Brothers (and a cute dog)– in the Valley

I’ve recently completed a book that I think should be on the reading list of basically everyone in the United States, who is involved in understanding and wanting to change the current milieu. The title is Troubled, by Rob K. Henderson, and it’s the life story/memoir of a young man raised largely as poor in the foster care system, who at the current point of his life is finishing (or has recently finished) his Ph.D. in psychology at Cambridge in the U.K.

The book is a first person memoir that covers the time period from his birth to the present. Born to a drug addicted mother, whom he spent the first three years of his life with, he traverse the foster/adopted parent landscape, with his eventual enlistment in the US Air Force, followed by a degree at Yale, and then his current Ph.D. posting. What is amazing about this book is that it is largely representative of those of us coming from profoundly dysfunctional families, with the family structure shifting and dissolving almost on a regular 9 month interval. Rob bounced through some nine different foster placements, IIRC, after being taken from his mother at the age of 3, for being tied up by his mother and screaming while she entertained various men in their apartment.

The beauty of the book is its low level dysthymic tone and structure. Not everything is bad all the time, and that gives a far more accurate view of poverty in the United States than others. I recently attempted to get through, for example, Barbara Kingsolver’s recent novel, Demon Copperhead, but could not, because it turned into a classic Misery Olympics tome. For the record, I’m a pretty big Kingsolver fan — she grew up across the Ohio River from my own hometown of Portsmouth, OH, and I’ve always appreciated her descriptions of my own childhood environs. But Henderson does a much better job of capturing the grinding sadness of loss of faith in stability of adults in kids’ lives, as well as the actual violence that people in poorer communities across the US experience. The short version is simple — it may be more stimulating, and glamorous if the violence is upped a couple of clicks. But then you usually don’t survive it. You get killed, or you kill someone and end up in jail. Henderson’s journey is one of the actual lower classes, and not nearly so dramatic. And that is the reason to read it.

Though I never experienced the chronic extent of what Henderson endured, I’m fond of joking that on the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) scale of “bad things happening to you in the course of your life”, I’m a heptathlete on the scale of 1-10. I experienced the fighting, the dealing with chronic adult problems and the like. But like Henderson, I never had to deal with sexual abuse, which in my opinion is likely statistically the thing that really makes young people go off the rails. Though it’s no way to raise a child, there’s also no question that chronic abuse lends to those lucky enough to inherit a robust neural system the ability to discern insights into the human condition that you simply can’t get from a happy, two-parent home.

And that’s what makes this book so important. It’s an actual window into that world, with the author stating right up front (I think in the preface) that the usual nostrums of education as a ladder out of dysfunction are vastly overrated. Stable attachment is actually key, and as someone that shares his own diagnosis of chronic dysthymia (low level depression and cynicism) I can attest that this is correct. You end up outside the stable family ice cream shop, perpetually looking in while you spend a lifetime processing your wounds, often incorrectly, while others are enjoying their lives.

I also deeply share Rob’s view that he also states in the book when people tell him “well, you turned out alright.” Either the implication is “it couldn’t have been that bad” or “this must be an OK way to raise kids.” Lordy. I’ve found from my own experience the only people holding that opinion are either the divinely clueless, or pathological narcissists.

There are a couple of points which I conjecture likely saved Rob from utter destruction. I think he does a great job in the book of explaining how life in the military helped him navigate his early adulthood while not going to jail. He also seemed to avoid lots of hard drugs, and that had to help. But oddly enough, One of the factors I conjecture that he likely survived because he did get to spend the first three years of his life with his drug-addicted mother. I’m not attempting to minimize the trauma associated with being an infant and having some level of abuse directed at him. But while it likely has given him unstable attachment patterns, he likely at least has some. Kids mostly form up their young brains in the first two years, and having a constant caregiver, no matter how poor, is key. Rob’s own story shows that it’s far more likely to get passed through a series of foster placements than to end up adopted. That’s what happened to him.

And early attachment matters. I’ve fought for this at the university for years — providing day care for children and mothers so that young infants don’t experience a revolving door of violation from caregivers leaving every couple of months. If we really wanted to prioritize something that might make a difference in the next generation, it would be this.

Itinerant father figures do pop into Rob’s life on a more unscheduled basis, and Rob’s writing once again supports my thesis that common wisdom delivered from elders is important, and relatively uncommon. One thing Rob does a great job of describing is how many successful life habits, mostly involved with longer-term consequential thinking, simply did not occur to him at various points in his life. They seem obvious (and are likely mimetic, not memetic) but they absolutely are not to an increasing number of young people. I find in my classroom (I’m teaching senior undergraduate engineers here — people who by any measure of success have almost made it) that the notion of holding yourself accountable to excellent work is a foreign concept. I beat into their heads that they are the best, and that is not a snowflake brag — it is a brand promise to pay attention to the world around them to excel. These are the folks that are designing the next generation of planes, rockets and trucks. You better hope they’re the best.

Rob also singlehandedly demolishes the current ‘Woke’ movement in one of his final chapters with what I believe a term he’s coined — “Luxury beliefs.” He does a great job of explaining elite coding at a more accessible level than I do. Elites often subscribe to beliefs to prove their virtue to each other that they themselves never follow. This is a classic “stated preference/elected preference” gaslighting technique that manipulators use. One of the examples he gives is “Defund the police.” He correctly notes that this affects poor communities far more than rich communities, but if you want to move up in current elite liberal circles, you have to rep it. These destructive beliefs virally propagate because they are fundamentally ungrounded, and sound nice on the surface, but are deeply problematic.

And as Rob also notes in a measured tone, with each of his examples, there may be opportunities for continued progress in better and more humane solutions. But the impacts of any policy will be felt more harshly on the poor than the rich, who often end up with disastrous, collapsing cascades of personal crisis. One of the statistics I cite a lot in arguments is the fact that 25% of African-American kids are likely to experience an eviction before reaching the age of majority. And then that leads to other disasters. Not everyone survives these disasters, especially if they have a fractured family, full of immature actors. And they either melt into the justice system, or they die.

So read this book. It’s the best text I’ve listened to in a while, and Rob himself narrates it. The one thing that I did find memetically interesting is that Rob ended up in elite circles himself — he is at Cambridge, after all. I’d encourage him to dig outside the thinking that dominates in those circles, and use his experience well, with a critical eye. If you read this, Rob, do know that those people’s thought patterns are largely broken. They really don’t understand psychopathy/Cluster B well, and many of them are afflicted, as well as being afflicters. Check out my work, of course, but also dig into my metamodern pals, like Hanzi Freinacht (Daniel Goetz and Emil Ejner Friis.) They also tend not to like Bowlby and other family systems therapists either. They’re just not systems thinkers, and the problem is, of course, that people are trapped in systems that are poorly understood, but deliver execrable outcomes for the lives of far too many.

And Rob – thank you for your heroism. One of the chief problems with even getting people like Rob to write down their narrative in a meaningful fashion is that many of the people who are the perpetrators are still alive. And needless to say, they don’t like being written about. Curiously enough, since Rob’s tale is one of chronic abandonment, it’s likely that he’s relatively safe from the legal hassles normally engendered when writing about one’s dysfunctional past openly and honestly. And while I absolutely do not condone child abuse, nor adult abuse for that matter, the ancient Greeks knew that this was the path where heroes were born. Hercules didn’t have twelve labors for nothing.

For those interested in a somewhat sanitized and incomplete version of my own story, here you go.