When NURTURE comes to play
"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed,
and my own specified world to bring them up in
and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him/her to become
any type of specialist I might select:
doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, even, beggar-man and thief,
regardless of his/her talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations,
and race of his ancestors."
John B. Watson
It is not very frequently - if ever - that I have seen interviews of victims
of child abuse. If I have, I don’t remember. And now that I researched on one case about a psychologically disturbed child I chose from a list our Psychology professor gave us, I think my eyes are looking like two fried eggs, LOL! In doing some research about the case I chose, I found this interview - part of a documentary called “The Child of Rage” - where little Beth Thomas - a pretty,
brown-haired, soft spoken, six year old - calmly reveals to her therapist - Dr.
Ken Magid - how she tortured animals and
sexually molested her brother Jonathan.
Beth Thomas was
a victim of childhood sexual abuse until she was approximately 19 months old. Her mother died
when she was one year old and she and her infant brother Jonathan were
left at the mercy of their sadistic father; the NURTURE part of the “NATURE versus NURTURE debate”. (Nurture refers to all the environmental variables that impact who we are, including our early childhood experiences, how we were raised, our social relationships, and our surrounding culture.)
In the documentary, Beth describes her father’s abuse and displays a crayon picture of herself lying in bed weeping as he
touches her genitalia. Her voice is as strangely calm when speaking
about her own abuse as it is when talking about the abuse she inflicts on her
brother. By the time Beth and Jonathan were rescued by Child
Services she appeared to
be deeply scarred by neglect and severe abuse.
That's how she was nurtured (or not nurtured, for that matter). See the dictionary definition of nurture HERE.
The two children were given to loving adoptive parents, Tim
and Julie, who had no biological
children. Tim and Julie were not given any information as to the
children’s abusive background. At the time of the adoption little Jonathan was 7 months old. His head was flat at the
back and bulged forward at the front from being left on his back in his crib
all day. He couldn’t raise his head or roll over. Beth suffered
from nightmares of a “man who was falling on
her and hurting her with a part of himself.”
It took
approximately two months until Beth’s adoptive parents discovered
the truth about Beth and Jonathan’s upbringing. They recognized that both
Beth and Jonathan exhibited disturbing behaviors. Julie caught Beth
masturbating several times a day until she made her own vagina bleed and had to
be hospitalized. Beth poked pins into her brother and into the Thomas’s
pets. As she got older, on a particular occasion she
smashed her brother’s head into the cement floor of their basement until he
needed stitches to close a gash in his forehead. Beth’s intention was not
merely to harm her brother but to kill him. She often voiced her desire to kill her
entire family including her adoptive parents.
Now - to me - the most disturbing aspect of Beth’s behavior
was her complete lack of remorse and concern for her actions. She was well
aware that her actions were wrong and hurtful but this didn’t matter to her.
Not long after these incidents her adoptive parents brought her to a therapist
named Connell Watkins, who
diagnosed Beth with a severe case of Reactive
Attachment Disorder.
Reactive
Attachment Disorder is characterized by markedly disturbed and DEVELOPMENTALLY inappropriate ways of
relating socially. It can take the form of a persistent failure to initiate or
respond to social interactions in an appropriate way - known as the “inhibited” form - or can present itself as indiscriminate
sociability, such as
excessive familiarity with strangers - known as the “disinhibited form”.
Beth’s condition involved a complete inability to bond with any human being and
a complete lack of empathy. This is also known as sociopathy or psychopathyalthough
those terms are not used about children under the age of 18.
RAD arises from a failure
to form normal attachments to primary caregivers in early childhood.
This results from severe early experiences of neglect, abuse, abrupt separation from caregivers (Beth’s mother passed
away when Beth was one) between the ages of six months and three years. It
also results from a frequent change of caregivers or a lack of caregiver
responsiveness to
a child’s communicative efforts. That Beth Thomas developed RAD is certainly beyond her control.
The assessment is not a criticism, nor is it blame against the child. It
names the cluster of symptoms Beth displayed due
to her nightmarish life with her father. Due to the kind of negative NURTURING she received during her
DEVELOPMENTAL years.
Beth’s
condition was so extreme that in April 1989 Connell
Watkins removed Beth from Tim and Julie’s home and
brought Beth to her own home to give her intensive behavior modification. In
spite of Beth’s dangerous behavior the therapist was confident she could help
Beth since her professional history included working successfully with
extremely disturbed children, such as 9-year-old murderers.
At first all of her freedom was restricted until Beth demonstrated that
she could be trusted. It was a difficult transition for Beth. At first Beth was locked inside her bedroom at
night so she couldn’t escape and hurt other children or adults in the
house. She had to ask permission to do everything from play with a particular
toy to getting a glass of water. Over time these restrictions were
slowly removed as Beth’s behavior improved. Within one year of living in the
house and being NURTURED lovingly,
respectfully, fairly… her behavior was so recovered that
Beth was permitted to share a bedroom with the therapist’s own daughter.
A remarkable transition took
place in Beth Thomas. She
learned empathy and remorse when someone was hurt. She learned about right and
wrong. When she talked about her earlier abuse of Jonathan she wept openly. She
no longer talked about hating anyone or wanting to kill anyone. She didn’t
abuse herself anymore. Her therapy took years to complete and Beth, like
any child abuse victim, will likely live always with the
consequences of her abuse; with the NURTURE she received in her first developmental years.
Yet Beth Thomas grew into a mentally healthy
woman.
She and her adoptive mother Nancy Thomas established a clinic for children with severe behavior disturbances. Nancy and Beth Thomas’ website is www.attachment.org
