staying until I accomplished that goal or they kicked me out of the gym.
In spite of the occasional intrusion of interpersonal politics in the form of favoritism, nepotism, or cliques, sports represented a meritocracy where you got what you earned. Schoolyard pickup games (regardless of sport) had a well-defined social order. The acknowledged two best players were designated captains who took turns choosing players for their respective teams from among the assembled kids. There was a direct correlation between your skills and when you were selected—the better you were, the sooner you were picked. I could count on one hand the number of times I wasn’t either a captain or among the first players picked. This selection process was fraught with emotion. As it progressed, with each successive selection, I watched the facial expressions of many kids fall as their hope to be picked earlier faded. If there were more kids than available places on the teams, some didn’t get to play at all. I always felt the anguish of those who were picked toward the end or not at all; of those who were not good enough.
Sports provided an ideal sublimation for my anger. Sublimation is a more “healthy” defense mechanism that channels or redirects unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and urges, into socially acceptable pursuits. It takes the energy of something potentially harmful and turns it to a constructive and useful activity. Athletic competition was a socially acceptable and emotionally safe outlet to discharge my energy and emotion, especially anger. Instead of criticism, feelings of inadequacy, and punitive consequences, as long as I could convert my anger and other heated emotions into sports-related competitive fervor, I experienced feelings of achievement and received positive recognition and high praise. In this context, I knew who I was and that I was worthy.
The only downside of this passion for sports was its ignition of a white-hot competitiveness that combined with rapacious perfectionism to drive me to be too hard on teammates, oppressive to referees and umpires (I set a record for technical fouls in Oyster Bay youth basketball in the early 1970s that probably still stands), and merciless toward myself. However, were it not for competitive sports and the cathartic release they provided, I have little doubt that I would have become part of the juvenile justice and/or youth psychiatric systems at a tender age.
My involvement in sports was also a sanctuary from much of the tension and conflict between my parents and me. In this special sphere, my parents were consistently available for me. They were models of emotional and practical support. Despite his nonstop work schedule, my father somehow still made time to play catch with me; throw pitches to me so I could practice batting and learn how to switch-hit; throw passes to me on the run until being able to touch the football meant I would catch it; and shoot hoops and play one-on-one with me on the court in our driveway—for what seemed like hours at a time. My mother drove me to and picked me up from hundreds of practices, often giving rides to my friends and teammates who didn’t have parents willing or able to be there like that for them. When I earned the money to get those $16.00 Adidas, she drove me across the width of Long Island to Wolf’s Sporting Goods in Rockeville Centre, the only store on Long Island that carried them.
My parents were a constant presence in the bleachers and on the sidelines at my games from little league to high school, regardless of the sport. My father’s expectations for performance were evident in his urgent and high-volume exhortations to me and his vehement critiques of the officiating, which could always easily be heard above the din of the game and other crowd noise. At times it was so obtrusive and embarrassing that in the midst of playing I’d yell at him to stop. On at least one occasion the referees kicked him out of the gym altogether. My father offered to coach my teams in youth sports, but given how conflicted our relationship often was, I didn’t want him to. When he later coached some of my younger brother’s teams, I remember feeling a mix of relief, envy, and sadness.
That ambivalence hit the heart of the relationship I had with my parents. There were many instances when they were available and nurturing, and yet, overall, I felt emotionally rejected and abandoned. Although I had an abstract cognizance that they loved me, the impression that they didn’t like me was tangible.
Besides carting my siblings and I around like a car service, my mother spent many hours helping me with school projects in elementary school. She was also my very first writing teacher. I’ve been calling her by her first name since I was in seventh grade. One day I started doing it and she allowed it so I kept doing it, and it became normal. Though my friends always thought this was strange, I never gave it much thought until I was thirty-one years old and happened to mention it during an individual therapy session with Bob, an exceptionally wise and skillful psychotherapist. He was struck by the dynamics inherent in my calling my mother by her first name from such an unusually young age and offered an interpretation: beneath the surface of my conscious awareness I had concluded that in order to feel safer psychologically I needed to put more emotional distance between my mother and me, and calling her by her first name served that purpose. As I reflected in silence on Bob’s hypothesis, its ring of truth grew louder.
There is no way to know whether my incipient acting out precipitated my parents’ judgment of me as the “problem” child, or whether my early unconscious perceptions that I wasn’t good enough for them spurred my anger and acting out. These family dynamics evolved dialectically, each influencing the other directly and indirectly, until both of them became “true.” Like all self-fulfilling prophesies, this scenario was the product of an interaction between beliefs and behaviors, wherein how a situation or person is characterized evokes attitudes and actions, which bring that characterization to fruition. Like a snowball rolling downhill, as the process continues, it gathers speed and momentum, going faster and becoming harder to stop.
“It takes dynamite to get me up
Too much of everything is just enough”
JOHN BARLOW, I NEED A MIRACLE, GRATEFUL DEAD
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Everyone has a certain personality style that includes core traits. When these constitutionally endowed qualities combine with the roles we adapt in our family system, it contorts the lens through which we see ourselves and we get a distorted view of who we are. This misshapen self-perception impacts how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world.
We learn to view ourselves in a way that mirrors how others seem to view and treat us. Unconditional positive regard refers to the elemental acceptance and emotional support of a person regardless of what he or she may say or do. It describes the simple but potent actions, in words, attitudes, and deeds, of accepting someone for who he or she truly is—with all of his or her mistakes and imperfections. Carl Rogers, the founder of Client-Centered Therapy—a humanistic approach that undergirds many contemporary forms of counseling and psychotherapy—considered unconditional positive regard requisite to healthy psychological development and made the therapeutic application of it a cornerstone of his model of helping people.
For most of us, the acceptance and positive regard granted us by others has been conditional. In other words, they are commonly attached to various conditions of “worth.” Growing up we were shown acceptance and positive regard when we demonstrated that we were somehow “worthy,” rather than unconditionally because we deserved it simply by virtue of our humanity. Many of us have had the experience of getting positive attention, acceptance, affection, and love if, and sometimes only if, we behaved to the satisfaction of others.
Because we have natural human needs for acceptance and positive regard, the conditions under which they are given exert a persuasive influence. We tend to mold ourselves into shapes determined by family and social
