Most advice given to people with abusive parents is wrong

If your parents are physically, verbally, emotionally, or otherwise abusive towards you, please seek professional help. Your high school, university, or community centre should have counselling services which can help you.

Since I have written very openly about my upbringing by physically and emotionally abusive parents, I’ve received many comments both in public and in private. For those who have written to thank me, you’re welcome. For those who have written to disagree with me, I would like to address a few of the most common comments.

The most important thing I want to ask you is whether your opinion would be any different if, instead of writing about physical and emotional child abuse, I had written about physical and emotional spousal abuse, or sexual child abuse. Would you tell a battered wife to be more understanding of where her husband is coming from? Would the fact that her husband had been brought up in a more traditional culture have any bearing on your advice to her? Similarly, would you ever tell a sexually abused child to be more sympathetic to his parents, or that they were only acting in his best interests?

If you would never even think of saying to a battered woman that she should be more sympathetic to her abuser, why would you ever give that advice to an abused child? An adult in a physically or emotionally abusive relationship could at least be said to have chosen that relationship, but no child chooses his or her primary caregivers. If anything, society ought to hold parents to a higher standard of behaviour towards their children than it holds for the interaction between spouses.

And if you would never take the side of parents who sexually molest their children, why would you take the side of those who beat or threaten them? What difference does it make whether the abuse is sexual, physical, or emotional?

Before I address each of the comments below, let me say that I understand that the people who make them are generally well-intentioned. The problem is that if you have no experience of being abused as a child yourself (or if you have, but are in denial about it), then you’re liable to read into the situation many things which are simply neither applicable nor true. And if you are unfamiliar with the literature on child abuse and bullying, then the advice you give may not only be unhelpful, but can actually be very damaging to the recipients.

Below are some comments I have frequently received (though not necessarily in order of frequency).

• You should be grateful to your parents because they raised you.

  No, you should be grateful to people who have been kind to you. Parents are generally kind to their children, but this is not always true. There is no reason why one ought to feel gratitude towards an abusive parent. If a father feeds, houses, and looks after the health of his daughter, but also sexually molests her, would you ever dream of telling her to be grateful to him?

  Acts of kindness do not cancel out acts of cruelty. To take an extreme example, imagine a couple who murders the parents of a child, whom they then raise lovingly as their own son. Years later, after he has grown up, he discovers the truth. Would you ever tell him that he should be grateful to the murderers (whom he has considered to be his parents for his entire life) merely because they had raised him? Of course not.

  Most people should be grateful to their parents, because their parents had treated them well. I am grateful to the people who supported me and were kind to me while I was growing up. For example, I changed my surname to that of the family who took me into their home after my father had kicked me out of the house for visiting the university library, to acknowledge the role that they had played in allowing me to pursue an academic career.

  You should not be telling people who have been abused by their parents that they should be grateful to them. It is extremely damaging to insist that someone ought to have feelings that they do not naturally have. Many psychological problems and mental disorders have their origin in the repression of natural emotion.

• You shouldn’t be angry.
  I would not describe my primary feeling about my upbringing as anger, but as outrage or indignation. Perhaps you consider these to be the same thing. But either way, what is wrong with feeling angry?

  Anger is the natural reaction of a psychologically healthy human being to injustice. If you don’t feel outrage when you encounter child abuse, and especially if you think that an abused child shouldn’t be angry, then I submit that there is something wrong with you.

• Your parents have had a difficult life or a different upbringing.

  I don’t see the point that people who bring this up are trying to make. What is the relevance of this? Would you ever tell a battered wife, or a girl whose father threatens her life for dating, that she should be more understanding of her abuser because he had been raised in an environment where women are expected to be completely subservient to men? Or would you tell a boy who is being abused by a priest that he should be more understanding of his behaviour, because the priest has led a sexually repressed life?

  In our society, wife-beating and sexual molestation of children are universally considered wrong, without regard for the backgrounds of the offenders. Why should the physical or emotional abuse of children be treated differently?

  Furthermore, the idea that an abuser’s upbringing somehow explains or mitigates his or her behaviour is very insulting to those people with the same or a similar upbringing who are not abusers. I was very fortunate while growing up that I had friends with similar immigrant backgrounds, but parents who treated them well, and so I could see that my parents’ behaviour is not a necessary outcome of their upbringing. They made a choice to be abusive, when they could have chosen to behave differently.

  I know why my mother is so verbally abusive. When I was young, I witnessed her own mother being verbally abusive towards her. She is repeating the same behaviour towards me. I do not care that she is verbally abusive because that is the way she was raised. I was raised in the same way, but I will never repeat her behaviour.

  Please stop telling abused children that their parents are the way they are because of their backgrounds. It isn’t true, and it doesn’t help. The idea dehumanises the abusers, as it treats them as though they were automata with no choice in how they react to their circumstances. You’re also helping to perpetuate the cycle of abuse by implying that the recipient of it has no choice but to act in the same way.

• You don’t understand your parents’ motivations.

  A person who says this inevitably has some very specific beliefs about what the motivations of abusive authoritarian parents are. But isn’t it a little bit presumptuous to think that you know what a complete stranger’s motivations are better than people who have known him or her for decades?

  Philip Guo’s article on “Understanding and dealing with overbearing Asian parents” is characteristic of the kinds of things people say about the motivations of abusive parents when they have no personal experience of being abused and are unaware of the scientific and clinical literature on child abuse and bullying. The explanation given in the article of why Asian parents are so obsessed with grades and rankings sounds reasonable (and obvious), but because it does not take into account the psychology of bullying, it does not mesh with the actual experience of people who live with the situation that it purports to explain.

  The most common motivation that people attribute to abusive authoritarian Asian parents is that they just want their children to succeed academically, and are acting in their best interests. The assumption that parents are motivated primarily by the welfare of their child is so beyond questioning for most people that it is essentially dogma.

  But there are instances where most people can recognise that a parent is not acting in his or her child’s interest, but is instead using the child to satisfy their own emotional needs. For example, consider the young girls who are made up to look like sexualised adults for child beauty pageants, or the young boys who are forced to spend an excessive number of hours practising and playing a sport that he does not like. In these cases, it’s obvious that the child’s mother or father is living vicariously through them, and where the child is harmed as a result, we have no hesitation to label it abuse.

  Once you move away from the assumption that a parent necessarily places his or her child’s welfare above his or her own emotional needs, the behaviour of abusive authoritarian Asian parents makes much more sense. These parents come from backgrounds where everyone is expected to excel academically. But more importantly, they come from environments where children are berated and made to feel inferior for their lack of academic success. Simple mathematics, of course, dictates that the majority will not be the top students in their peer group, and so the majority will have experienced being bullied for not doing well in school.

  People react to bullying in different ways, but one common reaction is to become bullies themselves. And that is the reason that abusive authoritarian Asian parents behave in the way that they do, not because they are acting in what they perceive to be their child’s best interests.

  I have written previously about how my parents’ reaction to my academic success was to punish me out of jealousy and revenge. Two anecdotes bear repeating here. My father’s reaction to my receiving praise from my teachers and peers, being nominated for awards and offered opportunities unavailable to other students, and so on, was not pride, but rage. He repeatedly took steps to prevent me from continuing to be academically successful. When my mother learned that I was receiving praise and becoming noticed for my teaching, she repeatedly called me at work to insist that I stop being a good teacher. If they had been motivated by my well-being, then what explains their behaviour which is clearly so detrimental to it?

  You may say that these are just two exceptional instances and that abusive parents are generally looking out for their children’s welfare. But the point is that anyone who has actually lived through an abusive upbringing can easily come up with hundreds of such anecdotes from their own experience, and instinctively knows that their parents act to satisfy their own emotional needs, rather than (and even at the expense of) the welfare of their child.

  Perhaps you are resistant to the idea that parents could act selfishly and put their own interests ahead of their child’s because it’s horrifying to you. But reality does not change regardless of your feelings about it. It is a fact that there are selfish people in the world, and it is a fact that there are bullies in the world. Since parents come from every segment of society, it follows that some parents will be selfish and some will be bullies.

  People who have been abused as children need to learn to trust their own instincts as a part of the recovery process. To insist to abused children that their parents are motivated by their best interests when they instinctively know otherwise is to tell them to suppress their instincts, which is very damaging.

• Nobody benefits from exposing or criticising abusive parents.

  On the contrary, nothing could be more important for society. Abused children need to see that it’s okay to express their emotions, and that their feelings aren’t wrong, contrary to what society normally tells them.

  Many of the world’s human-made problems are caused at least partially by authoritarian parenting. A child’s parents are his or her first authority figures, and how he or she relates to them will have a bigger impact than anything else on how he or she relates to authority, power, and society for the rest of his or her life. There are numerous studies in the scholarly literature linking abusive parenting with substance abuse and addiction, violence and criminality, juvenile delinquency, and other anti-social and self-destructive behaviours. I’m not claiming that if society changed overnight, and it suddenly became acceptable to openly criticise one’s parents for abusive parenting, that these problems would disappear. But the suppression of natural and justified emotions by societal taboo does not do society any good. Suppressed emotion does not just disappear. They simply surface elsewhere, oftentimes as rage, and mostly directed at people other than their original objects.

  I believe that suppressed rage against abusive parents is an important factor behind much of the conflict in the world. Alice Miller, in “For Your Own Good”, has documented how many of Adolph Hitler’s actions as an adult can be traced to childhood traumas suffered at the hands of his father. Furthermore, she demonstrated how pre-WWII Germany became susceptible to a dictatorship because of the prevalence of authoritarian parenting which insisted on deference to power and authority. Or, to consider a more recent example, to what extent was George W. Bush’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein motivated by a desire to avenge himself on a father who had made him feel inferior while he was growing up? Incidentally, Saddam Hussein was also abused by his stepfather as a child.

  How many of the world’s conflicts are actually symptoms of suppressed rage against parental abuse and oppression? Why do so many people feel the need to disparage entire groups based on religion, ethnicity, or politics, completely out of proportion with any actual disagreements or differences? I think that much of it can be explained in terms of bullying: people who are bullied by their parents must vent their frustrations on others, because society forbids them from directing their rage where it properly belongs. I grew up listening to my father rant about how entire populations of millions of people deserved to die merely because they were born into the wrong group. While some people puzzle over how ordinary German soldiers could have followed orders to exterminate so many of their fellow human beings, I know exactly the type of person who would do such a thing.

  There are also many clear examples of abusive parenting in the world of entertainment, which one can easily see on the front pages of the tabloids. There are numerous celebrities whose upbringing by abusive parents is a matter of public record, such as Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan, and Tiger Woods. The fact that their upbringing by abusive parents, which is clearly the cause of their psychological problems, is ignored (or at best treated as a footnote) by the media which loves to endlessly discuss every other aspect of their personal lives illustrates the pervasiveness of the taboo against criticising parents no matter how bad they are.

  The argument that parental immunity to criticism is necessary to the social order has been made in the past for other societal taboos, and it is just as insubstantial as in those cases. People used to argue that society would collapse if wives no longer dutifully obeyed their husbands, or if slavery were abolished. Society has been better off since these changes, and I think it will be better off still if it stopped coming to the defense of abusive parents. Denial has never helped anyone, and people can’t get help until they admit that they have a problem and are clear on what that problem is.

• You are a terrible person.

  Abusive parents often tell their children that they are terrible people if they question their authority. I remember when I was growing up that my parents would repeatedly tell me that I should be ashamed whenever I disobeyed them.

  The only reason you would say that I am a terrible person for speaking out against child abuse is if you were abused as a child yourself, and are in denial about what was done to you. There is nothing bad or shameful in defying authority or exposing injustice. If your reaction to my writings about being abused as a child is to tell me that I’m a terrible person, I suggest a long, hard look inside yourself.

• One day you’ll have children.

  The implication here seems to be that by disobeying my own parents and openly criticising them for being child abusers, my own children will one day turn against me. But why would they, if I don’t abuse them? (And if I do, then they should.)

  Yes, one day I will have children. And I hope for my children to live in a world where anyone is free to speak out against injustice and tyranny, no matter who the perpetrator.

– davinci

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