When we become parents, children enter our world completely at our mercy. Our job is to protect, not abuse, them in every way; emotionally, physically, spiritually, sexually. Abuse is defined as anything that is harmful, injurious, or offensive. How does verbal abuse affect children? Does what we say to our children matter? This is like asking if they themselves matter at all, rhetorical to the point of being preposterous.
Words can be as painful as beatings, as verbal vituperation is a spiritual attack as well. Verbal abuse transforms words into weapons for the recipient. While words do not leave a traditional permanent mark that is visible on the body, they do leave an emotional, psychic scar, one that follows children into adulthood. This venomous energy tinges everything for that individual. Many healers can pick up on these emotional scars in the body’s energy field years later. Abuse like this causes copious physical illness. We bottle up what assailed us, the contemptuous, coarse, insulting words; we hold within what we felt we were; reviled. Anything that diminishes a child’s spirit is abuse, whether through words, slaps, emotional manipulation, belittling a child’s dreams and aspirations, guilt tripping, sexual abuse, or physical, emotional, or spiritual neglect.
I’d like to touch on name calling, especially. There are many verbal weapons: “idiot,” “stupid,” “jerk,” and worse. What we say to our children affects them profoundly. Parents who verbally criticize their children were usually raised in the same way. They may be in denial about this. It may be that they can not properly identify what they experienced as “abuse.” They can justify their parent’s cruel treatment of them all day long. They can get angry with everyone but their parents or no one at all. Anger creates a desire for change. Anger can be very transformative. Anger helps us confront injustice.
Personally, I understand how difficult it is to face the reality of our parents. I spent many years minimizing my father’s sexual abuse of me, my mother’s dismissal, ignoring, and abandonment of me, my grandfather’s verbal venom, and my grandmother’s emotional manipulation, my aunt and uncle’s indifference to the abuse I underwent. We subconsciously think it’s better to just maintain an illusion, to make excuses for them, and to blame ourselves. We go through life with feelings, sometimes vague, sometimes pronounced, of unworthiness, fear of rejection, low self-esteem, and a monstrously critical superego. The police in our head that acts as an inner critic, berating us where our parents left off, only using our own voice. We judge ourselves, we sabotage ourselves, we think we are whatever we were told we were. This cumulative process begins in infancy. Whatever we are met with throughout our childhood is what we think we are. This is called introjection, when we internalize the characteristics of a person or object into our own psyche unconsciously. This serves a purpose for us, this defense mechanism. If we take on our parents flaws and make them our own, we can protect our image of them. It’s all our fault, they did their best, sigh, and well, we were troublesome anyway, on and on. We can reverse this, and we must! Parents remain unhealed, having an infected wound, and project outward the emotions that have become too painful for them to face about their parents. Children are the screen receiving the projection. The cycle continues. We have to break this cycle.
In my blood family, words were hurled and hurt me to my core. I was called names that suddenly and forcibly altered my view of myself. I was teased for crying, my need to cry wrenched from me. My “crimes” were minor, forgetting to put a bucket back in the proper place, not wrapping the barn hose back up perfectly. My grandfather would blow up over one of these “crimes” I had committed, yelling in my face that “I don’t like you, and I don’t love you!” Words in his defense then offered up by my grandmother. “Oh dear, don’t be so sensitive, he’s just domineering,” or “Oh sugar, he’s just abrasive, I’ll talk to him.” This was always followed by, “But he loves you so much, you are his whole world!” If that is love, please hate me. What a twisted definition of love! Even as a young child, I remember thinking, “He screams in my face because he loves me? He scares me to death and makes me cry because of his love for me? He calls me ‘stupid’ because he loves me? I’m confused.”
No wonder people struggle ad infinitum with an inability to love themselves, let alone others, no wonder people gravitate toward soulless, emotionally abusive marriages and vacant relationships.
No wonder I sought out similar situations to my early experiences for so long. Our image of love is totally, unequivocally distorted. Verbal abuse wrecks us completely, we are demolished. Self love is often categorically rejected as narcissism. (It is a myth that narcissists are authentically loving themselves. They are often the utmost in insecure person on the block, they just develop and don a mask so ornate they deceive not only those around them, but themselves as well.) We certainly can not love our neighbors well if we can not start with loving ourselves well. Fragments of “love” fraught with conditions, poison, and pain are not really love. The world over, we can see people loving their neighbor as themselves, all right, that is to say: NOT AT ALL! Barely, conditionally, abusively. We need to cultivate more self love, especially compassionate love for the child within us who has been hurt.
Verbally abusive parents have not faced the deep pain their own parents caused them. Sometimes, they even venerate them as great people who just acted like that “for their own good.” People believe it is easier to justify or altogether forget what happened. All of this is mostly unconscious. However, when they have children, the cycle is then continued. If they can get in touch with the pain they felt as a child, they can begin to see their children as porous, emotionally malleable beings. They can see themselves in their child. Verbal abuse stifles joy, creativity and passion are smothered. We may marry someone who verbally diminishes us, and when we have children, we pass on this emotional cancer. The same holds true for any abuse.
When we as parents can feel our own pain about our parents, transformation happens. We can allow our righteous anger and grief to endow us with a deep resolve NEVER to allow poisonous parental ghosts to visit upon our children. This involves sitting with some very unpleasant feelings, many tears, difficult yet essential for healing. We must for our children and for the children we were.
This is a step toward breaking the cycle of abuse. Since we are our children’s sole support in this world, what we say is powerful. Our children care with all of their souls what we think of them. They look to us as a mirror to reflect to them that they exist, and that they are loved just because of this fact. Our words can nurture their spirits, and our words can truly break and annihilate them. It is up to us how we will choose to use them. Look at your children. Pledge that the only thing to be broken is the cycle.