Pain Of Child Abuse
Document Title: Pain Of Child Abuse
Document Ref No: R9010171
First Published: Reflections - Philippine Daily Inquirer
Publication Date: October 17th 1990
Author's Name: Father Shay Cullen SSC
Two weeks ago I wrote about the suffering of children and the pain caused
by negligent parents. I explained that this pain stays with the child and
shapes his or her character and personality.
It is childhood trauma that remains constantly exerting its power and pain
on the individual as he grows up and faces the world. People phoned me,
weeping as they remembered the injustices of their childhood.
I recommend having a good cry and talking about your suffering to a friend
who can understand and be supportive. It's always curative to feel the pain
and not bury it within. There it will only fester, causing tension, depression
and unhappiness.
There are no drugs in the world that can cure this but loving people can.
This childhood suffering dished out by parents in a wrapping disguised as
'love' is the most powerful and painful experience of life. It is the furance
of confusion and frustration where the child learned what an adult is and
the model he has to follow...usually with disasterous consequences, because
as I said earlier it is the abused who are most likely to become the abuser.
Parents who beat and abuse their children usually justify it by saying it
is "for their own good". They themselves were usually beaten and
abused.
While I have every sympathy for the parents who are sick themselves, the
abuse of their children has to end.
Last week a ten year old child was found by a Preda social worker. The child
told how he was often hung upside down from the ceiling by the leg as a
punishment. His father thought that this would disipline the child. Instead
the child, damaged in body and spirit ran away to the streets.
These "disciplinary" attitudes have been frequently taught and
encouraged by so-called child rearing experts for many years, perhaps not
in such violent ways, but nevertheless in the past they have recommended
humiliation, rejection, withholding food or affection, scolding and beating.
These were passed along to the next generation and still persist in society
today. Younger parents are more enlightened and take a more healthy loving
and supportive relationship with their children.
But not all.
Many parents picked up these harmful attitudes and destroyed the individuality
and emotional life of their children. They were robbed of all spontenaity
and freedom and spend the rest of their lives trying to find it agin. They
seldom if ever understand what happened to them.
But the child still suffers from the mistake of the parents. It is this
what sows the seeds of violence in families and society. They are attitudes
that go unquestioned from one generation to the next because parents see
it as being critical or reproachful of their own parents.
The one thing that was drilled and pounded into them under threats of rejection
and disapproval - generations of children were told; "never thwart,question
or be disobedient to your parents, they know best".
The great Sigmund Freud discovered that most of his psychiatric patients
had been sexually abused by their parents and had buried the awful experience
inside them. They had been threatened and terrified not to reveal anything
and the disipline of their upbringing served its purpose well. It silenced
the child for life.
Freud could not reveal his finding, as Alice Miller recounts in her book
"For your Own Good". Freud, she says realized that he would be
rejected from society if he made such accusations of wide spread child abuse.
It happens even today.
So he devised a cover-up strategy to "explain" what he had found.
He called it "childhood fantsy". That is one reason that many
psychiatrists confuse the facts of child abuse and think it is just a fantasy.
It is this kind of abuse that turns children in on themselves, and later
outwardly against their parents. Parents can't understand why their son
or daughter is so rebellious but all the scolding from the crib to the college
have found their mark and a blind revlusion of their nagging parents.
The teenager is not aware of the deeper impluses that are making the generation
gap more apparent. The suffering of the past is catching up.
Some children who have been verbally, physically or emotionaly abused, not
to talk of sexually abused, fight back as soon as they feel the mounting
tension within. They are disobedient, leaving home, preferring to stay with
others, seeking independence, freedom, even revenge.
If a child physically survives child abuse (and many don't) there is a chance
that he or she will seek revenge. Can you blame some of them?
I once had a child ibn the Preda center that was tied with chains to a post
in the house for days and starved like a dog.
Other children when they grow older take on behavior that is spiteful, rebellious
and even punish the parents who have now grown older and weaker while the
child is now a teenager and is stronger and more confident.
This is frequently the profile of some serious drug dependents. While trying
to calm the rising anger and frustration with drugs he rebels against the
parents who abused him.
Chemicals are used to quell and tranquilize the floods of frustration and
hostility that the drug user cannot even identify. His turn to self-medication
is a dangerous survivalist strategy that has such side effects that his
life is made worse not better.
To solve drug abuse we have to change attitudes towards child-rearing.
The young person is applying a kind of unconscious self-medication, temporal
and in the end self-defeating. Society likes to blame and reject the dependent
and fails to recognize itself mirrored in his pain and violence.
In the drug dependent this pain is buried deep inside from the early years,
it is buried even out of sight of the memory . Rejection and non-reconitation
and affirmation of the child is like a virus incubated in the spirit. It
is the sleeping emotional volcano that can erupt unexpectedly and subside
as quickly to the alarm and distress of the parents and to the anger and
violence of some sectors of society.
At the Preda Human Development Center in Olongapo where I work the psychotherapy
is designed to deal with these hidden emotions. It helps the victim to grapple
with the pain, identify it and re-live. It is a therapy that helps the pain
erupt in long denied tantrums and bouts of weeping and crying.
Afterwards there is enlightenment and peace.
The causes of the pain have been recognized and experienced and the urge
to use pain-killers passes because the pain and its roots have been dissolved.
Any doctor will tell you that the poison pus has to be drained from the
wound or there will be no cure. A dentist will tell you that a rotten tooth
has to be pulled or it will infect the whole mouth.
Likewise with the emotional infection of childhood abuse.
Hundreds of patients at the Preda Center have completed their therapy and
gone on to be reconciled with their parents and live successful lives.
Child abuse has such long term effects yet it is difficult to confront it
in the family and society. It has its own built-in survival device so to
speak.
Thousands of children are frightened and coerced into being obedient, docile,
submissive, silent and subdued. They come to believe in the almighty and
intolerant power of the parent and if you look closely you can see its potent
presence in society.
Abusive political power thrives in a society that allows children to be
dominated and frightened. Dictators have learned the skills from their parents
and spend their lives taking out their revenge and hatred on their hapless
subjects, their "children".
Despots frequently call themselves the Father or Mother of the nation and
their rule is marked by cruelty and torture.
