Have you ever met people with “disaster mentality”? The ones who see every contretemps as the end of the world, always assume the worst, and have trouble seeing their way past their problems?
More often than not, these are people whose parents adopted the pernicious maxim that they should always present a common front in any problems with the child and never take the child’s side against each other. Such a child grows up thinking, “If Mommy is hurting me, I can’t even tell Daddy, he won’t listen”, or vice versa. Later in life, their first reaction to any problem is despondency and the desire to give up without even trying. In their world, there is no alternative to a bad scenario. Everything and everybody in the universe is allied against them.
Parents who adopt this parenting strategy do so in order to prevent the child from manipulating them by setting one of them against the other. Of course, the problem with this strategy is that it is all about protecting the parents from the child and setting the child up as their enemy. The child grows up with the belief that s/he is all alone in a battle against a hostile world and carries this attitude through his or her entire life.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is very interesting. I’ve frequently felt guilty about not using the ‘united front’ strategy, so your reasoning makes me feel better.
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Don’t feel guilty! You are doing exactly what you should.
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During the nineties basically nobody would speak to you about anything. It was a broad sweeping cultural mentality of closing the ranks against further information, I think.
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Yes, that was my parents’ policy and it is disabling in a lot of ways, yes.
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This is interesting. My parents did not have a particularly good marriage and are now divorced (and they divorced after all their children had moved out of the home and were full adults. So they were married throughout our entire childhood/adolescence.) Many times, my parents did NOT present a united front. (They never bad mouthed each other. But we could always tell when my parents had tension and disagreed.) In some ways I think this was damaging to me and I have always thought of it as a parenting mistake on the part of my parents. But, on the other hand, I really don’t have “a disaster mentality” at all. To me, there is always another way, another angle, another day, another strategy, another solution, another approach. To my mind, as long as I am alive, there is ALWAYS ALWAYS another scenario and I truly feel like I have control over my own life.
On the other hand, my husband was raised by a couple who had a wonderful wonderful marriage. They were (one of them has passed away) a truly united couple. And they always presented a united front to my husband and his siblings. And it wasn’t for a nasty reason. They just were (as far as I can tell) very much in sync and worked out differences in private. In some ways, this approach clearly benefitted my husband. But he COMPLETELY has the “disaster mentality” you just described. It sometimes astonishes me how easily he feels defeated. The smallest setback can really send him in to a very sad place and it’s very difficult for him to feel empowered. Hmm. You made me thing. 🙂
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I have a cold, which is obviously not a big deal, but I’ve been planning my funeral for 2 days here. 🙂 So I know how your husband feels.
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This is one of those times when I realize just how unusual (and overall, despite some chaos here and there, fortunate) my upbring was….
I never have understood the idea of a common (or united) front against children. Yes, some children are adapt at playing one parent against the other but the united front idea seems like total overkill – the only context I can see it making sense is if the family is seen as a kind of factory whose previously happy workers are being whipped into discontent by union firebrands. But who wants to turn their family into a factory?
Another way it could make sense is if the fact that their children won’t turn out to be carbon copies of the parents is felt to be a dangerous threat by the parents. I imagine such parents see signs of individuality like a dangerous cancer that must be fought valiently and bravely until the bitter end when the disease claims its victims. Again, I can’t imagine why people would want to live like that but apparently a lot of them do….
In my family it was completely taken for granted that children would not follow in their parents’ footsteps and would choose their own kind of lives (in terms of work relationships and everything else). Actually trying to follow in a parent’s footsteps would have been perceived as very weird (unless it really did seem like what the child wanted).
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This sounds like paradise. 🙂 You are very fortunate.
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“… the problem with this strategy is that it is all about protecting the parents from the child …”
Rogue counter-script:
The person suffering from this problem recovers when s/he/it checks Crazy Ma and Doormat Pa into a Home for Elder Crazy People, providing eventual release from this life script.
Group support:
The group tells the person that it isn’t awful that Crazy Ma and Doormat Pa were put on a life care pathway — these things happen, after all.
You’d probably like to think this doesn’t happen very often, but consider it one of those ways that your tax money works in hidden ways …
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Putting up a united front to a child or children is a terrible idea. It works much better to agree that if either parent says something is OK to do, it is OK. The child then knows that if both parents say “No,” independently, the answer is no. This saves a lot of worry and stress. This is one thing my first wife and I did correctly. It was so much easier than so many other couples’ strategies.
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“Have you ever met people with “disaster mentality”? The ones who see every contretemps as the end of the world, always assume the worst, and have trouble seeing their way past their problems?”
Sure and then being a numbers kind of guy I head over to the Rapture Index a.k.a. the prophetic speedometer on the Rapture Ready website to check out the current “end of times” number which was 188 on September 22, 2014. This is based on the number of recent events designated as having eschatological significance such as the Mark of the Beast (PRISM spying scandal), the Beast Government (Pinellas County, Fla., students are paying for lunch by waving one hand over a palm scanner) and, of course, the rise of the Anti Christ as foretold in Rev. 13: 1-8 (B.O.’s election). How do you interpret this?
The higher the number, the closer we are to the pre-tribulation rapture or as the site states:
Rapture Index of 100 and Below: Slow prophetic activity
Rapture Index of 100 to 130: Moderate prophetic activity
Rapture Index of 130 to 160: Heavy prophetic activity
Rapture Index above 160: Fasten your seat belts
http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html
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That sounds even more relaxing than watching horror movies (my favorite way to decompress)
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