we don't. well i don't. it's individual, but you loaded the question, so it's hard to answer it correctly
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Truth.
There is no requirement that you do. I'm completely unsure why people believe that you must allow shitty human beings in your life because they are family. Fuck that! Allow people in your life who make your life better. If that's family, that's great, if it's not family that's completely ok also.
Sooooo, I have a ton of info here, but I’ll keep my point short and sweet.
Depending on the age, we HAVE to.
Because rejecting a parent is death. You’ll find that 7 year olds will make excuses for and defend abusive parents, because rejecting a parent is rejecting safety, housing, food etc….
And while that may be less true when you’re 18, some of that programming never leaves you, even if it should.
… so it just becomes a personal tragedy.
I'd argue that your mind is learning what love it at that age. However you are treated by your caretakers is what you believe is love because we are born with no definition so that we can adapt to whatever circumstances. Adopting your family's schema on love, when you age out of that family, you'll find yourself in a similar situation.
As evidence, most adults in abusive relationships were abused as children. People often ask why adults stay in abusive relationships that are clearly terrible from the outside expecting practical reasons, like finances or kids. In reality, the victim will likely fall into another abusive relationship if they left because that's what they think love is. Adults that were raised in non-abusive households would have left at the first red flags, whereas the adults raised in abusive households would find those red flags as signs they are loved. To them, they're not red flags; they're green flags. It isn't after a string of these relationships or a really bad one that they seek help to change this pattern. The path is hard and burdensome because they have to tear down what they unconsciously learned and re-raise themselves without the guidance of a parent.
Same thing happens with the abusers, but they took on the identity of the abusive parent. They feel that love is allowing them to control and devalue their partner by whatever means. These people have much less chance of recovery because they don't see a reason to change. If their relationships fail, then in their mind, it's the victim's fault. The abuser's only lessons are how to change their abuse strategies so that victims don't leave.
In conclusion, it's not only that the child can't leave. It's that they're completing a major developmental stage: learning what love is. They have no other options because we are designed that way.
Also entirely valid.
It's been difficult for me. I find understanding helps a lot.
I view a lot of the abuse and family violence that I both experienced and witnessed, as a sort of generational shame and resentment, partially due to poverty and Catholicism. Coupled with jealousy of people born into more privilege who lived in our community. And a healthy dose of substance use to cope with the above feelings, primarily in the shape of alcohol, but also a lot of stimulant abuse in the family.
It helps a lot that my father has softened quite a bit. I don't know that he's completely changed in the sense of understanding how he has hurt people. But he seems to treat his current wife well, and with all of the male children out of the house the cycle of abuse seems to have stopped. And he has acknowledged how he's hurt me when I've brought it up, at least generally. And been supportive and not abusive since I turned 18.
I've also had to do a lot of personal work, a lot of self-discovery. And a lot of work with an excellent trauma therapist using IFS and EMDR, along with a meditation practice at home.
And all of that said it's a process. Sometimes my trauma gets triggered and I'm right there as a 12-year-old pissed off at him again. Which is to say give yourself some grace too.
I appreciate this, particularly for the IFS-informed aspect. I feel like IFS is gonna be an increasingly mentioned modality
Yeah it's really effective. And becomes a practice in its own right of self-care. It's also one of the modalities MAPS is using in MDMA treatment protocols.
There's parallels in my Buddhist practice. Which is in the plum village tradition. Thich Nhat Hanh uses language like embracing the anger with your mindfulness and holding it like a mother would hold a crying infant. So, while the technical language is different it can be very similar to the IFS process and the two help inform each other for me. Compassionate inquiry is another one I've heard of but not studied. Which also has strong parallels.
Sometimes I catch myself just holding space while two parts have a loving conversation with each other. Which is a nice change from always being at war with myself.
fight, flight, freeze and FAWN are reactions to trauma / abuse. If a parent is abusing a child, children don't really have any other immediate option other than to fawn. They don't know to call the police, they can't fight back or run away.
I made a post talking about my personal experience.
This post is more of a safety check. As a couple of other people pointed out you don't have to. And if the abuse is continuing, focus on your safety first.
I didn't speak to my father for 6 years. When he came back into my life, I think he understood that he couldn't take the relationship for granted. And that if he treated me like shit, I would never talk to him again.
I don't know that he really changed. But he does respect my boundaries now. Even if it's more out of fear of the consequences than compassion for me. And trying to understand and forgive has helped me to develop more compassion.
But I had stopped the cycle of abuse by setting a firm boundary with him. And that had to happen before any sort of trust could be rebuilt. And to be honest, that was his job. He needed to respect my boundaries to earn my trust. Trust is earned it's not given, after all. And without safety and trust, love can't flow.
So yeah, don't put it on yourself either. You are the victim of abuse. Restorative justice, such as making amends, rebuilding trust, and ultimately hoping that love can be there again, that's the job of the person that did the damage.
Its sad it takes us being fully independant and able to pull away in an enforceable way for them to get the message that they're not god and they are not omnipotent as far as we are involved.
Its like: why the fuck did you have us if you weren't ready to take that on and even so, why couldn't you fucking leave us alone in lieu of all the active abuse and enforced profiting off our labor and suffering.
I would choose neglect 10/10 if i tmean they left me the fuck alone and didn't interfere in my being as ok as I could make myself given the circumstances
Yeah for real.
I'm so grateful I had someplace to go to. My stepdad was not great either but he was much easier to cope with than my father. And my mom is my role model for compassion in this world.
Unfortunately in my case the cycle of abuse continued with my stepbrother when my dad remarried. Which is why I have doubts about him really getting the message. And my stepbrother ended up moving out when he was 17 and couchsurfing through the rest of high school.
Anyway, I made a edit to my post above. I just wanted to point out that we are the victims of abuse. Restoring the relationship is on the shoulders of the person that caused the damage to the relationship right. It's up to them to make amends and rebuild trust. And without rebuilding trust there can't be love. So, it's really not our job.
Finding compassion and understanding for everyone can still be really helpful though in that it can lead to deeper self understanding. Which requires kind of stepping back and looking at the factors that contributed to the cycle. But that doesn't mean you need to let an abusive person into your life. Or feel warmth towards them. Even if they do try to make amends, it's completely acceptable to just not have the spoons to deal with it.
I think it's because we are designed with a somewhat blank idea of what love is. We are born with a system that will become love, but we are born with it undefined. It's similar to how we are born with a need for food, but not our culinary culture. It is during our formative years that we learn what love is just like we learn what delicious food is. Btw, in Spanish, when a kid doesn't like to eat a specific food, it's said that they haven't learned to eat it yet. Back to the topic, the part that does come predefined is that we are to attach to our caregivers. Thus, we don't leave them because we are designed to not leave them and have them teach us love.
Another issue is that as children, we don't know we are being abused. What we've experienced in our families is all we know. From the perspective at this age, that's just how life is. There's no reason to leave.
Once we start realizing that not everyone goes through our experiences and that there are much nicer ways of relating to family, we can start recognizing that our familial situation is terrible and we want it to be different. The issue here is that there are only two options. Either you suffer the bad parts of the abuse while surviving on the breadcrumbs, or you lose any possibility of ever having a childhood family. The person basically has to decide to lose a major part of life. That is an immense amount of grief to endure, and they have to do it without the support of family. In these situations, the victim usually just kind of learns to manage the relationship unless there is a major catastrophic event that forces a decision. Otherwise, they're learning how to overcome the frequent but comparatively tolerable difficulties. You'll hear them say things like, "My dad is cool as long as you don't expect him to..." or, "I love my mom, but I know not to..." They're consolations to salvage their one opportunity. The decision is then to either (a) take a humongous hit by losing childhood family or (b) learn to deal with the most recent difficulty. The latter is much easier to brunt.
tl;dr: We don't know it's abuse. Instead, we are taught abuse is love. We are designed by birth to attach to our parents. And once we figure out it's abuse, it's a terribly difficult lose-lose decision to make where one option is addressing a recent issue and the other is nuclear.
Who you love is ultimately up to you. Some people still have love for their parents despite strictness, others might place the bar lower than you describe. That isn't to say I encourage physical discipline, I'm only saying people have different priorities. I probably faced what people today would call an unacceptable category of discipline, but either way was and am too distracted by how I mention society treats me to care.
sarcastically.