One of the strangest and saddest phenomena of psychological life is that there are many parents who, while sometimes only half realizing it, end up bullying their own children. Why do parents bully their children? In short, they do it in order to try to feel better about themselves because they suffer intensely in the very same area that they are choosing to bully their child in. Someone made them feel awful and they surmise, by twisted logic, that they will feel better through the process of making their own child feel very bad indeed.
They aren’t doing it personally; the child is just collateral damage to a misguided project of healing and an attenuation of symptoms. It doesn’t make any sense of course, but it may actually work for the parent for a time.
Let’s imagine a parent who harbors a terrible fear of being stupid. Somewhere in their own past, they were belittled and made to feel hugely inadequate. Now a child comes along, their own child, full of the normal hesitations and weaknesses of early infancy. Without really realizing what they’re up to, the parent grows inflamed and incensed by this child’s apparent stupidity and starts to mock and attack in another person what they fear and hate in themselves. It makes them feel a bit better. The child becomes a repository of all that they fail to tolerate in themselves; they (the child) are the dumb one, so they (the parent) don’t have to be; they (the child) are the stupid and ugly one, so they (the parent) don’t have to be. Therefore, the parent is liberated to live more easily within itself. The bad is contained and localized; it can’t be in them if it’s all in little him or her.
It can take bullied children a very long time to realize that they have even been bullied. They don’t, after all, grow up thinking that someone else has actually made them feel stupid or made them feel ugly or made them feel soiled, let alone their own parent whom they depend on and admire and long to be loved by. They simply think that they are stupid, ugly and soiled; there is no call for an explanation or a cause.
Yet, if we are those now grown up bullied children, we don’t need to wander too much more about what might have happened to us. We simply need to take stock of how we feel about ourselves and guess that the terrible judgments and sensations that we have about ourselves did not arise spontaneously. The feelings we harbor of ourselves are legacies of real occurrences in the world; someone who isn’t necessarily owning up to it made us feel a certain way, and that is why now we are in such pain.
Typically, those who’ve been bullied don’t look backwards; their illnesses point them relentlessly to the present and the future. The bullied anticipate terrible things happening to them that echo events that once happened to them but that they don’t remember in any way. They are causeless paranoias, self-haters and warriors; catastrophe is never far away.
A person feels they’re ugly because two decades ago a mother made them feel as such; a person feels they’ve done something very wrong because even further back someone did something very wrong to them. The fear contains the imprint of unconscious history. We overcome our bullying when we learn to discriminate between what actually belongs to us and what was placed in us; between who we are and what we’ve been told we are; between how our caregivers like to present themselves and what they’ve actually done.
Our triggers and apprehensions lie along the fault lines of our early traumas, so they can guide us back to what we suffered through when we are ready to explore. We’re on our way to overcoming bullying when we can say at last: “I’m not ugly; I was made to feel unacceptable. I haven’t done anything wrong; something wrong was done to me, and in general I am not awful; something awful happened to me.”