peanutbutterandbananasandwichs:
Ok, seriously though, where does this idea that Sam was made to feel ‘important’ in his childhood come from. Please point me to one piece of canon evidence that says that Sam felt this, that Sam was made to feel that he had value or that his wants and thoughts and feelings were valued and important, please just one.
This is a child who thought he was dirty and unclean at a very, very young age – it didn’t just come from no-where, Sam didn’t make this up out of his head and I don’t buy that he ‘sensed’ the demon blood, this was a feeling that came from the environment in which he was raised.
And when this is then paired with so he still values himself (because someone who says “I’m the least of you” really sounds like someone who thinks they have value!) and “he takes care of himself” – like, does he? Because I’m fairly certain Sam really, really doesn’t….
Just….I’m sorry, but stuff like this makes me want to vomit…
It’s complicated and messy, I think. There’s a sense in which you could say that Sam and Dean were both made to feel important in their childhood, but in opposite and in both cases destructive ways. Dean had a job – looking after his brother – he was also a participant in the family secrets and the family mission. That is, in a warped way, a kind of importance. But not only was he given a completely inappropriate level of responsibility for a young child, he was also instrumentalized. He came to feel that he was his job, that he was “Daddy’s blunt instrument” in ways that feed into both his later self-identification as a depersonalized killer and the ways his relationship with Sam get twisted by defining Sam as his job rather than an equal and autonomous person. (ETA: and what happened with Lisa and Ben shows that this isn’t just a problem that obtains in his relationship with Sam; he extends the internalized model to familial relationships formed in adulthood.)
As for Sam, I think, again in a warped way, being the object of ‘protection’ (at this point in SPN I can’t seem to type that word without scare quotes) is a kind of importance in the family structure, but more destructive than constructive for self-worth. Sacrifice is an apt later illustration of that pattern: trying to affirm someone’s worth with “I do all these things of which you are the object” at once positions them at the center of something and denies their intrinsic value. And the sense of unclean otherness, whether it came from some perception of demon blood or from John’s suspicions about Sam’s place in the supernatural drama surrounding the family (I don’t think it makes a huge difference which it is, and it can be both; SPN is fantasy, its metaphors are literalized) also stages Sam as a central figure, but being the dangerous one or the freak (the one who in canon time becomes the one who by John’s rules might have to be put down) isn’t exactly an affirming importance.
I do think that Dean’s mediating position in the family structure was real, and that it did involve an element of being a buffer between Sam and John. The thing about that structure, though, is that Dean was also a conductor and mediator of the abusive structures of the family. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT SOMETHING FOR WHICH DEAN SHOULD BE BLAMED; HE WAS A CHILD, IT WAS ABUSE OF HIM AS WELL AS OF SAM. But when he was thrust into the position of caretaker, while it did mean that Sam had someone giving him care, it also meant that the care Sam was getting was both only that which a child could provide and only that which a child whose primary model of parenting was John Winchester could provide. It’s an uncomfortable truth that child!Dean’s caretaking often echoes John’s. John abandons his kids; Dean leaves Sam alone (in the Something Wicked flashback, in the AVSC flashback, in the pattern of dropping him off at Plucky’s). Dean was a participant in gaslighting Sam about the truth of his life. (Again, not something for which Dean, a child, is ethically accountable, but it’s still a part of Sam’s formative experience.) Kid!Dean gets angry and physical with kid!Sam when Sam mentions Mary in the AVSC flashback. And there’s a lot of evidence (Bugs, for example) that Dean backed up rather than challenging John’s behavior to Sam. The ways in which Dean has become more and more John-like in many ways in his dealings with Sam in canon time are deeply rooted in their childhood patterns.
I would say that Sam developed some impulses of healthy self-care, though he also has rifts of catastrophic lack of self-worth and self-destruction. Being positioned as the outsider from whom secrets were kept within the family undermined him in a lot of ways (and it’s significant that his story both within and beyond the family often echoes the motif of having his sense of reality radically compromised), but it did also give him a kind of perspective and an impulse to question and investigate that stood him in good stead in striking out from the family pattern in healthy ways, though undertows within and without are always pulling him back. But I wouldn’t say that makes him lucky. People can get certain strengths from traumatic experience (Dean as well as Sam; Dean would never have survived purgatory without that ability to form small, cohesive us-against-the-world bondings that is very much related to the John Winchester model of family), but trauma is still a fundamentally destructive thing.
Yes! I agree, wholeheartedly. And long ago I agreed in many, many, many words. 😛
Hearseeno 