Chapter (1?) of my book.

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# It Is a Personal Choice...

whether or not to confront your parents with your decision to conceptualize the way they raised you (using spanking) as abusive.  I promise you that if you do, on the spectrum of responses, you will hear many things.  Some parents will break down into tears and talk about how guilty they have felt their entire lives.  Many of you will take this as evidence of remorse and will be bamboozled. Instead of asking follow-up questions, you will be temporarily overloaded by their outpouring of emotion. This will shut down the logical portion of your brain, and you won't ask such essential follow-up questions as: If they felt so guilty, why have they waited this long to say something to you about it?  Is that why you are letting me live in the house rent-free? Is that why you bought me that car? Another response parents will be changing the subject abruptly. You will notice that “all of a sudden”, something “significant”must be talked about at that moment.  They may or may not promise to come back to the topic.  

You can expect them to have a sudden onset of “stomach pain”, “shortness of breathe” and some parents might even “faint”, but what they won't be able to do is call you a liar because your body keeps the score.  What most parents will do, because it is the safest option, is offer you explanations for their behavior.  This will work on most of you because most of you are addicted to your parents' validation. 

Many of you who have “good relationships” with your parents actually have extremely codependent one’s, but I would venture even to use the word “abusive” because your parents are the only people in your life who can shape your conceptualization of “how you conceptualize”, meaning they define the world and things in it for you and they may have presented you with a definition of “abuse” that prevents you from being able to conceptualize their behavior as abusive.   

That is why I believe that all explanations for abuse are excuses unless they are couched within the context of understanding that they are responsible for the behavior that they are explaining for.   There is an easy way to tell this, which will be the subject of Chapter 2. 

The easiest way parents prevent you from conceptualizing their behavior as abuse is through how they use language.  Instead of calling it “spanking”, they call it “popping”.  If you tell them they are “yelling” at you, meaning “speaking to me in a way where I feel uncomfortable,” they will say that they are “not yelling” and denying your lived reality all at the same time.  So when you go to them and tell them “spanking me as a child was abuse”, they can easily make you feel stupid and dumb by just saying “no its not”.  And if you are unknowingly dependent on your parents' validation for your existence, you will agree with them.  How do you know if you are dependent on it?  It can be not easy to tell, but here are some signs..

Calling them before you make any small decision

Making big decisions in your life only after to speaking to them

If they have financial vestments in your life

If you have a “good idea” talk to them and then it feels like a “bad idea”

If this concept is scaring you

The way this works is that when you are young, you are constantly trying to figure out who you are, what you are, how you are, and what you need to do to be ok.  Your parents supply the validation for all of this information.  You basically go around saying “I think I am X” and your parents either say

 “Yes, You are X” or 

“Yes, You Have the Right To Feel You Are X” or

 “You are NOT X” or 

“You Are Stupid For Even Thinking You Are X”. 

Where X could be “gay”, “lesbian”, “transgender”, “funny”, “sweet”, “wanted”, “loved”.  The way you say these things and the way they agree, disagree, or disqualify you are legion.  These interactions overlap to a complexity that even my neurodiverse mind has time keeping up with. 

The issue is that you depend on your parents for survival, as a child you know this instinctively and your parents have varying degrees of awareness about this fact. Most of you come from families where you are the “black sheep” or you were “a mistake” or your parents had you as a solution to their relationship problem. This means they were not fully prepared to take care of you, nor were they ready for the onslaught of wants and needs you would have.  So when you said “I think I am sad” and they were not ready to deal with any emotion from you other than blind happiness and acceptance, they needed you to believe “No, You Are an Annoyance To Me”. 

Now, this is key, they may have said the words “I am here for you”, but the metacommunication or the “feeling behind the words” was “You are an annoyance to me”.   As a child, you cannot talk about how you feel on that level because you cannot conceptualize it, but you can “feel” it. This is where children first learn not to believe how they feel.  The other issue is that when your parents made you feel that way, unloved (which you equate to being alone, which brings guilt and fear), they also are the only ones who can make you feel loved.  A child will do anything to feel loved by their parents, even deny themselves and their emotions. 

Some parents are still using this cycle of making their children feel unlovable and then providing them with drips of love and validation when they do what they want; to control them even to this day. Let’s say you want to go to school to be an underwater basket weaver and your parents have dreams of telling their friends about how their child is a doctor.  Your parents have several ways of manipulating you into becoming a doctor.  

They may buy you doctor like toys, they may tell you “you’ve always wanted to be a doctor”,  but the primary way is to simply withhold joy and validation when you tell them you want to be a basket weaver or better yet, simply tell you that you’re stupid for having the idea.  They might then subtly remind you that you “always wanted to be a doctor” and when you “remember” that they will give you praise and the cycle is complete. 

 So when you decide to go to your parents and tell them, “I am thinking you made me feel unlovable as a child by hitting me”, you are speaking to them on the exact level they wouldn't let you speak to them when you were a child. It is directly to them, and they cannot run away from it.  You are speaking on both levels, and they have no choice but to answer, unless you allow them to deceive you, as said earlier.  So should you use this information to confront your parents? It depends on whether or not you are dependent on them for validation.  If you can tell your parents that “I believe what you did to me was abuse” and be able to live with the fact they could say “no”, or “that's just that crazy therapist talking,” AND you realize and understand you don’t need to argue then, why not?  However, if your heart is STILL racing after reading all of this, probably shouldnt as you dont need their validation to set boundaries.  Even still, if they do express “remorse” how do you know if they mean it or not?