Grace" and other websites.
Beginning her post with the question, "Whose side are you on?" Debi attacks those who have dared to publish accounts of how Gothard lied to, molested, or otherwise mistreated them. According to Debi, these "critics" are "bitter" (that's the ultimate pejorative in IBLP circles, remember?), they are "foolish", and they have joined a "Satanic attack on God's people".
On the one hand, Debi describes Gothard as a "man who put his whole life into doing a work for God". On the other, she denies having any connection to IBLP's beleaguered "ministry" which, she claims, helped "set thousands of people free from bitterness".
Gothard and the Pearls have, in fact, had a symbiotic relationship for years. They attended a Basic Seminar in the late 1970's. IBLP promoted and distributed the Pearls' parenting book To Train Up a Child. The website for IBLP Australia still offers at least two of the Pearls' numerous books. At least one of the Pearl girls worked at Gothard's orphanage and training center (South Campus) in Indianapolis and the Pearls kept several Russian orphans at their home over the summer. Michael solicited donations for IBLP from his followers. Several of the Pearl children's spouses were raised in Gothard's ATI program. (I say "spouses", but Michael Pearl made it clear years ago that his children do not need any such thing as marriage licenses. A ceremony and their parents' blessing is apparently good enough.*)
Besides being given to racist and homophobic remarks, the Pearls are somewhat obsessed with sex. It gives Michael hope to envision homeschoolers "outbreeding" progressives. He counsels the wife of an angry man to "make love" to improve her husband's mood. Debi often suggests that being sexually available is a wife's primary responsibility. Michael even wrote a book on erotic pleasure for fundamentalist Christian couples.
And then there are the Pearls' highly controversial child training methods, which have now been linked to three child deaths. There is currently a petition circulating to ask Amazon.com to remove To Train Up a Child from its website in the interest of protecting children from parental abuse. According to a BBC report last year, To Train Up a Child has sold over 800,000 copies and boxes of the Pearls' books have been shipped for free to U.S. troops overseas. "No Greater Joy" pulls in over $1 million a year, with Debi functioning as "the financial brain of the company", according to her son Gabriel.
Michael is a renowned knife-thrower
Last year, Rachel Held Evans wrote a blunt piece about Michael and Debi Pearl and their abusive "ministry". First, she quoted Pearl himself describing how to handle a rebellious child:
"If you have to sit on him to spank him then do not hesitate. And hold him there until he is surrendered. Prove that you are bigger, tougher, more patiently enduring and are unmoved by his wailing. Defeat him totally." -Michael Pearl
And Evans added her own warning:
But it’s not just children who suffer from No Greater Joy's ministries. When I was conducting research for A Year of Biblical Womanhood, I read Debi Pearl’s popular book, Created to Be His Helpmeet…which I threw across the room a total of seven times.
The writing is awful, the biblical exegesis deplorable, but what troubles me the most is that the book reads like a manual for developing abused wife syndrome.
In their story "The Real Michael Pearl" a few years ago, Religious Child Maltreatment pointed out the peculiar rush Pearl appears to derive from seeing small children spanked into silence, and his sense that he has "come upon the holy grail of childrearing".
To Pearl, and many parents who follow his teachings, the primary goal of parenting is not to support children by fulfilling their needs to feel safe and experience appropriate autonomy, but to control children.
In April 2011, Cindy Kunsman, a nurse explained the physical dangers of Pearl's teachings in a post on the No Longer Quivering blog. Homeschoolers Anonymous reposted the piece in September of last year:
Due to the severity of the spankings with [Michael Pearl's recommended] plumbing line, both Zariah and Lydia Schatz suffered renal failure because of rhabdomyolysis.
...[W]e may never learn the details about new cases of Pearl-related kidney disease unless it is reported by the families of the survivors.
Kunsman went into much more detail about rhabdomyolysis in another post at Under Much Grace. This article convinced me that the Pearls are not just cranks, they are dangerous.
If the children are aggressively spanked on a chronic basis, ...it is possible that chronic damage could occur in children that is not bad enough to cause kidney failure but bad enough to cause damage. Unless a child undergoes blood tests at some point, “renal insufficiency” (inefficient kidney function that is lower than a normal, healthy level) could be present and no one would be the wiser. It is conceivable that at least some children have experienced some damage, but not enough to produce symptoms of kidney failure.
In October 2011 Rachel Stone wrote about Pearl in for Christianity Today. Her article included sadistic passages from To Train Up a Child and described the Pearls' methods as "a program of calculated cruelty":
One child suffering under this training is too many; it's my hope that the Pearls will be widely discredited, and soon.
In a November 2011 post, a Chicago blogger pointed out that the popular Duggar family, who are still members of Gothard's homeschooling cult, not only endorse but actively promote the Pearls' materials on their own website:
www.NoGreaterJoy.org Features some of the finest in family-friendly, value-based books, audios, videos, and articles on parenting, husband and wife relationships, ministry and more! Materials include, To Train Up A Child, Jumping Ship, Created To Be His Help Meet, Preparing To Be A Help Meet, Only Men, the Good and Evil graphic novel in over 20 languages and a FREE bi-monthly magazine.
Samantha at Defeating the Dragonsand Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism have both written boldly about the dangerous and abusive teachings of Michael and Debi Pearl. Author and mother of five Elizabeth Esther, whom Anderson Cooperinterviewed alongside Michael Pearl late in 2011, has been both outspoken and tearful about the horrors perpetrated against children when parents follow Pearl's advice. You can watch the interview for yourself here.
A 2011 New York Times article quotes Michael likening childrearing to training "stubborn mules" and explores links between child deaths and the teachings in Pearl's book.
Dr. Frances Chalmers, a pediatrician who examined Hana’s death for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, said of the Pearl methods: “My fear is that this book, while perhaps well intended, could easily be misinterpreted and could lead to what I consider significant abuse.”
This video shows Michael and Debi Pearl in action at a child training seminar, apparently at the Cane Creek church that meets on Pearl's property in a Tennessee hollow. Michael would much prefer to be known through his books than through these clips, but there he is on his own turf:
With his wife smiling and nodding beside him, Michael Pearl laughingly advocates cruelty against children. He encourages hitting children, even infants, with implements. He recommends luring young children with tempting objects and then swatting them to teach them obedience and self-denial. He teaches parents to instill fear in their children on purpose. Michael Pearl seems to get off on asserting his domination of a much younger, smaller human being:
" A proper spanking leaves children without breath to complain. If he should tell you that the spanking makes him madder, spank him again."
The Pearls have long pointed to the supposed happiness of their own trained and obedient children as evidence of the efficacy of their methods. However, Michael and Debi have not taken well to being called out by adults whose parents followed this couple's advice. Earlier this month, Michael became defensive against vocal homeschool graduates such as those of us who post at "Homeschoolers Anonymous" and posted his response at "No Greater Joy". But even as he blasts those who speak the truth about their experiences, Michael must admit that homeschooling is no panacea:
"Not every homeschool experience will be a great success. Some will be total failures; others will be good but not altogether good. In some cases, out of six children a family may lose one or two to the world, but they will have two or three that are exceptional human beings."
Alas for a child who turns out to be a less-than-exceptional human being! Pearl chalks such failures up to satan at work and recommends people buy more of his books, just to be safe.
I really should not be surprised to see Debi Pearl defending Bill Gothard and his ministry against what she considers defamation. But I look at her daughters, their body language, and I wonder what stories they could tell and what they would say about their famous parents if they felt completely safe.
It speaks volumes that the Pearls feel compelled to hitch their ministry to Gothard's falling star.
"None of my daughters or their husbands asked the state of Tennessee for permission to marry. They did not yoke themselves to government. It was a personal, private covenant, binding them together forever—until death. So when the sodomites have come to share in the state marriage licenses, which will eventually be the law, James and Shoshanna will not be in league with those perverts. And, while I am on the subject, there will come a time when faithful Christians will either revoke their state marriage licenses and establish an exclusively one man-one woman covenant of marriage, or, they will forfeit the sanctity of their covenant by being unequally yoked together with perverts."
I spent the rest of that day in the Legal Department. I guess Michael spent the rest of the day at his house, packing. At five o'clock, I rode my bike--always an adventure in a long navy dress skirt!--back to Brook Manor and fixed myself dinner. I probably talked to Chris and Michael, but I can't remember. What I do remember is being in my new bedroom organizing and unpacking my things when I got a phone call on the house phone late that night. It was my parents.
Dad was driving down to get me in the morning, they said. I was confused. Michael had been fired; I understood that. But he had a car. Why was Dad--? Bill Gothard had called them. Just a few minutes earlier, apparently. His office stood just yards from my window, but he had said nothing to me. Bill wanted me gone, too, they said, not just Michael. It was after eleven in Michigan. Dad would leave early and arrive by noon; the Suburban could easily haul our bicycles and all my luggage. Stunned, I stopped unpacking.
And so my first night to sleep in my own room was also my last. I lay there in the quiet and came up with enough of a plan to settle my racing thoughts. Mom had recently announced that she was pregnant with a twelfth child. With six kids under ten years old, she would clearly need help. God knew I was so emotionally invested in the Institute I could easily be what we called a "lifer"--the kind of girl who would only "leave in a white dress or a black box". So God must have arranged to get me fired so I would be free to invest in my family. I would be the heroine of the story!
I had been around long enough to know that staff members sometimes disappeared overnight. They were just...gone. No explanation was ever offered. You could come down to breakfast and they had simply vanished. I didn't want to be one of those. When I woke in the morning, I did not dress in the despised navy and white. I was no longer in Gothard's employ, so he was no longer my authority. I put on my favorite homemade red sunflower print jumper, with mustard-colored buttons. I would be noticed when I went to the Production Center to gather my personal effects, and there would be no mistake about my employment status!
I did not attend that morning's staff meeting, no longer considering myself staff. When I entered the Legal Department in my cheery picnic frock, someone told me Gothard was looking for me. Feeling angry and betrayed, I evaded the man for a while but eventually found myself seated beside him on a sofa in the building's front lobby, beneath the framed painting of his parents. He peered into my eyes, which I found disagreeably intimate, and told me my parents wanted me to come home. There wasn't much to say to that, so our conversation was brief. I thought he wanted to take my hand, but I kept my distance. Someone was lying to me, that much was clear.
It was nearly noon when Dad arrived at Brook Manor. Chris, who had met my parents on a weekend visit home with Michael, was hanging around to say goodbye and Dad invited him to join us for lunch at a nearby restaurant. I could feel my role reverting as soon as we opened the menus: I immediately eliminated all the choices containing pork. When Chris casually ordered an egg scramble with ham, on Dad's check, I gasped inwardly, shocked and envious. (I would have been reminded of the scene in Chariots of Fire when Sybil orders a pork dish on a dinner date with Harold Abrahams, except that scene had always been edited out when Dad showed us the film.) My first autonomous act after being dropped off at Headquarters had been to order pork, and now I instinctively surrendered that freedom as I slid back under my father’s “umbrella”.
After lunch we loaded the vehicles. In the flurry of collecting my belongings, I forgot my crockpot but remembered my grapefruit knife and was daring enough to give Chris a photo (of me? us?) to remember our times together. Our goodbyes, in the Staff Center-Brook Manor parking lot when Dad was ready to go, were brief. For the first time since November, we shook hands. This time we knew we would see each other again. Lisa was getting married in the fall and she had asked all of us from the old "CLink" to have a part in the wedding.
For the rest of day, I sat in the car, feeling more stunned as time and distance grew between me and IBLP Headquarters. We stopped at an Arby’s where the familiar decor stirred numerous memories. This time, Chris wasn’t there to order fries he couldn’t eat. Back in the passenger seat, I pensively sipped my Jamocha shake. I remember feeling shaken, weary but agitated. Of the previous twenty months, only three at most had been spent at my parents’ home. I was one of a minority of IBLP staff who found training center life to be less restrictive in many ways than living at home.
Yesterday I was sitting at a desk doing a job I had fantasized about for years. Now I was a 23-year-old woman being taken to a place I really didn’t want to return to. No one had asked what I wanted; it never occurred to me that I had any options. Thrown out of my house overnight, without a job, a car, or a plan, I was again dependent on my father. I had a checking account and plenty of skills, but little knowledge or experience or confidence that I could survive in a world of adults.
Watching mile markers slide past the window now, I braced myself for the inevitable adjustment. The pants folded in my suitcase would have to stay in my bedroom or under long skirts. The pajamas would have to be hidden under a robe. I would no longer be in charge of my own meals or schedule. Instead of working in an office for a regular minimum-wage paycheck, I would likely be helping to raise children, sew dresses and bloomers, garden, clean the house, and feed the family. City life had agreed with me; returning to the stench and flies of the farm would be trying. But if that’s where God wanted me, I would make it. I would show him how faithful I could be.
I was introduced to email when I started work at IBLP’s
CharacterLink. I was twenty-two and thoroughly impressed. The week before I’d
been using a a rotary phone at home, and now I could type messages that arrived
almost instantly at someone else’s desk? Get out! My dad got his first account
a week or two later; he was in his forties. I remember talking to
customers—customers whose names I recognized, whose books I had read, whose
sermons my parents had followed, whose kids were held up as role models to
me—who had been frightened of the dangers of the Internet but were so excited
now about this rapid new mode of communication.
Our customers, for the most part, did not own televisions. Many did not even subscribe to newspapers. Bill
Gothard himself had told his followers that he would not risk the dangers of
reading a newspaper with its unwholesome advertising, but let his sister clip
out items of interest from U.S. News
& World Report to leave on his desk. And these men--these homeschool
dads now in their 40’s and 50’s--would give me their credit card number, we
would give them an account and, just like that, they were ushered into the wild
and wonderful world of 1990’s email.
This was a world of endless forwards and chain
letters and “Reply all” and spammers offering to extend your piano by four inches. Google hadn’t been invented yet, mind you. And while
Snopes.com existed, many new email users were unaware of it. The male
sexagenarians who led Gothard’s Institute may not have had a lot of experience evaluating claims. Perhaps their schools had not offered exercises in distinguishing fact from
opinion. For those who had spent many of their adult years overseas with
limited means of communication, email’s rapid torrent of words and images must
have seemed miraculous.
I had only been using my email account for a year when
Bennie McWha, an ex-missionary who ran IBLP’s Indianapolis compound, stood up
at lunch before we dispersed for the holidays and read to us from an email he’d
received. As far as I could tell, he was deadly serious. The email—an urban
legend that had circulated for years—described a traveler who awoke in a
bathtub without his kidneys. McWha wanted us to be cautious as we journeyed to
our homes, lest we meet a similar fate. I was incredulous that a man of God
would spread such a fearful hoax to a group of terribly naïve kids. But there
it was. We joked about it for years afterwards. (All the more so because it went along with a Dilbert strip we had adopted as a motto during our CharacterLink days in Oklahoma.)
At IBLP Headquarters a few months later, I tried to chuckle
at the right times when one of the men, who no doubt thought he was sharing
something special, read to the staff from pages of one-liners he had printed
off email. Of course, they were the same ones that had appeared in everyone’s
inbox sometime in 1998, but these guys were like kids in a candy store. At the
Institute Christmas party, we had played a parlor game based on the names of
Christmas carols; now you could just read all the entertaining answers in one
email and be done with it.
Then there was the Y2K scare. Like many other evangelicals,
Bill fell for it. I say fell for it, but really he spread the panic. Staff
ordered large quantities of survival supplies (including kerosene stoves and
lanterns) which ALERT packaged into kits and marketed to ATI families at
Knoxville that year. At several hundred dollars apiece, many families could ill
afford the Y2K kits, but maybe the peace of mind was worth the investment. We
were glad Otto Koning didn’t burn down the Production Center the day he
demonstrated the kerosene lantern (“just like the ones we used on the mission field!”)
in front of the assembled staff. It did not light as smoothly as he expected and
a pillar of flame shot out of it!
As a secretary in the Publishing Department, I occasionally
handled copyright permissions—both granting and obtaining them. One week, Bill
had come across an article he really
wanted to distribute at an upcoming seminar and it was sent to my desk. I
looked it over, and multiple red flags went up. I may not have gone to
college and learned about citing sources, but I had spent a year surfing the wild worldwide web and I’d learned a
thing or two about credibility. This article, something purporting to be about heart health, didn't pass the smell test. I looked up the website for the organization
that had published the piece, and quickly grew more convinced that no educated
professional would take this pseudo-scientific group seriously.
Glad to be saving
Gothard and his ministry from an embarrassment, I contacted his office with my observations. To
my surprise, I was told that Bill wanted to promote the piece anyway. The quasi-medical
information may have been misleading, but it supported other points he wanted
to make. I was to go ahead with the project and have copies printed. I
swallowed my pride, and obeyed my “authorities”, wondering if attendees would
be put off by encountering such quackery at a seminar they trusted. I think I
realized at that point that my values did not parallel those of the Institute.
When summer rolled around, Bill and all the important staff
went off to Knoxville for the big annual ATI conference. Chris, Michael, and I
were part of the remnant left behind. After the hectic weeks leading up to the
conference, the Headquarters campus felt strangely deserted. Brook Manor was
nearly empty, most of the girls having gone to assist their department bosses
in Knoxville. I remember that I cooked chicken and rice in my crockpot one day
and took it over to the Staff Center so a small group of us could eat dinner together.
Friday evening, with the place still virtually empty, I invited Michael* and Chris, who were rooming together again at one of the IBLP men's houses on Pinehill Lane, to
join me out on Brook Manor’s back deck. I dared not let them indoors, but the deck, facing the trees that bordered Bronswood Cemetery, was secluded while being publicly accessible. We sat on chairs and talked.
And talked. We talked about life, we talked about God; we talked about our
families, our plans, our experiences and concerns with the Institute. We talked
late into the night, ignoring the darkness and our bladders and the cooling
night air.
Then Michael, our indefatigable night owl, announced that he was ready to go home to bed.
Chris and I begged him to stay a little longer. We were
savoring the rare opportunity to communicate deeply for hours. Since our weeks
in Indianapolis, our friendship had not flamed with such intensity. To me, it
was not sexual or even romantic in any way--I still thought Chris was scrawny, hairy, and sometimes dressed funny--but it was emotionally intimate; Chris was the best friend I had at that moment, and certainly the closest male friend
I’d ever had. We would gladly have talked for hours more, but we both knew he could
stay only as long as my brother (three years our junior) was there to chaperone.
When Michael decided it was time for bed, our magical coach turned back into a
pumpkin. Reluctantly, but oh so obediently, we said good night and went our
separate ways to sleep. Little did we know how long it would be till our next heart-to-heart talk.
I think it was after Gothard returned from Knoxville that I was given a new position--as secretary to Robert Barth, director of the Legal Department. It had been my dream to work in the Legal Department from the time my family had first toured the Institute's Headquarters nine years earlier. I had spent over a year enrolled in IBLP's law school, and I admired Professor Barth and the rest of the aspiring lawyers who worked for him. I was, quite simply, starstruck. I trained a replacement to take care of Mr. Fredrickson, Mr. Garvin, Miss Julie* and the rest on the third floor, and I moved my personal items to the large desk across the hall from the computer server room. I discovered that I wasn't very good at typing from my new boss's dictation, but I was determined to learn. He would not be disappointed in me!
Change was afoot at Brook Manor, as well. With someone else going home, a single bedroom was vacating, and after six months, I now had the seniority to take it if I chose. My roommate was a dear friend, but our friendship has always been strongest when we are not sharing a bedroom. I could remember having my own room for several months when I was ten or eleven, and for several weeks on a ship in Russia when I was seventeen. Since then, I had always shared with someone else. What a treat to have a quiet secluded space all to myself! Chris, who had had a room to himself his whole pre-IBLP life and was afraid I would get so comfortable I wouldn't care about hanging out with him and Michael anymore, said I would "ferment" alone in there, but I was excited as I gathered up my possessions from the corner room with attached bathroom and began transferring them to the next room over. Sharing a bathroom down the hall would be a small price to pay for the luxury of privacy.
The next morning, Bill must have
checked his email. Michael and I were sitting together in the morning staff
meeting when, after the usual hymns and prayer, Bill advised us all of yet one more reason to commit never
to enter a cinema: AIDS-contaminated needles in theater seats. Michael and I
immediately recognized yet another urban legend and while I smirked and raised my eyebrows,
Michael--never one to mask the truth--let out a short guffaw. Voluntary or involuntary,
his insubordination was noted.
While I waltzed up to my new office immediately after the closing
prayer, Michael was confronted by Gothard himself. Later in the morning, Michael
came looking for me. He’d been sacked, effective immediately. I was stunned. Hadn’t we been more subversive numerous times before? And now, to be fired for laughing at something that was clearly untrue being used as a scare tactic? It wasn't like either of us had been to a movie theater since we'd been scared by The Secret of NIMH way back in 1982!
After our many months of obedience and determined, albeit strained, loyalty, this was an insult. Even when we disagreed with the many ridiculous rules, we had tried always to be guided by honesty. If it was forbidden to laugh at a nude emperor, perhaps the Institute was worse than we feared. I commiserated with my
brother and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to process the news. My life
at Headquarters would certainly be different without his companionship, and his
car. What would happen to my friendship with Chris, without Michael there to link us all as a "natural grouping" and to keep any activity from being perceived as a [forbidden] date?
If you struggle with frequent anxiety or panic attacks, you may want to consider this handy resource. I discovered David Carbonell's website last year, and found his counseling approach so reassuring that I later ordered his Panic Attacks Workbook. Though I only worked through the first five chapters, they were immensely helpful. Dr. Carbonell reminds me Mr. Rogers, which puts me in exactly the right frame of mind to relax and learn.
I picked this book up again this weekend and realized that there is a lot more useful material to read! Even if I don't have such severe panic attacks ever again (and I really hope I don't) I would like to work through the rest of this book. And because it is a workbook, it gives the reader the chance to reflect and interact with the information and develop strategies for managing stressful situations and emotions before they get out of control.
This workbook is less than $20 on Amazon, and it is worth several hours of therapy, at least. I should add that it is geared toward treating anxiety, panic disorders, and phobias, but not specifically PTSD. Many of the tools would apply to managing flashbacks as well, however. Carbonell also offers advice regarding when self-help is not enough and what situations would call for other professional help.
Here are a few excerpts I found particularly reassuring when I first started working through the book:
I think we will eventually find out that most people have an inborn tendency to respond to stress and change in one particular way or another. If you have panic attacks, this is yours.
Adults with panic disorder seem to have often grown up in an atmosphere, that for one reason or another, failed to teach them the world is a safe place where they could happily pursue their own enjoyment.... [M]aybe the parents were themselves anxious and overprotective...Or perhaps the child learned to spend too much time and effort taking care of others...
For most people who develop panic attacks, it begins in their twenties or thirties--the years of establishing an independent life for yourself when you are most likely to experience these kinds of changes.
There is no reason to feel guilty or ashamed of having panic attacks.
(from "Why People Develop Panic Attacks and Phobias", page 28)
If you are looking for a thorough, objective analysis of the movie, you might just want to skip this post. Instead of giving the film the deep treatment it probably deserves, I am only offering my very subjective and personal observations. I will say up front that I had no expectations of the story following the Genesis version of the myth. I was actually startled by how much it was informed by that account.
I saw "Noah" by myself while the kids were at school. I had read enough contradictory reviews to be curious, and when I realized it was directed by the same guy who gave us "The Fountain", I knew it would offer thoughts worth pondering. And I was not disappointed.
The story of a global deluge is very familiar to me, and not just from the Fisher-Price set, though our toddlers played with that, too. Growing up, nearly every question about biological or geological history was answered with, "Well, the Flood could have done that." The Flood was the reason for petrified forests, petroleum, peat bogs, fossils, dinosaur bones (the eggs were harder to explain, but probably them, too), and the Ice Age. (Living in Michigan, we couldn't deny the historical presence of glaciers.) The Flood explained the diagonal rock strata along the Pennsylvania turnpike, the formation of mountains and islands, attempted justification of American slavery, and why humankind formed early civilizations in Mesopotamia.
Based on a timeline that hung in the hallway of my childhood home, I thought Noah built his ark around 4000-3000 B.C. (Answers in Genesis pegs Noah's worldwide Flood at 2348 B.C.) The movie seems to deliberately avoid a specific timeline. And at every point the story feels more like mythology from Middle Earth than like historical documentary. At its core, it is a well-told fantasy tale.
There were a few ideas presented in the film that would have seemed stranger to me had I not first heard them floated (pun intended, folks) by the likes of Ken Ham and Carl Wieland. For example, Noah uses an herbal vapor to put the animals to sleep for the duration of the voyage. AIG's website suggests this as a possible solution to the eating and pooping conundrum: "It is, of course, also possible that God put the animals into a sleep for most of the time that they were on the ark."
Also in adherence with Ham's interpretation of Genesis, Noah is a strict vegetarian. And the ark appears plenty spacious for the numerous species on board, almost as if Aronofsky checked AIG's website to suggest specifics: "Without tiering of cages, only 47 percent of the ark floor would have been necessary. What’s more, many could have been housed in groups, which would have further reduced the required space." The fountains of the deep, just one among many fabulous special effects, did not surprise me in the least because Ham's version of the Flood always included such subterranean water sources combining with the 40 days and 40 nights of rainfall. I could also accept the advanced metallurgy, having read in Creation magazine long ago the suggestion that antediluvians could have built rockets and used batteries!
Those were aspects of the story that seemed almost familiar to me. The things that actually surprised me were:
Noah wearing pants. I partly went to see that, I admit. But way more than that was...
Mrs. Noah, and Noah's daughter-in-law, wearing pants!
Methuselah. He was a strange, wizard-like character. His creepy cave reminded me of the owl in the Secret of NIMH movie. I had never been able to imagine him dying in the flood. Now I can.
Noah becoming a crazed lunatic and the whole family being trapped with him on the boat for months. Talk about post-traumatic stress. As if they hadn't all been through enough already.
The miracle forest. I mean, the landscape was pretty much post-apocalyptic up to that point; nothing remained of that lush world the creator had first thought up. But then Noah plants Methuselah's magic seed, and poof! up sprouts a wood as fantastic as Jack's beanstalk or Jonah's gourd.
The rock giants. I get that they came from the Watchers myth, but I had a hard time taking them too seriously since they looked like a hybrid between one of Peter Jackson's Ents and a Transformer that got too close to hot asphalt. Fascinating guys, and they got to do the real work of building the ark since Shem, Ham, and Japheth were too young to care much.
No agriculture. No animal husbandry. No farming of any sort. We never really saw Noah's family eat. They drank hallucinatory tea, apparently. And made a point not to eat meat--raw or otherwise. And it was vaguely suggested that they packed some food, but we didn't see it, or see any way they could even obtain it, other than gathering a few tiny berries. When Ham offered a bit of food to a hungry girl, I watched eagerly to see what it was, but it only looked like a crumbled granola bar and the camera went by it quickly.
The patriarchy. Oh, the damnable patriarchy! I should have expected it, of course, but it's been a while since I spent two hours immersed in that system again, and it was portrayed in a truly disturbing way. All the way down to Noah trying to control his sons' sex lives.
The cavalier way Noah used fire on the ark. All that dry wood smeared with flammable petroleum products. Did he have a death wish?!
Noah's wife threatening to leave him. Honestly, I might have pitched him overboard by that point, but I guess that would have deviated irrevocably from the biblical account.
In my opinion, the big theme this film brought up was the question, "How do we decide who is worth saving?" Depending on the audience, the question might bring up theological issues of salvation and damnation. Or it might be about humanitarian response to disaster or suffering. It might apply to national or international conflicts, political power and interests, or forming policies for addressing homelessness. It might be about whether and how we fight poverty or how we view immigration and human rights. It might apply to medical decisions. Mental health issues. How we deal with crime as a society.
In this movie, the writers raise a lot of questions, but leave it to the viewers to wrestle out the answers. By the time the ark went aground, all of us in the theater were probably ready to get vicariously drunk. I certainly was, and I've never even been drunk. It just seemed the most fitting response to Noah's whole shitty experience.
All the scenes in Noah are vivid, all are artistic, and a few are breathtaking. But the real drama in this version of the Noah's Ark tale takes place inside Noah's head and in his heart.
This seminal work by Alice Miller, which first appeared in German in 1979, has been published under various names: The Drama of the Gifted Child, Prisoners of Childhood, The Drama of Being a Child, Das Drama des begabten Kindes. The adjective "gifted" does not translate well, as Miller uses it to describe a young person who was able to use his/her own limited resources to adapt to and survive a difficult or even abusive upbringing. The book is only about a hundred pages, but I ended up with six pages of notes!
The adult child may still have a need to idealize her parents, in which case denial proves a useful tool. But until she can confront the difficult parts of herself (which may in fact be her greatest strengths!) that her parents rejected, she will be continue abandoning her true self. The key to reclaiming personal autonomy and a complete sense of being alive, according to Miller, is acknowledging the parts of one's self that were "split off", as it were, and recognizing the needs of the child that the parents were not able, for whatever reason, to adequately meet. When one is able to properly mourn what was lost (irretrievably for the child at that point in his development), one can regain the ability to experience all the instinctual desires and responses of the human psyche without hiding the "bad" ones behind a thick wall.
