THE TULIP THEORY

By Dr. Faye Snyder

Early in our marriage, my husband and I foolishly ordered 100 Tulip bulbs from Holland to plant in our new garden in Southern California. The bulbs arrived with a note atop, which read, “Do not worry about your bulbs. They have their own fertilizer. You don’t have to water them. You don’t even need to put them into the ground. You can leave them on the shelf in a closed-door cabinet. Whatever you do, they will still bloom into beautiful blossoms for your enjoyment.” Of course, they didn’t mention warm weather. I put the note down and proclaimed aloud to my husband, “Oh my God! I was raised on the Tulip Theory.”

We assume genetic instructions, like fish assume water. The old Nature v Nurture debate was solved with the end of the Human Genome Project, which found no evidence for genes instructing behavior or personality. Even the most invested scientists conceded. The evidence is in. The fat lady has sung. Behavior is not inborn. Genes design the body, not the personality. Genes make the body. Experience and practice fashion personality. A piano cannot make music without a pianist, and a pianist cannot play a melody on the coffee table.

I see television commercials claiming, without self-consciousness, that the treatment for depression, bipolar, or anxiety is this or that drug. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual offers diagnoses without description of early causal experiences. Insurance panels and MDs generally seek diagnoses that are based on symptoms, not childhood experiences. Files from mental hospitals rarely have a useful review of early childhood.

News investigators, journalists and reality television programmers don’t know or understand the significance of gathering information about the first years of childhood before airing or printing stories about violent criminals and mass shooters, and we hear commentators state that no one knows why someone acts so violently. Even filmmaker Michael Moore asks plaintively why so many shootings in America. The information is here if we want to know.

Insurance referrals, pediatricians and parents seek psychologists often, not for therapy, but for a diagnosis of ADHD or Autism, so they can get extra funding, without having to learn how to help their child become less symptomatic. It doesn’t appear that those empowered to make the diagnoses know how to reduce the symptoms therapeutically or to notify parents to remain active. A parent in the Tulip Theory assumes that there is no point in teaching discipline or self-regulation to a child diagnosed with autism, and there is no diagnosing expert to ensure that

parents continue to parent hands on, to take referrals for parent education. As the pervasive assumption is that behavior is all in the genes, children diagnosed in their first years with a developmental disorder of autism often are not parented into social skills in the following years. The die is cast. What else is there to do? These children often develop serious behavioral issues due to neglect. It’s the Tulip Theory. What is to be will be. A violin protege is presumed to have natural talent. A genius is thought to have been born smart. A client comes to therapy believing that she can’t change, because she’s “always” been this way. A mother says, “But I had three children and they all turned out differently. How could it be parenting?” Poor people are presumed inherently lazy or incompetent or unworthy. The death penalty is the result of believing someone deserves to be killed, because they should have known better to do better, even if they were neglected, beaten about the head and regularly demeaned before the age of three.

That’s the Tulip Theory. It doesn’t consider the real causes underlying behavior, so parents are not encouraged by the professionals to perceive and talk to their children when something is off. As a matter of fact, a vast amount of research funding is spent by the pharmaceutical industry trying to prove that behavior is, at least, in part, inborn, and medicine will help. Sometimes it’s easier to see what we believe than what is. For those who have not been told what to see, it’s easier to perceive. When my son was five, he asked a visitor: “You know why I am so good at mazes?” “Why, no, I don’t,” said our cooperating guest. “It’s because I love mazes so much that I practice a lot.”

When parents raise children in the Tulip Theory, they often wait until the child is older before engaging in a meaningful dialogue, assuming intelligence is inherent. They wait to talk to their child until she can speak words, rather than understand them. Parents leave their newborns in daycare or in othercare, as government research calls it, and go off to work. Some must, but some assume it’s fine, because the child will be who she will be.

The War of The researchers

I am a theoretician and researcher of research. I have been studying the reported causes of behaviors for more than 30 years, making my own notes as a clinician. I have seen that there are two camps of researchers reporting in with competing evidence. I call it The War of the Researchers. I have observed apparent motives or philosophies underlying the two camps. Simply put, one camp is pro-child and the other is pro-parent, or rather, The Tulip Theory. It turns out that one set of facts is far more credible than the other. In the late 1800s, shortly after Gregory Mendel introduced his theory of genetic inheritance for flowers, speculation and research mushroomed. Genetic theory was soon applied to the animal kingdom, and then, the line was crossed. Researchers begin attempting to prove personality and intellect were inborn, including superiority and inferiority in mental health, intellectual capabilities and talent in a sort of phenotyping to represent the observable as evidence of the unobservable. These were called Pedigree Studies, and the evidence was simply that subsequent generations had similar behaviors. Another group of scientists later called these imitations the “intergenerational transmission process”, crediting exposure and experience rather than genes. Today, the same phenomenon is explained by the more recent discovery by Giocomo Rizzolatti of mirror neurons, which should have won him the Nobel Prize.

It is mirror neurons that instruct us to identify with the other party, no matter how well or badly, they treated us. We save those emotional and loaded experiences, especially from parents to re-enact from the other end, when it’s our turn to be in power, whether in play or after we grow up. What goes in must come out. What doesn’t go in can’t come out. We become as we were treated, unless we learn to self-reflect and self-regulate, something we also need to see modeled.

Behavioral researchers who designed the Scandinavian Studies, aka the Adoption Studies, the Twin Studies and the Schizophrenia Studies, have rubberstamped the Tulip Theory. They failed

to rule out other explanations that would also account for their results, which is a necessary step in good science. I speak not just of the undiscovered and then overlooked mirror neurons, but also of behaviors that can be explained in other ways by other research.

In my field, the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, as they are not mutually informed. Behaviorists know little to nothing about attachment theory. Attachment theorists seem to barely know about trauma theory. Both know next to nothing about the great discovery of mirror neurons. We don’t all know about the impact on a child who must contain her thoughts and feelings, especially in situations where there has been abuse. Few mention the profound impact on children within families that blame together, rather than self-reflect together. Thus, to date, except for The Causal Theory, there is no overview or comprehensive theory of developmental psychology, that considers the impact of the most critical experiences taken together.

I have found that the pro-parent side of The War has been very well-funded but riddled with research flaws. In my book, The Search for the Unholy Grail: The Race to Prove that Behavior and Personality Are Inherent, I have identified at least ten common techniques that were used by the behavioral researchers, consciously and unconsciously, to reassure patrons and parents that their children will be what they will be. At the end of the Human Genome Project, some authors wrote that behavioral researchers misled genetic researchers with sloppy research designs and overzealous interpretations of their behavioral studies. I also learned that pro-child researchers designed the best studies, which were regularly replicated and expanded with significantly more transparency.

Logic tells us that both sides couldn’t be right. Yet psychologists like to think that both sides can be right, as if they were mediating an argument. Thus, psychologists have enabled a non-critical, illogical climate for the epigenetic theory, a hypothesis now accepted as a phenomenon, holding that we all have genetic predispositions that can be triggered by environment. There is no such evidence of genetic predispositions for behaviors, but there is “research”, the results of which are interpreted to suit the patrons and parents.

The popularity of the 50/50 assumption works to represent the ongoing certainty of inherited traits. Instead of ruling out imprinted behaviors via mirror neurons, we assume “fragile genes”. Proparent researchers continue to ignore other causes and explanations of behavior, which should be incorporated in researcher rule-outs when their studies are presented and interpreted.

Researcher Bessel van der Kolk has said that the worst of all trauma is attachment trauma, and the insecurely attached child suffers other trauma more deeply than the securely attached child. Thus, an insecurely attached woman who is raped by the same rapist will suffer more severely than a securely attached woman. Soldiers on either side of a buddy killed next to them in the trenches, may differ in how they handle his sudden and violent demise. These differences have historically been explained as genetic predispositions or fragile genes, but the best of our research explains them in terms of critical childhood experiences, the foremost of which is attachment, be it secure or insecure.

The Predictor Score Sheet considers the impact critical experiences have on one another. It is the lack of these gestalts that make all of us blind and superstitious about genetic instructions. On nearly every news cast someone says, “We just don’t know why a person would do something like this.” A juror on the Menendez Brothers trial said, “I was molested, and I never wanted to kill my parents.” It is not just child abuse that creates personality. Personality is formed at our foundation by the quality of our attachment, which magnifies future experiences. If these experiences of insecure attachment are followed by abuse and neglect (versus discipline by natural consequences), and then followed further by mandates to repress one’s feelings and thoughts to comply with parental requirements (versus expression of the same), we have an entirely different outcome. If children learn to blame others and extract revenge for disloyalty instead of learning self-regulation and self-reflection, the

totem pole of personality formation is complete as the components interact. Most important to know: a securely attached child, no matter whether abuse follows, will not abuse others.

For sure, we notice that not every molested child grows up to be a pedophile. However, who realizes that a securely attached child can never become a violent adult? Who knows that a child molester must have already learned to repress their feelings for their parents’ sake before they were molested? Who differentiates for the severity, age, frequency and nature of the of abuse to determine whether the perpetratorin-the-making will become a common garden variety pedophile or one who ends up on the news? Thus, the Predictor Score Sheet enables some uniformity of assessment for purposes of prevention, understanding and prediction.

The Causal Theory holds that there are critical events in the formation of personality, changing a trajectory for life, for better or worse. The good news is that if we know what we are healing, we can modify the trajectory with different circumstances. For example, therapy, good friends or a good education can make a difference, while drugs, bad company and lack of education send us further in the other direction. I just live for everyone to know or at least the herd.

Dr. Faye Snyder trains anyone interested—parent, clinician, attorney, judge, school counselor, social worker, investigator, forensic evaluator or behavioral researcher—in how to understand and predict behavior according to critical childhood events with the Predictor Score Sheet. She can be reached at the Parenting and Relationship Counseling foundation (PaRC) by calling 818-891-8477 or emailing drfaye@theparcfoundation.com.

“We become as we were treated, unless we learn to self-reflect and self-regulate, something we also need to see modeled.”