The Family Origins of Executive Functioning Deficits

Just as the brain is an organ of adaptation, executive functioning is a process of adaptation to our physical and social worlds. As our brains and minds take shape during the early years of life, the structures and strategies of our survival become the templates, strategies, and internal logic we tend to use for the rest of our lives. As most of our early learning is social, emotional, and nonconscious, the later influence of our early experiences is often obscure and difficult to discover. When these templates are flexible enough to adapt to adult challenges, they usually go unseen and unexplored. If they are too rigid and a bad fit for our current lives, we become distressed and seek solutions. This dilemma is what psychotherapy was created to address. Adults seek therapy because of a failure to individuate from their family of origin, often accompanied by failures of attention and EF. Let’s consider a fairly common case.

Consider the development of a child’s executive functioning as their brains and minds adapt to an insecure parent. In this case, a parent attempting to regulate their fears and anxieties by attempting to control the world around them. Parents such as this are usually intolerant of alternative opinions and ways of doing things, as well as experiencing differences of opinions as critical and rejecting. Through countless interactions with their patent’s defenses, the child learns that their ideas, interests, and autonomy trigger negative emotions and rejection from the parent. Because they are completely dependent and have no other frame of reference, the reality presented by their parents is their only reality. They learn that their survival depends upon their compliance, continued dependence, and is best served by avoiding having their own thoughts, feelings, and desires. Depending on the temperament of the child, they will either comply or rebel. Rebellion is the healthy choice and leads to a set of challenges and conflicts, but let’s first consider the compliant child.

Normal attempts at autonomy or individuation by the child will be met with the parent’s emotional dysregulation and threats of physical and financial abandonment. The compliant child is terrified by these manipulations and does their best to stay in their parent’s good graces. If they are clever enough, they fine tune their dependency in conformity with the parent’s psychological needs. They will learn to avoid making choices, not attend to life’s demands, and sabotage personal successes out of their invisible loyalty to their parent’s needs. The more resources the parents possess, the more leverage they will have, and the greater the impact of their disapproval. This family dynamic makes it more likely that the child will have been sheltered (kept from) learning most of the psychological and professional skills which would allow for their independence.

This adaptation shapes the networks, strategies, and structures of their executive functioning, creating a self-sustaining and perpetuating process. On the surface, it looks as if the child lacks the intelligence and EF to be competent and autonomous, when they have actually been quite successful in adapting to the invisible emotional environment that their teachers, therapists, and employers never see. When their parents search for answers to their children’s failures at school and work, they are told by professionals that the culprit is problems with attention and executive functioning. Of course, they are usually blind to the psychological drama and would be unable to accept responsibility. This directs the solutions to be focused on medication, executive coaching, and forced discipline for their supposed neurological problems.  They generally come to believe that their child’s problem is a result of an unfortunate genetic inheritance, from the other parent’s side of the family.

The diagnostic labels, medication, and failure at school and work trigger shame, erode self-confidence, and reinforce the need to rely on the parent. Because they lack boundaries, assertiveness, and a sense of personal power, they learn to get what they want through passive aggressive manipulation, a lesson well-learned at the knee of their parents. Ironically, the parent will see their child’s attempts at manipulation as a sign of bad character, antisocial personality, and more evidence for their lack of proper EF. The child’s stellar emotional awareness of the parent and their successful adaptation to their parent’s unconscious world is never recognized for the high-level of adaptive executive functioning it represents.

The child who rebels against parental control and manipulation will often have many of the same problems in school, relationships, and work. Although they will also be diagnosed with ADHD and deficits in EF, the abandonment anxiety of their dependent sibling will be wrapped in anger and rage. They will either dissociate or zone out in family situations or call the parents out for the injustice, manipulation, and hypocrisy they see coming from them. While it is common for the behavior of these children to also be a flaw in their EF, they will offer logical, cogent, and compelling arguments when describing their conflicts and when making a case for something they need. This expression of EF is seldom taken into account, while the data from standardized tests is taken seriously. This, despite their contempt for the tests, their lack of motivation to perform well, and the pleasure they take in sabotaging a process their parents are spending a fortune to diagnose their problems while denying their own.