Some people who experience trauma as young children never escape the cycle of emotional violence and neglect they were raised in.   Parents who routinely neglect or humiliate a child do this because of their own inescapable pain.  Why wouldn’t a parent incapable of nurturing a young human being seek help?   It is humiliating to them to admit they are not perfect and all-knowing, and besides, our culture doesn’t offer this kind of help to “losers.”  The child, therefore, is the problem, demanding, weak, selfish, needy, emotionally draining, never happy, critical, hypochondriacal, crazy, ungrateful, unfair, vicious, etc.

Much easier for someone who can never be at fault to have a long list of their child’s critical defects, never mind that the child is three months old, or a year old, or three days old, for that matter. It is well known that some babies are born placid and “easy” while others are more agitated and “difficult”. It is the pure bad luck of a parent who can never be wrong to have the latter kind of baby and absolutely no fault of their’s if the child grows up to unfairly harbor ill will toward them.

I don’t have much sympathy for the authoritarian personality.  I have almost none.  It is a shame, terrible, regrettable, lamentable and to be mourned, seeing a parent like this with her child, but sympathy for the moral dilemma of the snarling, other-blaming autocratic parent?  None.

I’m sure most childless cat ladies and cat men, and many parents, feel the same way about domineering parents who angrily insist on blaming their children for the parents’ unresolved issues and inadequacies.

Imagine my horror, sharing a vacation house with a couple of old, dear friends who were seething at each other day after day.  Watching the manic discomfort of their oldest son when he came by, the mother’s clear inability to connect with this unconventional young man, the father’s amiable attempts to be a good guy, even though he was unable to protect the kid from even the worst abuse when his son was young, or ever. 

As their anger at each other simmered and escalated, and I later found out they often go days locked in a silent battle of the wills, I fell deeper and deeper into the quicksand of someone else’s unresolvable pain.  I had seen too much, too clearly, too horribly, humiliatingly.  In the end, if I didn’t stop insisting on my own right not to be abused, which I eventually was, I would have to be killed.  They made it crystal clear.  Every single time.  They would rage, storm out, insist the only problem was me, that I am unloving, unforgiving and disloyal.   I suppose witnessing their rage at each other made me all of those things.

So when the lynch mob of the rest of my old friends came for me, disorienting and painful as it was, I could only thank God for a neck made super strong and resilient by decades of working to restore my neuroplasticity, the ability of the emotions and intellect to roll with the fucking punches without getting destroyed.

I find it is helpful, when facing an unfair attack, to keep in mind that “all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.”