Though the lasting psychological
consequences of the extreme conditions in these homes results in a
loss of healthy perspective for the survivors, based on the histories
of the children who are sent to IFB reform homes, many of the homes
wherein they were raised laid the foundations for unhealthy thinking
before those children ever made it to these facilities. I believe
that to fully heal
from the abuse experience, the survivor must look deeper into
their history to find the roots of the patterns that were intensified
and exploited at HH. I believe that an essential part of healing for
many of the survivors involves examining the developmental factors
that originated with the their families of origin.
The focus in recent posts here
concerning the special qualities, characteristics, and needs of
children addresses those roots of victimization, but they are highly
applicable to many who have experienced all sorts of spiritual abuse.
Parents must accept
a child's qualities of self-centeredness, their boundless energy, and
their resilience so that they can form realistic
expectations about the child's capabilities. These qualities,
the gifts of childhood, create characteristics that a parent
must respect and anticipate because their children are valuable,
vulnerable, imperfect, dependent, and immature while
they are growing up.
In healthy parenting, though the job is
not easy and the parent grows and learns along with the child as they
continue to learn and grow in their own development, the parent
realizes that the child lacks experience, reason, and capabilities
(pictured as the empty beaker in the sense of self of the child). A
nurturing parent provides for these needs of their children until
they are sure that the child can perform these tasks themselves. The
healthy adult holds resources that the child lacks and shares with
them with the child from the abundance of resources inside them which
they hopefully built in their own childhoods (represented by the
heart in the diagram). Nurture, care, and love flows from parent to
child so that eventually, the child can provide those things for
themselves, having developed their own abundance.
As we read in the review of the five basic characteristics of children, when a parent lacks understanding
of their child or has a lack of their own internal resources, that
sense of abundance, worth and peace within themselves, they obviously
do not have enough of that goodness to share. No human being is
perfect, and parents often do lack their own sense of worth and
peace. They might also have their own personality-based natural
strengths and weaknesses that interfere with communicating well with
the child. In dysfunctional families however, parents and children
draw nurture from each other and/or they can unload their
frustrations off on one another in unhealthy ways which create and
foster more dysfunction.
When a parent carries a great deal of
shame because of their experiences and because of the nurture and
skills that they may have missed, they lack the resources to
effectively parent their children, at least in the ideal sense.
Especially concerning imperfection and immaturity, we see prime examples of a parent who feels a
great deal of shame themselves. Human beings are both imperfect and
are sometimes immature, and even adults enjoy a sense of their inner
childlike qualities. If a person believes false ideas including
ideas that life should be fair, that they should be perfect, or that
children should have capabilities beyond their developmental ability,
these ideas bring the parent's own internal sense of shame to the
surface.
What do we do with shame? It's an
uncomfortable emotion, and when undeserved or inappropriate to bear,
it's quite natural to seek to get rid of shame. Unfortunately, in a
parent who carries a great deal of toxic shame through either false
ideas about the reality of how life works or because they are
full of shame over the parenting they received, they usually
unconsciously unload their own shame into their children. If shame
comprises the core experience of the parent, and this shame replaces
the parent's sense of abundance (worth, peace, and safety), they only
have shame to share with their child. The child becomes their
secondary receptacle for it.
Most people do not like to dwell on or
think about the experiences that they found shaming, and for those
who grew up in homes where they were shamed when they were very
little, they will not consciously remember specific events. The
experience of shame can be terrifying, and adults who carry this kind
of shame through intolerance and controlling behaviors will usually
do anything to avoid feeling these overwhelming emotions. When a
child triggers shame in an aggressive or angry parent who compensates
for their shame through control and intolerance, the parent usually
either shames or punishes the child.
Alice Miller writes in The
Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting
(pp 27 -8):
In every adult who has suffered absue as a child lies dormant that small child's fear of punishment at the hand of the parents if he or she should dare rebel against their behavior. . . .These patterns of childhood will inevitably then be adopted by their victims whenever the fear and anxiety used on their partners and their own children, at work, in politics, wherever the fear and anxiety of the profoundly insecuare child can be fended off with the aid of external power. It is in this way that dictators are born; these are people with a deep-seated contempt for everyone else, people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn that respect at a later state with the assistance of the gigantic power they have built up around them.
Parents who tend to resort to
punishment and/or demonstrate high needs for control often display
characteristics of narcissism. Note these excerpts from a post at
Overcoming
Botkin Syndrome about the Narcissistic Parent in the
homeschooling's partriarchy movement:
In a most basic sense, narcissists with NPD display exaggerated self-interest because they are compensating for fear and high sensitivity to criticism. This exaggeration is a means of coping with and resisting the disturbing emotions that they feel deep inside, emotions that they deny feeling, even to themselves. Some of the hallmark features of NPD include personal grandiosity, an excessive need for admiration/attention, a sense of entitlement, and a diminished capacity for empathy. When a person with NPD feels threatened or becomes uncomfortably aware of their internal sense of shame and inferiority, they behave in a number of predictable ways which creates problems for those with whom they interact. . . .If you are a child or partner of someone with NPD, you will find them unable to handle any kind of criticism, resorting to demeaning tactics and intense anger when they feel threatened (though they will never let you see that they feel threatened because of their grandiosity). They NEVER admit to wrongdoing, and when consequences force them to realize that they have failed to be perfect, they will become even more dramatic, emotional, and aggressive. Life is all about blaming other people for their shortcomings, because they are really just terrified inside. Like playground bullies, they don’t take well to open confrontation. Direct confrontation usually becomes explosive, as the narcissist prefers to be passive-aggressive because they actually fear confrontation. That makes them hard to understand, because on the exterior, they seem to seek out conflict and aggression. Considering their inner experience of helplessness and fear seems oxymoronic (if not impossible) when you are on the receiving end of their wrath and if you believe their exaggerated perceptions of themselves.
In
the next post,
read
about how a lack of abundance in the parent
creates
a relationship of enmeshment with the child.
