There are two children in the house. One of them keeps getting into trouble. The school rings. The stories stop adding up. Money disappears from your purse, and apparently nobody took it.
The other one is quiet. Does what is asked. Stays in her room with the door shut. Says she is fine, the same way every time.
Which of them looks more serious to you?
We rank them by what they cost us
Parents bring their children to me for counselling, and it is nearly always the same one of the two: the child who got into trouble.
The quiet one does not come. There is no reason to bring her. The school does not ring, nothing goes missing, she is home at night. Nothing about her needs seeing to.
Here is the thing I want to point out. When we decide which child is more serious, the measure we actually use is not how much pain is this child in. It is how much is this child costing me.
Most of the time the two questions give the same answer, so nobody notices which one they are really asking. In adolescence, they stop giving the same answer.
In adolescence, the hurts of early childhood come back up
Early in life, every child goes through frustration, disappointment, and times of deprivation, when they do not get what they need. A young child has neither the words nor the support to deal with these, so the child simply carries them and moves on. The feelings do not go away. In adolescence, when aggression runs higher, they come back up.
As they rise, these old feelings start to stir a basic destructive force that every human being has. “Destructive” sounds alarming, and I will explain what I mean by it in a moment. From this point on, the two children go different ways. The child who keeps getting into trouble turns that force outward, into defiance, lying, stealing, or fighting. The quiet one turns it inward, against her own wanting: she goes numb, passive, and out of reach.
Where is the battery?
Think of a toy doll that walks and makes a noise. Somewhere on it, under the feet, on its back or on top of its head, there is a little hatch, and behind it the box the batteries sit in.
So what is a battery? It is energy.
I use the battery to explain aggression and destructiveness, because that is what they are: energy. In themselves they are not bad. Passion and tireless energy come from them. When the doll walks, the battery is working. When the doll does not move, the battery is just sitting in its box. It is the same with a child. When the energy is connected to action, the child can protest, go after what they want, say no, and get moving. When it is disconnected, the child may stop wanting, objecting, or starting anything.
The child who keeps getting into trouble has a battery that is working. The energy has come out in the wrong direction, and I will not be soft about that — lying and stealing break the rules everybody else lives by, and somebody gets hurt. That has to be stopped, whatever else is going on. But the fact that the act happened at all means the force is moving.
The quiet child has not simply held back from using the force. She has switched it off. Often she is a child who has grown up keeping an eye on the adults’ moods, and instead of getting angry or asking for help, she hides herself. She does not argue, does not ask for anything, does not cause trouble, because the wanting itself has been shut down. So her quiet may not mean she is well. It may mean the life in her has gone into hiding. At the extreme, it is as if something in her has died. Yet the battery is still in the box. It is simply not connected to anything, so nothing happens.
How Winnicott saw these two children
The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott looked at the children everybody else had written off as problems and said something nobody else was saying. These ones have hope in them.
I am not stretching his meaning. He wrote it himself, in a 1956 paper: the antisocial act — an act that breaks the rules other people live by, such as lying or stealing — is an expression of hope. What such a child hopes for is the care they missed out on. They have not given up on getting it, and through the trouble they are asking for it again.
It is worth being exact here, because this is easy to misread as saying that the behaviour is healthy. What Winnicott had in mind was not the offence itself but what is going on inside the child that comes out as trouble. He called this the antisocial tendency, and it turns up in ordinary children in perfectly decent homes, not only in young offenders.
He said something else alongside it: most children who keep causing trouble are, to some degree, emotionally unwell. Having hope does not mean the child is fine. It means something in the child is still switched on, something that can be worked with.
Winnicott also wrote about the other child, the quiet one. Being agreeable and well-behaved, he said, can become a shell the child wears on the outside. He saw going along with others as a matter of degree. Doing it reasonably well is something a child achieves, and it is healthy. But when the child must always agree and adapt, the shell grows thick and covers over the child’s own wishes and feelings. Socially she causes no trouble, while inside she may already have collapsed. The distress did not disappear; it just stopped showing.
The Child Who Was No Trouble at All follows that child into adulthood, where she is still being told how little trouble she is. This piece is about her as a teenager, with the shell still on.
No symptom, no appointment
Here is what I am actually trying to say.
The child who turned the force outward has symptoms. The school rings, the money is gone, the adults are furious. It is loud and exhausting. And it is precisely the noise that makes an adult put a coat on and take that child somewhere. Help arrives.
The child who turned it inward has no symptoms anyone has to deal with. Nobody is inconvenienced, so nobody brings her in, and nobody asks whether she has stopped feeling, wanting, or connecting with other people. She may get no help until she is twenty or thirty. By then the emptiness, the depression, or the inability to form close relationships has become unbearable, and she finally opens a counsellor’s door on her own.
So the child who gets help late is not the child who caused the trouble.
The force moving is one thing; hurting someone is another
To avoid any misunderstanding, let me be clear about one thing. This is not a piece saying that lying or stealing or hitting is fine. Behaviour that harms another person has to be stopped, and I am not softening that.
Expressing anger and doing damage with it are two different acts, which is the whole argument of You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious. A child is allowed to be angry, allowed to argue, allowed to say out loud that something is unfair. Hitting someone is a different matter: that is what has to be stopped.
What I want to change your mind about is not the behaviour. It is the measure you reach for when you decide which of your children is the serious case.
If there is a quiet child in your house, ask yourself whether she is quiet because she is all right, or quiet because she has hidden herself away. A child who is all right can disagree, ask for help, say what she likes, and get angry, even if she also likes to spend time on her own. A child who has hidden herself away says “fine” to everything, asks for nothing, and seems to want very little, even when you would expect her to want something. At a glance, both are simply quiet. Underneath, they are in very different places. And it may be that nobody has yet asked which of the two she is.
References
- Winnicott, D. W. (1956). The Antisocial Tendency. In Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (pp. 306–315). London: Tavistock Publications, 1958. — the antisocial act as an expression of hope.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (pp. 140–152). London: Hogarth Press, 1965. — compliance hardened into a shell.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1984). Deprivation and Delinquency. C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd & M. Davis (Eds.). London: Tavistock Publications.
Related
- The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
- The Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting
- I Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board