Growing up, children should feel safe, secure, loved, and cherished. Unfortunately that isn’t always the case. Many children grow up feeling like the love of their parents is conditional. That their safety is reliant on their parents mood that day. That security is the guy at the door of the Target store. They’ve never heard of nor felt being cherished and wouldn’t even know that it was something they deserved.
Children growing up in these environments tend to become peacemakers, putting the needs of others before their own. Working their hardest to keep everyone else, especially their parents, “happy” so that they can feel safe and loved. It sounds like it might be a good thing, but it’s not for many reasons. Children who do this begin to believe that they don’t matter, their feelings don’t matter, their needs don’t matter. They internalize the idea that the only thing that matters is keeping the people who are supposed to love them unconditionally happy, so that they will continue to love them.
When they grow up, these children have a higher tendency to wind up in a physically or emotionally abusive relationship and may not even realize it, because that’s what they’re used to. They have learned that the people who love them also hurt them. That love and pain go together. They have been conditioned by the situation they grew up in to believe that those who love them will also make them feel worthless.
Or maybe, the abused child has learned they were abused as a child and healed from it. Maybe they thought they learned from that. Maybe they find a romantic partner who values them and shows genuine love. Somebody who totally understands the abuse they suffered and helps them continue to heal throughout the rest of their life. That would be amazing. There are people out there who will be that person for the abuse survivor.
Then there are people who will know that the person is an abuse survivor and try to understand, but because they don’t have empathy, they may be unable to truly help. After awhile, they may end up saying things to the abuse survivor that are hurtful, that cause the survivor to revert back to the hurt, insecure, scared child, but because of therapy, the survivor is able to say something to the partner. The partner apologizes or explains away the behavior and the abuse survivor, wanting to be loved, accepts and forgives and moves forward.
The hard part in all of this is that the words leave scars. If the motivations for the negative words are never dealt with, the scars may get infected. If the words continue to happen, if a pattern of negative words emerge, the childhood abuse survivor may end up becoming the victim of adult domestic partner violence.
The survivor of childhood abuse needs to heal from that, face it and always confront it in all relationships moving forward. Nobody ever deserves to be abused, sometimes abuse is so covert that we don’t even realize it’s happening, even more so if you are the survivor of childhood abuse.
Always, always, always be careful with your words. According to several relationship researchers, including John Gottman and April Stevenson, it takes a ratio of 7:1-4:1 of positive to negative interactions for people to maintain a positive relationship. That means that you need to have somewhere between four and seven positive interactions to every negative interaction to maintain a good relationship and build a person up. So when you criticize a person, you better have at least 4 good things to say about them too, I would tend to go overboard for a child. But be specific. Say things like, “You did a great job cleaning up the clothes off your bedroom floor.” “You worked really hard on that math homework.”
If you are an abuse survivor though, I think you can set boundaries without doing this. Telling somebody they hurt you, is not being critical as long as you do it in a way that emphasizes your feelings. Such as “I felt hurt, when I was told________________, because_________________.”
It would be amazing if we could end childhood abuse and domestic abuse, but as long as there are humans involved in relationships, we won’t be able to. Until then, my hope is that all who have been abused will find the help they need. Here are a few resources if you have been abused or know someone who has been abused:
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