TRANSCRIPT
Something I often hear in society is people going to extreme lengths to defend bad parents. The reason this comes up for me is yesterday I was having a conversation with someone I’ve known for a while, and I was telling him about someone else who I know who has two children, who really is an awful parent, screwing these children up in terrible ways. I was just saying how disappointing this is and how terrible it is for the children.
This person, this friend of mine that I was talking to yesterday, said, “Well, you have to realize though that without this parent, maybe, okay, maybe they’re terrible or whatever, without them these children would not even exist. Point being, you can’t criticize that parent too much because at least they gave these children the gift of life.” I was thinking, “Oh, what kind of a defense is that?” I’m thinking then, “Well, if someone rapes their children, should you let them off the hook? Well, because they did at least give this child the gift of life, you can’t hold that much against them?” Or people who kill their children. I mean, you see that in the news sometimes. People who kill their children who are one or two or three years old. Well, you know, okay, they killed their child, but well, at least that child got to live for three years because they did create that child. So you can only hold so much against them. That seems to be kind of the attitude that this person had yesterday when I was talking. It’s sort of this attitude that really just lets parents off the hook for their bad behavior.
The interesting thing, ironically, is this person I was talking to yesterday has children of his own, and from what I’ve observed, he is not so good of a parent. I think in that way there is kind of a fraternity of parents, kind of like a cult of parents that many, many, many parents, most parents in a way, are part of. If you challenge one parent, a challenge against one parent in a way is a challenge against all of them because so many parents have a lot of bad behavior. I think a lot of parents rationalize their own bad behavior in their mind by saying, “Well, okay,” and this is an unconscious process a lot of the time, “they say, yeah, I did some bad things to my child, but I did give this child life, so this allows me to do some bad things. I have some money in the bank with my child because without me this child would never ever have existed.”
I think my own parents did this too. This in a lot of ways is how they rationalize their traumatizing behavior toward me, their betraying behavior, their neglectful behavior, by saying, “Well, yeah, we made some mistakes with Daniel, but we gave him life, so that equals everything out. No matter how bad we were, if it wasn’t for us, Daniel would not exist. Therefore, he always owes us something. We own him, therefore he owes us.” It’s almost like I was a slave in their system, and until I bought my freedom, they would always own me. The problem is there was a setup that no matter what I did, I would never really, on that deep psychological level, that deep level of psychological ownership, I would never be able to buy my freedom. In their mind, they would always at some level think they owned me because they created me.
Then I think back to a few years earlier, five, six, seven years ago, I was having a conversation along these lines with a different friend of mine who is a parent, a parent of two children, children who have some problems, problems related by and large to the way that she treated her children when they were young. She and her ex-husband, they fought horribly in front of the children, with each other. They fought toward the children. They violated and betrayed the children in all sorts of ways, this being directly responsible for the children’s lives. Well, this is the backdrop of the person I was having this conversation with, and I wasn’t even criticizing her parenting of her children. Instead, I was saying why I think most parents, most people, are just too traumatized and too screwed up to really be ready in any healthy way to have children. They’ll just screw up their children, and it’s really not fair for the children.
This woman said to me, and this is why I bring this up, she said to me, she personalized it. First of all, I wasn’t even criticizing her, but I guess it did apply to her. I wasn’t even thinking that, but what she said to me is, “Are you saying that my children shouldn’t exist? You’re saying that because maybe I did some bad things to my children that they should never have existed in the first place? My children are wonderful boys, and here you are saying they shouldn’t exist.” I thought, “Wow, how a person, a person incidentally who is very sophisticated, was able to turn around my argument and make it out to be like an attack, not only on her but on her sons, by saying effectively, even though I wasn’t personalizing it toward her.” But let’s say I had been. Let’s say I had said to her, “You know, you had no business having children because you were so traumatizing of them. You caused them such absolute misery in their childhoods, such trauma, such pain that they had to shut down, that they had to lose whole parts of themselves, that they had to grow up to become dysfunctional people who really had a lot of problems. Maybe it would have been better if you had done some more healing before you had children.” She turned it around that I was attacking the very existence of her children and saying, “Oh, that I was saying that they shouldn’t exist.” It was confusing to know how to answer that.
What was I supposed to say when she said that? This to me reminded me in a way of trying to argue with my own mother, who was very, very screwed up and turned everything around as an attack on her, my dad too. I would say, “You know, you shouldn’t have treated me that way. You betrayed me in lots of ways.” That made my parents feel kind of bad, and then they turned it around and said, “You’re making me feel bad, therefore you’re a bad person, Daniel. You’re harming me.” I didn’t harm you; you harmed me. It’s like very confusing to know how to argue with somebody like that. But what is my argument against this woman when she said, “You’re saying my boys should never have existed,” and I don’t like that argument?
Well, what I would say is actually, no, my real thought on that is any child who is created, any child who is born, has a right to exist. Once they’ve been created, once they’re born, once they’re living their lives, every baby, every young child, they have a right to exist no matter how dysfunctional and horrible their parents are. Maybe one parent is out of the picture. Maybe the children have been given away for adoption and are being raised by complete strangers. Every child has a right to exist, and they deserve to have all their needs met and all the love and all the nurturance and caring and respect that every human being deserves. Every child has that as their fundamental right of existence.
But often I think our world, and that child, they would be so much better if their parents had grown up first. And for parents who never ever grow at all, so many people in the world I see have no commitment to growing. In fact, often they have children to avoid themselves, to avoid their healing, to avoid their growth, to avoid their self-knowledge, to avoid maturing, grieving from their own childhood traumas. It’s like instead of doing the inner work to heal, they instead say, “Tag, you’re it.” They transfer all their unresolved material onto their children. I say so much better that they not have children and instead do their healing work within. And from what I’ve seen is when I’ve talked about that with a lot of people who are parents over the years, what I find by and large is a lot of people, a lot of parents, just don’t want to hear that, don’t want to apply that to themselves because for many of them it feels like it’s just too late.
Too overwhelming. They’ve committed too much damage on other people to really look within and begin to face the horror that they acted out. The horror that was done to them in their own childhoods that they have turned around and replicated on others. So it’s much easier to rationalize their bad behavior with the strange arguments that I have heard over and over.