The Many Innocent Victims of Incest

by Dr. Michelle Golland

Susan Smith placed her young children in a car and let it roll into a lake in 1994. She hid the facts, blamed someone else and was later found guilty and is currently serving a prison sentence. Casey Anthony is currently on trial for the disappearance and subsequent death of her two -year old daughter Caylee. Immediately after her daughter’s disappearance, Casey hid the facts and blamed someone else. Both women claim to have been incested by their fathers for several years of their childhoods and into their adulthoods, and it is this connection and the similarities of their alleged crimes that I want to think about.

Incestuous relationships create a confusing and traumatic situation with the child in all cases. The bond with the incestuous parent becomes confused between the normal attachment that a child feels for a parent as caregiver and the additional sexual attachment. There is no such thing as mutually consensual incest and there is no outcome to such situations other than trauma.

One of the major psychological findings about children involved in incestuous relationships with their parents is what’s called an insecure attachment style. Okay, quick primer on attachment. Attachment is the word we use to describe the bond between parent and child in childhood, which later translates to how well the individual is able to bond in adult relationships. The Attachment Bond Theory was created by an English Psychiatrist named John Bowlby and an American Psychologist named Mary Ainsworth in the 1960’s.

Ideally, a child will be securely attached and able to create meaningful relationships and feel empathy for others as they mature. Secure attachment is the result of parenting that is child focused with an awareness of the child’s emotional world. Everything else falls under a large umbrella called insecure attachment and includes avoidant, ambivalent, disorganized and reactive attachment styles. Avoidant attachment is the result of unavailable or rejecting parents and leads to adults who are avoidant of intimate relationships, rigid and critical. Ambivalent attachment occurs when parenting is inconsistent and even sometimes intrusive. Ambivalently attached children grow up to be anxious and insecure adults who can be controlling, blaming, and erratic. Disorganized attachment is the result of parents who ignore their children and even can behave in frightening or traumatizing ways. Children raised this way can become chaotic, insensitive abusive adults, who in spite of their behavior, desperately crave security. Finally, reactive attachment is the result of extremely unattached or malfunctional parenting and often results in adults who are incapable of forming relationships. Okay, primer done.

So, as I mentioned, ideally we raise our children to be securely attached individuals who will later pursue and nurture healthy adult relationships. Where incest is involved, as alleged in the Casey Anthony case, there is no chance for secure attachment. The very act of molestation discounts awareness of the child’s emotional needs. As we have seen in the case of Susan Smith and other women who have committed similar crimes, the sad reality of attachment dysfunction is that it trickles down to the person’s own relationship with her children, or in other words, the inability to attach includes the inability to attach to biological offspring. 

In both the Casey Anthony and the Susan Smith cases the immediate reaction of the women seemed to be detachment and dissociation from the reality of the loss of their child. They seemed emotionless when talking about their missing children and appeared to be cold and callous. Additionally they resorted to primary defenses of blaming others and perhaps hoping that they could get away with, well literally murder, if they simply pretended the crime didn’t happen. It’s a very childlike way of reacting, like deflecting responsibility for a broken lamp. This immaturity can also be the result of insecure attachment as their primary focus in growing up might have been survival in a chaotic home, a home that allowed incest for example, instead of being nurtured through maturity in a healthy way.

Is insecure attachment an excuse for killing your children? No. emphatically, no. However, knowing that there is an explanation that can serve to clarify why such a nightmare can and does happen, can help us to feel like the world is a bit more organized, and can remind us as parents how important it is to be good and attentive caregivers. Our children require us to see them, to acknowledge and respond to their emotional worlds in nurturing ways, to hold reasonable and steady boundaries within which they will push and eventually become their own person. Unfortunately, it is way to easy to create children and much, much more difficult to create highly functioning people.

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The Curse of a Narcissistic Mother: Cindy Anthony

by Dr. Michelle Golland

If we believe that Casey Anthony was involved in the death of her daughter Caylee and we believe her parents either know this or have further information that would help build a case against her, they sure aren’t talking.

Many mothers ask, “How could Cindy Anthony protect the murderer of her innocent granddaughter?” Cindy Anthony’s narcissism is the how and the why. Cindy needs to protect her own self-image as the mother of a possible child killer. Her overwhelming narcissism would not allow her to ever reveal what she may know because she would never be able to cope with the public seeing her as a “bad” mother.

The allegations of sexual abuse by Casey against her brother, Lee, and her father, George, would make sense given the volatility of their family. What I see clinically with Cindy Anthony is a portrait of a narcissistic and self-involved mother who has been trying to control those around her for many years. Her anger and rage is palpable when we see her in interviews, whether with police detectives or the media at large.

Let’s face it; this family has been fighting since it was revealed that little Caylee was missing. They have continued to be volatile with each other and create chaos, even outside the chaos of losing a child. Casey and her parents not only disagreed how to handle the memorial and funereal of Caylee, but while she was alive they were in a constant struggle for power and control over their daughter and their granddaughter. As a psychologist, the manner in which they have conducted themselves at each of these critical moments is a reflection of how they managed as a family prior to little Caylee turning up missing. Secretive, deceptive and rageful seem to be the themes constantly swirling within the Anthony household.

Cindy and Casey have had a challenging and disconnected relationship for a long time. They seemed to be fighting over Caylee even while she was alive. In reports, Cindy forced Casey to keep the baby when Casey would rather have terminated or adopted out. It seems that Cindy used her granddaughter as a further way to shame and guilt her own daughter Casey to either behave responsibly or to use her as a weapon in the war of “I do so much for you” game that parents like this often find themselves waging against their children.

Cindy appears to be a controlling and difficult mother, and if true, her reaction to Casey about being sexually abused by her brother, a narcissistic and dispassionate mother as well. According to Casey, when she shared with her mom about the abuse, she said, “That is why you are such a whore!” I must say, I am not shocked by Cindy's response. This can often be the reaction of the family when sexual abuse is revealed. It is so overwhelming, they often would rather deny than deal with it directly and effectively.

It seems that Casey is a pathological liar and clinically appears to have elements of borderline personality disorder. When looking at people who develop these personality structures, we often find behind them was a parent--whether mother or father--who was extremely narcissistic as well.

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