Abstract
On Mother’s Day, social media sites swell with praise and gratitude and pictures of smiling families. But then, a jarring post reminds us: not everyone celebrates their childhood. How do you engage in emotionally meaningful adult relationships when your own caregivers never showed you what that feels like? How do you interact with friends and partners without fears and expectations of pain? How do you abandon the shadow of your childhood and learn to love and be loved?
In Not the Price of Admission, Laura Brown approaches these questions from four perspectives: her own experiences, her clients’ experiences, feminist trauma therapy, and music. Through stories of bravery, recovery, sadness, and joy, she illuminates the excruciating pain of living in harmful relationships. As a feminist therapist, she demonstrates how beliefs about oneself and others can lead to poor adult choices, and she offers a path to safer, more meaningful, and loving relationships. And throughout, passages selected from her eclectic playlist elicit memories of melodies and rhythms, allowing the reader to enter into an emotional space that gives depth to the printed page.
The focus is on adults whose early caregivers failed to provide “emotionally-meaningful relationships” (p. 3), which is contrasted with “good-enough” caretaking. Thus, Brown speaks not only to survivors of reportable crime but also to those who grew up in “an emotional desert where connection and affection were mostly absent” (p. 2), experiencing a mother’s unpredictable outbursts, a father’s scorn, or a caretaker who did not want children.
Through her own and her clients’ stories, Brown demonstrates how adult relational attachments continue to be structured (and too often ended) from inadequate childhood paradigms. She unflinchingly describes her own pain of searching for more solid, trusting, and self-preserving connections. The first two chapters, appropriately titled “Ready for the Thing Called Love” and “Time Passages,” follow the path to adulthood set up by the strategies children develop to survive chaotic environments, including blaming oneself, striving for perfection, anticipating harm, and planning and self/other control—which disrupt their adult attachments. Her analogy of an “inner relationship operating system” (IROS; p. 48) is particularly apropos.
In “Aching Breaking Heart,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” and “Alone Again, Naturally” (Chapters 3–6), Brown describes ways adults can sabotage their relationships, from avoidance to overreliance, all characterized by a belief that this person could not love them for themselves. She encourages the reader to recognize in themselves patterns of shame, self-blame, self-sacrifice, boundary confusions, and abandoning safe relationships; to plumb both positive and negative relationship patterns; and to create a new set of goals—a new IROS. This can be daunting, even terrifying. Brown makes no promises that others will be pleased with the changes, but she offers examples of, and hope for, new and better ways of relating to others.
Most important is self-loving and self-care, and yet it can be the most difficult to achieve for someone who has never been loved or cared for. The final chapters, “Hold on to Yourself,” “Rolling in the Deep,” and the Epilogue, “Happy Enough Together,” reinforce both the possibilities of a happy (enough) ending and offer advice for handling the challenges along the way.
Not the Price of Admission will be helpful to therapists, adults who experienced childhood pain and the people who love them, and those who have sensed something is wrong but have not found the right words. I would assert that anyone can find pieces of themselves in her descriptions, and anyone can incorporate Brown’s wisdom to fine-tune already-good-enough adult relationships. Brown allows all her readers to “see how it is done,” a model of feminist therapy in action.
Therapists and clients will find excellent companions in Brown’s (2012) Your Turn for Care, which addresses the challenges of dealing with aging caretakers who were less than optimal, and Freyd and Birrell’s (2013) Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled, based on Freyd’s betrayal trauma theory. Together these books become an accessible guide to achieving a “normal everyday adulthood” and becoming a “good-enough” parent.