The Human Psyche is Perfect

Even with all its flaws

I used to have this very particular idea of perfection. Perfection is possible, I thought - but what exactly is perfection? A person who has no unhealthy fear, no pathologies, none of the ego-centric tendencies that we all display from time to time.

I rejected the Christian idea of perfection by this point, but I still held to the concept that there must be a way of raising people who were, for lack of a better phrase, anomalously close to perfect. People who could just be themselves, who had no need for armor or shields, who wouldn’t make the same mistakes that I made.

I was unsurprisingly obsessive about finding out how to raise my kids so that they wouldn’t have the problems that I did. I read book after book about how people learn, how the brain works, how to model emotional intelligence, how to raise spiritually aware children, how to respond when… etc. I was fascinated by unschooling and Montessori schooling, and I poured way too much of myself into trying to direct their learning for far too long — up until the day, in fact, that I finally drove to Snake’s house to do something for my own sanity, for a change.

I am a better parent for all of my research, though. I have reasons for most of what I do, even if I still parent on default mode sometimes. I have a pretty good gauge of what to address and what to ignore. It was really cool to watch first Dusty and now July teach themselves to read. But I am no closer to achieving that ideal of perfection than I ever was.

It took the summer of 2019 for me to realize that the idealized, shadowy, high-energy-state, Christian-esque concept of perfection is superfluous. It may or may not be possible, but it doesn’t really make a difference.

What we have is the people we are — and we function perfectly.

From the moment of conception, a human being is subject to interpretation by its environment. The formation of an embryo is affected by everything from the food its mother eats to the stress its mother feels to the amount of light and sound it is exposed to from outside the womb.

A fetus literally feels everything its mother feels; when an emotion causes her to manufacture a particular hormone, the fetus will use that experience to learn how to manufacture the same hormone in its own brain. The mother’s thought processes teach it how to form synaptic connections, which areas of the brain to use, how to think. That may at least partly explain why easily stressed mothers are more likely to end up with easily stressed babies.

Just as a fetus responds perfectly to its environment while in utero, it continues to do the same as a baby outside the womb. It cries in response to hunger, a need to pee, overstimulation, or the not irrational fear that it might be eaten by the Wolves if you leave it alone.

It thrives on human contact - its skin learns how to process touch by being touched. It learns to speak by being spoken to. When you smile at it, its mirror neurons work on copying both the expression and the sentiment until its face can follow suit. For every single minuscule external event that happens to a human, there is a perfectly matched internal response, a neuron traveling down a pathway with the same intensity as the event it is processing, and a memory of it stored in the brain.

This exact balance between external stimulation and internal response persists until you learn to block the external - then, you are no longer learning. Nothing in, nothing out.

It so happened, this past summer, that Little B fell into a swimming pool that was just over his head. The people in it were making a whirlpool, so for the minute and a half or so that it took me to see that he wasn’t on the ladder anymore, run over to the pool, and yell at the adults in the pool to pluck him out, he was being whipped around the outer edge of it, unable to breathe. He didn’t seem too terribly phased by the event, but the experience was now in him. He is a perfectly functioning human — it would have to come back out.

A few days later the kids wanted me to fill up our little toddler pool, and the older ones got the idea to make a whirlpool in it. Little B participated for a moment, then got out and just watched the water swirl. He got back in as an animal, but that didn’t seem to do it. He got back out and threw a toy in, watching it spin around in the water. But the toy floated — still not right. He threw in a t-shirt and stood for a long time, watching the shirt submerged in the water, spinning around and around and around.

I didn’t intervene, didn’t tell the bigger boys to stop making a whirlpool, didn’t try to talk to him about his fears or his feelings — he needed to get it out and I wasn’t going to interfere with that. He needed to see what had happened to him from an outside perspective. Perspective in, perspective out.

Our entire lives are built on experiences like that. We take kindness in when someone is kind to us, and we are able to let that back out to others in response. We either absorb anger and nastiness that is flung at us and let it out in self-loathing, or we deflect these things by being angry and nasty right back — it amounts to the same thing in terms of energy exchange.

For everything that happens to us, there is a memory stored and a way of getting it back out. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s just how humans work. Perfectly.

I am coming to accept that, no matter how well I structure their environment, my children are going to disappoint me sometimes, and drive me half crazy in the process. They’re going to ruin things that should have lasted for years, they’re going to pick up habits and expressions from other people that will annoy the shit out of me.

I’m going to disappoint them, too. I’m going to throw away things they wanted to keep, I’m going to get mad when I shouldn’t, and then they will do the same thing back at me or one of their younger siblings. They are just responding to their environment. When they do these things, they are functioning perfectly.

The one sure-fire way to fuck them up is to fault them for their perfection.