Revenge as a Motivation for Abusive Parents

As I have alluded to in my previous post, I’m current reading Alice Miller‘s For Your Own Good^[1].

(Coincidentally, she passed away just a few days before I wrote that post, although I didn’t know about this at the time.)

I’m only about half way through the book, but one particular idea really struck me, and I wanted to write something about it. It’s so obvious in retrospect, and explains so much about the behaviour of my biological parents towards me throughout my life, that I’m shocked that I hadn’t thought of it earlier myself. And that is that abusive parents are actually exacting revenge through their children for the pain and humiliation that they feel or have felt themselves.

This is the only possible explanation for their self-contradictory behaviour of simultaneously punishing me for my academic interests and activities while loudly claiming credit for my academic accomplishments. The same people who screamed at me or beat me for learning about a subject during a school term would suddenly turn around and brag to their relatives about what high marks I achieved in the same subject at the end of the term. I had never understood how they could be so blatantly hypocritical, or so oblivious to the fact that their actions were completely counterproductive to their ostensible goal.

Like many children raised by abusive authoritarian Asian parents, I had been operating under the assumption that my biological parents’ goal was for me to be academically successful, and that only their methods had been misguided. This was why it was so difficult for me to cope with the fact that the higher I reached academically, the more infuriated my biological parents became and the more harshly they punished me for my success. They continually disparaged my research as “worthless”, criticised me for going to scientific conferences, spoke dismissively of the research institutes where I worked, and insulted my colleagues who are some of the most respected scientists in the world. This is simply not the behaviour you would expect of people who want their child to do well academically.

But it is the behaviour of people who are extremely envious of those who are academically successful. When I realised this, their behaviour no longer seemed contradictory. Jealousy explains how they can simultaneously brag about my achievements to others while dismissing my interests and my research as “worthless”, disparaging my colleagues as nobodies, and punishing me for doing the very things that I had to do to be successful.

My biological parents must have been very poor students while they were growing up, and never fulfilled the expectations that their (authoritarian Asian) parents had of them. They would have grown up habitually dismissing and putting down the achievements of others in a case of “sour grapes”, while coveting those same achievements. They were probably continually compared by their parents to people who were much better students than they were, and felt humiliated by the comparison, but could do nothing about it at the time.

I was very fortunate to have been separated from my biological parents for a period of several years as an adolescent. During that time, due to the encouragement of my teachers, I excelled in school and, ironically, became the kid that all the other Chinese parents pointed to as an example for their children. One would think that my biological parents would have been pleased by this. Instead, my academic excellence enraged them, and as soon as they rejoined me, they started to do everything that they could to prevent me from continuing to be academically successful. Whereas I had gone to the library and to the houses of classmates freely by myself in their absence, they insisted on regulating when I could go to the library, what books I could read, and whom I could work on school projects with. They insisted that I maintained my high grades and even took credit for them while doing everything they could to punish me for earning them in the first place.

When I was in high school, I visited the university library and did research with a university professor. Albert Kwok-Wai Yeung 「楊國偉」 first dismissed my research as a “waste of time”, and when that didn’t dissuade me, he forbid me from going to the university library. This was, of course, extremely damaging when I later actually entered university, and had to spend a lot of time at the library just like every other student, and an environment that I used to enjoy became very stressful instead. I had never understood before why someone would punish his son for being studious (and especially an authoritarian Asian parent, who is supposed to desire this kind of thing), but the idea that he is exacting revenge through me — on his peers who had been better students than he was, who perhaps had higher marks or enjoyed their studies more than he did, or had opportunities that he never had — makes perfect sense to me.

Jealousy also explains the Stephen Hawking incident, which I have written about earlier. Albert Kwok-Wai Yeung’s reaction to my description of Hawking as “really famous” — he turned red in the face and screamed, “He may have heard of me. But I have never heard of him.” — is absurdly over-the-top in its ridiculousness, but may be explicable as the result of a lifetime of pent-up frustration over being negatively compared to other people by his parents.

Albert Kwok-Wai Yeung used to tell me a story as a child, the significance of which I had not realised until now. In the story, two people are arguing. Finally, one of them says, “You shut up. I have a Ph.D.” Those were the exact words that Albert Kwok-Wai Yeung used, and he always said them with emphasis whenever he told the story, followed by a chuckle. That, apparently, ended the argument. Even as a child, I had always thought that the story was stupid, because the guy didn’t even say what field his Ph.D. was in, so we don’t know if it’s even relevant to the argument. And in any case, a person with a Ph.D. can still be occasionally wrong even in his area of expertise. But apparently, in Albert Kwok-Wai Yeung’s mind, having a Ph.D. trumps any argument. (And, unsurprisingly, he has one.)

The story perhaps helps to explain why he expected me to get a Ph.D. while he attacked my scientific interests as “worthless” and threatened me for associating with my scientific colleagues and would-be colleagues. To him, a Ph.D. is just a means of getting revenge on people whose intellect made him feel inferior, which would include my colleagues. Therefore, I was both expected to get one and to avoid such people while doing so, a situation that was impossible.

The revenge motive also explains the extreme selfishness of Agnes Yuk-Lan Yu 「余玉蘭」. Whenever I was in a position to teach or to help someone learn something, she would insist that I withhold some information. Her insistence on this point made it impossible for me to perform my duties as a teaching assistant in graduate school, which forced me to turn down my teaching assistantship (and the funding that came with it), and eventually led to my dropping out of school. But no matter how I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t right for me to withhold information from my students when I’m teaching, she insisted that I had to do it. She simply wasn’t rational about it. After reading Alice Miller’s theory about the revenge compulsion in parents, I think it must have been the case that when Agnes Yuk-Lan Yu was a student and had sought help from her peers, they had withheld information from her. But because she was a poor student and nobody came to her for help in turn, she did not have the power to withhold information from others herself, and therefore was always covetous of this power. Subsequently, whenever I got into a position where I was able to teach or to help others, she saw it as an opportunity to exercise through me the power to withhold information that she never had.

I think many children of abusive authoritarian Asian parents assume, incorrectly, that their parents are motivated by wanting them to do well in school, rather than by revenge against or jealousy of their peers who had done better academically than they had. This is a dangerous assumption, because if the child somehow manages to do well in school in spite of his or her authoritarian parents, he or she will expect them to be pleased and will be taken completely by surprise by the negative reaction that actually follows (as I was). And this can have serious consequences for the psychological development of the child.

– davinci 12060

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