In an earlier paper, I highlighted the developmental line that produces a healthy adult heterosexual submissive female. I highlighted the role of temperament and environment and how they interact to influence the personality development of girls destined to have a submissive orientation in adulthood. In doing so, I alluded to problems in development that can occur, and in this paper, will expand on those.
There is a concept in the literature of temperament called "goodness of fit." This refers to the interactions between a child and her family of origin. When a child's temperament is found to be "good" by her family, and her developmental challenges are handled sensitively and well, development proceeds more smoothly than not. A novelty-seeking, sensation-seeking, socially expressive, high energy child will be seen as "good" in a family of high-energy, adventurous people. The same child in a low energy, novelty-avoiding, socially limited family will stick out like a sore thumb and irritate her parents and overwhelm them with her energy.
Similarly, a child who has an aversion to novelty, is slow to warm up, and takes little intensity of stimulation to react to will be "out of sync" in a family of high energy, novelty seeking extroverts. No matter how well meaning they may be, they won't "feel with" their very different child. They won't emotionally understand what the world is like for her, and why she has so much trouble with things the rest of the family finds easy and satisfying. There is a poor temperamental "fit".
It isn't so much what the temperamental characteristics are, it's the goodness of fit between parent and child. A similarly constituted child may fare very differently in two different environments, one more and one less well suited for her particular way of being.
This isn't to say that poorness of fit dooms the child to spend her adult life on some psychoanalyst's couch, but it does mean that the parent has to work that much harder to stay in empathic touch with his or her poorly fit child. And that during times of stress, their capacity to do so will be sorely strained.
In a situation of poorness of fit, with enough environmental stresses such as divorce, financial stress, or illness, it is inevitable that the child will suffer.
Let's imagine then a child with the essential temperamental trait of social responsiveness, that common trait in all submissives. That child that picks up subtle tensions, is vulnerable to criticism and praise, and develops a "people-pleasing" nature.
If such a child has other temperamental traits that create a poor fit between her and her parents, she is going to be mightily affected by a sense of "wrongness", guilt, shame, and anger, because no matter how hard she tries, she can't be what is "easy" for her parents, and she is exquisitely aware of being difficult for them. Or if a marginal or even good fit between parent and child is strained by unpredictable and overwhelming trauma which renders the parent less than fully available to the child, the child will still be mightily affected. She will still come to experience those painful emotional states of being wrong, bad, unacceptable, because she is so attuned to parental distress, and so likely to squash her anxieties and angers in order to "not make trouble". What happens then, because such a child is still a child, her attempts to take care of, to cure, her parents will inevitably shortchange her development. Something very common in the backgrounds of submissive women is a history of having, or feeling, overwhelmingly responsible for herself, and her significant others. You can see where that arises: in the child so attuned to the emotional states of others, a child who temperamentally is a people-pleaser, a child who too easily is used inappropriately because she does try so hard to be good, such a child feels the burden of responsibility for making others better.
You have a situation in which a child has no "psychological skin" so to speak; who reacts intensely to the emotions of others, and internalizes the difficulties she experiences with others. Because she is so sensitive to interpersonal nuance, and is so often not validated by her environment, nor taught how to manage her emotions, she develops real problems adapting.
Whereas an adequate, relatively stable early environment in a family with "goodness of fit" will likely give rise to the healthy adult submissive, an inadequate, unstable early environment with "poor fit" will give rise to a more or less troubled adult.
It is my opinion that this last group tends to be troubled by the spectrum of personality disorders in the cluster defined as borderline, narcissistic or histrionic personality disorder. Now, not every woman who has borderline, narcissistic or histrionic personality disorder is also a submissive; this is a critical point. I believe that some submissives do exhibit the life problems that lead to being diagnosed with those disorders. But I believe there are two separate populations, and two developmental lines to account for it.
IF a child with the temperamental axis involving intense, selective attention to social interaction is faced with an upbringing in an extremely poorly fit environment, with parents so far different in temperament, that they almost cannot empathize at all with their child's inner experience, that child is vulnerable to developing submissively, that is, with a core trait of being exquisitely sensitive to the moods of others, and a personality disorder. The latter developing because of the repeated failure to actually be able to please her parents with her "essential self". She grows to feel herself nasty, bad, destructive, unloved, and each misunderstanding damages her more and more. She feels intense rage at her psychological mistreatment, and intense shame at feeling the rage, and black despair of ever being good enough.
If a child without the temperament with the core submissive traits is born into such an extreme mismatch of temperament with her parents, she will still have to deal psychologically and developmentally with the experience of not being empathetically understood, of not fitting in with her family, and so on. But because her nature, unlike the submissive, is not so vulnerable to the interpersonal nuance, she is less likely to wind up quite as damaged. She may well have a personality disorder, but it often takes more than just poorness of fit to damage her that much. It may take outright abuse, and a host of other environmental factors other than poor temperamental fit. I am saying here, that the submissive child is more vulnerable to damage by poorness of fit by virtue of her interpersonal sensitivity and need to please, as well as more vulnerable to trauma.
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