openness engineered to guarantee concealment — "a black phobic dread of hiding…"

The family's communication pathology institutionalized as maternal care: Avril labors to perform an unsmothering trust precisely so that Hal will feel able to be open, and the performed openness is what lets him hide everything twenty meters underground. A mother with a phobic dread of secrecy manufactures the conditions of secrecy by working so hard to seem un-anxious about it. The channel is engineered to feel clear and to carry nothing true. Landed here on the channel mechanics; the family system is family-hamlet's. [sweep · shared-ground family-hamlet]