TRANSCRIPT
I was recently sitting with a group of elderly people, elderly men, and they were joking about having been hit by their parents, predominantly by their fathers when they were children. And they were laughing about it. Oh yeah, he used to smack me around. He used to wallop me in the face. Blah blah blah blah blah. I was such a bad kid. I was so rude. I was so obnoxious. He had to get me into line. Haha. And it was interesting to watch them, to see how disconnected they were from the feelings of their childhood.
Now, what I find interesting also is I wasn’t alone in being an observer of this disturbing conversation because I was with another friend who knew some of them. He said, “What’s interesting is a number of those guys actually hit their own children when they were younger parents. They passed on what had been done to them to their own children. A couple of them have children who actually extremely dislike them. Yet, these older guys made no connection between what had happened to them and their own behavior as parents and their children’s dislike of them.”
Now, now to shift a little bit, to pull back, I think of myself having observed [clears throat] children over many, many decades of life. And I’m sorry to say, but I have been an observer, a witness many times of people hitting children. I’ve even made some videos about witnessing this. And what I have seen every single time children get hit by their parents or perhaps by some other relative is those children are devastated, emotionally devastated. They die inside. They’re sad. They’re brokenhearted. Sometimes they’re furious. They’re in deep emotional pain, physical pain often, too. They’re not laughing about it. They’re not happy about it. They don’t find any humor in it at all.
And then there’s the question of whether or not their parents are helping them in any way. Like these older guys were saying, “Oh, my dad got me into line. He straightened me out.” Now, what I’ve seen is these children, none of them were doing anything that deserved to get hit. Can a child do anything to really deserve to be hit? I do not believe so. In fact, I know it’s not true.
What I’ve seen usually is to some degree or other, these children were annoying their parents. Their parents or their relative was in some sort of bad mood, was grumpy, woke up on the wrong side of bed, was feeling overwhelmed, and knew it, realized it, that they could just act out, act out their own unconscious, buried rage, their own buried sadness, frustrations, their own histories on their children or on these young relatives with impunity. There would be no negative consequence for their behavior. They could get away with it, so they were going to do it. They’re bullies, basically.
Isn’t it inherently bullying for a very large person to hit a vulnerable, very small person when that little small person cannot fight back? Yet, what is the process for that child potentially to grow up and end up defending the adult who hit him or her, defending the parent who hit him? Well, what I’ve seen again and again is children are so defenseless and so powerless that it works to their advantage, to the advantage of their survival and their safety, to psychologically side with their abuser, side with the people in power and find some psychological trick by which they can defend their abuser and sell their own selves out.
And so they do the easiest thing that human beings can do with our huge brains and our huge ability to have psychological defense mechanisms. We blame ourself. It must be our fault. It must be me. I was misbehaving. I was doing something bad. They were doing this abusive bullying behavior for my own good. They were protecting me. They were helping me. They were shaping me. They were guiding me. And yet it’s not true. It’s not true even if all of society or a specific part of society says it is true. Even if the law says it is allowed and legal and even good and helpful. Even if religions say it is good and allowed and helpful, even if psychology experts say it is allowed and helpful.
I made a whole video about Jordan Peterson talking about hitting children when they are misbehaving [snorts] to teach them the right way, to get them into line. The devastation that the child feels is healthy. It is a healthy reaction to the traumatic experience of being physically attacked by someone, physically harmed, pained by someone.
And then there’s the other question about the children who get hit, who say, “Oh, it was my fault. I was a bad kid. I was acting out. I was being rude. I was being sassy.” Whatever it is that the child, the adult says that their past child was being. What I’ve seen a lot of times is children who are neglected, who are abused in any number of ways, can misbehave, and their misbehavior is an expression of their pain. Often they have been abused and neglected by their parents, by the very people who later are hitting them to bring them into line.
It’s a snowballing effect. The parents abuse the children, neglect the children, do all sorts of different things to the children. The children express their rage, their sadness, their frustration, their confusion, their anger, their sadness in ways that their parents, that is their abusers, again cannot tolerate. So the parents attack them more to bring them into line.
And what does this say about our world at large? Well, it doesn’t just snowball in someone’s own personal life because, as I saw with these older men, it snowballs generation to generation. Hurt people hurt people. Abused people abuse people. Hurt people hurt people if they don’t figure out how they are hurt. If they don’t figure out how to heal from their hurt, if they don’t grieve their wounds, if they don’t side with the child they once were and have compassion for that child, if they don’t do that, how can they have compassion for other children?
I think about another one. Criminals. People who sometimes do horrible and terrible things to other people and then society completely writes them off and throws them in a cage and says we don’t care about them. Even puts them to death. Never asks why did these criminal people do the terrible things that they did? How could they do the terrible things that they did? What were their childhoods like? We live in a society where people don’t care much about that. People aren’t really interested in psychology much.
Many psychologists, people who study psychology often are not even interested in childhood trauma. Often psychologists and the psychology field in general is more interested in rats and pigeons and cognitive behavioral therapy and this type of therapy and this therapy with this name. All these different fancy names that are given acronyms and schools of thought that don’t look at the effect of child abuse on human beings. Don’t look at the effect of mistreatment on the later life of children. Certainly don’t look at its effect on society. How a million people put together who have all been treated this way one degree or other have a collective rage that can be acted out on another country, another religion, another nationality, on children in general, on the laws of their own country, on spouses. The list can go on and on.
So, I just think of me sitting with this group of men, listening to them joke about how they were all abused for their own good and me sitting silently because I knew that if I spoke up and said anything remotely resembling what I am sharing now, Heaven forbid if I had defended these old men, the child within them, if I had defended the little child they once were, they would have been offended. They would have been angry at me. They would have alienated me, rejected me because they lost themselves.
When people have such twisted minds that they side with their abusers, where they will defend their abusers to the nth degree and defend the abusers that they became because they so sided with their own abusers, they have no mental bandwidth to listen to compassion for the little children they once were. They have no compassion for someone who sides with their buried sadness, their buried rage, their buried despair and feelings of rejection. They have become zombies. They have become the living dead. And the process of waking up, of knowing their history, thinking about their history, putting their history in an accurate perspective, feeling their feelings toward their abusers, feeling their…
Guilt and shame toward themselves for their own horrible behavior, empathizing with their children. Often children who they now put down. Ah, they were bad kids. They’re snotty. They’re rejecting. They have no sense of filial piety. They don’t love their parents. They’re just selfish. They’re narcissistic. They think about themselves. Sorting it out is beyond them.
Could they potentially sort it out? Could they potentially make sense of their history? Yes. Because I believe anybody can make sense of their history given the right environment. But that’s the problem. We live in a world that for so many people, it’s the absolutely wrong environment.
And then I think about myself, having been that abused child once, slapped around by my dad, humiliated by him, being a victim of his rage from his own abusive childhood. Having a mother who did nothing to stop him. A mother who abused me in her own ways. Took advantage of my father’s abuse of me to get me to pay more attention to her.
I spent decades sorting [snorts] this out. Still am to some degree. Sorting out how I felt as a child. Sorting out who my parents were, how I really felt about them, needing to take long, long spaces of distance even as a young man away from them to be able to gain perspective on myself and recalling how they hated me for it, despised me for it, how no one in my family liked me for it.
I was undoing the patterns of the generations and remembering the despair I felt not just from recalling how I felt once upon a time but as an adult being rejected. It is so painful. So I can understand why so many people wouldn’t look, couldn’t look, won’t look, don’t want to remember, and by extension can’t empathize with children.
And yet so often these are the very people in our world who have children and think they are great parents and are delusional. I give credit to anyone who can look at their childhood, who has the strength to do it, who has the pain tolerance to bring up those ancient feelings, side with the person who was unsided with, who can call out the bullies and face the rejection of society.
Now decades later. And will society ever change? Will society ever side with the children for real? I don’t know. I don’t know if any society really ever will. Some societies make little steps outlawing child abuse, physical child attacking in this way and that.
And I’ve been in some of these countries where you can’t hit your kids legally. But I see some of these parents still neglecting their children in all sorts of emotional ways and verbally assaulting their kids in different ways. There’s all sorts of different ways that parents can harm their children deeply without ever putting their hands on them.
I still think it’s a step in the right direction where physical attacks on children are outlawed. But I still see we have such, such, such a long way to go.
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