Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

It may seem paradoxical to consider a personal crisis as having any benefit since it's painful. But it can help, and in more ways than one. What is believed a personal crisis differs and can seem different to others. After receiving notice of being laid off at a job, I received frequent condolences to which I gave the expected downcast response. Yet I really felt overjoyed at leaving the job where I likely would have lingered had this not happened, my life thereafter changing for the better.

Medical crises are different since they cause one to question their mortality. But even this can benefit for, as some have said, they were better people after their illness.

A crisis forces one from their usual way of relating into a different sphere of experience. Providing the potential to better understand themselves by recognizing their strengths and limitations, viewing themselves differently and realizing what is important in their life. Some people can only change when pressured by a crisis which, sensing this, their unconscious creates. Insight can arrive in odd ways.

I first met Joseph (a pseudonym) decades ago at a government job where we both worked, occasionally lunching together during which he spoke of his background: living abroad as a child, and growing up with a psychotic mother.

I referred patients to him after he left the government job for private practice. Thereafter occasionally meeting for meals during which I learned that he'd had two troubling marriages. I was supportive and provided guidance when he was involved with the Family Court, having often served as expert witness for the government.

During a lunch in a Chinese restaurant he ate unhealthy fried dishes, revealed that he had a heart problem and his cardiologist said he could die at any moment. I encouraged him to have his medical records reviewed at Johns Hopkins or Cleveland Clinic for a second opinion but don't know if he did.

Several years after our last meeting I learned from a patient we both treated that he had died and been diabetic, and from several other patients that he worked unusually long hours. I recently learned that the cause of his death was suicide, which shocked me like everyone who learns this since there is a biological imperative to live.

Though popularly believed to be a sudden impulsive act, the roots of suicide derive from childhood when the child was made to feel worthless. Then, years later when stress overwhelms, the tunnel vision of suicidal depression arises and death seems a benevolent escape.

I wish Joseph had phoned me before making his final decision, and wonder if he considered the affect of his suicide on his children before deciding.

Early in life the child's primitive mind creates the idea of danger and masters the overwhelming feelings associated with it, learning to "tame" these feelings. Later learning to distinguish real danger from not and develop protective mechanisms.

The originating source of discomfort of all trauma lies in the helplessness of the human infant when they are flooded by excitation beyond their capacity to master until achieving greater mental development. During later life trauma, a similar uncontrollable overwhelming anxiety, felt as something terrible, floods the helpless person during the event or even after upon realizing the peril it presented and what might have happened.

When the danger experience was sudden, a later temporary psychological regression to the state of helpless infancy and destabilizing distress can occur. Understanding what is happening and telling oneself that they are now a competent adult and not a helpless infant can comfort as the mental process unwinds, healing occurs, and the person recovers their usual equilibrium. 

To say that parenting isn't easy is an unquestioned truth when considering its beginnings: the introduction of a baby of unknown abilities and temperament into their parents' existent social structure of biological parents and, when using donor sperm with IVF (in vitro fertilization), an uncertain element.

Recognizing this difficulty, and the failure of many public school systems, some desperate parents have turned to home or private school instruction. A new development, though costing as much as a private school, uses AI instead of teachers and "guides" leading workshops with core subjects being studied for part of the day augmented by activities.

There is no formula to parenting a successful child or even its universally accepted description. Would such a child have gained a professional degree, a well-paying vocation, or a stable loving marriage? While each parent might decide differently, there is a sure and certain way of gaining these and one unrelated to expensive tuition or even choice of school. Which is for the parent to provide a facilitating interaction with their child, one that fosters the child's increasing independence and does not use them to fulfill parental needs and narcissism. Which, however, is not be the perfect parenting that none experience.

The goal of a "good enough" parenting is to create an independently functioning law-abiding adult. One capable of intimacy, who recognizes their strengths and limitations, and has a sturdy, accurate sense of who they are or "sense of self." Thanks to nature's biological instincts, this will normally develop in every child experiencing this parenting. With limitations of course, for just as height is biologically determined so too are intelligence, creativity, and artistic and physical talents. Thus those who are intellectually limited are also "normal" on the scale of human abilities.

While all children experiencing this "good enough" parenting can achieve their potential, fate and luck play their roles since the possibility of illness and accident are ever present. And, though striving to do their best, parents must endure and cope with the effect of their own parenting even while hoping to do better.