Wire Monkey

By Lynne Bizell

Everyone who has studied psychology knows about the famous wire monkey experiment by Harry Harlow. My mother was the wire monkey and incapable of giving or showing love. She was very ignorant and abusive. My life paralleled this famous experiment. This book is my struggle to live and survive the wire monkey and my abusive sister and brother. My life mistakes were all due to my mothers influence by not giving love or showing love. This book is about my struggle to find love and overcome the wire-monkey influence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524545932

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Copyright © 2016 by Lynne Bizell.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016916048

ISBN: Hardcover     978-1-5245-4596-3

Softcover     978-1-5245-4595-6

eBook     978-1-5245-4593-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

All the names of those living have been changed to protect their identity. All the events are true.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/26/2016

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Addendum

DEDICATION

To my son. It is my hope that he will understand my background and my experiences and how that influenced my decision-making process. Further, I hope that he will understand these things and recognize how these events influenced my decision-making and my life. It is my sincere hope that through this understanding, healing may take place.

CHAPTER I

Where do I begin to tell my story? First, I must explain my title of this book. I must describe a wire monkey.

Harry Harlow was an American psychologist who in 1957 began experiments with rhesus monkeys. He chose to use the rhesus monkey because it was more mature at birth than the human. Also, it was against the law to use human babies for such as experiment. Harlow obtained both his BA and PhD in psychology from Stanford University. Upon completion of his PhD, Harlow joined the psychology staff at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and there he started his experiments.

Harlow was intrigued by the human emotion of love. He questioned the theories which stated that love began as a feeding bond with the mother and applied by extension to other family members. He took infant monkeys away from their real mothers and gave them instead to two artificial mothers. One model was made of wire and the other made of cloth. The wire model was outfitted with a bottle to feed the baby monkey. But the babies rarely stayed with the wire model no longer than it took to get the necessary food. The monkeys preferred to stay with the cloth monkey. They cuddled with the cloth monkey, especially if they were scarred. When the cloth model had a bottle and fed them, they didn’t go to the wire monkey at all.

Harlow famous wire/cloth mother mother studies demonstrated that the need for affection created a stronger bond between mother and infant than did physical needs such as food. Even when the wire monkey was the source of nourishment, warmth provided by the electric light, the monkey spent a greater amount of time clinging to the cloth surrogate. These results led researchers to believe the need for closeness and affection goes deeper than a need for warmth.

Harlow’s research suggested the importance of mother/child bonding. Not only did the child look to his/her mother for basic needs such as food, safety, and warmth, but he also needed to feel loved, acceptance, and affection from the caregiver. His findings showed some long-term psychological physical effects of delinquent or inadequate attentiveness to child needs. Another experiment with wire and cloth monkeys created very disturbed monkeys.

When these isolate female monkeys grew up, they were either negligent or abusive. Negligent mothers did not nurse, comfort, or protect their young, nor did they harm them. Deprivation of emotional bonds to live mother monkeys (as infant monkeys) these (now adult) monkeys were unable to create a secure attachment with their own offspring.

Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who studied along with Harry Harlow. He spent time working with Harlow and his study of rhesus monkeys. Maslow developed a theory of hierarchy of needs. He said that if your most basic needs weren’t met, you would not move on up to the next level of needs. Maslow’s first level of need was the physiological needs such as air, water, and food. The next level was safety needs. This need includes a secure job and home. If this is met, individuals move to needing love and belonging. Friendship, intimacy, and family are the dominant needs at this level. All humans have a need to feel respected. This comes at the next level one looks to gain self-esteem and self-respect. If all needs have been reached, the person reaches self-actualization. This level of need refers to what a person’s full potential is and the realization of that potential. Maslow said that this level is when an individual becomes all that he can be. Using the Maslow theory, I am still looking for love and belonging. I cannot go any further up his levels until my need for love is met. In my adult life, I have always looked to find a mother figure and a mother’s love. I know I will never find this. I looked to my current mother-in-law, but she refuses to look beyond herself.

Erickson made his stages of development as a guide line as to what children needed at different times of their young lives. Erickson assumed that babies and children were naturally loved by their parents. He concentrated on more behavior and emotional needs instead of love. He said in the beginning a baby needed to trust the world. The infant will attach to his mother which lays the foundation to trust in other people. If an infant doesn’t learn to trust, he will have problems with later effective relationships.

Another researcher, John Bowlby, said mothers are often associated with this role as primary caregivers and attachment figures. Bowlby did believe that infants could form such bonds with others. The formation of the attachment bond offers comfort, security, and nourishment, but Bowlby noted that feeding itself was not the basis or purpose of the attachment. When attachment figures are available and reliable, the child develops a sense of trust in the world. At this point, the child can then rely on the caregiver as a secure base from which to explore the world. Bowlby goes into detail about attachment and the infant. He states that at first the infant recognizes his caregiver, but he doesn’t attach to the caregiver. A baby’s crying and fussing draws attention and care of the parent, which is rewarding to both the child and the caregiver. My mother never saw me as something to love or needed love.

My mother never met this need in me. Most likely it was partially met by other people because my father was dying at this time and I was left with other relatives while she attended to my father. But to my mother, during this stage, I was a bottle on one end and a diaper on the other end. I was something that just got in the way. She probably wished that I had never been born. Like the wire monkey, she never offered me feelings that she did not have herself. Plus, I was female. She became the wire monkey almost as soon as I was given over to her care. By age eighteen months, a baby should begin to be autonomous instead of shame and doubt. At this stage, my mother failed me again. She became the wire monkey almost as soon as I was born so failure was natural. As I grew, she would shame me and tell me I was ugly. This is when my real serious neglect began. I was neglected as a baby and my neglect continued. My emotional need for love and warmth was never met.

By three to six years, a child should show initiative instead of guilt. I began to try to get my mother’s affection, but I got ignored. My mother always called me bashful. I was not bashful, I was afraid of people. I was afraid someone would hurt me. She was hurting me so why should I expect anything else. I could not trust my world. I can remember at this age being held up to a mirror and being told to watch myself cry and being told I was ugly. Due to my mother’s dislike of females, I was doomed.

By grade school years, a child should be industrious instead of inferior. This is the stage when my older brother began to sexually abuse me and torment me mentally. Finally, the youthful years, twelve to twenty years of age, an identity would be shown. I remember my teen years as being very lonely. I felt I was dumb and unlovable to be in anyone’s company. I had never been touched in a loving way all my young life and it showed when I began to try to find myself an identity. By the time I was a sophomore in high school I considered suicide. When you reach your young adult years, you should be able to love deeply. I felt isolated and no one showed me how to care or love another. No one showed me love, and I had no examples to pattern myself after. In my middle adult years, I really destroyed my life. This is when no one gave anything emotionally to me. An individual should feel fulfilled and content. But no one can go through life without being loved, shown warm affection, and closeness. I wish to tell my life story so no one repeats my mistakes. Harlow’s experiment proved this and my life story proves his experiment. Now to help me make peace with my past, I must tell my life story even with all the mistakes.

CHAPTER II

My mother was a wire monkey. Because of her upbringing, my mother wasn’t capable of giving anything but basic needs: clothing, food, and shelter and no love or affection. Her parents were born in the 1880s, during the Victorian era of thinking. Women’s role at that time were that women were like animals, less than human, unable to think like men, born merely to breed and serve men. Therefore, she had a very negative view of herself. All of this was passed on to my mother by her mother. She hated herself and was unable to give anything to me or my sister except food, clothing, and shelter, Maslow’s theory of hierarchy. As I grew into childhood, I still did not get affection or closeness. She never held me or showed me love when I was hurt or just wanting to cuddle. My basic needs were all that my mother provided. Also the circumstances of my birth caused me to be abused and ignored by her. I was the last born to her and I eventually became the family scapegoat. She never bonded with me prenatally. When I was conceived, my father had a terminal diagnosis of cancer. She was a very angry person and did not know what she was going to do. All that anger and hostility was transferred to me and it became easy for her to abuse me when she didn’t feel any emotion toward me. My brother was her firstborn and he was her pride and joy. She nurtured and loved him. The attention he got was unnatural to the point of being pathological. He could do no wrong no matter what he did.

Now let’s explore my mother’s upbringing and why she was incapable of giving love and affection to me and my sister. She had a very abusive father and a loving mother. It was also when the Victorian ideas and morals were the culture of the time. It was 1910 in rural Kentucky. They also put great influence on Biblical ideas on raising children. Ideas such as spare the rod and spoil the child and children should be seen not heard. Victorians believed that no public display of affection should take place.

My abusive grandfather was twenty-eight years old when my mother was born, May 21, 1910. My mother was his firstborn in 1910. The European idea that the firstborn should be male was also accepted as the norm. How dare his wife present him with a girl. He constantly reminded my mother that she had no worth to him because she was a girl. All this anger was misplaced onto me and my sister, but mostly me because of the circumstances of my birth. Therefore, my mother grew up hating herself and wishing she was a boy to gain her father’s affection. He always told my mother that he would have to pay someone to take her off his hands and marry her. He also refused to let her get an education. He thought that an education for women was stupid and a waste of time because they got married and had babies and they did not need an education. My grandfather went on to have two more girls and one boy. He needed farm hands—not girls! My mother only got an eighth-grade education. Because she was a very smart person and excelled at her studies, she was skipped from the fourth grade to the eighth grade. No matter what the school told my grandfather about my mother’s progress, he made her quit school and work the tobacco fields. My grandmother had no say in what happened to her children. She believed that the man was the leader of the household and made all the decisions for the family. This also was a family norm for the times. When my grandmother got extremely ill in 1932, my grandfather refused her medical treatment. All her children begged their father to get her help. She had an infected gallbladder. When he finally decided she was really sick, it was too late. Her gallbladder ruptured and she got peritonitis and died from the infection.

My grandfather was not a poor man. He could have afforded her medical attention. He owned two grocery stores, an oil well, and a tobacco farm. Yet he tried to make us grandchildren believe he was a poor man. He got into financial trouble with his grocery stores by giving credit to tobacco farmers. He was operating them in the red. Once he gave my mother the responsibility of getting one of the stores on the positive side and he would allow her to run the store. My mother was successful in turning the store around. When my grandfather saw that she could operate the store, he took it away from her and sold it. My mother once told me a story about her father and the law. He wasn’t faithful to her mother and he had a girlfriend who was from the seedier side of life. My mother told me she saw him leave the house one night with his shotgun. The next day this woman was found dead. My mother said her father was cleaning his shotgun the next day because it had been fired. My mother suspected her father of the dastardly deed because of the events the night before. My mother always said that her father was the murderer. My grandfather was a friend to the law in their community and they just ignored the possibility that he could have killed this woman.

Eventually, my mother left home to Lexington, Kentucky. She had been living in Irvine, Kentucky. My mother worked as a nanny and housekeeper for the wealthy people to support herself. When the Second World War broke out, she went to work in the ammunition factories. When she was a nanny, I don’t know if the people who employed her like her job. These children did not get affection from my mother. All she had to do was take care