This section was my workspace for philosophy essays between July 2006 and April 2008.
I call this "Prehistoric Kilroy" because it gave me practice for more
disciplined essays in Kilroy Cafe.Also see my philophical blog and Twitter feed.
Issue #50, 12/20/2006
The Volatiles
— or —
The Chaos of the Common Man
By Glenn Campbell
Family Court Philosopher
Without going into detail, I can tell you that I have had
intimate experience with the cliental of the child welfare
system. This has given me a deep appreciation for
caseworkers and the difficulties they are facing. There are
powerful psychological forces at work that can overwhelm any
good-intentioned intervention.
The real problem with these families isn't drugs; it is
emotional volatility. Most of the hard-core clients of
Family Services are living lives of cyclical, self-generated
chaos, of which drugs are only one symptom. Child abuse and
domestic violence are volatility issues, as is most juvenile
delinquency. In fact, almost all of the non-perfunctory
cases in Family Court involve at least one party being
unable to keep on an even keel.
For lack of a better word, I call these adults "the
Volatiles". This class of people may overlap with
Borderline Personality Disorder, but I mean the term more
loosely: people of limited emotional control.
What do I mean by emotional volatility? Imagine that each
person has a thermostat inside them that regulates their
emotions—you know, like the thermostat in your home.
If you set the thermostat to a comfortable 78 degrees, then
the furnace or air conditioner is automatically cycled on
and off to keep the temperature close to that mark.
Emotionally, that's how most of us work. We don't get too
euphoric or too depressed, and we have a pretty constant
attitude toward other people. We may get annoyed with a
family member, but we're not going to try to kill them. When
we encounter a stress, we find a way to compensate for it so
it doesn't eat us up. We keep our emotional temperature close to
a comfortable level.
The volatile client also has a thermostat, and it might work
okay when things are calm. If you introduce a significant
stress, however, then the system goes haywire, because the
person tends to overcompensate for whatever it is they are
feeling inside.
This is nicely illustrated by the way a Volatile often
responds to the real thermostat in their home: If they are
feeling cold, they turn the thermostat way up, as far as it
can go. The furnace chugs away for a while, and soon the
house is sweltering. Now, they're feeling hot, so they open
up the windows and turn on the air conditioning full
blast... until they're freezing again. They can't just
relax and leave the thermostat alone. Furthermore, if you
try to explain to them how thermostats work, they don't seem
to listen. In any test of intellect vs. feeling, intellect
will usually be overruled.
This is exactly how they respond to their own emotions. If
they get a little depressed, then they panic and do
something desperate to try to erase the feeling—like
drinking, taking drugs or lashing out at someone. Of
course, this action destabilizes the system rather than
bringing it back to stasis. Their relationships
deteriorate, causing more panic and pushing them into a drug
binge or violence.
Their whole experience of life is alien to us. We see the
world as more-or-less constant; they see it as ever
changing, for or against them. These are the people who get
angry at traffic jams and inanimate objects and who attack
the very people who are trying to help them.
Their whole view of the world is colored by how they feel
right now, with their feelings of yesterday being quickly
forgotten. They can't separate their immediate emotions from
the long-term facts of the world, so they tend to respond to
the world poorly: inappropriate paranoia interspersed with
extraordinary naivete.
For a caseworker or anyone else, dealing with this situation
from the outside can be extremely frustrating. You struggle to
stabilize the family; things seem to be going well for a
while, but then some modest stress comes along, and
everything collapses again.
In my view, we are talking about a huge portion of the
population: somewhere between 2 and 20 percent, depending on
how you define volatility. (The 2 percent would be a strict
clinical diagnosis of Borderline Disorder.) The Volatiles
tend to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods, because their
emotional instability makes it difficult for them to hold a
job or pursue an education. We know where those
neighborhoods are. If you put pins in the map for every
child welfare case, they would be clustered in certain areas
of the city. If you grew up in a different kind of
neighborhood (as I did), then you may have never seen this
emotional instability in action, and it may come as a
surprise to you.
At worst, volatility leads to escalating violence that can
only be stopped by an arrest. At best, the Volatile can't
detect the feelings and needs of others when they conflict
with his own. He tends to be impulsive in his
decision-making and poor at processing evidence. When
responding to others, he can be either unreasonably
suspicious or ridiculously gullible, depending on what his
emotions want him to believe. He may glorify someone one
minute and attack them the next, and in his view, it is that
person whose emotions are changing, not him.
In their daily lives, the Volatiles seem to require
continuous external stimulation. When television is
available, it is turned on all the time, morning, noon and
night. Television provides the pacing of their lives and
the majority of its content. When not watching television,
the volatile is engaged in some other continuously
stimulating activity: music, sports, drinking, gambling,
etc. The worst thing to them is to have "nothing to do," as
this attracts random uncontrolled thoughts. They abhor
introspection and will instantly become "bored" and
uncomfortable whenever given an opportunity to think about
their life and explore their own motivations.
Volatiles can only surf on the rough surface of life; they
rarely dive beneath the surface. They lack much curiosity
and won't travel beyond well-worn paths. They have little
interest in creativity or understanding. Their political
opinions are strongly expressed but superficial and are
dictated by their feelings. These are not "thinkers," at
least in the broader issues of their lives.
Some potential Volatiles, especially males, are drawn into
obsessive technical pursuits, like car repair or the
collection of sports trivia. If they have any available
time, this is where you will find them. This obsessive
activity gives them a "center" and makes them much less
volatile. When they are engaged in their hobby,
they aren't beating on their kids, which is good, but they
are also emotionally unavailable. They often tend to leave their
kids to raise themselves—or leave them to the mercy of
the other parent.
The Volatiles who have no obsessive hobby are in worse shape.
They have no "center" and no core source of self-esteem, and
no one on the outside can give this to them. In the absence
of continuous stimulation, they feel empty. When their life
lacks conflict, they may impulsively generate it on their
own, because this is the only way they feel alive.
Otherwise, they feel like they are drifting and lost. In a
weird way, they need external chaos to protect them from
their internal emptiness. Although they don't want their
lives to be a never-ending hell, they frequently act to
create it.
Volatile parents invariably abuse their children, if not
physically then mentally. Their discipline is inconsistent:
either brutally harsh or perversely permissive. They
frequently demand from their children things that they
themselves don't abide by, like abstinence from swearing,
drinking and drugs. Their words rarely match their actions
and don't take into account the child's feelings and
experience. The household rules are constantly changing, and
many promises are made that are never fulfilled. By
adulthood, the offspring is usually twisted by this
haphazard parenting into another Volatile himself.
This mental abuse is far worse in the long run than any
physical or sexual abuse, and there is almost nothing that
anyone on the outside can do about it. We know that there
are plenty of terrible parents out there, cranking out the
next generation of dysfunctionals, but the government can't
take those children away because there are no
standards of proof for mental abuse. Furthermore, there
would be no place to put these children if it did take them
away, as the system is already overwhelmed merely with drug
cases.
About all the government can do is respond to obvious
parental drug use and physical injuries. These are the only
kinds of abuse that can be clearly measured and proved. We can order
drug treatment and maybe throw in a few parenting classes,
but we are probably never going to repair the deeper problems of the
family, which are entrenched in the personalities of its
members. The most we can expect is to bring the abuse and
neglect to within "acceptable" tolerances—that is,
where it is again invisible and unmeasurable. As long as
the drug tests come out negative and the parenting classes
have been completed, then you have to shove these families
out the door and shift your attention to the next train
wreck.
Each of these families would absorb infinite resources if
you had them, and it might not make much difference. If
the parent isn't on drugs but has the emotional maturity of
a ten year old, then you can send them to every parenting
class available and it's not going to give them good
judgment. Furthermore, a lack of judgment is no legal
grounds for terminating parental rights.
Drug abuse is
resolvable, one way or another. There is no remedy, however,
for stupidity.
—G.C.
Reader Comments
“Bullseye.”
— 12/21/06 (rating=4)
“Pollyanna here on "The Volatiles". Parenting is not about intelligence (fortunately), but rather loving commitment and responsibility - neither of which require intelligence. I think you actually touched on the major issue with, "...they need external chaos to protect them from their internal emptiness." It is the emptiness, the "hole in the soul", not the lack of intelligence that is the individual (and perhaps even societal) need. And perhaps we can't fill that any more than we can correct terminal stupidity, but for me - hope must survive. I wish I had solutions commensurate with my hope, but such is not requisiste for Pollyanna any more than solutions commensurate with pessimism for the Philospher.”
—Realist Pollyanna 12/21/06
“type identified, but where are the reasons?”
—tularetrump@hotmail.com 12/21/06 (rating=3)
“man its my mother-in-law to a tee.”
— 5/17/09 (rating=3)