There are a number of pictures of them in public, one I believe from a trip to Disneyland. There were, I believe, 13 of them, and not all were chained to their beds. Most of them could have escaped at any time. The oldest was 29.
What is interesting to me is that this was not a physical confinement, but a mental one. This girl who escaped and alerted authorities may well have been told not to go by her siblings. Perhaps she escaped after they were asleep.
Martin Seligman, in experiments that will never be repeated in this country, locked dogs into metal cages with electrified metal plates for the floor. He shocked them until they gave up. Then he put them in a cage with no door, or opened the cage door where they were. Once they gave up, they would endure the shock indefinitely, even when freedom was five feet away.
This is of course called Learned Helplessness, and it is a very common concomitant of traumatic abuse committed by parents in the quest to make their children manageable. What it feels like to me is that some part of me is ALWAYS working. Most people work for a while, get tired, then rest. A traumatized person can never rest. Even when you are sitting in a chair, staring at the wall, you are working. And what I think this means, to put it in dog terms, is that the very IDEA of escape becomes exhausting. You go there, and there is a massive flash, a massive terror, and you either abandon the thought, or endure the unendurable again.
All these children were caged in their minds. I get this. I see this. I feel kinship with them. In my own family, we developed this elaborate pretending, this elaborate charade playing, so that we all seemed happy and normal. But I was fully expected to surrender my sense of self, any personal ambition I may have had that led away from my parents, and the right to speak any unwanted truths.
I am slowly escaping my cage, but it is astonishing to contemplate how old I am, how long ago all this happened, and how it still haunts me.
And if you look at the parents, they, too, are caged. The impulse to cage others springs from the experience of living in one yourself. It can be rationalized in an infinite number of ways, although I think religion is likely the most common.
And this is why the word love feels so tainted to me. It was, after a time, used at least by my mother. But she has no idea what the outside world even feels like. And she doesn’t know that she doesn’t know.
But I do think getting beyond the need to cage–which is to say to control–others is an important mile-marker for all people seeking emotional growth. And ponder all our politicians, our business leaders who want political control: all of them live, in some part of themselves, at the same level as these parents. They are horrible, execrable. But they exist on a continuum with all who seek to deny the liberty, the joy, the exultations of others.