This post is the last in a series on authoritarian wounding and should be taken in the context of this ongoing series, which looks at many aspects of the authoritarian personality, the various ways that authoritarians harm their victims, and the efforts victims of authoritarian contact make to try to heal themselves.
If you’ve had the experience of being harmed by a family authoritarian—a parent, sibling, grandparent, aunt or uncle, partner, adult child, etc.—or by someone else close to you—a cleric, teacher, boss, co-worker, etc.—I invite you take the Authoritarian Wound Questionnaire, available here. I also invite you to tell your story, as it is long past time that we got this epidemic of wounding exposed—and ended. Come back each Thursday to read more about authoritarians in the family and please think about taking the Authoritarian Wound Questionnaire and about telling your story.
When I began my research, I presumed that there must be a lot of authoritarian wounding out there, given how toxic growing up with or living with an authoritarian personality had to be and given how many authoritarians are among us. When, as history has shown us repeatedly, whole populations look primed to follow a fascist leader, and given the authoritarian research conducted by Adorno, Altemeyer, and others, I supposed that it must be the case that within the family—within a great many families—this same dynamic must be playing itself out in microcosm, harming millions, many if not most permanently.
This is indeed what I found. Respondents were not professional writers or storytellers and yet their stories were not just homespun and real but also eloquent. This suggests that a narrative approach to healing might prove a go-to strategy for some helpers. Asking clients to write their story, either in response to questions or in response to some other sort of prompt, gives clients a chance, maybe the first chance they have ever been offered or have ever afforded themselves, to get clear on the extent to which they were harmed and to gain insight into their own difficulties, behaviors and personality. Most respondents reported that they found responding to the Authoritarian Wound Questionnaire a therapeutic experience.
I have not presumed that everything respondents reported is gospel. I had no desire to include some sort of “lie scale” or other test of respondents’ veracity, even if such an inclusion were possible. I think this rather mimics therapy or coaching, where helpers take the studied stance of not doubting or disputing their clients’ reports, especially in the beginning, when relationship-forming is going on, and typically not until they discover that they must, because their client’s story isn’t hanging together, sounds classically delusional, and so on. I take the fact that respondents are only telling their story, as opposed to the “whole truth” or a rounded picture of reality, as no bigger (or smaller) a problem than the equivalent problem one encounters in session.
It struck me as interesting that as many respondents identified their mother (or some other female, like their grandmother) as being the authoritarian in their family as identified their father (or some other male). The same was true with respect to work, where as many respondents reported authoritarian female bosses as reported authoritarian male bosses. Again, this is not a scientific study and I have no statistics or statistical analysis to present. But I did find this result interesting and surprising—at first glance. At second glance, it helps explain why women can be as staunchly fascistic as men when fascism gets a toehold in society. Needless to say, I am not suggesting that women are more authoritarian than men or even as a rule as authoritarian as men. What it does mean is that women are not exempt from any discussions about who does the wounding.
There are obvious differences between experiencing authoritarian victimization in childhood, say at the hands of a parent, stepparent, or grandparent, and experiencing that victimization as an adult, say at the hands of a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife. In the first instance, we understand why the child could not just leave. In the second instance, we have to wonder why that adult stayed. Respondents wonder that too! This is the result that perhaps surprised me the most, how often victims of authoritarian wounding in childhood went on to choose one, or a series, of authoritarian mates. One clear takeaway from this pattern is that, when your client reports that his or her current mate is an authoritarian, you will want to check in on what is probably a history of childhood trauma and wounding.
I think it would be sensible to formally add authoritarian wounding to our current list of adverse childhood experiences. The adverse childhood experience literature has focused on ten adverse experiences that contribute to long-term psychological and emotional difficulties: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, violence toward the mother, household substance abuse, household mental illness, parental separation or divorce, and the incarceration of a household member. But many other adverse childhood experiences likewise produce negative psychological and emotional consequences. I think that we should consider adding authoritarian contact and wounding to the list of significant adverse childhood experiences.
I would have loved to learn more about the following, which in hindsight would have been valuable areas to inquire about. I would have loved to learn about cross-cultural differences. It may well be the case that what may look like authoritarian behavior may be an artifact of culture. If your whole society is strict in certain ways, say with respect to modest dress, or if your whole society highly prizes a certain value, like education in Confucian philosophy, then it follows that many members of that society may be “strict” and “tough” in these regards without being full-fledged authoritarian personalities. Likewise, I would also have loved to learn more about the negative effects of cataclysmic societal circumstances. For example, to what extent are South Korea’s epidemic mental health problems, including multi-generational authoritarian wounding, a consequence of living in an armed state across from a hostile neighbor for more than half-a-century? I would have loved to learn more in both of these two fascinating areas of inquiry.
It turned out that to a person, nothing had really fully worked to help victims heal their authoritarian wounds or resolve the consequences of their traumatic experiences. Most aspired to healing, made efforts at healing, and were still hopeful about healing, but knew that they were not “there” yet—typically not by a longshot. Many expressed the belief that they would never fully heal. To my mind, this means the following for helpers. First, many of your clients may be deeply pessimistic about the possibility that they will get any real help from you, given that they believe that they are broken, ruined, or doomed. Second, for those clients who retain some hope of healing and who see themselves on a journey of healing, they will deeply appreciate examining these issues, even if that examination proves painful, and are already primed to see this healing journey as a long one. They may prove very patient and very accepting of small gains, given their understanding of how severely they’ve been wounded.
It was rather painful reading and transcribing these stories. Imagine living them! I think that, as helpers, we can inadvertently not credit our clients with having lived through an awful lot (even if we ourselves did!). Because the current dominant paradigm has us scanning for symptoms of disorders rather than exploring our clients’ life experiences, we can easily forget that life hurts and that our clients may have come to us because they have been harmed. I think that these real respondent stories are extremely valuable in reminding us of these realities.
While we do not know where these millions upon millions of authoritarians come from, ready at what amounts to the drop of a hat to administer massive electroshock to their fellow human beings in “learning experiments,” to feverishly follow a fascist, or to treat their children barbarically, they are right at this moment doing their damage behind closed doors. When circumstances allow, they are also doing that same damage brazenly in public. Because there are so many of them—researchers estimate that they may amount to as much as 25% of the population—the amount of harm they do is monumental. Whole societies have reaped the whirlwind; as have countless families.
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This post was previously published on Psychology Today and is republished here with permission from the author.
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