Many year ago I heard a speaker discuss the phenomenon of “negative target fixation”. It occurs most often in pilots but I think the concept is fairly universal. When you tell your brain to avoid something ; for instance a tree in a field; for some reason your brain does the exact opposite and you end up hitting the tree. I have noticed this same thing happening when I ride mountain bikes. You tell your brain to avoid a rock in the trail and some how you end up hitting the rock. The reason I bring this up is that I am convinced we do the same thing with tragedy or in an effort to prevent tragedy in our lives.
We knew that Adam had issues with self esteem and confidence from a fairly early age. He was starting to have issues with classmates in second grade. When we moved to our new neighborhood and Adam attended the school in our neighborhood these issues got significantly worse. It was almost if Adam lacked some sort of resistance to the naturally occurring meanness of this world. Every day he would come home traumatized by the actions of his classmates. Our natural instincts were to find fault with the school and their lack of response and to question what type of parents would raise children that were so cruel and hateful. Some of those feelings were legitimate but the underlying question was why Adam was so vulnerable?
We did seek out professional help for Adam and he started working with a counselor but eventually we were forced to move Adam to a private school where we thought the children would be less cruel and raised to be more kind. We soon learned that this was not the case and Adam continued to struggle with bullying and we continued to struggle with ineffective school administrators. Eventually, as I mentioned before Adam was diagnosed with anxiety and mild depression and was prescribed Lexapro to deal with his symptoms. His issues seemed to lessen and he seemed much happier at school.
After his 9th grade year we offered him the chance to attend a bigger school with better facilities and he chose to stay in his current school because of his friends. Ironically, those relationships ended up triggering the pain that led to his decision to take his life. To be clear no one at his school caused Adam’s death. The meanness and hurtful things that were said to Adam were typical of any high school and we all at some time in our lives have experienced what Adam experienced and even far worse and did not choose to take our lives.
The point is in our attempts to shield Adam from harm we failed to address the true underlying issues of his mental illness and helped create the outcome we were trying to avoid. It is all hindsight and I blame no one, even myself for missing this but it is very clear now. By not dealing with Adam’s inability to respond effectively to other people’s criticism we left him vulnerable. It was “negative target fixation”. We should have spent our energy understanding what was happening with Adam instead of trying to protect him from the external behaviors contributing to his feelings about himself.
It happens to all of us and the way to avoid it is to understand that typically our first instincts in times of trauma are usually wrong. Our emotions take over and we don’t act in a rational logical way. I have mentioned how fear causes us to make poor decisions in a previous article and I do think that hindered us on some level in how we interacted with Adam. We were afraid of him being hurt and wanted to protect him. This fear is prevalent when it comes to suicide. It is every parents worse nightmare and as parents we need to understand that our responses to our children and the things that happen to them can be affected by this fear.
Be careful not to respond to events in your child’s life with fear. This will lead to you missing the opportunity to address the real issues. Remember “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear” 1 John 4:18. Do not let your natural instincts create circumstances that produce the outcome you are trying to prevent.