When Destructive Behavior Makes Biological Sense
Robin Marvel was never supposed to succeed. By the time she was a teenager she’d watched her mother be violently beaten by her father and a number of boyfriends, been sexually assaulted herself, moved haphazardly around the country, become an alcoholic, and gotten pregnant by her boyfriend.
“There was never any stability at all,” Marvel says of her life with her mother. “I was always homeless, we were always being evicted or moving, the lights would be off for weeks. We would get kicked out of domestic violence shelters because she would break the rules.”
Sometimes Marvel would come home to find cocaine and mounds of marijuana on the table. “My mom was extremely unstable. She would just wake us up in the middle of the night and say ‘We’re moving to Michigan.’ Then the same thing would happen in Michigan—we’d just move back. I missed the first three months of third grade because we were living in a station wagon in Sacramento.”
Having a daughter at 17 sobered Marvel temporarily, but in a few years she began drinking heavily again. “I wouldn’t see my daughter for days,” she says. “I was just being this really awful person. I maxed out credit cards. I had a car repossessed. I didn’t understand the responsibility of paying bills and keeping good credit. And I didn’t see the importance in it either. I didn’t see the value in being able to build a financially responsible life.”
Reflecting on her perspective at the time, Marvel says, “You have no control over life, it just kind of sucks. It was just kind of a normal thing for me to live in that horrible lifestyle.”
Studies in social science
