So, I have been reading What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo. It’s a wonderful book so I’m reading it for the second time. She was horribly abused as a child, physically and emotionally. The physical abuse was quite significant. I worked with abused children for 20 years. Her story is horrible and compelling. Her ability to describe the process she went through to heal is so honest and real. It’s brilliant…hence the second time reading it. I highly recommend it.
Families are funny, as in strange, for many reasons but for now I’m thinking about how each child in a family is raised by a different parent than the others. I don’t remember who came up with the idea…definitely a family systems person…possibly Bowlby. Family systems theory basically says that a family functions as a system, and everyone has their unique role in keeping the system functioning. That’s a simplistic one sentence summary but it gives you the general idea. Within the system if someone changes or does something different it can throw the whole family off kilter. Kind of like throwing a stick into the spokes of a bike someone is riding…there’s gonna be a crash…. Speaking of bikes and crashes, when I was 9ish I was riding a tandem bike with my friend…who shall be nameless because I don’t remember her name. She was in the front steering, and I was right behind her. With the inherent wisdom of 9-year-olds, we decided that she should steer with her eyes shut and I would direct her, all while riding down a hill that, at the time, seemed huge…we lived in Wisconsin, so it was definitely not huge. Anyway, we started down the hill, and I yelled, “Go left! Go left!” And she went right, way right…into a mailbox. Huge crash, blood everywhere…not exactly. My friend ran off crying and I scraped my knee. And I’m pretty sure it was her mailbox…and it was made of bricks and cement. Only did that once.
Now I’m back from my wandering…All of that was to say that families shift and change, so each child’s experience of their parents is different…as if they were different people all together. That seems to be true for my sister and me. She’s 17 months older than I am, even though she convinced my children that she was younger than me. It took years for me to convince them that she was kidding…I probably had to show them my birth certificate. Little fuckers. ❤️
My sister and I have some very different memories from when we were kids. Our perceptions were different as well. I remember things that my sister doesn’t, and she remembers tons of stuff that I don’t. I seem to remember more painful memories. I was emotionally abused as a child. I believe sister was too, although her perception is different. I was told that I was dumb and stupid. That when they passed out brains, I thought they said trains and I missed mine. When it came to brains I got the short end of the stick. That I didn’t know anything about whatever we were discussing…especially if it was something I majored in or involved my career. My sister was told those things as well. “I don’t know how we had such stupid children.” While my parents lived with us my mom frequently called me a dummy. I am very sensitive about being called dumb or stupid or being told, as I regularly was “that’s the problem you’re thinking again.”
The insults to my intelligence and my ability to think were the most hurtful to me. I am someone who thinks a lot. In fact, I overthink a lot. But I make sense of the world by thinking. My thinking leads to my writing. I think about patterns in my life, I read books and think about the information in connection to my experiences. Sometimes I just sit and think…kind of like Winnie the Pooh sitting there tapping his head and repeating, “think, think, think.” If something is heavy on my mind…I sit and sort and think. So, the implication that I don’t think or I’m too stupid or dumb to understand something really hurts me at my core…in my heart. It damages my understanding of myself and the world…or it used to.
Sometimes I think I have so many degrees because I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t stupid. When I was getting my master’s in counseling, I wrote a paper on…I have no idea. Too long ago. What I do remember is the professor writing on my paper that I had the second highest grade in the class and that it was a “brilliant” analysis. No one had ever used the word brilliant in connection to me. I cried. That was the first time that I realized I wasn’t stupid. The tears were full of anger and relief…anger at the messages I’d been given growing up and relief that they were wrong. And sadness that I spent so many years believing everything my parents said. They were the adults and so I thought they were right.
I have mentioned before that I have done a good amount of therapy. At one point in my psychological journey, I did EMDR…eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. I called it the light bar…sounds like a bar that serves only lite beer…and I was there drinking with my therapist. Anyway, in EMDR you focus on one memory that is particularly painful and emotionally charged for you…it’s juicy, as Pema Chodron would say. It’s a trigger. I picked being told I was stupid. Back then that was fireworks for me. So, I got the memory in my head and tapped into my feelings, all the while tracking the lights on the light bar moving rapidly back and forth across the bar. When it was over, I had an epiphany. I told the therapist that when my parents told me I was stupid, I wasn’t stupid, I just disagreed with them. I had a different perspective and to them that was being stupid. EMDR took a lot of the fire out of the word stupid…not all of it but it was a huge difference. I thought EMDR was magic.
I also think there was physical abuse in my house. I never had marks or bruises. Although when I was little, I never looked to see. I had some bruises, fingerprints on my arm, once when I was a teenager…from my dad. I think that hitting children is abusive. My sister and I were hit with a belt and a brush…that’s abusive. Even though spanking may have been standard practice in the 60’s, that doesn’t make it less abusive.
I spanked my oldest daughter but not my other two kids. I feel bad because I had to learn parenting with her. At the time, the far-right church I went to encouraged spanking your children. And the church was my teacher. They told us not to use our hands to spank but to use an object…like a wooden spoon. Which I did. Once. That’s all it took to realize they were wrong. We tell children to calm down and stop crying while we hit them…that makes no sense.
The thing about spanking children is that we do it when we’re angry. We ask our child to do something or stop doing something and they don’t. We probably ask more than once and then exasperated we spank them. We teach them that it’s okay to hit people smaller and less powerful than them. We hit the most vulnerable people in our world. We teach kids that when you’re angry and don’t know what to do you can hit someone…and then blame them for it.
We’re teaching our children that physical violence is a legitimate way to solve problems…and it’s not. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” and all that other bullshit. We confuse fear with respect. We think if our children are afraid of us then they respect us. But fear doesn’t breed respect, it breeds resistance, defiance, shutting down. It leads to avoidance. I avoid people I am afraid of. There may be people I fear that I respect but I do not respect them because of that fear. I respect them in spite of it.
One day we were talking about corporal punishment with my parents…not sure what started that mistake of a conversation. My dad told my wife that he made my sister and I go and get the brush to hit us with to humiliate us. My wife was gobsmacked for sure. I was too. Who intentionally tries to humiliate anyone, let alone a child? My mom was angry we were having the conversation and said, “I’m sorry. I guess you had a horrible childhood.” But that wasn’t my point. My point was that hitting children is not a good disciplinary tactic. It doesn’t teach any of the positive things we might want it to. It teaches fear and division. It teaches lying and deception…if I don’t get caught, I don’t get hit. It’s hypocritical to tell children they aren’t allowed to hit and then we turn around and hit them. That’s crazy making shit.
So maybe I’m not stupid but why did it take so long, and so much school, to come to that realization? And why did I need a teacher to praise me to recognize that? Why couldn’t I see it within myself? Hard questions. Maybe we form the internal vessel in our children that holds their thoughts and beliefs about themselves. Children think their parents know everything…at least until they’re teenagers…so when a parent throws around words like stupid, dumb, lazy, or tells them that they are too much or too little, their children believe them. Children incorporate that information as a fact in their lives. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me…that’s some unhelpful bullshit.
Our words hurt and wound and damage other people. The good news is that our words can also heal. If you tell your children how much you love them, that you’re proud of them that means something to them. That is validation that helps them form their image and beliefs about themselves. Instead of tearing them down, build them up with praise…praise for the wonderful qualities they bring to this world. We don’t tell our children often enough that they are kind, compassionate, intelligent, capable, honest, loyal, hardworking, determined, loving, understanding…the list could really go on and on. There is no shortage of words available to describe our children and to encourage them to grow and believe in themselves. And really, I still want to hear those things. I want to feel that I am loved. Everyone wants to be loved. I still tell my adult children how much I love them, that I’m proud of them, and how lucky I am to be their mom. No one is too old for praise and encouragement. No one is too old to love or be loved.
Let’s focus on love. Let’s lead with love. We get plenty of negative messages about ourselves from the world. Now maybe there are people thinking that we can’t just be all about love with our children because the world is a hard place, so we need to do our part to toughen them up. No we don’t. Life will happen and they will grow stronger…they don’t need the negativity or bullying to come from us. That does so much damage. Let’s make sure our homes are places where we encourage and challenge our children to become the best version of themselves. And with respect, kindness, compassion, understanding, and tons of love that person will emerge. In the end, all that matters is how we love people. Let’s love our children and each other fiercely.
Kai Raines 