This hit too close to home that I couldn't finish reading it in a sitting. I had to walk around my apartment a couple of times waiting to relax before coming back to my computer.
I have blanks in my memories too, where my dad told me he hit me (he apologized for it, like in OP). And I remember nothing after "the triggering incident", like in OP.
I also have very bad trust issues now, to the point where it is hard for me to make friends if they insist on having opinions on my life. Relationships have never worked for me, because it takes me forever to open up.
Childhood trauma sucks. Why people take their anger out on innocent kids just trying to understand how the world works in their own ways, is just beyond me.
There's SOO many more positive and healthy ways to raise a child. And realizing that now makes me genuinely teary eyed about all the neural pathways in my brain that were formed or not formed as a result of my parents decisions.
But I'm kind of glad to see so many of my friends being awesome parents, really caring for and listening to their kids. I'm lowkey excited for the next generation, who will be much more open about their thoughts and feelings, and probably more well adjusted as humans.
My pet hypothesis is this will also why the current/next generation is much more open about sexuality / gender / identity, and I expect this to get only more nuanced as science understands more and as people learn to express more. But that's just something I cooked up. Anyone else feel this way?
I too share your sentiments about the upcoming generation(s). The other thing I notice about them is that they're overall far more accepting about differences in race, sexual orientation, gender, etc.
I would broadly agree with your characterization, with a specific painful exception. In certain very left leaning American communities there is a guilt about or bias against cishet identities. The eager diagnosis of gender identity issues along with irreversible hormone and surgical treatments (great discussion from a former gender identity counselor in this Triggernometry interview [1]) constitute child abuse and medical malpractice in some instances.
I’m a happy cis adult male. I liked painting my nails a lot as a kid. I’m glad my parents just set me up with nail polish and ventilated area instead of bringing sexual identity into it.
> But I'm kind of glad to see so many of my friends being awesome parents, really caring for and listening to their kids.
Hmm, thats kind of reaching. Let the kids grow up and decide whether their parents were really up to snuff. Otherwise it is like wearing "I am awesome" T-shirt and then using it as proof that I am awesome.
> My pet hypothesis is this will also why the current/next generation is much more open about sexuality / gender / identity, and I expect this to get only more nuanced as science understands more and as people learn to express more. But that's just something I cooked up. Anyone else feel this way?
I'm not sure if it's true or not, but it's something I hope, certainly.
At the same time I think a lot of people are stuck in cycles of abuse that they inherited, and which they themselves are going to pass down to the next generation. And I think to some extent this reflects the inhospitality of the societies we live in.
Anyways, I also wanted to say that I felt a lot of the same things you did reading this. Thank you for posting. I hope you will feel more peace as you get older.
Hey, OP here. I'm really touched that you read the entire piece. I poured a lot of myself into it, so thanks from the bottom of my heart.
I had a different problem with relationships. I opened up quickly enough, but my partners grew up with happy families and didn't understand the level of abuse I had experienced. I felt incredibly alone. If I didn't get extremely lucky and meet a partner who understood how deeply people could be abused, I probably would be single.
In my personal experience, my dad was trying his best but simply couldn't know better. When I think about the challenges he faced -- growing up in the aftermath of the WWII and the communist Revolution, his parents were poor, he immigrated to the US by himself practically penniless, being disdained by white people for being Asian -- I feel overwhelmed by how much he had on this plate. This being said, I am still mourning the happy family I did not grow up with.
I think the current/ next generation better understands that 1.) there is such a thing as trauma 2.) We can work through them so we don't keep harming ourselves and others. I am hopeful that more people can end the cycles of violence they grew up in.
I always felt pretty different. I was never really "abused," but I grew up always feeling more connected with people who have divorced parents or with an absent father. Mine was right there, he drove me to soccer, how could I listen to Everclear and Linkin Park and feel emotionally attached to it? I was the model of middle America. As I grew older I always felt closer to "outcasts" and misfits. My general feeling of disconnected-ness and being different followed me wherever I went. I always felt different. I always felt like there was something wrong with me. I never understood why.
After reading online about what a great book Running on Empty: Overcoming your childhood emotional neglect was, while also feeling like I was running on empty, I decided to read the book. It felt like a biography. It made so much make sense and helped me understand why I've had the feelings I've had most of my life.
Abuse almost always comes with emotional neglect. As time moves forward I imagine most physical wounds heal, but the emotional ones are the wounds that don't heal so easily.
Hi, I don’t know you and I may be completely wrong, but consider that, rather than OR on top of being emotionally neglected, your may have a personality with high neuroticism that facilitates “fatal flaw” thinking. Know that neuroticism is, like personality traits in general, partly inherited. It’s up to you to evaluate how much of your problems can be chalked up to nature and/or nurture.
Anyone interested in the Big Five,(which unlike Myers-Briggs, has actual data behind it) can do a free one here from the creator. Note - it doesn't work accurately if you are depressed, and yes, it requires you to be honest.
https://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/
Sorry for the pain you went through. I suffered subtle trauma as a kid. Some examples were verbal anger from father, lack of a model of a secure relationship since parents hated each other in private, no empathy, and rare sympathy, between all family members. We basically didn't care about each other but put on a facade of a happy family with others. Recently I came across Attachment Theory which describes types of insecure relationships compared to secure ones. Combined with some professional therapy, it has been enlightening and relieving understanding my issues. A long journey ahead. Reading about Attachment Theory is my recommendation for anyone feeling similarly.
Your life sounds similar to mine, and with few words, I think you've described emotional neglect.
I've found myself to be quite avoidant. I found attachment theory before I heard of neglect, and I found it to explain my relationships pretty well. I actually think I found running on empty while looking into attachment theory. I feel like it adequately explained how I came to be so avoidant. Based on your words, I am pretty confident that at least one of her stories of neglect will hit hard.
FWIW, I agree that the terminology is unpleasant and reeks of internet language-isms like "the top 10 ways...". I feel like there is probably a book or MBA like class that teaches that this is the way to promote your articles online. I also agree that that language feels like it's for a lowest common denominator audience.
The book is pretty mechanical and straightforward and generally doesn't include language like that. The voice the author uses in the book is professional voice and not internet voice.
The one exception is this "fatal flaw" idea which is more or less the thesis of the authors book: Childhood emotional neglect results in feeling like if someone really knew you, they wouldn't like you. The author doesn't bring the term out in the first 10 chapters after which it is well founded.
The term itself is used to mean: "a character trait possessed by a hero that ultimately leads to their downfall." And through 10 chapters she did a pretty good job of showing that neglect does indeed lead to feelings which lead to "downfall" like consequences.
Subtle art of not giving a fuck is a mass market book of questionable value, but it has one chapter with a core truth for the human experience.
The chapter was on the dichotomy of blame and responsibility. You can choose a strategy of blame or a strategy of responsibility for the problems in your life, but only one of them is going to be productive. Blame can help soothe you, but blame is just emotional masturbation. Responsibility is painful, but taking responsibility is the only way to make progress.
My dad deserves blame for a neglectful childhood. He deserves blame for a lot of the experience of depression I have had in my life. He deserves blame for his complete lack of empathy. No amount of blame is going to modify my condition. No amount of blame is going to fill the holes on my life. The only way I will feel better is taking responsibility and being accountable to myself for my own emotions. I can't change the past, but I can change how I act now.
I think psychologists use the idea of locus of control. Does the world happen to you, or do you happen to the world? If life happens to you and you are purely a victim of circumstance, it's hard to imagine putting in work to improve the conditions of your life if you don't have a lot of control over it. Even though you often can't control what happens to you, you can control/influence how you react, and through that it's possible to imagine improving your situation.
Just like you would probably struggle with math if you never learned math as a kid, you would probably struggle with emotional regulation if you never learned emotional regulation as a kid. If a kid doesn't know algebra by college, that's not the kids fault, that is a failure of their education or their parents, the kid doesn't know math is important to their future or that math is missing from their education.
My dad would make me pick, the belt or the wooden spoon. I'd pick the belt because a) fuck him and b) it would be over faster.
I used to think this was normal, that every kid got this.
He'd punch me in the arm, in the chest, smack the back of my head to 'toughen me up'.
One night I had a car accident, I called him from hospital (I was fine) he asked how the car was, how bad was the car? Who did I hit?
It dawned on me that he'd never asked if I was ok. I hadn't said anything but "Dad I crashed the car".
Years of abuse that I would hide and no one would know about, except my mother who put up with it and never stopped him.
Now he has very serious dementia, in a care facility on his own, still healthy but completely not himself. He cries and my heart breaks. He asks me to help him die because he forgets who I am, but I remember everything.
I got to choose the belt my dad would use to beat me with until I stopped crying and didn't make a sound. A wider belt had more mass to slap, but a thinner one stinged like a whip.
Part of sadistic narcissists is building these mind games where you only get options for how to lose, never any to win, so you feel helpless and trapped.
The scariest thing about having abusive parents is that you end up becoming like them. It took me many years to understand why my relationships would all fail. In hindsight, I was emotionally abusive to a lot of my partners. I will not offer an apology for it, as that just feels hollow and empty. All I can say is that I am trying to be better.
For some people, hearing an apology means something even if you feel like your words are hollow and empty. I had a difficult upbringing too, but I have never repeated the mistakes of my parents in my own relationships. I wonder if that difference is related to how early someone realizes that their parents shouldn't be treating them this way. It's harder to recognize certain behaviors when you don't know what to look for.
Could it be that you won't apologise because a part of you fears that the apology might be used against you?
The recovery process will necessarily pass by trusting people again, and making yourself vulnerable to them. That is the only way you can experience that they behave like normal human beings who won't exploit your weaknesses.
I was just about to write the same thing. No matter how much I understand my parents, or how much I progressed through years of therapy, I hate myself when I'm doing the same things I hate in them. My therapist says the progress I made so far is tremendous and I can't expect myself to progress much faster and I should be proud of myself. However no matter all the progress if I keep causing suffering on people I love. It's really hard to forgive myself sometimes and I keep wanting to run away.
‘All I can say is that I am trying to be better’
There is a lot more in your reply but I hope that you find the way to locate the ability to remove those shackles.
At some point you become self aware, for me it came after a girlfriend of 6 years just left one day.
I went through lot of anxiety after that. But i realized where it was alll coming from, it's as if I always knew how to act better in hindsight but when I was facing the situation I almost always couldn't do anything good.
Not that she wouldn't have left if I was good, people leave all time for whatever reasons. But I could still have been nicer to her I feel, she was also similar to me so it's not like she was always nice to me but I could have shown her better.
My father was quite abusive to myself and siblings, and now we all cut off contact, but he refuses to accept any responsibility for his actions. Everything is someone else’s fault, he’s the victim, everyone is teaming up against him, etc. If you take the checklist for narcissistic personality disorder he hits all of them spot-on. Really nothing you can do but become estranged and raise your own children better.
Out of all the traits, I think an inability empathize - simply to put yourself in someone else’s shoes - is the defining characteristic. Whether you are dealing with a child, a spouse, a service worker, a friend - the afflicted cannot understand how someone else feels. The “me” focus is overarching and permeates all thoughts and actions.
One memory sticks out that perfectly encompasses his malady, is when my wife cooked a big meal for a gathering which included in-laws, friends, and neighbors. When she announced dinner was going to be served, he filled a plate with food and ate by himself at the table, before anyone else had sat down or been served. When asked later why he did that, he came up with a few reasons which essentially were “I was hungry”.
I’m leaving out all manner of physical, emotional, manipulative, financial abuse he inflicted but the above anecdote is such a pure distillation of the lack of social grace combined with intense self-indulgence.
I am in no way trying to invalidate the anguish that the author or people in this thread have suffered. I simply want to share my experience with having parents that beat me in a culture where it is commonplace.
I grew up in a Muslim country where I and everyone else I knew received the same level of physical punishment as part of the general parenting strategy. Some call this normalized child abuse - when I moved to a Western country for work and discussed this type of upbringing with others, they claimed I was abused and oblivious ("repressing"), and they seemed shocked at the fact that it didn't bother me or that it hasn't affected my relationship with my family. If I had been the only person receiving beatings and everyone else at my school was telling me I was being abused, I may have also deemed my father to be a monster, but I assumed the punishments were justified.
Someone may take this to imply that whether you see your parent as a monster or not depends on the context (on whether it is culturally acceptable or not) and that there is nothing inherently damaging about receiving beatings. Others may conclude that cultures where beating children is acceptable are barbaric and their children do indeed suffer lifelong trauma but manage to cope (if they do not seem to have been affected). I don't have enough data to draw any conclusions myself.
However, and this is my man point, a charitable view of the issue may at least make a distinction between parents who are intentionally hurting their children because of their own issues, and parents who believe physical punishment (or any form of a strict, stern upbringing) is a valid method for raising your children. Is it possible that the father of the OP, being Chinese, thought he was doing the right thing at the time?
One interesting thing I noted is that even in Western countries, beatings are more common and accepted in certain groups. Some Black and Hispanic friends of mine have joked about how hard their parents beat them, but I have yet to meet a White person who thinks of beating children as anything more than abuse.
> they claimed I was abused and oblivious ("repressing")
Leading the witness...
I once had to fight with a therapist who tried to coach me into admitting similar when nothing remotely of the sort even happened. It was surreal, and happened right around the time of the Ramona "repressed trauma"/"false memory" mess (same school of thought?). The Ramona one must have been the only therapist brazen enough to be caught doing it because she certainly wasn't alone.
From what I've seen since, "repression" has become the retcon of psychology...commercialized gaslighting and externalization.
If you're deluded enough to think your parents didn't abuse you, that's just because you're not remembering it right. For just $150 a session, I'll show you how your parents are to blame for all your failures.
In the US South when I was growing up it was common for white parents to whip their kids with a belt.
However, in every culture where this kind of beating is common there are parents who do not engage in it, who recognize that violence is the weakest form of authority.
> “I don't have enough data to draw any conclusions myself.”
The field of psychiatry exists to collect this kind of data and draw conclusions. Doctors agree that physical abuse is traumatizing to children. Not all of them certainly, but a significant amount.
Think about whether you’d want to perpetuate this kind of treatment onto your own children. Would you hit them knowing that there’s a non-negligible chance they’ll be working out that treatment decades later with a therapist? What would you actually gain by doing that? There’s no productive reason to hit children. If the only justification is “I was beaten too”, then you have the power to stop the cycle.
I don't believe psychiatry here. Life is tough experience in many aspects for most of us. We experience many forms of abuse not only physical, psychical too .... But psychical is harder too prove and measure. How they quantify all circumstances and decide that physical violence was determining or significantly more important here?
Most people can't even recognize or name psychical traumas they live through...
We all just grow scars and being traumatized by ever new experiences whole life. Which was worst?
You will have immediate reply to what will say here. I was beaten - not too hard in my early youth. It was common in our times/area my parents weren't hard on this. I don't blame them.I'm completely fine with this. I didn't beat my already teen children.
What I remember more was schaming by peers and or aunt's, whole catholic environment and other variations of minor - would would say - psychical violence. I was very shy and awkward for most of my life most probably thanks to this and not few beatings. But beating is easy to name, detect and measure.
Physical violence is easy to beat boy in whole spectrum of violence.
This kind of punishment was very common in most western nations two or three generations ago as well. So if you talk with people from my father's generation it is very common to hear stories of physical punishment by parents and teachers.
Fifteen years ago the common opinion there was "well it didn't hurt me because everybody got it". Only, people realized that it actually did hurt them, they just buried it deep down. They realized that the "strong hand" of their elders was actually a sign of weakness. If you cannot guide a kid without beating them, you are an utter failure as an adult.
As someone who similarly has Asian parents that have gone through their own trauma in life, this resonates with me. As a younger child, my parents would hit us with clothes hangers, as this was the only method of discipline that they knew at the time. I don't feel like they realize or acknowledge the effects of that.
While interactions nowadays are rarely negative, I've resolved to cut of communication at some point in the future, after I've alleviated my own guilt by "repaying" them monetarily for all they've done in raising me.
I get yelled at most days still, though.
Most of the electronic devices I've owned over the years have been broken by my dad smashing it after getting frustrated over some aspect of schoolwork related to my usage of such devices. Curiously, this seems to happen after he's had a few drinks.
> after I've alleviated my own guilt by "repaying" them monetarily for all they've done in raising me.
You don’t owe them that. “They put a roof over my head and fed and clothed me” isn’t a parent doing good for their kids, it’s the minimum allowed by law. You make a choice when you have a child, and these costs are part of that choice.
I lost my mom in my late teens. My parents were wonderful. Definitely well above average. I owe them so much.
Something that I’ve been discovering is that I have two sections of blanks in my memory: the anguish of her being so sick for years, and the times she lost her cool with me.
Both sets of memories have been trickling back decades later. I’m not sure what to share about it in particular, but in general it has been a fascinating and oftentimes horrible sensation. To suddenly have a memory activate for no apparent reason.
I’m incredibly thankful that my wife is the person she is. I’ll randomly come into the room holding back tears and she immediately knows what it is and what to do.
I think it’s important to speak these things aloud to help further normalize our talking about them.
Readit News
I have blanks in my memories too, where my dad told me he hit me (he apologized for it, like in OP). And I remember nothing after "the triggering incident", like in OP.
I also have very bad trust issues now, to the point where it is hard for me to make friends if they insist on having opinions on my life. Relationships have never worked for me, because it takes me forever to open up.
Childhood trauma sucks. Why people take their anger out on innocent kids just trying to understand how the world works in their own ways, is just beyond me.
There's SOO many more positive and healthy ways to raise a child. And realizing that now makes me genuinely teary eyed about all the neural pathways in my brain that were formed or not formed as a result of my parents decisions.
But I'm kind of glad to see so many of my friends being awesome parents, really caring for and listening to their kids. I'm lowkey excited for the next generation, who will be much more open about their thoughts and feelings, and probably more well adjusted as humans.
My pet hypothesis is this will also why the current/next generation is much more open about sexuality / gender / identity, and I expect this to get only more nuanced as science understands more and as people learn to express more. But that's just something I cooked up. Anyone else feel this way?
I’m a happy cis adult male. I liked painting my nails a lot as a kid. I’m glad my parents just set me up with nail polish and ventilated area instead of bringing sexual identity into it.
[1] https://youtu.be/gbuGMbqjsSw
Hmm, thats kind of reaching. Let the kids grow up and decide whether their parents were really up to snuff. Otherwise it is like wearing "I am awesome" T-shirt and then using it as proof that I am awesome.
Or maybe that's just my increased skepticism of throwaway accounts talking after LLMs became popular.
I'm not sure if it's true or not, but it's something I hope, certainly.
At the same time I think a lot of people are stuck in cycles of abuse that they inherited, and which they themselves are going to pass down to the next generation. And I think to some extent this reflects the inhospitality of the societies we live in.
Anyways, I also wanted to say that I felt a lot of the same things you did reading this. Thank you for posting. I hope you will feel more peace as you get older.
I had a different problem with relationships. I opened up quickly enough, but my partners grew up with happy families and didn't understand the level of abuse I had experienced. I felt incredibly alone. If I didn't get extremely lucky and meet a partner who understood how deeply people could be abused, I probably would be single.
In my personal experience, my dad was trying his best but simply couldn't know better. When I think about the challenges he faced -- growing up in the aftermath of the WWII and the communist Revolution, his parents were poor, he immigrated to the US by himself practically penniless, being disdained by white people for being Asian -- I feel overwhelmed by how much he had on this plate. This being said, I am still mourning the happy family I did not grow up with.
I think the current/ next generation better understands that 1.) there is such a thing as trauma 2.) We can work through them so we don't keep harming ourselves and others. I am hopeful that more people can end the cycles of violence they grew up in.
After reading online about what a great book Running on Empty: Overcoming your childhood emotional neglect was, while also feeling like I was running on empty, I decided to read the book. It felt like a biography. It made so much make sense and helped me understand why I've had the feelings I've had most of my life.
Abuse almost always comes with emotional neglect. As time moves forward I imagine most physical wounds heal, but the emotional ones are the wounds that don't heal so easily.
Here is the authors website with a relatively short read and I think anyone resonating with this HN article will probably feel "seen" by it: https://drjonicewebb.com/the-painful-secret-many-people-live...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism
I've found myself to be quite avoidant. I found attachment theory before I heard of neglect, and I found it to explain my relationships pretty well. I actually think I found running on empty while looking into attachment theory. I feel like it adequately explained how I came to be so avoidant. Based on your words, I am pretty confident that at least one of her stories of neglect will hit hard.
If they called it anything else (eg. "unrealized vulnerability") it might have been more digestable.
The book is pretty mechanical and straightforward and generally doesn't include language like that. The voice the author uses in the book is professional voice and not internet voice.
The one exception is this "fatal flaw" idea which is more or less the thesis of the authors book: Childhood emotional neglect results in feeling like if someone really knew you, they wouldn't like you. The author doesn't bring the term out in the first 10 chapters after which it is well founded.
The term itself is used to mean: "a character trait possessed by a hero that ultimately leads to their downfall." And through 10 chapters she did a pretty good job of showing that neglect does indeed lead to feelings which lead to "downfall" like consequences.
It seems like you’ve found the fatal flaw in the fatal flaw definition.
The chapter was on the dichotomy of blame and responsibility. You can choose a strategy of blame or a strategy of responsibility for the problems in your life, but only one of them is going to be productive. Blame can help soothe you, but blame is just emotional masturbation. Responsibility is painful, but taking responsibility is the only way to make progress.
My dad deserves blame for a neglectful childhood. He deserves blame for a lot of the experience of depression I have had in my life. He deserves blame for his complete lack of empathy. No amount of blame is going to modify my condition. No amount of blame is going to fill the holes on my life. The only way I will feel better is taking responsibility and being accountable to myself for my own emotions. I can't change the past, but I can change how I act now.
I think psychologists use the idea of locus of control. Does the world happen to you, or do you happen to the world? If life happens to you and you are purely a victim of circumstance, it's hard to imagine putting in work to improve the conditions of your life if you don't have a lot of control over it. Even though you often can't control what happens to you, you can control/influence how you react, and through that it's possible to imagine improving your situation.
Just like you would probably struggle with math if you never learned math as a kid, you would probably struggle with emotional regulation if you never learned emotional regulation as a kid. If a kid doesn't know algebra by college, that's not the kids fault, that is a failure of their education or their parents, the kid doesn't know math is important to their future or that math is missing from their education.
I used to think this was normal, that every kid got this.
He'd punch me in the arm, in the chest, smack the back of my head to 'toughen me up'.
One night I had a car accident, I called him from hospital (I was fine) he asked how the car was, how bad was the car? Who did I hit? It dawned on me that he'd never asked if I was ok. I hadn't said anything but "Dad I crashed the car".
Years of abuse that I would hide and no one would know about, except my mother who put up with it and never stopped him.
Now he has very serious dementia, in a care facility on his own, still healthy but completely not himself. He cries and my heart breaks. He asks me to help him die because he forgets who I am, but I remember everything.
Part of sadistic narcissists is building these mind games where you only get options for how to lose, never any to win, so you feel helpless and trapped.
The only winning move is not to play.
Didn't say a word, always felt the alternative of foster care was much worse
Now, I'm paying for my mother's husband's rent
Doesn't help that saying the word abuse has men ostracized in my community
sigh
The recovery process will necessarily pass by trusting people again, and making yourself vulnerable to them. That is the only way you can experience that they behave like normal human beings who won't exploit your weaknesses.
“You do this thing where you don’t think you can ever be forgiven, so you don’t apologize, but I can’t forgive you if you don’t say you’re sorry”.
An apology is only hollow if it's not followed up by any action.
Deleted Comment
I went through lot of anxiety after that. But i realized where it was alll coming from, it's as if I always knew how to act better in hindsight but when I was facing the situation I almost always couldn't do anything good.
Not that she wouldn't have left if I was good, people leave all time for whatever reasons. But I could still have been nicer to her I feel, she was also similar to me so it's not like she was always nice to me but I could have shown her better.
I had to do that too. Stay strong.
I am grateful to my wife, and for my son. We are doing things better for sure.
One memory sticks out that perfectly encompasses his malady, is when my wife cooked a big meal for a gathering which included in-laws, friends, and neighbors. When she announced dinner was going to be served, he filled a plate with food and ate by himself at the table, before anyone else had sat down or been served. When asked later why he did that, he came up with a few reasons which essentially were “I was hungry”.
I’m leaving out all manner of physical, emotional, manipulative, financial abuse he inflicted but the above anecdote is such a pure distillation of the lack of social grace combined with intense self-indulgence.
Also cut off all contact due to it too.
Deleted Comment
I grew up in a Muslim country where I and everyone else I knew received the same level of physical punishment as part of the general parenting strategy. Some call this normalized child abuse - when I moved to a Western country for work and discussed this type of upbringing with others, they claimed I was abused and oblivious ("repressing"), and they seemed shocked at the fact that it didn't bother me or that it hasn't affected my relationship with my family. If I had been the only person receiving beatings and everyone else at my school was telling me I was being abused, I may have also deemed my father to be a monster, but I assumed the punishments were justified.
Someone may take this to imply that whether you see your parent as a monster or not depends on the context (on whether it is culturally acceptable or not) and that there is nothing inherently damaging about receiving beatings. Others may conclude that cultures where beating children is acceptable are barbaric and their children do indeed suffer lifelong trauma but manage to cope (if they do not seem to have been affected). I don't have enough data to draw any conclusions myself.
However, and this is my man point, a charitable view of the issue may at least make a distinction between parents who are intentionally hurting their children because of their own issues, and parents who believe physical punishment (or any form of a strict, stern upbringing) is a valid method for raising your children. Is it possible that the father of the OP, being Chinese, thought he was doing the right thing at the time?
One interesting thing I noted is that even in Western countries, beatings are more common and accepted in certain groups. Some Black and Hispanic friends of mine have joked about how hard their parents beat them, but I have yet to meet a White person who thinks of beating children as anything more than abuse.
Leading the witness...
I once had to fight with a therapist who tried to coach me into admitting similar when nothing remotely of the sort even happened. It was surreal, and happened right around the time of the Ramona "repressed trauma"/"false memory" mess (same school of thought?). The Ramona one must have been the only therapist brazen enough to be caught doing it because she certainly wasn't alone.
From what I've seen since, "repression" has become the retcon of psychology...commercialized gaslighting and externalization.
If you're deluded enough to think your parents didn't abuse you, that's just because you're not remembering it right. For just $150 a session, I'll show you how your parents are to blame for all your failures.
However, in every culture where this kind of beating is common there are parents who do not engage in it, who recognize that violence is the weakest form of authority.
The field of psychiatry exists to collect this kind of data and draw conclusions. Doctors agree that physical abuse is traumatizing to children. Not all of them certainly, but a significant amount.
Think about whether you’d want to perpetuate this kind of treatment onto your own children. Would you hit them knowing that there’s a non-negligible chance they’ll be working out that treatment decades later with a therapist? What would you actually gain by doing that? There’s no productive reason to hit children. If the only justification is “I was beaten too”, then you have the power to stop the cycle.
We all just grow scars and being traumatized by ever new experiences whole life. Which was worst?
You will have immediate reply to what will say here. I was beaten - not too hard in my early youth. It was common in our times/area my parents weren't hard on this. I don't blame them.I'm completely fine with this. I didn't beat my already teen children.
What I remember more was schaming by peers and or aunt's, whole catholic environment and other variations of minor - would would say - psychical violence. I was very shy and awkward for most of my life most probably thanks to this and not few beatings. But beating is easy to name, detect and measure.
Physical violence is easy to beat boy in whole spectrum of violence.
Edit: typos on phone
Fifteen years ago the common opinion there was "well it didn't hurt me because everybody got it". Only, people realized that it actually did hurt them, they just buried it deep down. They realized that the "strong hand" of their elders was actually a sign of weakness. If you cannot guide a kid without beating them, you are an utter failure as an adult.
While interactions nowadays are rarely negative, I've resolved to cut of communication at some point in the future, after I've alleviated my own guilt by "repaying" them monetarily for all they've done in raising me.
I get yelled at most days still, though.
Most of the electronic devices I've owned over the years have been broken by my dad smashing it after getting frustrated over some aspect of schoolwork related to my usage of such devices. Curiously, this seems to happen after he's had a few drinks.
> I get yelled at most days still, though
I get the feeling that most outside observers would still classify these interactions as abusive...
You don’t owe them that. “They put a roof over my head and fed and clothed me” isn’t a parent doing good for their kids, it’s the minimum allowed by law. You make a choice when you have a child, and these costs are part of that choice.
Something that I’ve been discovering is that I have two sections of blanks in my memory: the anguish of her being so sick for years, and the times she lost her cool with me.
Both sets of memories have been trickling back decades later. I’m not sure what to share about it in particular, but in general it has been a fascinating and oftentimes horrible sensation. To suddenly have a memory activate for no apparent reason.
I’m incredibly thankful that my wife is the person she is. I’ll randomly come into the room holding back tears and she immediately knows what it is and what to do.
I think it’s important to speak these things aloud to help further normalize our talking about them.