Computer Shooter on the Couch

Perhaps you are one of the 30 million plus people who have viewed the You Tube video, Dad Shoots Daughter’s Computer.  It is certainly a compelling 8 minutes.

And while the dad has some points, his final response is terrifying.  However, since comedy is actually all about anxiety, I found myself watching with my fifteen-year-old and we were both cracking up.

You can’t analyze funny—you laugh or you don’t.  We did.

But like laughing at church or temple, and knowing you’re not supposed to, and then laughing even harder… there’s just something scary/funny about a dad who’s so torqued out that he bothers to post his rebuttal to his kid’s disrespect on her Facebook page—and then goes Clint Eastwood on her symbolic self.

And the really scary thing, at least to me (besides the thought that I could piss this dad off and he might want to put a bullet in my equipment too), is just how many parents lack even the intelligence and restraint to simply shoot the laptop rather than abuse the child directly.  And even those abusers-by-proxy are doing serious damage.  It would be better for them to learn to laugh.

I’m sure this dad wanted to be heard, and I can only imagine that having gone viral he’s now navigating between the possibility of a reality TV show and the vague embarrassment of becoming poster-man for parental rage and helplessness.

Perhaps we might deconstruct this video in terms of attachment.  Simply put, this dad behaves in a scary way.  We have every reason to suspect that he has not grown less mature over his daughter’s fifteen years under his care, and thus his personal level of self-regulation when she was an infant could reasonably be questioned.  One can tell that he is hurt, that he works hard, that he is trying to teach manners and responsibility and yet he is completely impotent in the face of his daughter’s rebellion and disrespect (and her need for autonomy, and her budding sexuality no doubt too).

Just imagine Freud interpreting “Father” shooting his “gun” into his daughter’s “laptop” and suddenly you’re not in North Carolina anymore, you’re in Chinatown. Yuk.  And then you understand the defense of projection {that’s himself he’s shooting} and reaction formation {he hates her so much because he loves her and unconsciously feels forbidden incestuous desire} and displacement {what’s he been up to with his own “laptop”?}  Big Brother undoubtedly knows.  And the going viral may be because the video is structured like porn:  a little chit-chat and then the money shot.   Show it don’t say it.  Give the people what they want.

Now if dad becomes violent, even to objects, when triggered, we can hypothesize that he may have often enough felt helpless when his girl was a baby and behaved in normal baby ways (i.e. crying even though fed and soothed), and that he might have been prone to moments of red-zone anger, frustration or odd freeze responses then too (this can happen to the best of us, I know it did to me when my kid was a colicky infant… and BTW, mother migraines and colic appear to be linked—and the new thought is colic might be best conceptualized, and treated, as if the kid has a baby migraine:  quiet and darkness).

So… if parents act in a way that is scary when babies are just forming their map of the world and their trust, or not, in it, this odd scary vibe causes a neuron short-circuit and baby, rather than becoming calm and confident, develops a propensity for terror herself (it may look like a freeze response, a deer in the headlights, but inside her head it is a riot of terror and neurochemicals).

This can leave an encapsulated pocket of freaked-out terror in a child’s mind  and later lead to sudden outbursts, breakdowns, dissociations (i.e. feeling out of body and trance-like) and moments that make more than one or two parents feel like reaching for their gun.

I certainly remember moments when I felt like smashing, or at least trashing, my kids’ video game equipment.  Perhaps the take-away here is actually the need for more understanding, compassion and support for parents who may not necessarily be helping matters when they shoot a computer (after all, the kid can only imagine that dad quasi-unconsciously, wanted to shoot the child herself), compounding both shame and her likely later sexual attraction to violent men who will inevitably hurt her, exciting and abusing her, just like dear old dad, but who nonetheless need understanding, respect, compassion and help with anger-management.

If we could support parents to work through their own unresolved terror, abandonment, losses and hurt (often stemming from their own childhood wounds of terror and/or neglect) before the kids are born, we could facilitate an entirely more manageable generation of children who would naturally and instinctively know how to manage their feelings, trust caregivers and authority figures and care about others, the group and the planet and not just their own scared and insecure selves (the ongoing megaphone narcissism/unquenchable economic hunger of our highly disturbed current culture).

The dad who shoots the laptop certainly loves his daughter (all parents love their children), and he probably gave her everything he could, everything he didn’t likely get as a child.  His child may seem “spoiled” to him because he could not tolerate frustrating her when she was younger, nor could he tolerate his own frustration or emotion, and now that she’s older she may have little gratitude for what she has.  But she also probably does not feel loved, which has much to do with feeling understood.  Thus neither dad nor daughter is feeling the love, and that’s sad because they probably do both love each other (they secretly believe they are themselves both shit, the shame born of being scared and insecure as a little kid—you conclude it’s your own fault).

But more than anything else, I think this dad is scared that his little girl is not going to be equipped for the real world and that the clock is running out on his time to ready her for reality.  Parenting hits the red zone when we are scared and out of control, very often because we love our kids so much and we’re not getting through to them.

Yet owing to the nature of the teen brain, the very best thing we can do when our kids are in the red zone is to give them space, not engage, allow them to return to “normal” at which point they are very likely to make good decisions (and prove themselves, once again, to be good kids).

This cool-down space is probably a very good idea for mom and dad too, especially when parents consider gunplay to be an appropriate component of problem solving.