As some of you know, my apartment is right on the teetering edge of the downtown east side, which apparently is Canada’s poorest postal code. My block is actually the western border of the DTES on its southern tip: on my side of the block, you almost never see the down and outers. But on the other side of my block, which puts you on Main Street, it’s all about the DTES residents. There are single room occupancy hotels, slimy bars, a flourishing drug trade, everything. So I have had plenty of opportunities to see and think about homelesness and the cluster of problems that accompanies it. I can’t talk about a solution to the problem without explaining something of how I understand why the problem exists, so that’s what this post will mainly be about. What follows is highly summarized, but I hope to at least impart the flavour of this huge body of research.
First we need to decide how we define the homeless. I actually include not just people sleeping on the streets but the people living in abject poverty in the shitty, rodent and bug infested single room occupancy hotels in the DTES. They are barely a step above literal homelessness and seem to share a lot of the problems of the actual homeless: interpersonal, intrapersonal, substance abuse and dependence, and so on. And, the people with an SRO can easily slide into homelessness. There are probably some things that set the long term homeless folks apart, but I don’t know them, and they are all nearly equally filthy and miserable looking, so I think we can safely consider them as a group.
Developmental psychology and the psychology of trauma have a lot to teach us about why people born in the DTES are so very, very fucked right from birth. We can begin at the basic level of biology with the physical health of the mother and whether she uses substances including alcohol (which can be devastating to the fetus, at thresholds which are currently uncertain). I don’t know a lot about this side of things other than to say if your very physical self is compromised early because your fetal vessel was unhealthy, that’s bad. And ask yourself, what does it say for the mother’s ability to mother, considering that her poor health represents basic failures to perform self care skills and make realistic choices in furtherance of an superordinate goal (the developing fetus’s health)? This is a social issue also, as ill health and drug use are linked to poverty and exploitation in a mutually reinforcing cycle.
So our first real problem is that we begin with damaged adults. This is where damaged children come from. Contrary to what the post-Freudian apologists would have us believe, parenting actually has a great deal to do with how kids turn out. It’s not everything, but it’s huge, massive, enormously important. (This is one reason I am scared to be a parent - there’s a lot to fuck up!) Indigent people don’t come from nowhere. In Canada, where we are not torn by civil war or invasion, we have to look to psychology and sociology to tell us where we get these people. I know next to nothing about sociology so I will restrict myself mainly to psychology.
(Please note that we here at BV are not in the business of blaming victims. For every bad parent in the DTES there is surely a tragic and devastating story of trauma and loss to explain it. But that doesn’t change the reality of the situation, which is, in this example, bad mothering. The baby doesn’t care if mother is inadequate out of malice or inability. Good intentions do not raise up healthy children, good acts do.)
We move next to infant care and attachment - and attachment in this case doesn’t mean the fuzzy, bonding experience, but rather the evolutionarily crucial set of behaviours whereby the infant can rely on a sensitive and appropriate response from the primary caregiver when he experiences pain, sickness, or fear. If the primary caregiver, usually the mother, is unable to selflessly and sensitively respond to her infant’s distressing needs (for alleviance of distress due to hunger and other bodily needs, comfort when ill or in pain, and reassurance when afraid), he may develop an insecure or disorganized attachment by the time he is one year old. Disorganized attachment in particular predicts very poor social and emotional/interpersonal outcomes, a finding which is stable across the lifespan. Poor attachment style has a very high rate of intergenerational transmission; disorganized babies become disorganizing parents who have disorganized infants of their own. (Disorganized refers to the behaviours the infant manifests when his attachment system is activated by fear or pain - he wants to approach the mother because she is his source of comfort, but she is also a source of fear and pain, so he does not know what do to. He has no systematic, organized method of approach to her, and because of the conflicting emotions toward her will behave very strangely at the time of activation.)
Learning theory is instructive here too. Children learn through a variety of methods: One example is operant conditioning, where rewards and punishment are used to shape behaviour. Returning to our damaged parent, what sorts of lessons will she impart to her child through reward? It may be that her own needs are so pressing that she cannot set them aside and, without conscious intention, she teaches her child that he will be rewarded when he takes care of Mommy’s needs rather than his own. She may punish him for developmentally appropriate behaviours because she herself didn’t have good parenting and doesn’t know what it looks like, what healthy childhood looks like. Mother passes on lessons she has learned because she literally has nothing else to give. And now these lessons belong to the child.
Children also imitate people who are important to them. This is a very deep, unconscious internalization. When they imitate they aren’t acting, they’re taking in, assimilating, and then replicating what they learn. Children also internalize important people’s roles as a sort of template which informs later interactions with people in that role. They will grow up and respond to people in those roles as if they fit the internal template (whether they do or not). If as a child I learn that fathers are violent and capricious and untrustworthy, I may react with inapprorpriate terror and suspicion to male authority figures in adulthood. When children grow up in a household with severely damaged adults (such as the kind that populate the DTES), what they internalize can be dire indeed.
Psychodynamically, we can talk about ego defenses that are adaptive during childhood becoming entrenched and part of the personality, but then it turns out they aren’t so adaptive during adulthood. Dissociating during childhood sexual abuse is a survival skill - dissociating during a stressful job interview is not. But how do you jettison the defense, which by its very nature is unconscious so you don’t know you’re using it?
Recall our internal template of the violent father: it may be that though the adult experiences authority figures as terrifying, he cannot tolerate that powerful and frightening emotion and so defends against it, maybe by devaluing. So the terror is hidden (but still present) and all we see is someone who reacts to authority figures (like employers, doctors, and social workers) with great disdain and arrogance. He looks like a major jackass who, in defiance of all logic, defeats himself seemingly out of pure spite. But the truth is that really, deep inside, what you’re dealing with is a terrified child. Think of a time in your life, if you have one, when you experienced true terror. Could you have logicked your way into behaving differently than you did at that time? Why would expect differently from our hypothetical adult?
What we’re talking about is the entire field of psychology: nature and genesis of personality, self capacities of all sorts, and I guess the point I’m trying to make is this: I have a sense of what sorts of backgrounds lead to homelessness, which is nothing if not a significant failure to get along in this modern world. If you are long term homeless, you probably don’t have skills the rest of us do, such as getting along interpersonally in an adaptive manner. This failure alerts us to the existence of significant trauma in the person’s background, probably going back to infancy. Like good parenting, healthy interactions don’t spring from the void; much of how we interact and conceive of others comes from our earliest years. And we have to overlay society-level problems like the incredible difficulty individuals face when trying to escape poverty and its attendant evils. Combine social oppression with deep psychological damage and you get the downtown east side.
As for how to solve the problem, I have no good ideas. It’s such a huge problem. It requires massive social change but that is merely necessary, not sufficient. We still have a legion of people carrying elephants of intrapsychic damage and that won’t just go away when they get a safe apartment, healthy food, a job, and access to services.
Also, consider that the more “normal” segments of our society regularly produce individuals who cannot cope successfully and move to the DTES, or places like it, and fall into that lifestyle (which can include homelessness). There don’t seem to be a lot of kids down there, but the supply of adults doesn’t run out. This tells us that the problem doesn’t spring just from the DTES itself - even if we rounded up all the people there and dropped them into the ocean, more would take their place. The trick ending of this entry is that the damaged and damaging parents in question might be your next door neighbour. Their damage might have such a form that they are able to get along to a degree in so-called “normal” life - maybe they have a job, a spouse, a mortgage. But the damage sits in other places psychically and will likely be passed in some form to their child. Perhaps the child won’t have quite the same suite of coping mechanisms they do, and he or she will end up sliding through substance dependence into homelessness.
And how do we fix that?
