I have had two client cases recently in which a lifetime coping mechanism was rooted in how a child used his/her room to survive parental chaos. In one case a boy had an alcoholic father who would be angry, violent, and verbally abusive to his son. To stay out of father’s way and find some peace the boy would close his bedroom door and lose himself in books, games, and imaginary play. His room became a microcosm of safety and predictability in the midst of fear-inducing chaos. And so, isolation became his lifetime coping mechanism. The boy grew up to immerse himself in workaholic fashion in his primary job and several part-time jobs, while avoiding intimate relationships. As a grown man he came to me for help unlocking the proverbial door to an outer world of human interaction involving love and romance with a woman.
In the second case the client, as a child, had to endure witnessing countless loud, angry arguments between her parents. She would retreat to her room and transform the chaos into order by keeping her room clean, neat, tidy, and orderly with everything in its place. This comforted her by giving her a sense of control over her life. It represented the opposite of the chaos outside her room marked by turbulence, commotion, intensity, and distress. When she grew into a woman and married the client would become explosively angry at her husband when he deviated from her scheme of how to clean the kitchen. Failing to load the dishwasher the right way or leaving drops of water on the counter after cleaning pots in the sink would spark an expletive-filled tirade. This client came to me to understand why this happened and learn to stop it.
In both cases I was able to help the client see and progressively release a very old coping strategy which meant sanity and emotional survival for them during a traumatic childhood. When, as adults, we act compulsively or impulsively for reasons we don’t understand, it may be possible to trace it back to a childhood survival mechanism which, retrospectively, makes complete sense in the context of the child’s life at home. Sometimes a room functions like a life raft in a storm-tossed sea.
