TRANSCRIPT
Now, in a previous video, I said everybody who has been abused in some way or other is going to turn around and replicate the abuse. Unfortunately, I didn’t go into very much detail, and one of the ways I was criticized is people said it, and they said it quite right, quite rightfully, quite correctly. Wait a second, there’s lots of people who have been sexually abused who don’t turn around and sexually abuse other people. So how can you possibly say that people who have been abused always turn around in some way and replicate it?
Well, the nuance that I left out is that what I have seen is everybody who gets abused in some way replicates abusive dynamics. But it doesn’t mean they always do it in a most concrete way. It doesn’t mean that what happened to them is exactly what they replicate.
One of the ways, one of the simplest ways that I’ve seen a lot of people who have been really badly abused, even sexually abused when they were children, how they grow up to replicate the abuse dynamics is they grow up to not respect themselves. They grow up to not love themselves. They grow up to not have boundaries. They can grow up to treat themselves really, really horribly, sometimes in very similar ways to the ways that they were harmed. They can grow up to see themselves as an object.
And I think that’s even known. It’s known in so many ways. Look at all the women who are prostitutes. It’s like every single prostitute I have ever worked with, horrible things happened to them in their childhoods. They didn’t go into this job because it was like, “Oh, I went into it because it was just something that I loved.” It’s like, no, pretty much what I’ve heard again and again and again is they are replicating abuse dynamics.
Also, a lot of people who were abused as children end up getting into abusive relationships with partners. And this can happen to men, and it can happen to women. So it’s not just that people who were abused, sexually abused or physically abused, become sexual abusers or become physical abusers toward other people. But they can act it out on themselves also.
Some people who were abused in different ways can act out their abuse onto other people, but in different ways. They can not be loving. They can not be caring. They can be verbally abusive even though they were physically abused. They can be very rejecting or very neglectful or very abandoning of people in their lives over whom they had power, whereas they never acted out physical or sexual abuse toward people, even though that’s what happened to them.
Basically, the bottom line that I see is if people don’t heal the traumas that happen to them in some way, they are going to act it out on themselves or others.
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