« Silverbacks »
(I wrote this for my daughter as she was about to head off to college.)
I will explain this in terms of gorillas, not because I think that you can’t understand the explanation without the metaphor, but because (a) it is less boring that way, (b) this is a case where a good metaphor sets up your brain to reveal additional subtleties over time, and (c) I really like gorillas.
So here goes.
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In your life, identifying your silverbacks, understanding how they work, and learning to be one yourself, will be crucial for your best chances.
Honest.
Little gorillas learn some stuff from wrestling with other little gorillas. Because they are matched in power, playing around like that can last for hours, and repeat day after day. (It is adorable.) Because they exercise their power while they are still learning that power, it can sometimes be painful. But they are not very powerful yet in any absolute sense, so they are usually pretty safe from any lasting harm. It is a manifestation of mammalian play, which is an excellent thing for you to know about because it will always be part of your life. (And yes, aquatic and aerial mammals do it too.)
Little gorillas also learn something from wrestling with silverbacks. Because of the vast power difference, those lessons are much quicker, but they are also famously gentle. It goes like this:
Even though they go rolling AOT, the little gorillas are pretty safe. The silverbacks do just enough to make the boundaries clear.
That scaffolding is of great benefit to any little gorilla who will be living in that social environment.
The riskiest mismatches occur when a little gorilla is wrestling with an adolescent. It is more dangerous because the older one is significantly more powerful, but has not yet learned about the consequences of power imbalances.
The adolescents, then, understand only part of the picture. The know what happens between them and the silverbacks (i.e., power coming down to them from those above), but have not tended to figure out what that means between them and the little gorillas (i.e., power going down from them to those below). So while the adolescent has typically learned not to go too far with a silverback, it has not learned to be careful enough with the little gorillas. The adolescent still needs to develop the control (i.e., the gradation) that the silverback has achieved.
So, of course, the silverbacks are less gentle in their lessons with the adolescents. And a fight between silverbacks is, well, you just have to see it. You can watch a video online or whatever, but it is difficult to truly imagine what it is like to be standing just a couple of meters away.
Silverbacks should follow two guidelines:
And while gorillas provide us with this nifty illustration, there are some crucial divergences when it comes to how this works with humans; for example, humans manifest the most dangerous lessons of all (aside from death, which we will talk about later).
They don’t happen in everybody’s life. You are most vulnerable to them when you are young. You end up physically unharmed, but you have taken an emotional and spiritual beating. That sort of harm can be insidious, less readily visible, and in that way can miss being healed.
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When it comes to just the physical harm, the bigger picture is known as zoological infanticide. I won’t go into details because it can be very disturbing to think about; however, it is very important for you to understand something about it. It varies widely among species, and even among subspecies. Gorillas are safer than lions, for example, and western lowland gorillas seem to be safer than mountain gorillas.
And then there’s humans.
There are ways in which humans are the worst
Human children are very rarely at risk when living with both of their biological parents. That risk grows with a step parent, and is twenty times greater with a live-in.
In some marriages, a step parent is frankly no different than a live-in. In those situations, the risk is sometimes from the biological parent.
While I feel a reflex to lighten the mood here with humor, I find that this is something that I just cannot joke about.
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A biological parent can experience some serious reservations about any new partner becoming involved in parenting their children, particularly when it comes to any sort of discipline. That feeling can be all the more intense when they have previously suffered at the hands of some other partner (such as the other biological parent).
Some of these worries are historical, then, and not really about the new partner. A biological parent sometimes drowns in inky pools of guilt about their choices; ideally, everyone in the new family tries to help that to heal. Sometimes, the new parent will have to refrain from any behavior that might risk being mistaken for abuse, and will err well over on the side of caution.
Similarly, some of my extra care with you is not about us, but about your history.
All that said, I do not want to be so careful that I leave you without lessons that you still need. There is value to (gently) knocking you AOT across the jungle floor. (Not physically.) For your own sake, if for no other reason, you still need to improve your gradation before you indiscriminately tumble other people. But I feel conflicted when that sort of opportunity arises, and hold off on teaching you, because I do not want you to experience that lesson as if it were abuse, or as if I were ignoring the skills that you have already developed.
There would be no mammals left on the planet if these sorts of lessons were normally abusive. When the normal system gets screwed up along the way, you essentially have silverbacks who have never learned to be careful, which to me is incredibly sad. Naturally, this is vanishingly rare among gorillas in the wild. (So they got that going for them.)
In some human families, this kind of damaged inheritance can pass forward through generations. The best thing that parents can do is to figure out their family damage, get help, and pass on something healthier to their kids.
Which all comes down to three bits:
So learn to be one of those.
2017-05