Love Flowing Backwards

It’s a sad thing, but a vicious cycle, and a real one, in many families: reverse flow.

In some families, and to some degree or other in many families, sad to say, it is the children who sacrifice, the children that spend their days protecting the adults from their bad feelings, making sure the adults feel loved.

Adults know how important it is for children that they feel loved. Unfortunately, for so many, that is not always the priority for parents and caregivers, too often the priority seems to be discipline first, and love second. For children, however, for that very reason, that choice is not available, they are not able to exercise that sort of prioritization.

When an adult requires a child’s love, that child had better just give it up. An adult in the throes of feeling unloved, and adult who is experiencing their infantile lack of love is a dangerous thing to a child. A child in this situation has no choice. This child must set aside his own needs and serve the adult’s needs; this is a matter of self-preservation, and the child, almost invariably will look after his life first, and search for love later.

Unfortunately, what often happens is this search for love later in life becomes a desire to have children and continue this backward cycle.

(As a half-humourous aside, I must observe that in the world I am hoping to help create, saying “I want a child” will begin to be seen as a form of “I want a human being,” alongside of horrible phrases like “I want a Negro,” or “I want a pair of Vietnamese nymphets.” These are human beings, not possessions of some sort. It should be seen as a horrible thing to say, and it should be obvious that saying it signals an unhealthy psychological need as much – and more importantly – as it does a natural manifestation of the procreative urge.)

I’ve said it before, and I know I’ll be saying it again:

This generation needs to lose at both ends. We may not have gotten the unconditional love we needed as children, but we need to break the cycle. We need to not get that love again, we need to not suck it out of our children. That doesn’t save us anyway, it only continues the cycle, it only hurts our children, and theirs, and theirs, ad infinitum.

The buck should stop here. Let’s be the last unloved generation.

Don’t Turn Your Back on your Childhood Self

When I was a kid, and still pretty young, I realized my parents were crazy.

There was a moment that I remember, although I’m sure it’s not an isolated incident. We were in the car, going somewhere or coming back, all of us, me and my brother, my two sisters, and my parents, in the big family car, Mom and Dad in the front, kids in the back, either the Meteor or the Parisienne. This would have been in the mid to late 1960s.

My brother was hyper as Hell, he could get on your nerves, and had gotten on Dad’s. He’d gone too far; he knew he was in for it, and so he got scared and started crying. This was at least partly from real fear, maybe partly a ploy, something kids do to try to tell a parent that they’ve made their point, but he was really crying. Dad apparently found this noise to be not any less irritating than my brother’s preceding noise, and growled (perhaps you’ve heard this one before?)

“Stop crying, or by God, I’ll give you something to cry about!”

To my mind at the time, the child, my older brother by a year and a half, was already crying from fear, and my father’s solution was simply more fear. This seemed unreasonable to me; I was crying also, and I too was only more afraid and only cried harder after that. That may not have been the only time, but it’s the one I remember the most, and I decided in that moment that grownups were crazy.

The difference between me and most people, between me and you, is that I’ve never changed my mind about it. To reverse myself about that is, definitively, to become crazy. To join the ranks of the mad, and I’m not doing it. My eyes were clear in that moment.

Now, I know you’ve all been there too as kids. I hope I can in some humble, respectful way, suggest that if you have changed your mind in that way, that you reconsider, retrace your steps, and start again. Support the sane, frightened child you once were and reject the madness that we call ‘parenting, discipline, punishment, consequences.’

Support the child you once were, and support the children in your world now.

And support me too! Follow me on Twitter. I will continue to try at least to put something out in this topic weekly.

https://twitter.com/punishmenthurts

Consequences, shmonsequences . . .

Change your ways, people, not your words, or not only your words.

Consequences, discipline, ’cause and effect,’ these are all words for punishing. If you’re imposing any of these things, you’re punishing . . . and yes, that’s . . . bad.

I am the most politically correct person you’d care to meet, but here’s what’s wrong with so much about PC terms: they’re terms. Words. We have seen words banned, new words for old things, old words disappearing, but the things never seem to.  Outlawing the N-word has not ended some peoples’ dislike for black people, racism still exists, albeit in code.

Punishment still abounds, albeit in code. Changing things, though, that is more difficult than changing words. Changing this thing, the world-destroying scourge of punishing, this is going to be harder than memorizing new words for it. It’s going to involve some very heavy lifting, namely:

1. Admitting our parents hurt us to no good end; and

2. Never regaining our sense of personal power by hurting our kids to no good end.

That is some very heavy lifting. No shame in not doing it – just no glory either.

From an Online Conversation . . .

OK, first, you’re way down the road, the path of what I call “normal” parenting, it is way too late for you to change and do it my way. Your kids are living in the normal system and simply removing all the normal controls now would probably be disastrous.

(We were discussing someone’s teenager)

Second, you yourself are far down that road too. I have long since given up on expecting any agreement with my idea about child-rearing from someone who has already raised their kids in the normal way, or even done it for a few years. A massive load of guilt is the only prize for any person who has already raised their kids and then has my epiphany and starts to see things my way. I mean, I don’t blame you, or any normal parent, I feel it’s just the system, and as much as anyone is doing what I think is wrong now, I think that parent was first and foremost a victim of the system in their own childhood.

But having said that, we like to think we know what we’re doing, and when we learn anything we did was wrong, guilt ensues.

Generalization? Yes, but the number of people who think of discipline and punishment the way you do is huge. Of all our individual differences and all the variety there is with people, the one most common thing is the belief and practice of punishment in child-rearing. There may be differences in method, and in the rules, but the basic idea is the most common thing that most of humanity shares.

I do think that generally, punishments are a betrayal of love and the caring and protection we owe our kids, and I do think that generally, our kids are resentful about it, and that our kids and especially our teenagers are a whole lot angrier at us and “respect” us a whole lot less than we wish and we pretend. What is normal, what everyone expects, angry, resentful teenagers, is not built in, not automatic. We had none of it with our two girls, now 16 and 19.

We didn’t escape some normal patterns, though. Our first was outnumbered and overpowered by us, so she seemed to be the more compliant one, while the second one seemed to be wild and rebellious – that’s a normal pattern, right?

But we didn’t beat the younger one down, didn’t punish her, and I swear to you, the behaviour problems stopped in our house as soon as they were at an age when they could talk and reason (somewhere around six) – which is never the end of behaviour issues in punishing households.

“Expert parenting” isn’t applicable at all. We didn’t know what to do half the time. All we knew was what NOT to do – punish – and that just made everything easier and better, again, after the age of five or six. Toddlerhood was a lot of work, a lot of legwork, a lot of chasing, holding, talking . . . but punishing actually seems to CAUSE the bad behaviour. We learned that if you never punish them when they’re small, you never have to. You may be right, we may have had it easy with just girls, although the second one was pretty hyper and had her own mind.

Because we never punished, never committed that betrayal, our girls have always still been communicative with us, the lines of communication have never closed. They don’t have to hide, they don’t have to keep their own counsel.

About these ads

Occasionally, some of your visitors may see

Regarding “Boundaries”

“Boundaries” are a favourite buzzword for parents and parenting gurus alike. We all have ‘personal boundaries,’ of course, but ‘boundaries for kids’ aren’t the personal kind, or they aren’t all the personal kind. Kids are bound in more ways than that. Many more.

“Testing for boundaries” is a very popular idea, the theory being that kids are frightened in a big, boundless world, and we therefore owe it to them to provide some boundaries, to make them feel safe.

I’m sorry, but I call bullshit.

The “big, scary, boundless world” – that is the world we all grew up in, that is the world our species evolved in, it is part of us, and we of it (or, for the religious, this big, boundless world is the one God made for us, and the one we have dominion over, rather than the other way ‘round). This unbounded world is our natural environment. We were made for it.

From where I’m at on this subject, what I see is a certain amount of chaotic parenting in a very complicated world where even if the boundaries were consistent, which they often are not, responses to the crossing of them usually aren’t.

I see kids “testing for boundaries” because there is no logical system of boundaries. After all, every culture, every nation, every creed, right down to every family has its own idea of what the boundaries need to be. To take that idea two steps further, every family is comprised of two different families’ inherited set of rules, and even within each of the two, individual differences can be big. After that, kids are individuals too. So every child’s “system of boundaries” is a one-off, as individual as fingerprints. The common factor is only that every person must learn the boundaries, or else.

All a kid can really do is test each individual boundary, each situation empirically, in the absence of any system that he could extrapolate from or deduce. That is what “testing for boundaries” is. It is a child learning which particular, strange, just invented yesterday set of rules he will be obliged to learn, or else.

What I am trying to say here, is that it isn’t a natural tendency to push limits that causes your child to test boundaries, and he isn’t going to test them to the point of jumping over a cliff, or killing someone, not naturally. It’s not a natural tendency to find out how bad he can be, what he can get away with.

He’s just trying to learn his way around in the mad, chaotic world of your rules, what you think of as your “system.”

Admit it, there is no “system,” no method to our madness. Our one-off set of rules/boundaries is the result of millennia of random culture, blended with the random experience of our parents and ourselves, along with our random reactions to that experience. Face it.

We’re weird. The worlds we make for our kids are individual, weird and random ones. They’re only trying to make sense of the senseless.

Fail at Controlling Your Kids

This is it, this is what I'm saying.

Not "control your kids without punishment," or "control your kids without physical punishment."

I'm not trying to tell anyone that is is possible to control your kids without punishment.

It's not. I admit that.

What I'm saying is, punishment harms them - us. We were kids too - so controlling them harms them, so: give up the control. Control them a whole lot less.

Protect them from serious safety issues, but don't punish them in order to train them to protect themselves from these serious safety issues, because this punishment harms them. When they're small, too young to understand, that's YOUR job, protecting them, not theirs.

Protect yourself and your expensive or otherwise treasured things from them when they're small and experimenting with the world and with their power, creative and destructive power, but don't punish them in order to train them to protect you and your stuff from their creative and destructive power, because this punishment harms them. When they're small, too young to understand, that's YOUR job, protecting you and your stuff, not theirs.

Other than that, don't be controlling your kids, the cost is too high, the cost in trauma, the cost of their trust in you and your love, and the cost in their cognitive development.

You can TRY to control them, with speech, even distraction, don't get me wrong, you're supposed to teach them, you want them to know you're paying attention, that you care. You can TRY to talk them out of stuff, talk is OK, but if it's not working, it's not working, don't escalate to punishing. Let them learn the real-world consequences of their actions, let them learn about the real world.

Believe me, it won't "work" most of the time. With no tool more powerful thatn talk, you are going to lose the battles with your two-year old.

And that is how it should be.

If you always win, if you do what it takes to win every time, if you succeed at controlling your kids, that's only a short term win for you. Punished kids feel betrayed and abused. Punished kids, by the time they can converse, don't like you any more, and they don't want to listen.

If you want them to talk to you when they can, if you want teenagers that are willing to converse with you, keep it to talk when they're small, never escalate.

Lose the battles.

Fail at controlling them.

Beware of parenting advice that tells you you can win, because winning with your two-tear old means losing your older kids.

You want to win the war?

Lose the battles.

Negative Effects on Cognitive Development

I see rewards and punishments as very detrimental to learning about the real world. I think the kids minds are not properly developed by the adults always substituting artificial effects for real world effects that would have had an actual relationship to the cause.

Not every punishable situation is a safety, or a life and death matter.

They do say that over-punishing has the effect of some hampering of cognitive development, and I think this is why, because punishments and rewards interfere with actual, real life learning.

And if I’m right about that, then the increase of negative cognitive effects is linear, not only present in “over-punishing.”

Wouldn’t you think?

Also, punishment wouldn't have to physical for that negative effect, would it? Any punishment that substitutes an artificial effect for a real cause would do that . . . 

Regarding the Online talk about Bullying

There was a post on here recently, about a bullying incident, I think it was one that went viral, about a boy who was being bullied for bringing his My Little Pony backpack to school and the school basically told his mother he was asking for it, and he should just conform - of course I'm paraphrasing, but you've probably heard the story anyway.

Of course I find the school's reaction appalling, it's victim-blaming and all that, wrong from every possible angle.

But there was a comment stream about this story that went on forever, and I'm sorry to say, very few comments that had anything useful to say. Mostly, all the commenters wanted to punish the bullies. The school should, or the parents should . . . and that shows a disturbing lack of understanding.

Punishing CAUSES bullying.

because

Punishing IS bullying.

The only differences are who's doing it and why. The differences are: children are not authorized to punish and the reasons they punish are not sanctioned. The process, and the rationale are the same, and are as follows:

someone (a kid) does something that some more powerful person (bigger kid/bully, or parent/authority figure) judges to be wrong, and the bully/authority figure imposes some sort of hurt on them, it's that simple.

Every time an adult punishes a child, they not only demonstrate and teach the process, but they make the punished kid feel helpless and powerless, thereby creating in him a need to find someone else to do it to, a need to find a situation where he feels he has some power again. An example follows, and there will be a quiz afterwards.

Billy gets defiant at dinner and refuses to eat his vegetables, something his parents think is wrong, so they punish him, by banning him from the internet for the evening. This tells Billy that he lacks the power of choosing to play online when he likes, or eat what he likes, shows him that the exercise of power is a socially acceptable thing, and that it is the method his parents use to modify his behaviour, to stop him doing something they think is wrong.

Now Billy goes to school the next day, he's with his friends, and he sees someone doing something he thinks is wrong - wearing something "wrong," doing something that Billy has judged that he wouldn't do, something that seems wrong to him.

The quiz:

1. What have the adults taught Billy to do in this situation?

(Bearing in mind, perhaps the parents have told Billy not to bully - but, action speaks louder than words. What have they SHOWN him?)

2. What pre-existing need does Billy have that this situation may appear to him to fill?

 . . . now here's the tricky part . . . 

3. What will punishing Billy again do?

It may be debatable whether there are behaviours that can be improved by punishing - but the behaviours that are actually CAUSED by punishing, they can't be.

Hundredth Monkey Time

Word is getting around about corporal punishment. The science is coming in.

That’s a good thing, I’m not complaining. Check out these Time articles, brought to my attention by Morgan - on Wordpress, she’s here:

http://wordpress.com/read/blog/id/61364609/

and here are the articles:

http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/28/would-you-record-yourself-spanking-your-kids/

and

http://healthland.time.com/2012/07/02/physical-punishment-increases-your-kids-risk-of-mental-illness/

There is starting to be a lot of this stuff, and it’s good stuff. The first article states that something like 80% of families in a study that recorded their family households were recorded using corporal punishment methods – perhaps a surprise for those who haven’t raised kids yet, that so many resort to it – and these were families that knew they were being recorded. This seems new to me, mainstream press that states that corporal punishment is not going away.

The second article pretty much lists all the extra risks that corporally punished kids are in for throughout their life, as compared to less “spanked” people.

Again, all good info, I’m not complaining.

OK, I’m complaining.

This looks good, I think we may be on the brink of the Hundredth Monkey effect here, in terms of corporal punishment, it may be that professionals at least, and maybe even parents are getting the idea that it’s not good for us after all.

But all this talk about “corporal punishment” is misguided. It assumes there is some other kind, which there isn’t. How can any punishment be enforced, if not physically? We may wish to impose a non-corporal form of discipline, but it is in the enforcement that it becomes physical; it is in the imposition of it wherein the physical part lies. Be honest:

Why would our kids accept our punishments if we weren’t willing to back it up? Why would a person be “grounded” if they had no idea that there is anything to enforce it? Again, be honest: what is a punishment if we don’t make it happen? It all rests upon physical means ultimately.

So, if we’re heading into Hundredth Monkey territory, if this idea is going to take hold, let’s be honest about it, lets grab this opportunity and make sure a true idea, a real-life idea is the one that takes hold, and that idea is this:

It is punishment that is the cause of these poor outcomes. There is no harmless variety, all punishment is ultimately corporal; we are corporal beings, after all. What sorts of punishments would not be? Mental, psychological, emotional? Do those who decry only corporal types of punishment advocate for the mental variety? Are we to promote psychological punishment, emotional punishment?

This is an all-or-nothing sort of thing.

The question is not “HOW should I hurt my kid,” it is “SHOULD I hurt my kid,” and the answer is, of course, “no.”

The question is punishment or not. Make no mistake, do not be fooled my imitations, the science is coming in, but it needs to take one more step. People are being hurt by punishment, and the problem is THAT they are being hurt, not HOW they are being hurt.

Do Animals Punish?

I don’t think they do. I think punishing is the human difference, the human genius - as well as the human madness.

I think animals teach their children by example.

People have told me that animals punish, that that’s what they’re doing when for example, a lion or lioness snarls and yells and swats a cub, or maybe bites a cub when the cub tries to eat the food the adult is eating.

Now if the adult cat here is trying to teach the cub to wait its turn, or just not to try to take the adult’s food, maybe, but I doubt it. I think this is a case of teaching by example. I think the adult is teaching the cub, by example, to protect its share of the food. This is an important, real life lesson for a lion. The lion that doesn’t do that will be starved out.

If this is an example of punishing, I have a few comments:

1. Is this the only thing lions do that looks like punishment?

             - yes, I think it is. I don’t think they punish their kids for other things cubs do wrong, like wandering away into trouble, bothering the alpha male, not learning how to hunt, or just lazily not hunting. I think for wandering, mom might bring them back, but that’s all. I think they let the alpha male look after his own peace of mind, or the cub gets eaten, and I think a lion that won’t hunt or can’t learn may eventually be exiled and starved, but I haven’t ever seen on TV that a cub is beaten for refusing to learn.

(If anyone has seen that, if there are animal behaviourists in the house, please, let me know.)

2.  Teaching by punishing is a human thing. As another example, how does a prey animal, a deer or a rabbit “teach” its young to run and hide from the predators? By example – because, let’s turn that upside-down: does anyone think a deer or a rabbit hangs around to punish a child who doesn’t run while the wolves approach?

No, doing the wrong thing while simply telling your child to do the right thing and punishing him when he doesn’t – say, abusing your child about smoking and/or drinking when those are things you do – is a luxury animals can’t afford. The deer, the rabbit, they teach by example, and hope to stay alive to do it again tomorrow.

About Hating the Sin and Loving the Sinner – and Hating the Punishment and Loving the Punisher

Punishment is abuse, something I say a lot.

I know I’m ruffling some feathers with it, and I know why.

Unfortunately, me condemning the practice of punishing will feel like I’m condemning the people who practice it (or the ones who have practiced it in the past), if they feel like the practice is part of them.

 It’s the same as my argument about why Gays feel hated by Christians, even if the Christian haters (not all Christians, I know) say they “hate the sin, not the sinner.” When gays feel the “sin” is PART OF THEM, then hating the sin IS hating the sinner, to the “sinner.”

That is a chestnut. The Christian gay-bashers will continue, because, although the gays feel gayness is part of them, the Christian gay-bashers don’t think so . . .

so in the case of punishing, I’m the hater. A punisher may feel that punishing is part of them, but I don’t think so . . .

so the punishers, or the former punishers, feel hated my me. I guess I’m starting to see how anti-gay religious people feel. These are rather parallel things, for sure.

Of course, there are differences. I don’t think the punishers of world are concerned that their punishing is part of them, for them it’s built into, PART OF the punished, not the punisher. For them it’s about Original Sin – that we are born evil - or its Naturalist version – that we are evolved from beasts and are born with beastly instincts that need to be suppressed. Still, though, anyone who has raised a bunch of kids in the usual way identifies very strongly with punishment, with the “need” to punish. Still close to parallel.

And now for my defense.

1. It is going to matter whether these identifications are real or not, whether they’re true.

 - is homosexuality built into people?

Many say yes, and there are many good arguments for the truth of it. I believe it’s built in, PART OF people. Maybe not every gay person, as not every person living a hetero life is really wired hetero, perhaps some people live gay ‘against their natures.’ Homosexuality seems to be an integral part of many people, despite that it is often a fringe life-style, a life lived against the current, and fraught with difficulty and often danger.

 - is punishing built into people?

This question hasn’t really come up for many people, I don’t think. Again, it’s more the other way, as in “Is needing to be punished built into people?” But when it’s posed to punishers now, maybe for the first time, I think -

Many will say yes. After all, it’s nearly universal. Dishing out punishments can appear automatic and natural. But, unlike homosexuality, punishing doesn’t exist stubbornly, against the current, it doesn’t exist despite being marginal, despite being threatened. Punishing is unchallenged, unless it is seen in an extreme form, and very much supported. It is in this support that we see the difficulty:

How do we know if something that we teach constantly, use constantly, and recommend continually is natural? How do we determine whether it would occur naturally? Where has punishing ever been allowed to occur naturally, when have ever seen people raised in the absence of the society that seems to be a cult of punishment? Everyone in our society wears clothes. Is that built into us? How do we separate these things?

2. One is sex, one is violence. (If you think punishing can be other than violence, ask me in comments, or read my blogs.)

 - this is our society, where sex is immoral and violence is not. I mean that as a critique, just to be clear. I think for the religious, that arrangement seems to be correct, but not for me, not for the liberal, not for the modern, secular person.

_______________________________________________________________________________

So, parallel as it seems, these are the differences:

3. Homosexuality IS part of people, and it exists despite persecution, despite everything, because it IS built into some people, it IS natural.

4. Punishing is taught, promoted, supported by scripture and old science, and nearly universal, and if it is natural, we would never know it. Punishing is literally forced upon us all.

5. If we want to know if punishing could exist in nature, we’ll have to do an experiment: we’ll have to stop teaching it, promoting it, supporting it with bronze age stories, we’ll have to stop forcing it everyone.

Then we’ll see if it exists without all of our efforts to make sure it does. Let’s take it off life support and see if it lives.

Then we’ll know.

It’s not Easy, Letting Your Kids do Whatever They Want

It’s what I was trying to say with the title – really, letting them do whatever they want, despite the way the punishers try to frame it – IS NOT EASY. And that’s not why I do it, or anyone should do it. It’s doing it the hard way, the long way, and the right way.

.Beating your kids into always letting YOU have YOUR WAY, always – that’s the easy way, the fast way, and the wrong way.

It’s not comfortable either. It was scary, uncharted territory. But it worked.

I see what people say about how things are all going to Hell as the result of half measures, the result of confusion. The chaos we have going on today in our kids and our teenagers is because of the force we are still using, not because of the gentleness we’re starting to use more.

A lot of thought went into it. I hope you will read my blog. I’m afraid a plan just to “not spank” can’t really work, there will be more decisions to make, or you are likely to end up there despite the best of intentions.

It's not Always Easy, Letting Your Kids do Whatever They Want.

We had the family bed, and the kids could sleep when they wanted, nurse when they wanted, and they could toilet-train themselves when they wanted.

Most of that was pretty easy - well maybe not the nursing. With the boob always available, the kids would have small meals all night long, they never had to fill up and then do without. Those were some long nights and brutally interrupted sleeps for my wife. The family bed helped, we didn't have to get up, at least.

Toilet training was a breeze. Human beings will do that as soon as they're ready, and at a young age, they will see the advantage of not crapping in their pants. Making that a forced thing, making that about the parents, is really stupid, It's like forcing someone to eat dessert. Who wants to sit in shit?

A few things were a little tough though. As mentioned in a comment recently in someone else's blog, letting them procrastinate about their homework until the last possible night, and late that night, that made me squirm, freaked me out.

http://wordpress.com/read/post/id/48077210/10777/

It all worked out though. I learned to sleep through that sort of thing, and they're straight A students.

Another one was swearing. We had no rules about language, and we all watched anything on TV together, raised the girls on South Park - but when your first daughter, at seven years of age is playing video games by herself, getting worked up and yelling "Holy Fucking Shit-Balls!" at the TV, with no worry that you're there and listening - well that kind of freaks you out.

Then when the second one, at about the same age, stubs her toe and hop-runs around the house screaming "Fuck, fuck, fuck, Fuckley J. McFucklepants!" again, with no worry that you're there and hearing it, that can be a little shocking.

I mean, I wasn't raised this way. It all rattled me too.

But it's all good.

Really, really good.

We never Punished, and nothing Bad Happened.

I’ve got two teenage girls, 16 and 19. We never punished them for anything.

Well, after the older one lost her iPod by leaving it in a locker with no lock during gym class at school, and then borrowed her sister’s and lost it by leaving it in a classroom in her hoodie, we told her we couldn’t afford to buy her another one, and we didn’t, for a few years.

Technically, we could have, I mean, we’re mortgaged, operating in deficit mode, but we could have charged another one. I think what we said was “we can’t afford to keep buying these things if you keep giving them away” – something like that.

She felt so bad about it, she didn’t argue. That was as close to a punishment as anything we ever did, and it stands alone as a thing that approached punishing.

Our teenagers are lazy and messy, they’re not much help with the house – and that is as bad as it gets.

I have nothing worse to report.

They’re bloody brilliant, the kind of kids some teachers love, because they’re smart and they can talk to the teachers, and other teachers hate because they’re smarter than those teachers.

My oldest one tutors some of her college peers – and she told me this the other day – even in subjects she hasn’t taken. She’s not even in the class, and she can help you with your homework.

The older one is going through high school, breaking her sister’s records.

I swear, punishment damages your brain.

Selling Harm

Addiction is a strange thing.

I used to say, getting high, getting drunk – that I can understand, but gambling? Spending all your money to feel the high from heroin, or from weed, you’re getting something, at least some relief from all those pesky feelings, and with alcohol . . . well, I think with drink what you get is different. I think what alcohol gives you is a chance to vent, a chance to give voice to your worst feelings with no worry that you might remember doing it.

But gambling? That seemed like only half an addiction to me. You lose all your money and . . . nothing. Talk about cutting out the middleman. That is some pure, un-cut self harm right there.

And that is the clue to what’s really going on with addiction.

The addict tends to think that the very thing that is ruining him is the thing that’s saving him – that’s another clue. The addict sees good in the harm, perhaps it’s possible to say that the addict can’t tell good from bad, but probably more accurate to say that for him, the harm looks like good, or feels like good.

Harm from which good is said to come, or good that is derived from harm?

That is what punishment is supposed to be, that is the theory of punishing, good from harm, harm to create good. And this is where the addict learned it. Where we all learned it, at home, from our caregivers.

When a parent punishes, either hits, spanks, grounds or puts us in time-out, confiscates a desired object or simply withdraws his love in order to hurt us and induce us to avoid that hurt by doing what he wants, this is what is shown: good from harm. Worse, the parentexplains it, spells it out: this harm is good for you. For many of us, for so many of us, this lesson is applied for nearly every possible hard lesson we get.

It’s no wonder so many of us think harm is good, at least that harm brings good.

Is it?

Punishing and Teaching

When you have something important to say, some important lesson to impart – say itnicely.

When you’re giving a lesson, give it nicely.

I mean, if you want someone to listen to you, if you want your pearls of wisdom to be accepted, then you want to be someone to listen to, you want your students, your children, to respect you, and the more subtle, complex, counter-intuitive or difficult the lesson may be, the more you need to be a loved and respected teacher.

This itself may sound either mind-numbingly obvious or counter-intuitive, depending on a number of things, but things can sometimes be made infinitely clearer by turning them over, so lets look at this upside down and backwards:

The more subtle, complex, counter-intuitive or difficult the lesson is, the easier it becomes for your student, or especially your kids, to find a way out of getting it. Threaten them, hurt or belittle them, and they have a reason not to believe you. We should tread lightly; any abuse of our power is all the excuse a person needs to reject what we say, no matter how true, necessary and wise the lesson may have been.

A few kitchen sink sort of examples:

1. I for one, as a child, had heard so much stupid and contradictory crap from the adults in my life that they were no longer credible sources if they said the sky was blue or water wet. I didn’t believe the adults when they told me I would need to complete my school, get some skills, and that I would have to work to support myself. In hindsight, of course this is obvious, and should have been to anyone, even a person as dreamily clueless as me, but at that point – I was 15 – if they said it, it could only be wrong. Of course, in adulthood we learn that there is more to life than the structures of our nuclear family – even I got that, eventually – but that I didn’t see that then, and this blame belongs with the adults in my life. It is they who establish the rules, and the game itself. It was they who made the power structure of the family all that mattered. That was their game, and at 15, that was still the world to me.

So I didn’t get the skills, and I dropped out of school and out of life, because that would teach them.

It was quite a few years later when I picked up where I had left off, and made a very late start on living my adult life.

2. My wife doesn’t always agree with everything I say. I don’t know why, I must have lost a lottery or something. But when I am trying to make a point of some sort with her, sometimes I will try once, twice, three times, and if I’m not getting any traction, and if I deem the point an important one (child-rearing things are the worst of these memories), I may try making my point by talking louder, some times I may shout. I’m human, I’m a man . . . I’m sorry. Most of these incidents are in the past, when the kids were young and life was busy and stressful . . . 

but the point here is, if I got angry, or sometimes if I got loud, even if I was consciously trying to turn up the volume without being angry, if my wife heard anger – then my point would be lost forever. The last thing she would ever do is agree with an angry man, no matter if I may have been correct. I have learned that getting mad only makes it worse, and now I have a formula to follow: what is more important to me here – that I vent my frustration (and that is frustrating, believe me. Just when something is wrong enough to anger me, that is when nothing I say or do will be heard or acted upon. Unimportant stuff, something I don’r care about is fine – but something I’m passionate about – that I can just swallow and hold down forever) or that I retain some small hope of winning my point?

It’s a point of pride for me that I more often choose the second option, but even when I choose to vent, that doesn’t feel as bad as it did in the past, because now I know what’s happening. Being conscious always feels better. Looking back on something and knowing I was unconscious, running on some sort of programmed script, that is what has always felt the worst.

________________________________________________________________________________

Now, these examples were subtle, nuanced versions of what I’m really after.

If I’ve made any case there about people taking a moral stance as an excuse or a reason not to hear you, imagine the more blatant scenario of punishing. Do we take life coaching from someone who thinks it’s OK to hurt us when we are children? Do we take a whooping, or a grounding, or the confiscation of a loved object from someone and then open our minds to them? Do we remotely want to share in the wisdom of those who are punishing us?

Not me.

Probably not your kids either.

Clarity – the Up-side of Abuse

Originally posted @punishmenthurtseveryone.wordpress.com,

 Posted on February 14, 2014

I know, I know – not cool, not PC. Victims of child abuse have had it very bad, and at the worst possible time in their lives, brutalized and used by the ones who were supposed to be looking after them. I’m not “for” abuse, believe me.

But those people who have suffered extreme abuse, the outright, illegal, everyone-knows-that –is-abuse sort of abuse – those people have at least a chance for clarity. Those people have a chance to say of their abusers that they were wrong, they were the bad ones. Those people have a chance to say “it’s not my fault.”

Taking ‘don’t get me wrong a level deeper,’ I must say, I mean they have a chance, at least some of them. Still, the enemies of clarity are very powerful. Guilt, the mind control that abuse can create, social pressures, religious and cultural biases and injunctions . . . of course victims of abuse are often mired in a fog of uncertainty, which is a big part of their pain. But the cavalry is coming. The support for victims is on the increase, awareness is growing, and many survivors are getting more validation from the enlightened members of our society. If a person living in this kind of pain can find themselves among these elements, around these ideas, they will have a better chance to know that their suffering is not their fault, a much better chance to lay the blame where it belongs.

(Some find this sort of clarity among other victims, some in the roughest neighborhoods and in the poorest demographics find some belonging and solidarity in each other as children and young adults, in times and places where most people get abused. Sad to say, many grow out of it.)

I support this sort of awareness fully, of course.

But what of the rest? What about the people for whom the chance of clarity remains remote? What about the people for whom the abuse is ubiquitous, everywhere, people suffering forms of abuse in times and places where no-one will validate their suffering?

Of course, this has been the case for many, many people, always, suffering the sort of things that we are only now outlawing and beginning to prosecute for, but it must be said: much of what is now thought to be clearly abuse was legal and dare I say, “normal” in the past. Slavery and child slavery, beatings and corporal punishments of the worst sort, all these things have been socially sanctioned in the past and though they are now considered to be immoral and abusive, victims were, uh, unsupported. To say the least.

If our enlightenment is not yet complete, if there is room for improvement still, and if our improved humanity continues to march forward, who will today’s unsupported victims have been, in a better future? Who is suffering today and no-one knows it, so that no-one can care?

Answer?

You and me. The “legitimately punished” children.