Brittney Rushed to Hospital

The media is so interested in what is happening with Brittney and her many exploits. She has been so incredibly "out there" that most of us just shake our heads. Some might say this is a girl in desperate need for attention and all she does is attempt to get that attention.

I worked in adolescent treatment centers for five years. During that time I had many clients who were troubled teens whose parents claimed they were "attention seeking". Their behaviors were not that far off from Brittney's, but because of her income level and her media profile, her behaviors get even more out of hand.

What is "Attention Seeking" anyway?

What I began to observe in the kids who were "attention seeking" is that they needed attention for something far greater than they could even name. Always, they had some kind of hidden pain or trauma driving them to get someone to pay attention to it. Because they were young and unable to identify what was wrong with them, they did whatever they could to get the adults and professionals around them to pay attention. In my book, this is what "attention seeking" behavior really means. It means this child (or this person) is hurting desperately and needs help.

All of Brittney's behaviors can be seen as a cry for help. The sad part is that our medical and media world often overlook the obvious because it's "controversial". Dissociative Identity Disorder carries with it the implicit knowledge that something horrible happened to the sufferer. When you have this disorder, generally speaking, something really terrible has happened to you in your childhood. Yes, it has to be in childhood, because that is when the ability to dissociate effectively happens. After a certain age, our brains have developed substantially enough to prevent complete splitting as it happens in DID.

Why we avoid the issue

No one wants to look at the fact that around the world, and even in our "child focused" society, children get abused in terrible, often tortuous ways. The sad truth is that because we fail to look at the facts, we allow it to continue. Our denial keeps the game going. We live in denial mostly, I believe, because we don't want to think that seemingly normal people could be doing these things to their children. Does anyone want to think that Brittney's mom or dad could have allowed horrible things to have happened to their children? No, we don't want to "blame" them so we ignore the possibility.

Blame keeps us stuck

It seems to me that when we focus on who is to "Blame" we get our vision blurred. Even uncovering the horrors of childhood sexual, physical and verbal abuse does not mean we have to "Blame" the perpetrators. Our tendency is to do this of course, it feels satisfying to have a "bad guy" and we can just write them off. But the reality is that someone doesn't just do this kind of thing without having had some previous experience of it themselves. This is proven throughout history and research.

Why do we pretend that "blame" solves the problem? "Blame" perpetuates the problem. If we could transform our thinking into a view of others that includes compassion and ownership things in our world could be very different. We could help the poor perpetrators of the horrors of abuse, and protect the children at the same time. But because we tend to "how the book" at them and lock them away so we don't have to think about them again; we avoid dealing with the troublesome task of actually seeing them as human beings in need of help.

No one wants to "ruin" someone's life by identifying a perpetrator

This view keeps us from being willing to look at abusive behaviors in others. None of us wants to "ruin the lives" of someone by accusing them of something so horrendous. So instead we pretend it doesn't happen. Yet, as I noted in last weeks blog, there was a cat who uncovered dozens of videos of children being raped and abused between the ages of 5 and 14. I does happen and we have to remove ourselves from the black and white view of the offenders if anything is ever going to change.

Am I off my rocker?

I know a lot of you think it's wrong not to think of the offenders of child rape and pornography as anything but punishable by death or life imprisonment. Let me know your point of view. I may have written the book but I know there are things I an learn.