Growing Up Lonely: Disconnection and Misconnection in the Lives of Our Children

Preface

And a Note of Gratitude

The 2018 Symposium on Loneliness in the Lives of Our Children

I have the distinct impression that many, perhaps most, of us can look back on our lives and second-guess key decisions we made that were bad calls. But then there were all those other decisions—all too often made with scant information and questionable logic—that somehow came out just right, and made all the difference.

One such decision for me was when I was contemplating leaving one of Boston’s premier law firms for a proffered partnership at a much smaller firm. I was torn, for various reasons, until The Home for Little Wanderers—the nation’s oldest and one of Boston’s largest children’s social service agencies—contacted me to say that if I became associated with the smaller firm with its far more modest fee schedule, it would appoint me its general counsel. This was enough to entice me to make the switch, and never in my work life did I make a better decision. Above and beyond providing nearly thirty years of fascinating law work up until my retirement from the active practice of law, The Home was of a size and level of sophistication where it could take advantage of my double training—and it allowed me, from time to time, to make use of my academic training. More precisely, twice over the years, The Home invited me to organize symposia, the likes of which, to my knowledge, have never been organized by any other children’s social service agency anywhere in the United States—ever.

The first symposium took place in May 2005 and was concerned with adolescent sexuality—a critically important but rarely broached topic. Eli Newberger, MD, professor of pediatric medicine at Harvard Medical School, and founder of the Child Protection Team and Family Development Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, spoke about the effects of childhood sexual abuse on the development of adolescent character. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, professor of psychiatry at Boston University, and medical director of the Trauma Center, gave an enlightening talk about how he and his colleagues had learned that trauma victims, with particular reference to childhood sexual abuse victims, cannot be successfully treated with purely verbal talk therapy. This, he explained, is because children’s memories of sexualized trauma involve the limbic system: these frightening memories are stored somatically, in the brain stem, not in the forebrain like a memorized list. They are stored as feelings, he told us, not ideas, so the therapy for adolescents with traumatic memories from earlier sexual abuse must involve corporal treatment modalities along with talk therapy.

In the afternoon, Dr. Ann Burgess, professor of psychiatric/mental health nursing at Boston College and one of the world’s foremost authorities on why children so often compulsively reenact past traumatic events, explained how impermanency in a child’s home life all too often later develops into an inability to form and secure a safe home in their adult life. Then, Bronwyn Mayden, executive director of the Campaign for Our Children, relayed her research on the effects of today’s highly sexualized media content on the onset of sexuality in our children, and on the sexual practices of today’s adolescents. Finally, I delivered a paper on how children’s social service agencies can deal with the conflict between the realities of the earlier onset of sexuality in today’s teenagers and the regulatory restraints with which the agencies must comply that ban all touching—and certainly all sexuality—in residential treatment settings.

More recently, in the early summer of 2017, Joan Wallace-Benjamin, PhD, then the outgoing president of The Home, asked me to present my story The Loneliest Boy—which is reprinted in this volume—to The Home’s three dozen program directors and key administrative personnel. The conversation at the presentation was so vibrant, and the model I presented was so supportive of The Home’s then newly launched efforts to promote permanency planning for each and every residential and outpatient child The Home works with, that the collective group present that day asked me to organize another full-scale symposium. The new symposium was to be based on my story, The Loneliest Boy, and was to explore the ever-more-prevalent chronic loneliness exhibited by The Home’s young clients. It was left up to me to invite other speakers whose work I found to be at the cutting edge of understanding and treating the desperate feeling of being disconnected and alone—a feeling that more and more children were reporting to The Home’s clinicians in their counseling sessions. What a fabulous opportunity—and what an awesome responsibility. I am grateful to The Home from the bottom of my heart.

And so, almost a year later, the symposium Loneliness and the Power of Permanency was held on a stunningly clear day at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. The beautifully reproduced copy of the United States Senate chamber where the symposium took place is on the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum—on the waterfront of Boston’s outer harbor. President Kennedy’s sailboat, the Victura, still sits up on dry land by the library, waiting patiently, poignantly, for its skipper to return.

Even better than the venue, however, were the participants. With only a score of exceptions, the attendees were hundreds of mental health clinicians who sought both the training in the content of the talks and also the continuing-education credits these professionals needed to meet their requirements for licensure renewal. These clinicians work on a daily basis with abused and traumatized children in outpatient and residential settings throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, so it was truly our honor, as speakers, to address such a knowledgeable audience. Taking a conservative guess at the years of experience they had on average, and multiplying by the number of clinicians in attendance, we on the podium were humbled at the prospect of presenting our thoughts on children and loneliness to an audience with more than five thousand years—five thousand years—of collective practical, real-world clinical experience treating children with issues that so often included feeling inadequately connected—and thereby, lonely, unprotected, and unsafe.

The Loneliness of Our Times

The New York Times published an article on January 17, 2018, stating:

LONDON—Since Britain voted to leave the European Union more than a year ago, Europeans have mockingly said that the decision will result in an isolated, lonely island nation.

But Britain, in fact, already has a serious problem with loneliness, research has found. More than nine million people in the country often or always feel lonely, according to a 2017 report published by the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness.

The issue prompted Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday to appoint a minister for loneliness.

For far too many people, loneliness is the sad reality of modern life, Mrs. May said in a statement.

The chronic loneliness to which the British prime minister is referring didn’t exist until recent years, except, one would assume, in isolated individuals. When life was local, when one was surrounded throughout one’s life by family and childhood friends, when most people lived their entire lives in the community into which they were born—whether that be in a village or in a small town, or even in an ethnically defined communitylike neighborhood of yesteryear’s larger cities—everyone knew everyone else. There simply wasn’t enough social space to grow lonely in.

Jacqueline Olds, MD, and Richard S. Schwartz, MD, both associate clinical professors of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, each of whom has contributed a paper to this volume, were among the first psychiatrists to recognize the ever-increasing presence of chronic loneliness and the fact that social isolation has become a major public health crisis. Their groundbreaking book Overcoming Loneliness in Everyday Life was the first major work to explore the appearance in everyday life of the new loneliness, and the terrible toll it takes on the mental health of those afflicted. Their more recent work in this sphere, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century, was among the earliest studies to tie this new loneliness to the changing demographics of contemporary urban life: they pointed out how well over a third of adult households were now single-person households. Olds and Schwartz perceived and described how certain deeply embedded socioeconomic structures in modern-day life have the side effect of generating the increasingly prevalent chronic loneliness of our era, and they contrasted the recent appearance of this systemically induced loneliness with past times, when individualism was an ideology about self-reliance and not yet a description of lives spent eating microwaved meals on a folding table in front of a television set—alone.

Perhaps even more ominously, structurally determined chronic loneliness has now spread to our children. Amy Banks, MD, director of advanced training at the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute for relational-cultural theory and a senior scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, the fourth contributor to this volume, informs us that the absence—or even the inadequacy—of healthy connections in the home and neighborhood lives of our children has become a significant contributing factor to the ever-growing presence of adult chronic loneliness. Dr. Banks provides an analysis of the physiology of loneliness: how our disconnected children fail to fully develop the neural pathways in their brains they will need as adults to successfully connect with others in the ways and to the extent that their mental health will require. She makes this point succinctly and convincingly in the paper she has contributed to this edited volume, but you can find a far more extensive treatment of the topic in the book she authored with Leigh Ann Hirschman, Wired to Connect: The Surprising Link Between Brain Science and Strong, Healthy Relationships.

My own modest efforts to understand the scourge of chronic loneliness that degrades the mental health of so many children in our era consists of trying to understand how a child can be propelled into chronic loneliness either by disconnection (isolation) or by misconnection (defective linkages). The Loneliest Boy story that opens this collection is a reprint of a case study found in my recent book, Four Seasons of Loneliness: A Lawyer’s Case Stories. This story about the life of an ever-more-disconnected boy attempts to understand and explicate how the incest to which he was subjected in his family home set him up to repeat an incestuous relationship on his own initiative, which, in turn, doomed him to a life of chronic loneliness. I should mention that The Loneliest Boy was e-mailed to each entrant who registered to attend the 2018 symposium, which gave everyone present that day some common ground for discussion purposes. As you might imagine, this greatly enlivened and energized the extended question-and-answer portion at the end of the day. Once again, I have placed The Loneliest Boy first in this collection—based on the same logic, as several of the other contributors’ papers make reference to it.

My second contribution concludes this volume. Growing Up Lonely: Disconnection and Misconnection in the Lives of Our Children tells the stories of five children whom I met in my law practice. All of these children were at great risk of experiencing chronic loneliness not because they were physically isolated in life, but because they were misconnected to the significant adults in their everyday lives. The analytical model I propose in this essay is discussed in considerably greater depth in my soon-to-be-published book, Surrounded by Others and Yet So Alone.

J. W. Freiberg, PhD, JD

Boston

Midsummer Eve, 2019

I

The Loneliest Boy

J. W. Freiberg, PHD, JD

Hi, Terry. Susan Sears here. Am I going to lose my house? These were the first words I heard about a lawsuit that would stretch over three years and teach me more about loneliness than I ever wanted to learn. Ten minutes earlier my client had been served lawsuit papers, as she put it, by the biggest goddamn sheriff I’ve ever seen. And he was out to scare me. Why would he do that? Once I had calmed her down to the point where she could read me the heading to the lawsuit papers, I learned that she had indeed been sued, as had the small adoption agency she had run for over twenty years.

But allow me to step back a moment and explain how I got to one end of the phone line and Susan got to the other. In the fall of 1971, I became an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University, where I principally taught courses in social psychology. I was fascinated by the nature of the linkage between mind and society, how our perceptions and thoughts are colored and, to some extent, even structured by the era and social circumstances in which we live. I was ecstatic about my academic life in vibrant Boston, save for one problem: Boston University had an autocratic president who was so odious that he managed to provoke nearly the entire faculty to go on strike in 1975. I quickly became one of the leaders of the strike, and along with the other organizers, I appeared before the board of trustees—and the president—to present the junior faculty’s view as to why his contract should not be renewed. As it turned out, the trustees determined to indeed renew the president’s contract, and lo and behold, when my candidature for tenure came across his desk in 1978, it was my contract that was not renewed. Although a year later I was actually awarded tenure, I had in the interim applied to and been accepted to Harvard Law School, and since the problematic president was willing to pay my tuition in exchange for my resignation, off I went in 1980 to begin an entirely new career.

Little did I know that once I had learned the basics of practicing law, I would be almost immediately typecast as the attorney to whom cases and clients involving any and all sundry psychological issues should be sent. I had envisioned myself as a constitutional lawyer arguing great legal theories before the Supreme Court. But no, that was not to be the case. On the contrary, I practiced law in the trenches, as the saying goes. And while the nature of my practice meant that neither fame nor fortune would come my way, it also meant that I would, in effect, be doing social psychological research through practicing law. It was only in retirement, however, that I took the time to write about the observations I had made daily for more than thirty years.

So back to my client Susan Sears. She had retained my general counsel services about five years before this lawsuit because she had heard about my previous career, my sympathetic ear for social service agencies, and—not unimportantly—my modest fee schedule. I asked her to fax over the lawsuit documents, relax with a cup of tea, and give me an hour to read over the papers.

I could see almost at once that the complaint and its collateral documents were well drafted. That’s actually a good thing: quality counsel on the plaintiff’s side of a personal injury lawsuit greatly increases the odds of a timely resolution. That being said, the complaint was sparsely written, and about all I could discern from the papers was that Susan and her agency were being blamed for a failed adoption that had shattered the adoptive home, traumatizing everybody in the family—adults and children alike. Since children were involved, the adoptive parents were identified as John and Jane Doe, their adoptive daughter was called Ashley Doe, and their preadoptive foster son—Ashley’s biological brother—was dubbed Seth Doe. One thing, however, was abundantly clear: the plaintiffs were seeking massive monetary damages.

It was also obvious that the plaintiffs had brought a shotgun lawsuit; that is, they were suing anybody and everybody involved in any way with the failed adoptive placement. Additional defendants included the Massachusetts Department of Social Services (DSS) and about a dozen psychiatrists and psychologists. The DSS was accused of negligently managing the adoptive placement, while the mental health professionals, all of whom had treated the two adoptive children at different times after their removal from their birth family, were accused of negligence in failing to warn the adoptive parents about how the children might behave once they were placed.

The multiparty nature of the lawsuit meant two things to me: first, it was unlikely to settle quickly, and second, it was going to cost a small fortune to defend. I called Sears back.

There’s good news, I began, and bad news. The good news is, you don’t need to worry about your house. The nature of the claims means that it will certainly be covered by your agency’s professional liability insurance policy, and I reviewed that policy last spring, I know for a fact that it is in full force and effect. And by the way, your policy has no deductible, so neither the agency nor any of you will have to pay a penny out of pocket, so you can relax.

Okay, great. She paused. Wait a minute. You said there’s bad news too.

The bad news is that this kind of lawsuit is likely to drag on for two or three years.

Years! How do we handle this mess and make a living? There’s only three of us. I could hear distress in her voice.

For the next half hour, I walked Sears through what it means—in practical terms—to be sued. I explained how the legal discovery process works and told her that, absent a settlement, the case would not proceed to trial for at least three years.

You’ll be our attorney on this, won’t you? Sears pleaded.

That’s up to your insurance company, I explained. But by all odds, they’ll agree to that. Even if they don’t, I can be involved as the agency’s general counsel. One way or another, I’m going to hold your hand throughout this entire process.

Thank you, thank you, Terry, she said with real emotion in her voice, audibly exhaling into the phone. I could tell she was tearing up.

*

Sure enough, when I called the agency’s insurer, the company’s senior claim agent, Rhonda Wilkins, gave me the case to defend. She knew from past cases we had done together that my training in social psychology would be useful, especially because this case would involve depositions of more than a score of mental health professionals, not to mention our need to locate and work with a forensic psychiatrist to serve as our expert witness.

The plaintiffs’ attorney was Jeff O’Toole. He and I had once served together on a Massachusetts Bar Association committee, and I had formed the impression that he was a reasonably classy guy, especially for someone who practiced plaintiff-side personal injury law. Working with him, I thought, would be far better than what I could have drawn: a back-of-the-yellow-pages ambulance chaser. But reaching him was another matter. I called, but it took O’Toole more than a week to get back to me. Not a promising start.

In the meantime, Sears sent me three boxes’ worth of the agency’s case records from the Doe adoptive placement. They arrived on the Friday before a three-day weekend in the still-chilly early spring. I took the documents home, set up a card table in front of my living room fireplace, and spent all three of those days reading the record from front to back. There were five fireplaces in our old Civil War–era house, and we used them far too seldom in the rush of modern life. It was delightful to take the opportunity to sit by one for once. My son was about four years old at the time, and he essentially spent the entire three days playing under the table by my feet, enjoying both his fort, as he called it, and the wonderful warmth thrown off by the fire. He was just old enough to help put on the occasional new log, and as I interrupted my reading from time to time to join him under the table, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much of one’s life is determined by the happenstance of birth. Seth Doe and my boy were born into circumstances as different as could be: Seth’s life chances were doomed before he could walk or talk, and there was nothing he could do about it. This, if I remember correctly from college English class, is the technical definition of a tragic flaw: when one’s downfall and destruction are predetermined by an ineradicable flaw.

At the time I read the Doe case record, I was serving as general counsel to half a dozen children’s social service agencies, and in this capacity, I worked closely with the Massachusetts DSS. Accordingly, I had encountered some extreme and deeply disturbing cases involving the sexual abuse of children. But none of this adequately prepared me for the Doe case. I was horrified by what I read in the massive written record.

The two children involved had been raised by a young single mother, and all three of them lived in the home of the children’s grandmother and step-grandfather, as did the two siblings of the mother. The family rented a humble house in a town northwest of Boston, and they appeared perfectly normal to the neighbors. The children presented and behaved well in school and in the community, and the adults were polite and accepted in the neighborhood. Teacher and guidance counselor notations that I read in the record drew the same conclusions. All of them consistently indicated that the children were appropriate with their classmates, polite with adults, and diligent in their schoolwork. Other documentation showed that they played well with other children and that their performance on tests and homework was entirely acceptable. Ashley was consistently a strong B student, and Seth’s grades averaged out to A–. The school nurse’s report was no different: it stated that the children seemed properly fed and exhibited no health or dental problems.

Behind this façade, however, was a home life as abnormal as any of us who worked on the case had ever encountered. The step-grandfather turned out to be, in the words of the chief counsel of the commonwealth’s DSS, one of the most sexually abusive offenders on record in Massachusetts. He not only had sexual relations with his wife, but also with all three of her children—two daughters and one son. Moreover, he had sired the two Doe children by one of his stepdaughters, so