Trigger warning : The following article contains mentions of Parental Abuse and Trauma.
We are gonna talk about parents. Again. And, before I blow your minds with revelations, a kind of synopsis:
- All the happy kids who think their parents are great and amazing and the best; this article will offer you some perspective and I hate to be the other woman who would maybe ruin your relationship with them but nevertheless, you’ll surely get something to think about.
- All the happy kids who think their parents are great and amazing and the best and they actually are; this article will help you to not invalidate other’s experiences because you’ve never been through the same struggle.
- All the kids who understand the pattern, who kind of already know where this article is headed, who are not in the best of relationships (or any kind of relationship) with their parents; trigger warnings for you. This article is an invitation for you all to start a cult where we are kind to each other and understand each other’s experiences and bond over our shared trauma.
Important Note: While this article talks about abusive households, it does not include sexually abusive households since that would require a separate, more serious, and elaborate discussion.
Okay so, where do we start. This is going to be a lot so I don’t know, take care? Proceed with caution? This can and will trigger childhood trauma.
Parents are supposed to be this sacred thing, right? They supposedly build you as a person, teach you good stuff and they support you and other happy things that one writes in those articles about ‘my family’. Family is the only exposure you get in your early years—the years that lay the foundations. So, you get to know about love from your parents, about care and about support, your attachment style develops, and all the other things that one is supposed to know and develop.
But usually so happens that all of this pretty, healthy stuff that you’re supposed to receive from your parents is not there. What also usually happens is that you have the exact opposite of all this pretty, healthy stuff. In extremes cases, this impacts the person in ways that may turn irreversible, others have to work very very hard to recognize the patterns and not destroy themselves and the people around them, in other cases it prompts us to publicly expose ourselves by writing such articles for the college blog.
The most horrendous part of this entire dynamics is that many people don’t realize that there are better people, better ways. They don’t realize that beating your kid and then leaving them alone to cry is a wrong, wrong horrible method to discipline your child. They don’t realize that there are parents out there somewhere who care in a way that doesn’t leave their kids bruised for days. There are parents who don’t gaslight you, who don’t pick apart pieces of you that you are desperately trying to preserve. Parents who don’t take out their frustrations on their children. Parents who are aware that the kid in front of them is human, who will think and who will question and not a project work that they need to present in a competition for a perfect ten.
They believe if they don’t hit their children, they are going to be ‘nazuk’. But guess what?!! Kids are meant to be nazuk. It’s almost like kids are actually kids and not a dump yard for the projections of the parent’s failures and insecurities. They don’t need to have narrow perceptions of “bohot bure hote hai log aur zindagi” at ten.
Studies and reports[1] across the world are telling parents each year that they should NOT physically/verbally assault their children. It encourages anti-social behaviour, births anxiety, causes trust and anger issues, and ruins the parent-child relationships, but people just won’t stop. And when you think about it, slapping your kid say for lying, is way easier and less time-consuming than patiently sitting with them and asking for the reason they lied and solving out those issues. The latter requires patience, kindness, and brains to get to know the psychology of the child, the former requires absolutely nothing. Maybe their hand will tingle with the sensations of hurting their own kid. Maybe not. And when the core issue is not solved, the child will continue lying, maybe not in front of the parents, but they will. And in such circumstances, to get the desired result, parents increase the force and the frequency of physical abuse, not realizing that this method will not work. This is what makes this method of parenting even more traumatizing for the child.
Traumatizing kids is normalized to such a great extent that people take pride in counting the things their parents used to hit them with. In casual conversations about childhood, people laugh recalling “there cannot be a single material that my father has not hit me with”, conversations on WhatsApp groups about who got hit by what after the results, teachers in classrooms saying “chittar padne zaruri hai”, “todha bohot toh banta hai”, and I mean what would it take for you to get out of this hallucination? What would it take for you to acknowledge those bruises for what they represent?
They go ahead and justify it, say it made them stronger. But what it actually did is, it made them mean, unsympathetic, insensitive to their own selves. It robbed them of their childhood and pushed them into the adult world where they think it is justified to direct hate at other people because it was directed upon them. And I feel bad for such people. Less because they don’t recognize the patterns and the behaviors and have a very minuscule amount of self-awareness; more because they are going to pass on the same trauma to their kids that their parents passed on to them and the endless cycle of agony would go on until someone breaks it. Or not.
To break this cycle of intergenerational trauma, it is necessary for us to be in touch with our feelings, to know ourselves, and our surroundings. To not drag every other person in our mess as soon as we come in contact with them. To know yourself and to heal yourself is extremely important. It can start today; it can start tomorrow but it is a necessity that it starts. It is a necessity to recognize the patterns and once you do, you can watch it play havoc in your daily life and your relationships with other people and hopefully do something about it then.
Since ours is a society that pushes a very collectivistic way of life, one whose roots are based on worshipping the elders, any and every abuse by parents gets covered under the garb of “but they care”.
But do they?
Do they care in a way we need them to, want them to? If they do, why is there an ever-growing army of broken children? If they do, why is there a constant want to escape them? If they do, why then, they can single-handedly be blamed for ruining so many lives?
Physically/verbally assaulting kids and then showering them with ‘affection’ is a perfect breeding ground for abusive relationships. Looking for constant reassurance and validation from your partner because your parents never made you feel enough. Where does one’s perception of themselves stand when there was the constant “you deserve this, this is necessary”? Staying in toxic relationships because sometimes you receive just a tiny bit of affection and God are you hungry. Getting scared whenever people raise their voice. Being in a constant state of hyper-vigilance. Growing up hating yourself and everything that you do. Becoming your own parents. Being the perpetrators of sibling abuse. And NO. Not sibling rivalry. Sibling abuse i.e., treating your siblings with hatred, directing the abuse that you received from your parents onto them with many younger siblings associating violence and danger with their older siblings. Can’t ask for help from people, develops such rigid boundaries that you can’t let anyone in without degrading them first. Passing on the trauma you get from your parents to people who actually care. Tell me where do I stop. The list can go on and on and on.
In a family system such as ours where strict obedience is favored more than the sanity of children, it becomes difficult to know better. Everyone in such a family is pledging their devotion by conforming to the rules, everyone in the family is looking down upon those who dare to think differently. Everyone in the family is actively preventing children to know different, to know better by enforcing forms of social control. In such an environment, not enough people are telling us that it is important to break this conformity, that it is necessary to NOT worship our elders to the point where it becomes impossible for us to think of any different ways than those they’ve been feeding us.
Not enough people in this system are telling us that it is okay to cut off ties with our ‘families’. Not enough people are telling us that children have no obligation to remain in soul-sucking families and pretend everything is okay at the cost of their own selves. We don’t owe anything to our parents just because they gave birth to us. We don’t owe anything to them for being a child and having needs. Devotion, respect, and love are meant to be earned, they need to be built over time with mutual care and affection. And if they can’t provide us with that, can’t provide a healthy childhood, if they left us as a breeding ground for trauma and think we owe them our allegiance because they fed us, then food can be earned and trauma is better left behind along with the people inflicting it.
We need to know that love is not supposed to hurt. If it is hurting so much emotionally, physically, it is not love.
It is abuse.
And abuse can never be justified. Whether it is coming from a place of care or affection or concern or whatever excuses are brought up.
It is abuse and it needs to be stopped.
To heal, we need to be kind to ourselves. “Subject yourself to the power of your compassion until it becomes your new normal”. I know it takes privilege, time, triggers, and a lot of agonies to get to know about the pattern and then start the healing, but begin somewhere. Introspection and kindness to one’s own self have to come from within.
Grow. Assemble those broken pieces and heal them. After everything is said and done, at the end of it all, it’s all we have. Ourselves and our sanity. Or the lack thereof.
And be kind to the kids around you. Especially those who are always getting in trouble. Tell them, show them that the world is a good place with good people in it. Show them there are better things and better ways. Show them love exists and it is theirs too to have.
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Some resources, videos and articles for a start, for better understanding the concept, knowing the patterns and working on them:
- Does Every Parent Deserve A Child?
- Your narcissistic family tells you this…
- My 7 Types Of Toxic Family Systems
- The Adult and the Inner Child – Episode 1
- Childhood Trauma And Its Effect On Adults
- How Did Your Parents Mess You Up?
- The Lives Of The Adults Subjected To Parental Abuse As Kids
This article has been written by Manvi, Ist year
