This post isn't necessarily like other posts I have written for this blog, but it does foray into a discussion about abuse eventually so that you can see what can happen when people try to hurt others to teach them a lesson. This means I will also be discussing who perpetrates abuse (mostly people with personality disorders in the Cluster B realm).
And it is quite obvious that abusive people like to hurt others in order to get people to change their behavior (often with very little luck - and it will become obvious as to why).
But even if you are not abusive, and don't want to hurt the other person to get them to change, will that work?
The research says: Not too likely unless there are certain components in your pleas for change.
TRYING TO GET ADULTS TO CHANGE
WITHOUT HURTING THEM
AND WITH HURTING THEM
introduction
Here is an excellent psychology article that describes why it is so hard and frustrating to get people to change behaviors so that a more healthy relationship can emerge (I suggest reading the whole article):
How to Teach Someone a Lesson (Warning: What they learn might disappoint you.) - by Tina Gilbertson LPC for Psychology Today.
The main takeaway from that article is that you have to be the change that you want to see. Shaming someone does not work, especially if you can't practice what you preach.
At the very least, the person you are shaming has to see you as a benevolent teacher, someone who has their best interests at heart, someone who is living and behaving in the way that they are touting as the best way for you to behave too.
And the person who is going to think of you as a good advisor or teacher already clearly respects you, has a good relationship and rapport with you, senses that you are compassionate, steady and reasonable, and probably already takes your advice to heart.
If you don't have a good trusting relationship with someone you are trying to teach, they will not listen to you.
Most adults do not want people who insert themselves into a "teacher position" in our lives without our consent to have them in that position. We must welcome it, and we most likely won't welcome it unless we know they care about us a great deal. If they are doing it on behalf of themselves, or another person (as pressure to get us to move in a certain direction), it will most likely backfire - because it is an aggressive act. And like most unwanted aggressive acts, we are likely to balk and step back. If they step forward and get more irate with judgements and criticism, we are likely to step back even further.
If you are being critical in a number of different ways of the person you are trying to teach, the best take-away you are going to get is that you are "a highly critical and judgmental person".
Being judgmental has its issues because judgmental people aren't seeing you as a whole person, your good points, your bad points, what goes on in your mind, your life and ambitions, your morality, how you live, how you treat lots of other people in your life, what your life story is, and everything in-between.
When a person is highly critical and judgmental about us, what we will see are their blind spots about us, their inability to see others as they truly are, that they can't see us for what we are either, and their ego-driven audacity to criticize us when they are so flawed themselves (even in the way they are criticizing us). This is usually the stand-out thing we will focus on and walk away with.
And if the critical judgmental person is more immoral and unethical than we are, we are going to scoff at what they have to say. Either it is: "Ppppptttt! Look at who you are! Like you are better in that department than I am? If anything you look worse in that department than I do! How dare you try to teach me a lesson!" or "Pppptttt! Look at them! They did x, y and z and they are going to criticize me and lecture me for something they do all of the time?! Not going to happen!"
Even if the judgmental critical people in our lives aren't hypocrites, most of us are still going to search far and wide for hypocrisy to make sure your intentions are pure. This is one area where empathy and compassion can't be faked. The person giving us advice or criticism has to have a vested interest in, and compassion, for us, where their ego isn't involved, and we have to believe in it whole-heartedly, otherwise the advice or criticism is just not going to stir us to change.
It is especially hard to do for those of us who have gotten burned by fake empathy or a person whose empathy seemed to shut down instantly when we were vulnerable so that they could get more power, control and domination for themselves over us in our weakened state. We aren't going to hand over trust to you just so you can do that to us again, or like the last person did to us.
A teacher is someone you believe has greater knowledge than you do, who you endow confidence in to bring you into a higher state of knowledge. If you don't feel that way about them, they are not your teacher. A teacher is a "special position" to be in, and requires special social and personal skills and considerations on their part. If the teacher is insulting, judgmental, arrogant, highly critical, insolent, boorish, or abusive, they are not a good teacher. They need to be fired right away. It is my observation that they get fired from someone's mind first (the insults the offender spews boomerang off of a person's natural defenses) before they realize they are an unwanted teacher themselves. Unwanted teaching is a form of harassment, especially if it is hostile, bullying, insulting, denigrating, judgmental and unwelcome.
It is very difficult to shame adults anyway. Unless we are ruining our lives with criminal acts, lots of lies, lots of false narratives, unethical acts that normally bring social derision, living with lots of paranoia that all of our acts will be exposed, addictions, abusing others, having second thoughts, and being rattled with shame or toxic secrets, we are most likely happy with who we are. The more ethical we try to be, the more at peace with ourselves we will be too.
Who we are isn't likely to be rattled by someone who is less understanding or less ethical than we are. It might be if their ethics are noticeably higher than our own, but even there, most of us have to be sure enough that they are, indeed higher in ethics, and that takes a lot of time and investment in the relationship. We also have to want to make the positive changes in ourselves.
For highly unethical people, shaming is even less likely to work. Shame-ers tend to only be known for their shaming.
And if they are shaming us too much, and too loudly, and for too many pointless issues and extraneous reasons, or if there is hypocrisy involved, they tend to be narcissists or sociopaths who DARVO situations so that they don't feel at fault for the dirty acts that they commit and put the fault on us. That is not going to shame us. We are going to be looking at the tactic first and foremost. They just pretend the dirty acts belong to you instead. They are happy with the DARVO tactic if they are using it. If they aren't happy with it, they'd stop it. It's that simple, and they do have a choice.
If you are an ethical person and you are dealing with someone who DARVOs you all of the time, their ways of teaching you a lesson will not work unless your self esteem and boundaries for respect are so low that you allow them to make you into a doormat. Being a doormat is a trauma response, and most of us don't feel well enough after awhile to stay in it (being a doormat for any length of time will start to give you trauma symptoms). So perhaps the best thing to do in those situations is to find relationships where ethics and morality match. We all need to be in relationships where people care about us, and DARVO-ing us shows us that they don't care about us at all. Really: they don't care about us at all if they are using this tactic. It's a criminal-type mind that does this (criminals use the DARVO tactic a whole lot).
If the people giving us judgments, lectures, advice and criticisms aren't close to us, or don't know us, the same results will happen. What ever they say will be taken with a grain of salt because no relationship of trust or empathy has ever been established. So why do they do it?
Here is something I went through:
I remember someone who I had barely spent more than two days with in my whole life, giving me advice as to whether I should get married. She had a lot of opinions too, not just a few. And there was some coercion in her delivery. My first thought was: "That's so jacked up! Where does she get off!?" I didn't even look at her, and probably rolled my eyes. I don't even understand people who think that it's okay to do that, or even think that way.
All that it shows are these possibilities: that they think they know me after two days (no, they do not), that personal decisions like this can be influenced by them (no, they can't be), that they think their own opinions are so valuable and noteworthy that other people will listen to them (no, I won't, and I doubt other people would either), that they are so high on the ethics scale that I would actually take what she had to say seriously (no, she wasn't high on the ethics scale by the company she kept, by her highly critical, judgmental, and biased nature in the short time I saw her in action, by being a blind follower of someone I do not respect). I knew she had no interest what so ever in anything to do with me unless it benefited her and her husband. People who don't know you and think they can make such a highly personal decision for you and your life are probably either delusional, have a very high opinion of themselves, think your intelligence is so below par that you would actually consider what they have to say, or are highly aggressive (or maybe all of those things). These don't make for qualities that are trustworthy, or even "listen-able", for other people.
The choice of a mate, the choice of whether to get married, the choice of who to allow into a discussion about it, are filled with many moments of deep thought and consideration by the person who is making those decisions, and they have a right to make those decisions by themselves, without input. I never said, "I want input from you." The only person I listened to in my life, was someone I had known and spent a great deal of time with for over a decade, and also knew my husband in a profound way too.
My main concern with anyone entering into my life is, "Will they try to hurt me? Are we equals, and will I be treated as an equal?"
If those things aren't present, I lose interest right away.
And with people who want to give me advice it is: Are they selfish and self-serving, lying, back-stabbing, hypocritical, aggressive or passive aggressive, judgmental, dis-respectful, punishing people? Do they have arrogance, do think they are superior; do they want me serving their needs and wants and giving up my own; are they interested in listening to me?" Obviously I wouldn't want their advice or to learn any of their lessons. That's normal.
It can take time to know who people are, where they are coming from and what their agenda is. And it's normal not to want advice or criticism from these kinds of people either.
what kinds of personalities want to hurt other people
Now in terms of people who want to hurt you in order to teach you a lesson, this is always categorized as abuse. Right now some states make an exception: some laws in some states allow parents to hurt children under the age of 16 years old (but with a lot of counter laws so that it doesn't turn into abuse, which it tends to if they are hurting you a lot). However, most psychologists do not agree with these laws, and there is evidence that if a parent is purposely hurting a child or children to teach them lessons, that it tends to escalate to child abuse. The laws remain, however, because parents still want rights to hurt their children, within reason (no marks on the body).
In Great Britain, you are not allowed to emotionally hurt your children and you can be arrested for child abuse. The United States has yet to catch up on the research that hurting children often leads to child abuse, including escalating into physical abuse.
The reason why countries consider taking measures against the emotional abuse of children is that it has a huge impact on society, and in producing productive forward thinking adults. That will become clear as your read further into the post.
As for administering pain in other parts of society, if you are a judge or jury in a criminal matter, there are allowances to hurt criminals, and also rules, laws and standards as to how much you can hurt someone who has been convicted of a crime. But even in these incidences, the focus is going more and more in the direction of rehabilitation, precisely because hurting others does not produce much remorse or guilt. If anything, the verbal and emotional defensive walls tend to go up to protect themselves from more pain, even if they are criminals. This comes from all of the professional studies and literature on what hurting others produces. Some of those articles are listed below.
For the purposes of this discussion, any adult sixteen and over, and any adult in a close personal relationship who is experiencing a punishment or a lesson that involves hurting you (from a partner or spouse, a parent, an adult child, a sibling, a close friend, a grandparent, in-laws, step-family, for instance) then it is always categorized as abuse. To get the skinny on how much you are being abused and what tactics they are using to get you into a state of pain, go to this post.
As for who does this, and who are the masters of abuse, it tends to be individuals with Cluster B personality disorders: Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and some individuals, but not all, with Borderline Personality Disorder. It is a spectrum disorder, so many of the Cluster B personality disorders can over-lap in one individual. Most of the Cluster B personality disorders are associated with abusive behavior, but not necessarily Borderline Personality Disorder, unless the individuals who have it feel they are being taunted in some way, or abandoned by a person, or they have some narcissistic traits in addition to the Borderline traits. In other words, it's complicated. If you are being abused, reading about the disorders will give you a better understanding of what is going on, and why.
People with Borderline Personality Disorder, if they abuse at all, tend to reactively abuse. In other words, something sets them off and they react.
People with Narcissism tend to reactively abuse and proactively abuse. Proactive abuse is what it sounds like: they abuse when there is no threat; they abuse when they think there may be a threat; they abuse as an assurance that they will come out on top (i.e. have superiority over their victim); they abuse if they think they may lose a competition (narcissists tend to have pronounced levels of jealousy and they spend an inordinate amount of time competing). Overt Grandiose Narcissists tend to be a little more reactive than proactive, Covert Vulnerable Narcissists tend to be a little more proactive than reactive, and Malignant Narcissists (who tend to have a conglomerate of all of the Cluster B personality disorders) tend to be quite a bit more proactive than reactive including elaborate plans of attack, revenge planning and revenge fantasies, tit-for-tat responses, an addiction to some forms of sadism, fantasies that they are in control of their victims' lives and other people's lives much more than they actually are, pronounced grandiose delusions and ambitions, a criminal mind ... but they can be reactive too: mostly when they feel power, control and domination is slipping away from them; they can react with rage and violence.
People with Antisocial Personality Disorder tend to be proactively abusive, and even prefer it so they are not detected until they can make the most devastating impact on their victims. In other words, they wait to attack at the most opportune moment. They have no remorse for hurting others and often feel their victims deserved every part of it. This is even true for innocent victims or child victims: "They shouldn't have been so stupid to trust me" is their common response when they hurt others who never provoked them. A lot of them tend to be loners. Males show contempt for animals early on and females destroy, give away or steal other people's property. Most do not follow laws or codes of conduct and have criminal minds and criminal thinking (i.e. what can they get out of each situation). The lack of empathy is pronounced, and most of them have delusions that they are superior precisely because they have no empathy and get away with a lot of unethical behavior. More than half of the prison population are made up of folks with Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Then there is the Dark Triad which is an individual with malignant narcissism with pronounced Machiavellian traits, and the Dark Tetrad, which is an individual with malignant narcissism with pronounced sadism traits plus Machiavellian traits.
Borderlines have remorse for the state their victims are in when they hurt them, and for the state they are in (in terms of reputation, trustworthiness, feeling shame about their emotional dysregulation). Many Borderlines are willing to change their behavior, and to regulate their rage to get along better with others, unless they have pronounced arrogance.
Narcissists have little or no remorse for the state their victims are in when they hurt them in terms of empathy, but do have remorse for what it does to their reputation, whether people will trust them again, and whether their emotional outbursts will bring them shame. They have very little desire to change, preferring to blame their victims instead. They don't do well in therapy because narcissists tend to rage when they feel criticized and their behaviors are being judged, and they don't like to be taught. They want to be in the superior position, teaching, lecturing, criticizing others, so they overwhelmingly quit therapy.
Some people with Antisocial Personality Disorder care that hurting others might mean they will be held accountable, and some hurt others without worrying about whether they will be held accountable. Most have no remorse for hurting other people and can have the attitude that they can talk themselves out of anything. Therapy often doesn't work because they look at it as a "cat and mouse game", a game where they can or can't manipulate the therapist, so rehabilitation is very difficult. If they are incarcerated, therapy is usually part of the incarceration, and they may be less resistant to therapy, and to teaching, in order to leave prison in good standing. Because sociopaths can be charming, and try to talk their way out of consequences, the therapist has to be "charm-resistant".
do they succeed in hurting other adults?
and do they teach other adults an effective lesson on how to behave?
People who want to hurt others can succeed at it. And sometimes that is all they want, to prove to themselves that they can hurt another person, and perhaps how much they can get away with it too.
But the bigger question is, what are the ramifications of succeeding at hurting other people?
Let's just focus on the topic of this post, which is about whether they can succeed at teaching another person a lesson by hurting them. Can they do that?
Probably not, and certainly not in the way they were hoping for, or what they thought would be the outcome. Some articles follow this section of the post as to why.
The problem here is that hurting another adult is abuse. The perpetrator knows it is abuse unless they are living under a rock, and their victims know it is abuse too, unless they too are living under a rock.
Abuse brings out trauma symptoms. Unless a perpetrator is well educated as to what trauma symptoms will do to his victim, and has a keen Machiavellian approach way beforehand of what he will do once his victim starts having symptoms, he is not going to know what to do. The victim has failed to learn the lesson in the way the perpetrator wanted.
Most often abusers just keep trying to hurt the victim, as if kicking a broken toy to see if kicking it will make it work better, and learn better. And, of course, that produces more trauma symptoms. And it doesn't make the victim "work better in the way that he wants it to work", so he usually kicks the victim "to the curb" instead ("abuse and abandon", or "abuse and kill"). - He will blame the victim for this failure: "Terrible defective toy!"
Abusers tend not to know what trauma symptoms will do to their plans. They tend to be very low in emotional intelligence. If they knew that hurting others would do to their plans, they probably wouldn't abuse, but they don't know. They act on impulse or plan, and do it anyway, hoping that things will go their way. And they expect their impulsive actions to give them great rewards (because most abusers have an "arrogance problem" too: the arrogance keeps them blind). And it makes so many of them so blind that they think it's not their plan that went awry, but some faulty part in their victim. They think victims should act in some preconceived way.
The other issue is that most abusers have a "self reflection" problem too. If they could put themselves in their victims' shoes, and think about how they would react if someone treated them the way they treat others, then they would see that they, themselves, would not react the way they expect their victims to react. In fact, they might be even more resistant to abuse others.
They might think before they indulge in impulsive or planned retaliation too (because abusers tend to dwindle downwards into retaliation instead of thinking of other ways to cope with interpersonal issues). But unfortunately, most of them don't get to the self reflection part: they don't even think to attempt to look at how victims might feel, and what they might be going through. They just think if they abuse, then their victims will automatically do what they expect. Not too bright. Lack of self reflection makes them blind too.
Another issue is that most abusers don't change their own behavior themselves. In fact, if they are narcissists or sociopaths, they are extremely resistant to change. How is a person who can't change their behavior going to teach another person how to change their behavior? Teaching someone else something means that they are experts in the subject of "how to change your personality so that other people will approve of you." Being abusive is not a way to get approval. You wonder what their logic is. Not very bright. You might as well be getting "behavior lessons" from a three year old who is having a tantrum.
Another problem is that most abusers want either an infantilized person they can shout orders to (as though the victim is a child who needs to be told what to do, how to do it, and gets its self esteem from being an abusive authoritarian) or a parentified person who takes care of the perpetrator's every need (as though the victim is a parent who should be providing all of the perpetrators needs, and as though the perpetrator is a child who needs to be soothed out of tantrums), or both. These are sick roles that either lead to co-dependency or trauma bonding and don't end up in behavioral changes that either party will be grateful for in the end.
Another issue is that most abusers show that they are exploitive once they start abusing. It's the first thing victims see: "They want something from me and are intimidating me and blackmailing me to try to get it. They think abusing me is their ticket to get it. This is outrageous!" Victims will either try to go lateral ("Let's talk this out like adults and get rid of this power trip you are trying to pull on me", "Let's share the power and come to an understanding rather than me taking commands from you", "I don't do submission. You need to get a grip") or they walk ("I'm not playing that power game with that abuser", "I'm not going to be intimidated! Find some other victim to play head games with!", "They have got to be kidding! I can see their dirty motives and blackmail schemes a mile away!"), or they are going to be trauma bonded (they will get symptoms, work like a broken toy that can't do anything right for the abuser). If abusers were as smart as their arrogance tells them that they are, then they'd know their victims could see their unethical uncaring horrific motives and not want to play, given the chance.
Also a note on the previous chapter ... When victims are abused, they tend to look at abuse as "the perpetrator hates me, and therefor does not have good motivations towards me." It is why victims never learn what perpetrators want them to learn. It produces either the flight response in victims, or trauma symptoms. Take your choice.
One other issue: they have very low ethics. How are they going to teach another person how to behave better when they can't even begin to do it themselves? How are they going to teach people to have empathy for them when they have very little or no empathy themselves and just want to go around poking people where it hurts just to get an emotional reaction out of them (narcissistic supply), more submission, and more power and control for themselves? We're supposed to learn how to behave from them? From people who have lower ethics than we have? From people who like to indulge in revenges, lies, smear campaigns, sadism, or other diabolical acts? From people who are so blind that they don't know what their abuses do? What planet are they living on? And why are they so arrogant when they are like this? You would think that their arrogance would fail them at this juncture. But no! It's kind of like a flea trying to teach a human how to behave. Fleas are annoying; they are exploitive, they leave welts that itch and hurt. No. They are not going to teach us lessons beyond what kind of person they are showing us that they are. That's not going to change our behavior in ways that they want or like. Again, not too bright.
People who want to hurt others can succeed at it. And sometimes that is all they want, to prove to themselves that they can hurt another person, and perhaps how much they can get away with it too.
But the bigger question is, what are the ramifications of succeeding at hurting other people?
Let's just focus on the topic of this post, which is about whether they can succeed at teaching another person a lesson by hurting them. Can they do that?
Probably not, and certainly not in the way they were hoping for, or what they thought would be the outcome. Some articles follow this section of the post as to why.
The problem here is that hurting another adult is abuse. The perpetrator knows it is abuse unless they are living under a rock, and their victims know it is abuse too, unless they too are living under a rock.
Abuse brings out trauma symptoms. Unless a perpetrator is well educated as to what trauma symptoms will do to his victim, and has a keen Machiavellian approach way beforehand of what he will do once his victim starts having symptoms, he is not going to know what to do. The victim has failed to learn the lesson in the way the perpetrator wanted.
Most often abusers just keep trying to hurt the victim, as if kicking a broken toy to see if kicking it will make it work better, and learn better. And, of course, that produces more trauma symptoms. And it doesn't make the victim "work better in the way that he wants it to work", so he usually kicks the victim "to the curb" instead ("abuse and abandon", or "abuse and kill"). - He will blame the victim for this failure: "Terrible defective toy!"
Abusers tend not to know what trauma symptoms will do to their plans. They tend to be very low in emotional intelligence. If they knew that hurting others would do to their plans, they probably wouldn't abuse, but they don't know. They act on impulse or plan, and do it anyway, hoping that things will go their way. And they expect their impulsive actions to give them great rewards (because most abusers have an "arrogance problem" too: the arrogance keeps them blind). And it makes so many of them so blind that they think it's not their plan that went awry, but some faulty part in their victim. They think victims should act in some preconceived way.
The other issue is that most abusers have a "self reflection" problem too. If they could put themselves in their victims' shoes, and think about how they would react if someone treated them the way they treat others, then they would see that they, themselves, would not react the way they expect their victims to react. In fact, they might be even more resistant to abuse others.
They might think before they indulge in impulsive or planned retaliation too (because abusers tend to dwindle downwards into retaliation instead of thinking of other ways to cope with interpersonal issues). But unfortunately, most of them don't get to the self reflection part: they don't even think to attempt to look at how victims might feel, and what they might be going through. They just think if they abuse, then their victims will automatically do what they expect. Not too bright. Lack of self reflection makes them blind too.
Another issue is that most abusers don't change their own behavior themselves. In fact, if they are narcissists or sociopaths, they are extremely resistant to change. How is a person who can't change their behavior going to teach another person how to change their behavior? Teaching someone else something means that they are experts in the subject of "how to change your personality so that other people will approve of you." Being abusive is not a way to get approval. You wonder what their logic is. Not very bright. You might as well be getting "behavior lessons" from a three year old who is having a tantrum.
Another problem is that most abusers want either an infantilized person they can shout orders to (as though the victim is a child who needs to be told what to do, how to do it, and gets its self esteem from being an abusive authoritarian) or a parentified person who takes care of the perpetrator's every need (as though the victim is a parent who should be providing all of the perpetrators needs, and as though the perpetrator is a child who needs to be soothed out of tantrums), or both. These are sick roles that either lead to co-dependency or trauma bonding and don't end up in behavioral changes that either party will be grateful for in the end.
Another issue is that most abusers show that they are exploitive once they start abusing. It's the first thing victims see: "They want something from me and are intimidating me and blackmailing me to try to get it. They think abusing me is their ticket to get it. This is outrageous!" Victims will either try to go lateral ("Let's talk this out like adults and get rid of this power trip you are trying to pull on me", "Let's share the power and come to an understanding rather than me taking commands from you", "I don't do submission. You need to get a grip") or they walk ("I'm not playing that power game with that abuser", "I'm not going to be intimidated! Find some other victim to play head games with!", "They have got to be kidding! I can see their dirty motives and blackmail schemes a mile away!"), or they are going to be trauma bonded (they will get symptoms, work like a broken toy that can't do anything right for the abuser). If abusers were as smart as their arrogance tells them that they are, then they'd know their victims could see their unethical uncaring horrific motives and not want to play, given the chance.
Also a note on the previous chapter ... When victims are abused, they tend to look at abuse as "the perpetrator hates me, and therefor does not have good motivations towards me." It is why victims never learn what perpetrators want them to learn. It produces either the flight response in victims, or trauma symptoms. Take your choice.
One other issue: they have very low ethics. How are they going to teach another person how to behave better when they can't even begin to do it themselves? How are they going to teach people to have empathy for them when they have very little or no empathy themselves and just want to go around poking people where it hurts just to get an emotional reaction out of them (narcissistic supply), more submission, and more power and control for themselves? We're supposed to learn how to behave from them? From people who have lower ethics than we have? From people who like to indulge in revenges, lies, smear campaigns, sadism, or other diabolical acts? From people who are so blind that they don't know what their abuses do? What planet are they living on? And why are they so arrogant when they are like this? You would think that their arrogance would fail them at this juncture. But no! It's kind of like a flea trying to teach a human how to behave. Fleas are annoying; they are exploitive, they leave welts that itch and hurt. No. They are not going to teach us lessons beyond what kind of person they are showing us that they are. That's not going to change our behavior in ways that they want or like. Again, not too bright.
I will be talking about emotional intelligence in another post, but you can tell that abusers have very low amounts of it. They really know very little about human behavior, and human reactions to being controlled, trauma bonded, intimidated, or even teaching people lessons on how to behave.
Need some more professional articles that basically say the same thing as the Psychology Today article above? Note: this is not the end of this post - in the next chapter I talk about hurting under-age children in order to teach them a lesson)
What It Means to Teach People How to Treat You - Medically reviewed by Karin Gepp, PsyD — By Margarita Tartakovsky, MS — Updated on August 12, 2022 for Psych Central
Should I Go To Couples Therapy With My Abusive Partner? - by National Domestic Hotline
excerpt:
We at The Hotline do not encourage anyone in an abusive relationship to seek counseling with their partner. Abuse is not a relationship problem. ...
Abusive Relationship Therapy: Is It Helpful? (Couples therapy isn’t often recommended for abusive relationships, but individual counseling and other strategies may help.) - The Administrators of Psych Central
Why Couples Therapy Doesn’t Work For People In Abusive Relationships With Narcissists - by Shahida Arabi for Psych Central (re-published for Malahide Counseling and Psychotherapy)
That Will Teach You! Why Punishment Damages Relationships - by Dr. Ari Hahn, LCSW, Ph.D. Clinical Social Worker/Therapist for Choose Help
Is it Okay to Punish Your Spouse? - The Marriage Counseling Blog
What Couples Should Know About the Silent Treatment (How to Know When Silence Is Abusive) - by Sheri Stritof, Medically reviewed by Carly Snyder, MD for Very Well Mind
Giving your partner the silent treatment isn't harmless — it can be devastating - by Kellie Scott for ABC Everyday
13 Reasons Why A Punishment Of Your Husband Isn’t A Good Idea (2023) - by Bijan Kholghi for Coaching Online
Note: this article talks about women who punish their partner, but his advice and insights can be applied to any relationship, especially any of your close personal relationships
The silent treatment devastated me as a child. Then I used it as an adult - by Kellie Scott for ABC Everyday
Infidelity: Consequences of Punishing the Offending Partner - by Jim Hutt, PhD for Good Therapy
Unacceptable Relationship Behaviors (Unacceptable Behaviors That Will Destroy Your Relationship Real Fast) - by Beth McColl for Ask Men
Punishing - by Susan Felsch for Central Coast Counselling
Boyfriend punishes partner by criticizing her when she cries - by Neil Rosenthal for The Denver Post
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN
(HURTING CHILDREN PHYSICALLY AS A WAY OF TEACHING THEM A LESSON)
DOES IT WORK?
(HURTING CHILDREN PHYSICALLY AS A WAY OF TEACHING THEM A LESSON)
DOES IT WORK?
Not really.
Read: an article from the World Health Organization on corporal punishment: Corporal Punishment and Health
Some take-aways from the article:
Evidence shows corporal punishment increases children’s behavioural problems over time and has no positive outcomes.
All corporal punishment, however mild or light, carries an inbuilt risk of escalation. Studies suggest that parents who used corporal punishment are at heightened risk of perpetrating severe maltreatment.
My note: in other words it is a gateway to child abuse. Once abuse is introduced by a parent to hurt a child, it almost always escalates.
Read: Facts About Corporal Punishment - by Amy Morin, LCSW, fact checked by Adah Chung for Very Well Family
excerpts from the article (underlined are the most crucial parts of the article):
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has taken a firm stance against any type of corporal punishment. Its policy on corporal punishment, published in 2018, encourages parents and caregivers to use healthy forms of discipline when correcting their children and to refrain from using corporal punishment.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends healthy forms of discipline, such as positive reinforcement of appropriate behaviors, limit setting, redirecting, and setting future expectations. The AAP recommends that parents do not use spanking, hitting, slapping, threatening, insulting, humiliating, or shaming.
The AAP policy also indicates that corporal punishment is ineffective over the long-term and leads to negative outcomes.
In 2006, the Committee on the Rights of the Child released a statement declaring that corporal punishment is a form of violence that should be banned in all contexts.3 Other human rights organizations have issued similar warnings about spanking.
Research has shown that children who are subjected to corporal punishment, such as spanking, pushing, grabbing, and paddling, are more likely to develop mental health disorders. One study reported that harsh physical punishment was associated with increased odds of mood disorders, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and personality disorders.7
In my own generation, corporal punishment was all of the rage in terms of parents disciplining children.
My husband remembers a time when most of the children in his school had signs of physical abuse, from parental abuse to peer bullying: whip lashes, cuts, scabs, bruises, and infected wounds were most visible.
There was a huge generation gap when he finally reached adulthood too. Many from his generation did not respect their parents, especially those who received corporal punishment. Most who received corporal punishment past five years old were also recipients of child abuse. Most who were recipients of child abuse also experienced the silent treatment, lots of insults, the parents rarely, if ever, listened to their children and their concerns, there was way too much infantilization or parentification, a parent lashed out over so many things that were never their child's fault (unjust blaming), and so many "You are -" statements that the adult children could no longer remember all of them.
In my generation and in his generation, so many of us have experienced estrangement in adulthood from the parent as well. I know many artist friends who were and some who still are, estranged. It was either initiated by a parent, or by us over disrespect or abuse (for many of us it was initiated by the parent, but the parent told the family and/or their friends or wrote on-line that it was initiated by us - in other words, the blame-shifting tactic and the DARVO tactic were put to use by these parents, which furthered the lack of respect that we had for them). Most of us who were recipients of corporal punishment or child abuse thought our parent was "out of control", dysregulated emotionally, terrible teachers, saboteurs, terrible influences on our own children, terrible parents, with terrible respect for our boundaries as adults. Also "the bad years" of relating to our parent far outweighed "the good years". What a sad legacy.
So, I have to say that at least corporal punishment is increasingly being taken off the table for parents. Some parents will probably resort to other methods of hurting their children, but at least that one is getting more and more outlawed in the western world.
Read: an article from the World Health Organization on corporal punishment: Corporal Punishment and Health
Some take-aways from the article:
Evidence shows corporal punishment increases children’s behavioural problems over time and has no positive outcomes.
All corporal punishment, however mild or light, carries an inbuilt risk of escalation. Studies suggest that parents who used corporal punishment are at heightened risk of perpetrating severe maltreatment.
My note: in other words it is a gateway to child abuse. Once abuse is introduced by a parent to hurt a child, it almost always escalates.
Corporal punishment is linked to a range of negative outcomes for children across countries and cultures, including physical and mental ill-health, impaired cognitive and socio-emotional development, poor educational outcomes, increased aggression and perpetration of violence.
Corporal punishment is a violation of children’s rights to respect for physical integrity and human dignity, health, development, education and freedom from torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Consequences
Corporal punishment triggers harmful psychological and physiological responses. Children not only experience pain, sadness, fear, anger, shame and guilt, but feeling threatened also leads to physiological stress and the activation of neural pathways that support dealing with danger. Children who have been physically punished tend to exhibit high hormonal reactivity to stress, overloaded biological systems, including the nervous, cardiovascular and nutritional systems, and changes in brain structure and function.
Despite its widespread acceptability, spanking is also linked to atypical brain function like that of more severe abuse, thereby undermining the frequently cited argument that less severe forms of physical punishment are not harmful.
The whole article is worth reading.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has also taken a firm stance against corporal punishment.
The whole article is worth reading.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has also taken a firm stance against corporal punishment.
Read: Facts About Corporal Punishment - by Amy Morin, LCSW, fact checked by Adah Chung for Very Well Family
excerpts from the article (underlined are the most crucial parts of the article):
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has taken a firm stance against any type of corporal punishment. Its policy on corporal punishment, published in 2018, encourages parents and caregivers to use healthy forms of discipline when correcting their children and to refrain from using corporal punishment.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends healthy forms of discipline, such as positive reinforcement of appropriate behaviors, limit setting, redirecting, and setting future expectations. The AAP recommends that parents do not use spanking, hitting, slapping, threatening, insulting, humiliating, or shaming.
The AAP policy also indicates that corporal punishment is ineffective over the long-term and leads to negative outcomes.
In 2006, the Committee on the Rights of the Child released a statement declaring that corporal punishment is a form of violence that should be banned in all contexts.3 Other human rights organizations have issued similar warnings about spanking.
Research has shown that children who are subjected to corporal punishment, such as spanking, pushing, grabbing, and paddling, are more likely to develop mental health disorders. One study reported that harsh physical punishment was associated with increased odds of mood disorders, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and personality disorders.7
In my own generation, corporal punishment was all of the rage in terms of parents disciplining children.
My husband remembers a time when most of the children in his school had signs of physical abuse, from parental abuse to peer bullying: whip lashes, cuts, scabs, bruises, and infected wounds were most visible.
There was a huge generation gap when he finally reached adulthood too. Many from his generation did not respect their parents, especially those who received corporal punishment. Most who received corporal punishment past five years old were also recipients of child abuse. Most who were recipients of child abuse also experienced the silent treatment, lots of insults, the parents rarely, if ever, listened to their children and their concerns, there was way too much infantilization or parentification, a parent lashed out over so many things that were never their child's fault (unjust blaming), and so many "You are -" statements that the adult children could no longer remember all of them.
In my generation and in his generation, so many of us have experienced estrangement in adulthood from the parent as well. I know many artist friends who were and some who still are, estranged. It was either initiated by a parent, or by us over disrespect or abuse (for many of us it was initiated by the parent, but the parent told the family and/or their friends or wrote on-line that it was initiated by us - in other words, the blame-shifting tactic and the DARVO tactic were put to use by these parents, which furthered the lack of respect that we had for them). Most of us who were recipients of corporal punishment or child abuse thought our parent was "out of control", dysregulated emotionally, terrible teachers, saboteurs, terrible influences on our own children, terrible parents, with terrible respect for our boundaries as adults. Also "the bad years" of relating to our parent far outweighed "the good years". What a sad legacy.
So, I have to say that at least corporal punishment is increasingly being taken off the table for parents. Some parents will probably resort to other methods of hurting their children, but at least that one is getting more and more outlawed in the western world.
For those of us adults who never hit a child, and never thought of hitting a child, we can be proud that we are ending this scourge. Hopefully it also pushes us into an era of more world peace, and peaceful resolutions as well.
OTHER FORMS OF PUNISHMENT ON CHILDREN
(AS A WAY OF TEACHING THEM A LESSON)
DOES IT WORK?
The silent treatment is most always defined as a form of abuse when given to children (and even when it is done to adult children and partners). It is a favorite form of punishment by narcissists. Narcissists tend to be abusive in order to get power, control and dominance in their relationships.
If it is not being used as a form of punishment, it can be used as a way for someone who does not have good emotional coping skills, or as way for them not to hurt the other person any more than they have. However, if the silent treatment is accompanied by other abuses, or threats, it is pretty much guaranteed to be a punishment, especially when the target is a child.
Because it is a form of abuse, trauma symptoms in the child are likely to emerge too. It is quite a bit more egregious than shaming in most situations if the silent treatment is used habitually or goes on for a long period of time.
The silent treatment is also known to cause chronic pain, similar to physical pain. It activates the anterior cingulate cortex part of the brain that senses physical pain. Even so, real physical pain can also be experienced in terms of generalized anxiety disorder, which often goes hand-in-hand with being abused and experiencing PTSD or C-PTSD. To children (and even adult children), the pain starts out as the PTSD symptom of hypervigilance. This keeps your mind in "fight or flight" mode.
When children experience hypervigilance, especially if they live with their parents, they are mainly going to feel it as a "flight response". Most underage abused children know they can't fight with their parents and get a good outcome, thus the flight response is usually activated: trying to figure out the best way to get out of the situation they are in. It can mean the child will eventually fawn to the parent's demands, but it is never going to be an authentic response because the parent has activated the PTSD symptom of hypervigilance.
And even when the parent is satisfied with what they got out of the deal (a fawning child), the child is still going to be experiencing a hypervigilant state, even if it is relaxed somewhat to the point where he can get more sleep even if he isn't getting enough sleep. The reason why it is still activated is because the brain is still on high alert that it will happen again.
And there is a good reason why it is on high alert that it will happen again: because usually it does happen again. As I've mentioned many times, abuse escalates, and that means the silent treatment will escalate too.
The way the silent treatment escalates is that it certainly happens again and again, but more importantly it goes on for longer and longer periods of time the more it is used. Some silent treatments go on for a decade or more, and some go on, and on, and on, to the point of estrangement. And of course, a child is never going to be able to fix a parent's use of this destructive abuse tactic. Parents will give excuses for using it over and over again, and increasing the level of pain, just like a batterer will give excuses for putting his partner in the hospital with an escalation of bruises and cuts. It is up to the abuser to give up on the abusive tactic.
Since the point of abuse is to get more power, control and domination for the parent, the main focus that the parent will be to manipulate the child to be submissive to every command. The need for the parent to get more power, control and domination is working against biology; parents should be loosening the power, control and domination as the child becomes more adult, not the other way around. Also the child will be wanting more and more autonomy from his parent, at least in terms of making his own decisions, with the parent helping him along the way to be the best that he can be in terms of his own decisions - which is what teaching is about. The purpose is to get a student to be able to figure out problems on his own. If this isn't going on, you'll get a student like the ones every public school teacher sees: the ones who sit in the back of the classroom, un-interested, rolling their eyes, dismissing what you have to say. They are letting you know that they no longer want to be forced into lessons.
Some material on the silent treatment and how it effects victims, including child victims (and why it is mostly attributed to narcissists):
general:
(AS A WAY OF TEACHING THEM A LESSON)
DOES IT WORK?
No. Anything that hurts children, especially if hurting them is a habit, will mean trauma symptoms. Children are much more vulnerable to getting PTSD (or C-PTSD) than adults. Most of them don't have the wherewithal to know why they are being hurt, or how to stop it. While behavioral lessons are important, the best teaching method is to model the behavior that you want to see in your children.
Most psychologists say that modeling empathy, ethics, morality, forgiveness, adult ways of regulating emotions, showing how to resolve relationship issues, showing how to forgive, showing children respect for their feelings, thoughts and experiences are also a much better teacher than punishment.
If you feel you must punish your children, check yourself first for transgressions so that you aren't giving them mixed messages (i.e. "It's okay for me to insult you, but it's not okay for you to insult me" will never be a good lesson, and will at best confuse a child, and at worse, he will resent you and your lessons). Some psychologists suggest small "time-outs" no longer in minutes than a child's age, but even that practice is being studied as counter-productive since it is most used when a parent is angry. It teaches children that when the parent is angry, that the child is invisible to them.
But if you make it a bad habit, time-outs can also seem punitive and unfair unless you state clear reasons why it is good for them and good for you, and listen to their responses with empathy.
Most of us don't want to hurt our children because we are aware that it diminishes their trust in us as a safe place to go, as a reasonable source of learning, as a good sounding board for what ails us. If we hurt them, it will wound the relationship itself.
However, parents that make a habit out of hurting their kids probably do not entirely realize this. Or if they do realize it, they make an impulsive decision to use their baser instincts instead. They will have a very hard time keeping and enjoying a healthy attachment and re-establishing trust.
Here are just a few non-physical punishments that should not be used on children, and what these punishments do to children (when I could find links):
Most psychologists say that modeling empathy, ethics, morality, forgiveness, adult ways of regulating emotions, showing how to resolve relationship issues, showing how to forgive, showing children respect for their feelings, thoughts and experiences are also a much better teacher than punishment.
If you feel you must punish your children, check yourself first for transgressions so that you aren't giving them mixed messages (i.e. "It's okay for me to insult you, but it's not okay for you to insult me" will never be a good lesson, and will at best confuse a child, and at worse, he will resent you and your lessons). Some psychologists suggest small "time-outs" no longer in minutes than a child's age, but even that practice is being studied as counter-productive since it is most used when a parent is angry. It teaches children that when the parent is angry, that the child is invisible to them.
But if you make it a bad habit, time-outs can also seem punitive and unfair unless you state clear reasons why it is good for them and good for you, and listen to their responses with empathy.
Most of us don't want to hurt our children because we are aware that it diminishes their trust in us as a safe place to go, as a reasonable source of learning, as a good sounding board for what ails us. If we hurt them, it will wound the relationship itself.
However, parents that make a habit out of hurting their kids probably do not entirely realize this. Or if they do realize it, they make an impulsive decision to use their baser instincts instead. They will have a very hard time keeping and enjoying a healthy attachment and re-establishing trust.
Here are just a few non-physical punishments that should not be used on children, and what these punishments do to children (when I could find links):
What Shaming Teaches
and What it Does to Children
and What it Does to Children
Shaming can be so subtle that you are not aware of it (some of the articles I feature explain subtle forms of shaming that a lot of us take for granted), and shaming can be really abusive too, especially if it is accompanied by a lot of insults and other forms of punishment.
Most of the research that has been done on shaming children has shown it to be an ineffective way of disciplining a child. It doesn't work, and even tends to backfire.
When I taught in public schools, shaming by teachers and other school authorities was not allowed, and was grounds for being fired.
Habitual or over-the-top abusive shaming can produce trauma symptoms just like any form of abuse.
You can't be a good teacher of behavior and be shaming at the same time. Too much shaming will mean your child eventually won't want to hear what you have to say. All that it does in the end is cause hurt to your child, and make them disappear emotionally, and disrespect the lessons you are trying to teach because you are defining him in a bad way rather than teaching him a lesson that he will determine is beneficial to him.
So, what I'm saying here is that a child's mind always has to be going in the direction of: "My parents care about me; they are invested in helping me become all that I can be; my parents care about my behavior because my behavior and my ethics will help me to survive in the world; my parents ethics are better than mine and I have something to learn from them; my parents know how to regulate their emotions and how to get along better with others better than I do, and they are worth listening to for those reasons."
If, for instance, the parents have worse morals and ethics, when their behavior is worse than their child's, when there's more hurt to the lesson than there is modeling and teaching, when you don't show that you care about how he will survive or how he is surviving, you may end up with an emotionally distant, non-trusting, and even an estranged child.
Why Shaming Your Kids Isn't Effective Discipline - Jennifer Wolf, medically reviewed by Carly Snyder, MD for Very Well Family
Think hard before shaming children - by Claire McCarthy, MD, Senior Faculty Editor, Harvard, for Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School
Most of the research that has been done on shaming children has shown it to be an ineffective way of disciplining a child. It doesn't work, and even tends to backfire.
When I taught in public schools, shaming by teachers and other school authorities was not allowed, and was grounds for being fired.
Habitual or over-the-top abusive shaming can produce trauma symptoms just like any form of abuse.
You can't be a good teacher of behavior and be shaming at the same time. Too much shaming will mean your child eventually won't want to hear what you have to say. All that it does in the end is cause hurt to your child, and make them disappear emotionally, and disrespect the lessons you are trying to teach because you are defining him in a bad way rather than teaching him a lesson that he will determine is beneficial to him.
So, what I'm saying here is that a child's mind always has to be going in the direction of: "My parents care about me; they are invested in helping me become all that I can be; my parents care about my behavior because my behavior and my ethics will help me to survive in the world; my parents ethics are better than mine and I have something to learn from them; my parents know how to regulate their emotions and how to get along better with others better than I do, and they are worth listening to for those reasons."
If, for instance, the parents have worse morals and ethics, when their behavior is worse than their child's, when there's more hurt to the lesson than there is modeling and teaching, when you don't show that you care about how he will survive or how he is surviving, you may end up with an emotionally distant, non-trusting, and even an estranged child.
Why Shaming Your Kids Isn't Effective Discipline - Jennifer Wolf, medically reviewed by Carly Snyder, MD for Very Well Family
Think hard before shaming children - by Claire McCarthy, MD, Senior Faculty Editor, Harvard, for Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School
Shaming Children Is Emotionally Abusive (Children respect those who respect them.) - by Karyl McBride Ph.D. for Psychology Today
"Good" Children - at What Price? (The Secret Cost of Shame) - by Robin Grille and Beth Macgregor for The Natural Child Project
Doctors Warn of the Lasting Damage of Shame (A new report tells parents: Lighten up!) - by ADDitude editors for ADDitude
Doctors Warn of the Lasting Damage of Shame (A new report tells parents: Lighten up!) - by ADDitude editors for ADDitude
What Blaming Teaches
and its Effect on Children
If something happens to the scapegoat, specifically crimes against them, the people in the mob will most likely side up with each other the way they always have.
What kind of possible positive lesson is available to the child with this kind of outcome?
Let's get real here. Conspiracy theories, gaslighting and smear campaigns are no longer about the child. They are about the bullying mob's intentions, projections, aggressions and group-think, period.
A scapegoated child will learn:
"Abuse escalates."
"Mobbing is about prejudice and conspiracy theories."
"Conspiracy theories get so far out, like a hallucinatory trip."
Blaming can turn into scapegoating. Therefor, parents are encouraged to find other ways of dealing with issues so that blaming does not get out of hand, out of control, and escalate to this degree. And: if you can't take blame yourself, or have issues around being blamed, you should not expect your children to handle it any better than you handle it. That just makes sense.
A parenting expert shares the common mistake that psychologically damages kids—and what to do instead - by Hunter Clarke-Fields, Contributor, CNBC
excerpt:
Blaming is a put-down, and it can easily cause children to feel guilty, unloved and rejected. Even worse, it prevents you from developing a positive relationship with them.
The Blame Game - by Bonnie Harris for Connective Parenting
and its Effect on Children
Blaming a child a lot has similar effects to shaming. Where assigning blame can get tricky is if the child is not actually a culprit of the blame. This can cause him to blame his parents later on for being blind, punitive, unjust, unloving, unfair, terrible parents.
Getting a child to feel culpable for actions he actually does commit takes a lot of thought, and perhaps even education. Usually where you find unacceptable behavior, that behavior has been modeled somewhere in the child's life, and it can even be modeled by the parent. So adopting ethics when you are a parent is necessary if you want your children to tell the truth, to treat you with respect, and to be ethical and willingly accountable when they are culpable, themselves.
There is also a lot that can go on between siblings. Let us say that sibling A accuses sibling B of a transgression (like stealing). But actually sibling A did the stealing, not sibling B. This is very common for siblings to do up to age 8 years old. They get scared that the parent will punish them for stealing, so they stick their sibling with the fault instead.
It is before 8 years old, and even much earlier that parents need to nip this activity in the bud. Left unchecked, it can lead to a sibling using it in many other situations. The sibling relationship won't be close. If it goes past the age of 8, a continuation of these acts can lead to sibling abuse. I have heard many stories where it goes all the way to a sibling hijacking the parent's Will and Trust by planting false narratives and accusations into a parent's mind about the intentions of their siblings. There is an article in this section below that covers how to get siblings to stop blaming each other early on for things they did themselves. If it is not addressed early, it can turn children into liars, two-faced individuals and blame-shifters.
If the parent is a blame-shifter themselves, children won't respect what a parent has to say about blame-shifting, so that part of a parent's behavior needs to be cleaned up in order for them to teach a child or children why blame-shifting is not acceptable behavior.
Again, if you are going to be an effective teacher, you can't expect your students to do things that you don't do, can't do, make excuses not to do, or refuse to do. It becomes a completely ineffectual lesson, just as a bus driver teaching civil engineering who has never studied or practiced it, cannot and will not make a bridge.
Blaming can also be a slippery slope, where, if you use too much of it on one child and not on another, your child will see that he is being singled out for blame. The lesson he will learn is not going to be about what you are blaming him for: it will be about how you love his sibling more than you love him.
If he is being singled out for punishments too, then he is also likely to experience escalating trauma symptoms as well.
Again that doesn't teach him anything other than that his parent is unfair, unloving, unusually punitive and ethically wrong.
Most children cannot deal with the injustice of being "the blamed one" in the family. Usually when a child is blamed to this extent the parent cannot handle blame themselves, or they want to protect the reputation of another child or family member, so they give the one child all of the blame for family incidences that crop up.
This is called scapegoating. Scapegoating is basically blaming in the extreme. Most scapegoats cannot count the number of times they were blamed because it was just too constant, a painful way of life they had to endure. This isn't teaching a lesson, obviously.
Scapegoating is basically constant blaming where you have the realization that you aren't ever going to be be able to please your parent. You are an outcast, a virtual stranger where no one sees your good qualities.
Let's say that you are the truth-teller in the family, which many scapegoats are. If you are from a family of liars, and deniers, blame-shifting schemers, or criminals, they aren't going to appreciate your truth-telling. They are going to hurt you or ostracize you in order to get you to shut down your truth-telling, and probably even your talking. Definitely your insights. At the very least, they won't be interested in what you have to say. They'll interrupt, tell you to stop talking, tell you that you are crazy, give you the silent treatment or tell you that you are no longer welcome.
So what is the lesson here for a child? "Lie a lot and be like us"? "Truth-tellers are bad people"? "Insights and intelligence are no good"? "Believing in liars is what is good for this family, and for society"? What's the main point of the lesson here, especially if the child is going to school and learning that "Truth is good; you should not lie; you should have insights and intelligence if you want to get the most out of school and get into a profession that you'll love" and so on.
Scapegoating is always categorized as child abuse. Usually where you find a scapegoat child, you also find that the parent has a favorite golden child too who he or she keeps shielded from any blame, even if that favorite child is at fault in many incidences. The incidences are seen as excusable, even when they are not.
Usually where you find scapegoating you find mob bullying, shaming, lots of verbal abuse, lots of emotional abuse, ostracizing, the silent treatment, lots of gaslighting, blame-shifting, lots of invalidation, many smear campaigns, even physical abuse, and you also find parents who are either narcissists, sociopaths or psychopaths. Some Borderlines can scapegoat too, but usually are enlisted by narcissists, sociopaths or psychopaths to do so. If they are part of a bullying mob, they can also go in the direction of scapegoating. If they grew up seeing scapegoating or prejudice, they can, in some instances go in the direction of scapegoating too, however most Borderlines have empathy, and feel terrible when they hurt others, so it is not very likely they will take this path on their own. The area where it becomes problematic: Borderlines are often attracted to narcissists and narcissists are often attracted to Borderlines, and this is how a Borderline can join in on mob bullying, even if it doesn't feel right to them (Borderlines also have a poor sense of who they are, and narcissists come in and have no trouble assigning roles as to who they are, and can convince them that they need to join the mob).
Just as in society, where scapegoats are often of a different race, religion, or cultural background, and are being prejudiced against, conspiracy theories will usually be the main mode of how a scapegoat is viewed in the family as well. If a number of members are using the DARVO tactic, you can pretty much guarantee that there will be many, many conspiracy theories and smear campaigns with a lot of conspiratorial thinking swirling around the scapegoated child too.
Since scapegoating is mob bullying with each person in the mob having their own agendas and reasons for being part of the mob, the abuse will escalate. Abuse always escalates, but it will escalate much faster and more egregiously if there is a mob involved.
Scapegoating will always have additional prejudices and conspiracy theories, and be initiated primarily by narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths (who overwhelmingly tend to be abusive, and who like to abuse others).
Therefor scapegoating is very, very dangerous for the scapegoat.
Getting a child to feel culpable for actions he actually does commit takes a lot of thought, and perhaps even education. Usually where you find unacceptable behavior, that behavior has been modeled somewhere in the child's life, and it can even be modeled by the parent. So adopting ethics when you are a parent is necessary if you want your children to tell the truth, to treat you with respect, and to be ethical and willingly accountable when they are culpable, themselves.
There is also a lot that can go on between siblings. Let us say that sibling A accuses sibling B of a transgression (like stealing). But actually sibling A did the stealing, not sibling B. This is very common for siblings to do up to age 8 years old. They get scared that the parent will punish them for stealing, so they stick their sibling with the fault instead.
It is before 8 years old, and even much earlier that parents need to nip this activity in the bud. Left unchecked, it can lead to a sibling using it in many other situations. The sibling relationship won't be close. If it goes past the age of 8, a continuation of these acts can lead to sibling abuse. I have heard many stories where it goes all the way to a sibling hijacking the parent's Will and Trust by planting false narratives and accusations into a parent's mind about the intentions of their siblings. There is an article in this section below that covers how to get siblings to stop blaming each other early on for things they did themselves. If it is not addressed early, it can turn children into liars, two-faced individuals and blame-shifters.
If the parent is a blame-shifter themselves, children won't respect what a parent has to say about blame-shifting, so that part of a parent's behavior needs to be cleaned up in order for them to teach a child or children why blame-shifting is not acceptable behavior.
Again, if you are going to be an effective teacher, you can't expect your students to do things that you don't do, can't do, make excuses not to do, or refuse to do. It becomes a completely ineffectual lesson, just as a bus driver teaching civil engineering who has never studied or practiced it, cannot and will not make a bridge.
Blaming can also be a slippery slope, where, if you use too much of it on one child and not on another, your child will see that he is being singled out for blame. The lesson he will learn is not going to be about what you are blaming him for: it will be about how you love his sibling more than you love him.
If he is being singled out for punishments too, then he is also likely to experience escalating trauma symptoms as well.
Again that doesn't teach him anything other than that his parent is unfair, unloving, unusually punitive and ethically wrong.
Most children cannot deal with the injustice of being "the blamed one" in the family. Usually when a child is blamed to this extent the parent cannot handle blame themselves, or they want to protect the reputation of another child or family member, so they give the one child all of the blame for family incidences that crop up.
This is called scapegoating. Scapegoating is basically blaming in the extreme. Most scapegoats cannot count the number of times they were blamed because it was just too constant, a painful way of life they had to endure. This isn't teaching a lesson, obviously.
Scapegoating is basically constant blaming where you have the realization that you aren't ever going to be be able to please your parent. You are an outcast, a virtual stranger where no one sees your good qualities.
Let's say that you are the truth-teller in the family, which many scapegoats are. If you are from a family of liars, and deniers, blame-shifting schemers, or criminals, they aren't going to appreciate your truth-telling. They are going to hurt you or ostracize you in order to get you to shut down your truth-telling, and probably even your talking. Definitely your insights. At the very least, they won't be interested in what you have to say. They'll interrupt, tell you to stop talking, tell you that you are crazy, give you the silent treatment or tell you that you are no longer welcome.
So what is the lesson here for a child? "Lie a lot and be like us"? "Truth-tellers are bad people"? "Insights and intelligence are no good"? "Believing in liars is what is good for this family, and for society"? What's the main point of the lesson here, especially if the child is going to school and learning that "Truth is good; you should not lie; you should have insights and intelligence if you want to get the most out of school and get into a profession that you'll love" and so on.
Scapegoating is always categorized as child abuse. Usually where you find a scapegoat child, you also find that the parent has a favorite golden child too who he or she keeps shielded from any blame, even if that favorite child is at fault in many incidences. The incidences are seen as excusable, even when they are not.
Usually where you find scapegoating you find mob bullying, shaming, lots of verbal abuse, lots of emotional abuse, ostracizing, the silent treatment, lots of gaslighting, blame-shifting, lots of invalidation, many smear campaigns, even physical abuse, and you also find parents who are either narcissists, sociopaths or psychopaths. Some Borderlines can scapegoat too, but usually are enlisted by narcissists, sociopaths or psychopaths to do so. If they are part of a bullying mob, they can also go in the direction of scapegoating. If they grew up seeing scapegoating or prejudice, they can, in some instances go in the direction of scapegoating too, however most Borderlines have empathy, and feel terrible when they hurt others, so it is not very likely they will take this path on their own. The area where it becomes problematic: Borderlines are often attracted to narcissists and narcissists are often attracted to Borderlines, and this is how a Borderline can join in on mob bullying, even if it doesn't feel right to them (Borderlines also have a poor sense of who they are, and narcissists come in and have no trouble assigning roles as to who they are, and can convince them that they need to join the mob).
Just as in society, where scapegoats are often of a different race, religion, or cultural background, and are being prejudiced against, conspiracy theories will usually be the main mode of how a scapegoat is viewed in the family as well. If a number of members are using the DARVO tactic, you can pretty much guarantee that there will be many, many conspiracy theories and smear campaigns with a lot of conspiratorial thinking swirling around the scapegoated child too.
Since scapegoating is mob bullying with each person in the mob having their own agendas and reasons for being part of the mob, the abuse will escalate. Abuse always escalates, but it will escalate much faster and more egregiously if there is a mob involved.
Scapegoating will always have additional prejudices and conspiracy theories, and be initiated primarily by narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths (who overwhelmingly tend to be abusive, and who like to abuse others).
Therefor scapegoating is very, very dangerous for the scapegoat.
If something happens to the scapegoat, specifically crimes against them, the people in the mob will most likely side up with each other the way they always have.
What kind of possible positive lesson is available to the child with this kind of outcome?
Let's get real here. Conspiracy theories, gaslighting and smear campaigns are no longer about the child. They are about the bullying mob's intentions, projections, aggressions and group-think, period.
A scapegoated child will learn:
"Abuse escalates."
"Mobbing is about prejudice and conspiracy theories."
"Conspiracy theories get so far out, like a hallucinatory trip."
"The mob is dangerous."
"I better find a way out."
"I better buy home and auto security systems." - if they are an adult child
"I better find a way out."
"I better buy home and auto security systems." - if they are an adult child
"I better call the police." - if they are an adult child
That's what we want to teach our children, to protect themselves from us parents?
I hope I have proved why and how a trauma-bonded scapegoat can die.
Scapegoated members usually are ostracized from the family or quit themselves. And the mental health community encourages scapegoats to quit too.
That's what we want to teach our children, to protect themselves from us parents?
I hope I have proved why and how a trauma-bonded scapegoat can die.
Scapegoated members usually are ostracized from the family or quit themselves. And the mental health community encourages scapegoats to quit too.
Blaming can turn into scapegoating. Therefor, parents are encouraged to find other ways of dealing with issues so that blaming does not get out of hand, out of control, and escalate to this degree. And: if you can't take blame yourself, or have issues around being blamed, you should not expect your children to handle it any better than you handle it. That just makes sense.
A parenting expert shares the common mistake that psychologically damages kids—and what to do instead - by Hunter Clarke-Fields, Contributor, CNBC
excerpt:
Blaming is a put-down, and it can easily cause children to feel guilty, unloved and rejected. Even worse, it prevents you from developing a positive relationship with them.
The Blame Game - by Bonnie Harris for Connective Parenting
When Parents Blame Their Children (Does it really take a village to raise a child?) - by Ugo Uche, reviewed by Abigail Fagan for Psychology Today
excerpt:
One of the most difficult things I find myself doing as a psychotherapist is holding parents accountable. Typically when you have a teen engaging in unhealthy behavior, you have a parent who makes it his or her own priority to set the teen on the right path. However, there seems to be a caveat.
excerpt:
One of the most difficult things I find myself doing as a psychotherapist is holding parents accountable. Typically when you have a teen engaging in unhealthy behavior, you have a parent who makes it his or her own priority to set the teen on the right path. However, there seems to be a caveat.
“Please help me help my kid, but don't you dare tell me I am at fault.” ...
... children and teens with bad tempers usually have at least one parent (in their lives) who has a bad temper. The teen goes to school and displays a bad temper and gets penalized, then comes homes and displays the bad temper and gets penalized, all the while witnessing one of his parents periodically display episodes of bad tempers with no consequences. ...
3 Reasons Your Adult Child Treats You Like Dirt (Many well-intentioned parents express their concerns in off-putting ways.) - by Jeffrey Bernstein Ph.D. for Psychology Today
excerpt:
3. Expressing Criticism and Invalidation
excerpt:
3. Expressing Criticism and Invalidation
... When adult children sense criticism and invalidation, they can develop feelings of abandonment or rejection. Using guilt, shame, or other manipulative tactics to control an adult child's behavior can cause significant emotional harm. This can make the child feel like they are not in control of their own life and lead to feelings of resentment and anger. Lastly, parents who do not respect their adult child's boundaries and independence can run the risk of having their adult children alienate them. This is because your adult child likely feels like they cannot escape your influence or control. ...
How Can I Get My Son to Stop Blaming His Younger Sibling for His Own Bad Behavior? - by Emily Edlynn, Ph.D. for Parents
What Does It Mean to Be the Family Scapegoat? - by Nadra Nittle, Medically reviewed by
Yolanda Renteria, LPC
excerpts:
3 Ways To Exit The Role Of ‘Family Scapegoat,’ According To A Psychologist - by Mark Travers for Forbes
excerpt:
Many people come to therapy when they feel underappreciated by their family. They may say things like:
How Can I Get My Son to Stop Blaming His Younger Sibling for His Own Bad Behavior? - by Emily Edlynn, Ph.D. for Parents
What Does It Mean to Be the Family Scapegoat? - by Nadra Nittle, Medically reviewed by
Yolanda Renteria, LPC
excerpts:
... Commonplace in families with unhealthy dynamics, scapegoating tends to start in childhood when children are blamed for all of the problems in dysfunctional households. ...
... When children are assigned this role, the impact can be detrimental to their mental health and emotional well-being for a lifetime. ...
... In addition, it results in an upbringing in which the scapegoated child’s inherent worth, goodness, and lovableness are ignored. Instead, insults, bullying, neglect, and abuse are deemed appropriate for the child forced into this position. ...
... Why a parent decides to scapegoat a child tends not to make any sense because this behavior is rooted in dysfunction. For example, a child who is sensitive, inquisitive, attractive, and smart might be perceived as a threat and scapegoated by a parent who lacks these qualities. ...
... Being a scapegoat or a favorite is never about a child’s inherent worth as a human being. ...
... Being a scapegoat is a lonely, heartbreaking experience for a child, but it may also yield a more desirable outcome in some cases. For example, the maltreatment scapegoats endure in families is often the impetus that drives them to leave the dysfunctional, high-conflict home. ...
... Moreover, scapegoats very often decide to end the generational cycle of abuse when they start their own families. ...
3 Ways To Exit The Role Of ‘Family Scapegoat,’ According To A Psychologist - by Mark Travers for Forbes
excerpt:
Many people come to therapy when they feel underappreciated by their family. They may say things like:
1. “Someone is constantly making accusations against me for no fault of my own.”
2. “My parents keep blaming me for one thing or another as if it is always my responsibility to ensure everything goes right.”
3. “I am never praised for my achievements. Instead, I get belittled in front of everyone.”
It is no secret that families can be complicated. All too often, a single family member becomes the ‘scapegoat’ for the family’s problems.
A family scapegoat is a person who takes on the role of ‘black sheep’ or ‘problem child’ in their family and gets shamed, blamed, and criticized for things that go wrong within the family unit, even when these things are entirely outside of their control.
Scapegoating parents often have fragile, needy, and narcissistic personalities. They unnecessarily project hostility onto the scapegoated child.
... Parents/family authority figures maintain control by attacking and forming alliances that isolate the victim. ...
... Parenting figures distort reality to deny the target child’s legitimate needs and to act as if the victim child is the cause of not only the family’s problems but also the parent figure’s dissatisfaction. ...
What the Silent Treatment Teaches Children
and What It Does to Them
and What It Does to Them
The silent treatment is most always defined as a form of abuse when given to children (and even when it is done to adult children and partners). It is a favorite form of punishment by narcissists. Narcissists tend to be abusive in order to get power, control and dominance in their relationships.
If it is not being used as a form of punishment, it can be used as a way for someone who does not have good emotional coping skills, or as way for them not to hurt the other person any more than they have. However, if the silent treatment is accompanied by other abuses, or threats, it is pretty much guaranteed to be a punishment, especially when the target is a child.
Because it is a form of abuse, trauma symptoms in the child are likely to emerge too. It is quite a bit more egregious than shaming in most situations if the silent treatment is used habitually or goes on for a long period of time.
The silent treatment is also known to cause chronic pain, similar to physical pain. It activates the anterior cingulate cortex part of the brain that senses physical pain. Even so, real physical pain can also be experienced in terms of generalized anxiety disorder, which often goes hand-in-hand with being abused and experiencing PTSD or C-PTSD. To children (and even adult children), the pain starts out as the PTSD symptom of hypervigilance. This keeps your mind in "fight or flight" mode.
When children experience hypervigilance, especially if they live with their parents, they are mainly going to feel it as a "flight response". Most underage abused children know they can't fight with their parents and get a good outcome, thus the flight response is usually activated: trying to figure out the best way to get out of the situation they are in. It can mean the child will eventually fawn to the parent's demands, but it is never going to be an authentic response because the parent has activated the PTSD symptom of hypervigilance.
And even when the parent is satisfied with what they got out of the deal (a fawning child), the child is still going to be experiencing a hypervigilant state, even if it is relaxed somewhat to the point where he can get more sleep even if he isn't getting enough sleep. The reason why it is still activated is because the brain is still on high alert that it will happen again.
And there is a good reason why it is on high alert that it will happen again: because usually it does happen again. As I've mentioned many times, abuse escalates, and that means the silent treatment will escalate too.
The way the silent treatment escalates is that it certainly happens again and again, but more importantly it goes on for longer and longer periods of time the more it is used. Some silent treatments go on for a decade or more, and some go on, and on, and on, to the point of estrangement. And of course, a child is never going to be able to fix a parent's use of this destructive abuse tactic. Parents will give excuses for using it over and over again, and increasing the level of pain, just like a batterer will give excuses for putting his partner in the hospital with an escalation of bruises and cuts. It is up to the abuser to give up on the abusive tactic.
Since the point of abuse is to get more power, control and domination for the parent, the main focus that the parent will be to manipulate the child to be submissive to every command. The need for the parent to get more power, control and domination is working against biology; parents should be loosening the power, control and domination as the child becomes more adult, not the other way around. Also the child will be wanting more and more autonomy from his parent, at least in terms of making his own decisions, with the parent helping him along the way to be the best that he can be in terms of his own decisions - which is what teaching is about. The purpose is to get a student to be able to figure out problems on his own. If this isn't going on, you'll get a student like the ones every public school teacher sees: the ones who sit in the back of the classroom, un-interested, rolling their eyes, dismissing what you have to say. They are letting you know that they no longer want to be forced into lessons.
There are a lot of very good reasons why abuse is not a good way to get submission; it is a very, very bad idea (for the society at large, and even for family dynamics).
Anyway, when the silent treatment goes on for days, or weeks, this keeps the brain on high alert for any more attacks. And usually people who indulge in the silent treatment of their children, do attack them in other ways: taking toys or other possessions away, insults, degrading comments, shaming, unfounded blaming, false imprisonment like locking in them in their room for much longer than is healthy, a lot of gaslighting is also usually present, more threats of ostracism, smear campaigns, prejudice and conspiratorial attacks.
What hypervigilance also does is to keep the child's brain on such high alert that the child can't sleep, or they don't sleep very well (constantly waking up upset). If they do sleep, they are prone to nightmares which reflect the state they are in, that mimic his real life situation to a large degree. So it is like being haunted: he is haunted by the silent treatment night and day. Dreams don't even give him a respite.
So it is very upsetting, and the pain tends to be constant the longer it goes on. If they cry a lot from the nightmares and inability to relax enough to go to sleep, they may do so in private, especially when the parent or parents punish him for crying or feeling hurt in addition to the silent treatment. Narcissistic parents usually punish the child for having feelings about how they are being treated because narcissists have very little empathy, so they will not soothe a child who is crying over the silent treatment. They won't want to rescue him from it, or say "I've punished you enough." In fact, a child who is crying and pleading for it to stop will more likely set off a narcissistic parent's rage (in the way of the shame-rage spiral). This means that when they see the child's pain, they see it as a criticism of them, the parent. Unlike the rest of us who experience pain when we are criticized, narcissists react to criticism with rage, and for children, the rage is usually accompanied by more punishment.
Therefor, many children who receive the silent treatment bottle it up, and then the bottling up creates more symptoms.
The worry, the bottling up, being on high alert, the continued pain (even when the silent treatment has been temporarily relieved by the parent), can and does create Generalized Anxiety Disorder (typically referred to as GAD). About three quarters of the survivors I talked to who were given the silent treatment as children and beyond into adulthood experienced a lot of muscle pain (part of the anxiety disorder), headaches (also part of the disorder), and even significant heart pain (the heart is also a muscle, which would explain the pain there). Some of them experienced chronic stomach aches as well. The most common symptom started out as muscle aches all over the body, as though they had the flu.
For children and adult children who experienced the silent treatment for more than a year from a parent, most of them experienced Generalized Anxiety Disorder symptoms in addition to PTSD symptoms. The reason it wasn't 100 percent is because some children who started the emotional separation from their parent early on, when they were still a child - they withdrew so much by the time they were adults, that their parent had very little-to-no effect on them (in other words, the silent treatment was no longer hurting them because they didn't look to the parent for any parenting - that kind of relationship was emotionally severed early on). They were estranged to the point where they didn't feel any connection or intimacy with their parent. It was as though the parent was just an irritating stranger.
The adult children of child abuse who I have known, numbering in the hundreds, usually gave up on their parent at the point when the silent treatment went on longer than a year, and when the physical symptoms showed up to this extent, and especially the body/muscle aches. To experience those symptoms day in and day out, and night after night without let-up and with very little sleep, is torture.
The lesson here is that they are captives to torture, and that is it.
However, you can get medication for Generalized Anxiety Disorder these days. So some survivors take it, their symptoms let up, and they go right back to their abusers because they feel better. So I'm not necessarily a proponent of medicating yourself for symptoms like this, and the medications themselves have some issues and side effects. And if you return and the escalation of abuse continues, which it will, the medication will cease to work very well, which can cause a dependency.
The fact that your body is going through the symptoms in the first place is a sign that you cannot take any more abuse. That's a good message to get, not a bad message. Toxic families are called toxic for a reason. Abuse is a toxin when you are a child, and if the abuser uses a lot of lines of attacks, and if it keeps going on through adulthood, which it usually does, you are probably going to be receiving a lot of GAD symptoms. That's actually healthy compared to covering it up with meds, however, if you are pretty darned sure that you are not going to go back to abuse, medications can be a helpful way to move ahead, but always with some concerns (I hope to cover why in another post).
The GAD symptoms are likely to subside eventually without medication, especially with time and continued distance, to the point where you can forget about them by focusing as much as you can on the present. There are also exercises you can do to bring your focus more into the present day so that you can stop ruminating about your victimhood and your parent (shifting focus is part of trauma therapy with a licensed therapist).
If you can find relationships that are fulfilling and mutually respectful, empathetic and reasonable, then that tends to relieve symptoms too.
The survivors who had their self esteem totally blown out by the parent, who felt like empty vessels of themselves, who felt and who had other extreme issues going on in their lives, contemplated suicide a lot during parental silent treatments.
For underage children (talked about by adult children), they felt trapped, under siege, like hostages to abuse, and thought about suicide a lot, sometimes every day. It took all of the strength they could muster to get them to adulthood to escape their situation.
The silent treatment has been written about so much, and I have not read one professional article that touted any benefit to a child.
The way that a parent sees the silent treatment as a lesson to a child, is that the punisher expects their victim to writhe in pain over the silent treatment and do anything for the narcissist in order for the silent treatment to end. While it can get the parent of an underage child what they want, temporarily at least, the fact that it was used at all makes a child feel anxious, fearful, distrustful, inwardly upset and traumatized, resentful, invisible, not worth anything to the parent outside of fulfilling commands and demands ... and if used into a child's teenage years or adulthood, it will probably eventually lead to full blown estrangement.
And as we know, the parent-child relationship is such that if it doesn't benefit the child too, the relationship will either be a shell of its former self, very very shallow and insignificant, or be a total estrangement.
Abuse can be generational. Some children will adopt the silent treatment themselves as an adult and use it on their own children, or on the parent who used it on them, or on other members of a family. If there is a lot of estrangement in one extended family, I'd bet it had a lot to do with not knowing how to resolve issues beyond the unhealthy ways: silent treatments and other forms of abuse, stonewalling, blaming and shaming. This is where a child modeling the bad behavior of his parent can boomerang back on the parent or go down the generations as a family practice, sometimes with catastrophic effect. The silent treatment can and does produce suicide ideation and suicides, and I have been around enough survivor forums to know that it happens way more than it should - one therapist told me that one quarter of all children who get a long silent treatment lasting a year or more from a parent commit suicide (I am trying to find that source). Here is one source for now. But even so, there is a lot of talk in survivor forums about a sibling who died from suicide during their teenage years and twenties where a parent was ostracizing them or giving them the silent treatment at the time of death.
Again, that's not a good lesson: "Consider suicide because I don't care at all about you except what I can get out of you."
I also notice that for every one male suicide, there are about 10 female suicides (again, not a statistic, just something I notice for those of you who are studying this branch of psychology who want to get statistics on the silent treatment). Anyway, to me it says that girls are given the silent treatment by a parent so much more than a boy is. It is similar to the statistics on childhood sexual abuse: girls are targeted much more than boys are. It also seems that girls are overwhemingly chosen for the scapegoat role in their families as well. It would be interesting to know why. Is it the same prejudice that's been going on for centuries that males are more worthwhile and useful to a family than a female is? Or is it the same kind of trend in terms of sexual abuse where girls are a lot more sexually abused than boys? I suspect that both have something to do with why.
In a later post, I will discuss why girls are, in general, much more subject to abuse than boys are.
In a generational sense, the silent treatment when given to children, can also perpetuate the idea that this form of abuse should be used on the weak and vulnerable (like children, people undergoing tragedies, people who are disabled, and so on): perhaps you were given the silent treatment during a time when your own personal power was challenged. So you give the silent treatment when someone is going through a bad time!? That's supposed to teach what lesson now?
Again, children learn from parental modeling, especially if there are no repercussions for doing so or that they see right away. The child learns if he wants more power in a relationship, and to dominate someone, to attack that person in their most vulnerable, weakened state, a person who needs help. That's not a good lesson to be teaching. Plus it's even more trauma symptoms than the silent treatment during calm times.
Children who have been taught to normalize abuse and estrangement, may not realize this tactic is so dangerous until one of their own children commits suicide or becomes totally estranged from them, unwilling to put up with any more silent treatments. Thus, since there is too much of a danger in it becoming generational, it should be abolished.
There is not enough empathy behind the silent treatment to make it a useful tool to get a person to change their behavior. In fact it shows the child what their parents behavior is like more than their own. It is gross emotional negligence, and if anything, your child will eventually double down on resisting what you want, knowing it is about your need for more power, control and domination in your mutual relationship. Most teenage and adult children believe their parent has enough power, control and domination to begin with, and they don't want to give them any more of it, especially if the parent is going to be using it in this kind of bullying way.
Anyway, when the silent treatment goes on for days, or weeks, this keeps the brain on high alert for any more attacks. And usually people who indulge in the silent treatment of their children, do attack them in other ways: taking toys or other possessions away, insults, degrading comments, shaming, unfounded blaming, false imprisonment like locking in them in their room for much longer than is healthy, a lot of gaslighting is also usually present, more threats of ostracism, smear campaigns, prejudice and conspiratorial attacks.
What hypervigilance also does is to keep the child's brain on such high alert that the child can't sleep, or they don't sleep very well (constantly waking up upset). If they do sleep, they are prone to nightmares which reflect the state they are in, that mimic his real life situation to a large degree. So it is like being haunted: he is haunted by the silent treatment night and day. Dreams don't even give him a respite.
So it is very upsetting, and the pain tends to be constant the longer it goes on. If they cry a lot from the nightmares and inability to relax enough to go to sleep, they may do so in private, especially when the parent or parents punish him for crying or feeling hurt in addition to the silent treatment. Narcissistic parents usually punish the child for having feelings about how they are being treated because narcissists have very little empathy, so they will not soothe a child who is crying over the silent treatment. They won't want to rescue him from it, or say "I've punished you enough." In fact, a child who is crying and pleading for it to stop will more likely set off a narcissistic parent's rage (in the way of the shame-rage spiral). This means that when they see the child's pain, they see it as a criticism of them, the parent. Unlike the rest of us who experience pain when we are criticized, narcissists react to criticism with rage, and for children, the rage is usually accompanied by more punishment.
Therefor, many children who receive the silent treatment bottle it up, and then the bottling up creates more symptoms.
The worry, the bottling up, being on high alert, the continued pain (even when the silent treatment has been temporarily relieved by the parent), can and does create Generalized Anxiety Disorder (typically referred to as GAD). About three quarters of the survivors I talked to who were given the silent treatment as children and beyond into adulthood experienced a lot of muscle pain (part of the anxiety disorder), headaches (also part of the disorder), and even significant heart pain (the heart is also a muscle, which would explain the pain there). Some of them experienced chronic stomach aches as well. The most common symptom started out as muscle aches all over the body, as though they had the flu.
For children and adult children who experienced the silent treatment for more than a year from a parent, most of them experienced Generalized Anxiety Disorder symptoms in addition to PTSD symptoms. The reason it wasn't 100 percent is because some children who started the emotional separation from their parent early on, when they were still a child - they withdrew so much by the time they were adults, that their parent had very little-to-no effect on them (in other words, the silent treatment was no longer hurting them because they didn't look to the parent for any parenting - that kind of relationship was emotionally severed early on). They were estranged to the point where they didn't feel any connection or intimacy with their parent. It was as though the parent was just an irritating stranger.
The adult children of child abuse who I have known, numbering in the hundreds, usually gave up on their parent at the point when the silent treatment went on longer than a year, and when the physical symptoms showed up to this extent, and especially the body/muscle aches. To experience those symptoms day in and day out, and night after night without let-up and with very little sleep, is torture.
The lesson here is that they are captives to torture, and that is it.
However, you can get medication for Generalized Anxiety Disorder these days. So some survivors take it, their symptoms let up, and they go right back to their abusers because they feel better. So I'm not necessarily a proponent of medicating yourself for symptoms like this, and the medications themselves have some issues and side effects. And if you return and the escalation of abuse continues, which it will, the medication will cease to work very well, which can cause a dependency.
The fact that your body is going through the symptoms in the first place is a sign that you cannot take any more abuse. That's a good message to get, not a bad message. Toxic families are called toxic for a reason. Abuse is a toxin when you are a child, and if the abuser uses a lot of lines of attacks, and if it keeps going on through adulthood, which it usually does, you are probably going to be receiving a lot of GAD symptoms. That's actually healthy compared to covering it up with meds, however, if you are pretty darned sure that you are not going to go back to abuse, medications can be a helpful way to move ahead, but always with some concerns (I hope to cover why in another post).
The GAD symptoms are likely to subside eventually without medication, especially with time and continued distance, to the point where you can forget about them by focusing as much as you can on the present. There are also exercises you can do to bring your focus more into the present day so that you can stop ruminating about your victimhood and your parent (shifting focus is part of trauma therapy with a licensed therapist).
If you can find relationships that are fulfilling and mutually respectful, empathetic and reasonable, then that tends to relieve symptoms too.
The survivors who had their self esteem totally blown out by the parent, who felt like empty vessels of themselves, who felt and who had other extreme issues going on in their lives, contemplated suicide a lot during parental silent treatments.
For underage children (talked about by adult children), they felt trapped, under siege, like hostages to abuse, and thought about suicide a lot, sometimes every day. It took all of the strength they could muster to get them to adulthood to escape their situation.
The silent treatment has been written about so much, and I have not read one professional article that touted any benefit to a child.
The way that a parent sees the silent treatment as a lesson to a child, is that the punisher expects their victim to writhe in pain over the silent treatment and do anything for the narcissist in order for the silent treatment to end. While it can get the parent of an underage child what they want, temporarily at least, the fact that it was used at all makes a child feel anxious, fearful, distrustful, inwardly upset and traumatized, resentful, invisible, not worth anything to the parent outside of fulfilling commands and demands ... and if used into a child's teenage years or adulthood, it will probably eventually lead to full blown estrangement.
And as we know, the parent-child relationship is such that if it doesn't benefit the child too, the relationship will either be a shell of its former self, very very shallow and insignificant, or be a total estrangement.
Abuse can be generational. Some children will adopt the silent treatment themselves as an adult and use it on their own children, or on the parent who used it on them, or on other members of a family. If there is a lot of estrangement in one extended family, I'd bet it had a lot to do with not knowing how to resolve issues beyond the unhealthy ways: silent treatments and other forms of abuse, stonewalling, blaming and shaming. This is where a child modeling the bad behavior of his parent can boomerang back on the parent or go down the generations as a family practice, sometimes with catastrophic effect. The silent treatment can and does produce suicide ideation and suicides, and I have been around enough survivor forums to know that it happens way more than it should - one therapist told me that one quarter of all children who get a long silent treatment lasting a year or more from a parent commit suicide (I am trying to find that source). Here is one source for now. But even so, there is a lot of talk in survivor forums about a sibling who died from suicide during their teenage years and twenties where a parent was ostracizing them or giving them the silent treatment at the time of death.
Again, that's not a good lesson: "Consider suicide because I don't care at all about you except what I can get out of you."
I also notice that for every one male suicide, there are about 10 female suicides (again, not a statistic, just something I notice for those of you who are studying this branch of psychology who want to get statistics on the silent treatment). Anyway, to me it says that girls are given the silent treatment by a parent so much more than a boy is. It is similar to the statistics on childhood sexual abuse: girls are targeted much more than boys are. It also seems that girls are overwhemingly chosen for the scapegoat role in their families as well. It would be interesting to know why. Is it the same prejudice that's been going on for centuries that males are more worthwhile and useful to a family than a female is? Or is it the same kind of trend in terms of sexual abuse where girls are a lot more sexually abused than boys? I suspect that both have something to do with why.
In a later post, I will discuss why girls are, in general, much more subject to abuse than boys are.
In a generational sense, the silent treatment when given to children, can also perpetuate the idea that this form of abuse should be used on the weak and vulnerable (like children, people undergoing tragedies, people who are disabled, and so on): perhaps you were given the silent treatment during a time when your own personal power was challenged. So you give the silent treatment when someone is going through a bad time!? That's supposed to teach what lesson now?
Again, children learn from parental modeling, especially if there are no repercussions for doing so or that they see right away. The child learns if he wants more power in a relationship, and to dominate someone, to attack that person in their most vulnerable, weakened state, a person who needs help. That's not a good lesson to be teaching. Plus it's even more trauma symptoms than the silent treatment during calm times.
Children who have been taught to normalize abuse and estrangement, may not realize this tactic is so dangerous until one of their own children commits suicide or becomes totally estranged from them, unwilling to put up with any more silent treatments. Thus, since there is too much of a danger in it becoming generational, it should be abolished.
There is not enough empathy behind the silent treatment to make it a useful tool to get a person to change their behavior. In fact it shows the child what their parents behavior is like more than their own. It is gross emotional negligence, and if anything, your child will eventually double down on resisting what you want, knowing it is about your need for more power, control and domination in your mutual relationship. Most teenage and adult children believe their parent has enough power, control and domination to begin with, and they don't want to give them any more of it, especially if the parent is going to be using it in this kind of bullying way.
The silent treatment rarely works as a learning lesson because the child will focus on how unempathetic the parent is, how long the parent used it and in what situations. If the parent used it when their child was down on their luck or otherwise vulnerable, don't expect a relationship with your child ever again. The trust that your child had in you to act on his behalf (to parent, to love you, to keep you safe, to be there for you in tragic times, to teach good helpful lessons) can never be re-established.
Some material on the silent treatment and how it effects victims, including child victims (and why it is mostly attributed to narcissists):
general:
THE SILENT TREATMENT: WHEN THE NARCISSIST GOES PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE - Dr. Les Carter, Psychologist, for Surviving Narcissism (You Tube)
Narcissists and the Silent Treatment - by Dr. Ramani Durvasula (You Tube)
Narcissists and the Silent Treatment - by Dr. Ramani Durvasula (You Tube)
6 Ways The Silent Treatment Is Harmful - PsychToGo (YouTube)
Silent Treatment as a Way to Punish | Stonewalling in narcissistic relationships - Mindset Therapy PLLC
effect on children:
Silent Treatment as a Way to Punish | Stonewalling in narcissistic relationships - Mindset Therapy PLLC
effect on children:
The Effect of the Silent Treatment on Children. - by Ashley Berges (You Tube)
The Long-Term Effects of Abandonment - CPTSD Foundation
How & Why the Narcissist Mother Uses the Silent Treatment on the Family Scapegoat & How to Handle It - Raised by Toddlers: Surviving Narcissistic Parents
The Long-Term Effects of Abandonment - CPTSD Foundation
How & Why the Narcissist Mother Uses the Silent Treatment on the Family Scapegoat & How to Handle It - Raised by Toddlers: Surviving Narcissistic Parents
Silent treatment from parents: The psychological implications on kids and why it should be avoided - by the administrators of Times of India
What Does Gaslighting Teach Children?
and What Are the Effects on Them?
and What Are the Effects on Them?
Gaslighting is rare for normal parents who feel empathy for their children. However, it can still happen, but maybe only a couple of times in the child's entire life, and in perhaps in the heat of a moment when your child's behavior has exasperated you to the extreme. However, I'm mainly talking about calling your child crazy, and not the whole campaign of gaslighting that abusive parents are known for.
I'd bet you don't go around and tell all your friends and family that your child is crazy either, like abusive parents are known for.
Which is to say there are several parts to gaslighting, and one of them is calling your child crazy. This basically does what shaming a child does (which I discuss in the section above), and will have many of the same effects on your child.
Part of gaslighting is also a lot of attempts to deny his reality, deny the feelings that he has (and insist that he has other feelings instead), and deny the thoughts that he has (and insist that he has other thoughts instead). This part of gaslighting is called perspecticide - also referred to as invalidating.
Even normal parents can slip up on this occasionally, especially when they are accusing a child of something that they feel has ironclad proof behind it (where their child might be denying he did it). But, again, normal parents are not doing it for an agenda.
But it will probably be useful to know how abusive parents take it to an extreme, so that the rest of us don't go down the slippery slope of accusing our children of doing things, thinking things, and feeling things that they may not be experiencing, thinking or feeling. And getting these things wrong can build a really fast rift with your child. Which means that you have to develop an intelligent approach to accusations.
As I made clear in the post above, blaming is not the panacea of family harmony anyway, even if you do get it right. But, blaming can put you at some amount of risk for getting it wrong. Fortunately, most of us know that.
However, most narcissists and sociopaths do not know that, or if they are manipulative, they pretend not to know it. Most of them are so filled with arrogance and many play mind reader as well, that they consistently tell you what you experience, think and feel to the point where they will not even accept any other interpretation. They stonewall you instead (meaning that they stop the conversation), so that they don't hear your explanations. If their child persists in telling the parent they are wrong, they usually respond to the child with the silent treatment (because, again, they can't take criticism without raging).
So for abusive parents, gaslighting usually goes hand-in-hand with the silent treatment, another type of abuse that I talked about in the preceding section.
I'd bet you don't go around and tell all your friends and family that your child is crazy either, like abusive parents are known for.
Which is to say there are several parts to gaslighting, and one of them is calling your child crazy. This basically does what shaming a child does (which I discuss in the section above), and will have many of the same effects on your child.
Part of gaslighting is also a lot of attempts to deny his reality, deny the feelings that he has (and insist that he has other feelings instead), and deny the thoughts that he has (and insist that he has other thoughts instead). This part of gaslighting is called perspecticide - also referred to as invalidating.
Even normal parents can slip up on this occasionally, especially when they are accusing a child of something that they feel has ironclad proof behind it (where their child might be denying he did it). But, again, normal parents are not doing it for an agenda.
But it will probably be useful to know how abusive parents take it to an extreme, so that the rest of us don't go down the slippery slope of accusing our children of doing things, thinking things, and feeling things that they may not be experiencing, thinking or feeling. And getting these things wrong can build a really fast rift with your child. Which means that you have to develop an intelligent approach to accusations.
As I made clear in the post above, blaming is not the panacea of family harmony anyway, even if you do get it right. But, blaming can put you at some amount of risk for getting it wrong. Fortunately, most of us know that.
However, most narcissists and sociopaths do not know that, or if they are manipulative, they pretend not to know it. Most of them are so filled with arrogance and many play mind reader as well, that they consistently tell you what you experience, think and feel to the point where they will not even accept any other interpretation. They stonewall you instead (meaning that they stop the conversation), so that they don't hear your explanations. If their child persists in telling the parent they are wrong, they usually respond to the child with the silent treatment (because, again, they can't take criticism without raging).
So for abusive parents, gaslighting usually goes hand-in-hand with the silent treatment, another type of abuse that I talked about in the preceding section.
With the silent treatment the message is: "You are irrelevant unless you are submissive and doing everything I demand and command of you." With gaslighting, they add in: "All of your experiences, your feelings and thoughts are irrelevant too."
And by the way, I don't think they are faking this message. When people are almost entirely focused on how much power, control and domination that they want and are getting over others, it is an aggression that does not take into account what you feel and think about it. It is an onslaught to take you over, and turn you into a puppet without a brain or feelings (you are only supposed to be manipulated into being submissive for them, or else!).
So the child learns, "I'm supposed to be an empty vessel that other people decide who I am? And how am I supposed to do that? What if they tell me I don't have the feelings I say I'm having? What if I still feel the feelings that they say doesn't exist? Are they supposed to be telling me how I feel, think and behave, or am I supposed to be telling them how I actually feel, think and behave even when they don't listen to me?"
And if they do press the parent to accept that what they experience, and the way they feel and think is different than what the parent believes, the parent is going to see it as a criticism of their mind-reading. And what happens to narcissists and sociopaths when they feel criticized? They rage, and sometimes punish.
Over not being mind readers?
Yes. Most scapegoat abused children have been through this.
The message is: "How dare you challenge my mind reading abilities!"
And let me tell you, they are the least able to mind-read. The lack of empathy coupled with their lack of self reflection makes it impossible for them to do it.
This leads children to be silent, and letting other people define them.
That's a good lesson? Hopefully you can see why this is a horrific thing to do to a child.
If you add in the silent treatment to the empty vessel that you've made your kid out to be where you pour in his mind what he's about, and what he thinks, and what he feels all of the time without listening to him, you have poured poison in (or at least that is how the child's brain interprets it: symptoms). And for abusive parents they are going to do this most of the time. Plus they are either going to say he's entirely wonderful and faultless, or entirely terrible and always at fault, the result of splitting) - this is definitely child abuse.
So the child is going to be experiencing trauma symptoms in addition to the trauma symptoms of being stonewalled and getting the silent treatment. Horrible.
So what this teaches children is not to define themselves. Just let other people do it.
And it teaches: don't defend yourself when others judge you, otherwise endure a rage and a lecture.
And it teaches: let other people tell you what you think, feel and what you are experiencing, otherwise endure a rage and a lecture about that too.
And it teaches: soft boundaries: let everyone walk all over your real feelings and wipe their dirty feet/thoughts on your clean thoughts; let everyone else define you; let people accuse you of things you didn't do (because again, you don't know your own mind; only other people do); let other people hate you and be prejudiced against you for unreasonable reasons; just be an empty old vessel for anyone's rage and judgements.
And it teaches: don't talk, don't trust, don't feel, the hallmark of dysfunctional families. My own post about that is HERE. (Note: I'd suggest the link to the prior article rather than my own ... the link to my own article is mainly about an art piece I did on the subject).
Or conversely, it teaches children not to trust people who criticize them (even if it is helpful), to rage when they are criticized (so that the other person will stop; they won't feel any criticism is warranted anyway, so they'll just act scary and rage to throw off the idea that anyone can criticize them); to not trust anyone (they've been brought up not to trust what people say about them because those people who brought them up always got it wrong); and to not care about ethics (because their primary caregivers didn't care about ethics when they made up stories about how the child thought, how he felt and what he experienced, so he'll be damned if he has ethics too). This is basically how you make another narcissist or sociopath for the world to endure.
So the lesson here is to either make another narcissist or sociopath, or to make a child into a garbage can to dump rage and projections into.
Children who experience heavy doses of gaslighting with rage, where they are continuously told they are crazy, especially when they are upset about being raged at or abused (common), are going to have a hard time making any decisions for themselves, even on school tests.
And by the way, I don't think they are faking this message. When people are almost entirely focused on how much power, control and domination that they want and are getting over others, it is an aggression that does not take into account what you feel and think about it. It is an onslaught to take you over, and turn you into a puppet without a brain or feelings (you are only supposed to be manipulated into being submissive for them, or else!).
So the child learns, "I'm supposed to be an empty vessel that other people decide who I am? And how am I supposed to do that? What if they tell me I don't have the feelings I say I'm having? What if I still feel the feelings that they say doesn't exist? Are they supposed to be telling me how I feel, think and behave, or am I supposed to be telling them how I actually feel, think and behave even when they don't listen to me?"
And if they do press the parent to accept that what they experience, and the way they feel and think is different than what the parent believes, the parent is going to see it as a criticism of their mind-reading. And what happens to narcissists and sociopaths when they feel criticized? They rage, and sometimes punish.
Over not being mind readers?
Yes. Most scapegoat abused children have been through this.
The message is: "How dare you challenge my mind reading abilities!"
And let me tell you, they are the least able to mind-read. The lack of empathy coupled with their lack of self reflection makes it impossible for them to do it.
This leads children to be silent, and letting other people define them.
That's a good lesson? Hopefully you can see why this is a horrific thing to do to a child.
If you add in the silent treatment to the empty vessel that you've made your kid out to be where you pour in his mind what he's about, and what he thinks, and what he feels all of the time without listening to him, you have poured poison in (or at least that is how the child's brain interprets it: symptoms). And for abusive parents they are going to do this most of the time. Plus they are either going to say he's entirely wonderful and faultless, or entirely terrible and always at fault, the result of splitting) - this is definitely child abuse.
So the child is going to be experiencing trauma symptoms in addition to the trauma symptoms of being stonewalled and getting the silent treatment. Horrible.
So what this teaches children is not to define themselves. Just let other people do it.
And it teaches: don't defend yourself when others judge you, otherwise endure a rage and a lecture.
And it teaches: let other people tell you what you think, feel and what you are experiencing, otherwise endure a rage and a lecture about that too.
And it teaches: soft boundaries: let everyone walk all over your real feelings and wipe their dirty feet/thoughts on your clean thoughts; let everyone else define you; let people accuse you of things you didn't do (because again, you don't know your own mind; only other people do); let other people hate you and be prejudiced against you for unreasonable reasons; just be an empty old vessel for anyone's rage and judgements.
And it teaches: don't talk, don't trust, don't feel, the hallmark of dysfunctional families. My own post about that is HERE. (Note: I'd suggest the link to the prior article rather than my own ... the link to my own article is mainly about an art piece I did on the subject).
Or conversely, it teaches children not to trust people who criticize them (even if it is helpful), to rage when they are criticized (so that the other person will stop; they won't feel any criticism is warranted anyway, so they'll just act scary and rage to throw off the idea that anyone can criticize them); to not trust anyone (they've been brought up not to trust what people say about them because those people who brought them up always got it wrong); and to not care about ethics (because their primary caregivers didn't care about ethics when they made up stories about how the child thought, how he felt and what he experienced, so he'll be damned if he has ethics too). This is basically how you make another narcissist or sociopath for the world to endure.
So the lesson here is to either make another narcissist or sociopath, or to make a child into a garbage can to dump rage and projections into.
Children who experience heavy doses of gaslighting with rage, where they are continuously told they are crazy, especially when they are upset about being raged at or abused (common), are going to have a hard time making any decisions for themselves, even on school tests.
We did a little survey in one survivor forum and the question was: "In school, did you have so much anxiety when given a 'multiple question test' of getting the wrong answer, that you simply froze and couldn't complete it?" Overwhelmingly the answer was "yes." Some survivors were so unnerved by tests like that, that they either handed in their tests a quarter done, half done, not at all done, or just filled in random blanks to say they did it and not be told by a teacher that they had to fill in all of it, or re-take it. A lot of them said they had terrible "shakes" (a sign of PTSD), and so much anxiety that they could barely read what the questions were (another sign of PTSD - also called an "amygdala hijack").
Meanwhile, the parents at home were expecting their children to be so "perfect" in the marionette department, that when they came home with bad grades they were told they were stupid and crazy (also very common for abused kids).
How are you going to have a perfect marionette child, when the child is constantly in this hypervigilant state to the point where he can't concentrate? He can't concentrate in school and he can't concentrate at home. He goes right into the freeze response.
A lot of abusive parents punish a child who has gone into a freeze response because the freeze response is not the marionette submissive response that the parent wants.
And the child gets sicker, and sicker, and sicker, and it would seem from all of what I've read and put forward is that many of these children develop life threatening auto-immune disorders ... that is, unless another parent, or adult, is fighting for the child's survival, and for the legitimacy of his mind and feelings. Dr. Ramani Durvasula also mentions seeing abused patients with a lot more auto-immune diseases than usual.
And we know that narcissists can't tolerate a marriage partner who challenges them. So they are likely to divorce over not being able to gaslight, by being challenged about the gaslighting. What does a narcissist do when they are challenged by their partner not to gaslight? They rage about being criticized.
Which puts the child in more danger unless the loving, protective parent can get custody.
However, many survivors were able to write papers. They preferred tests that were not multiple choice tests with right and wrong answers. And they did much better on those tests. It does limit the kinds of professions they can enter, but at least there are some ways that children saddled with PTSD symptoms can succeed.
Anyway, for the underage child it can get worse ...
Meanwhile, the parents at home were expecting their children to be so "perfect" in the marionette department, that when they came home with bad grades they were told they were stupid and crazy (also very common for abused kids).
How are you going to have a perfect marionette child, when the child is constantly in this hypervigilant state to the point where he can't concentrate? He can't concentrate in school and he can't concentrate at home. He goes right into the freeze response.
A lot of abusive parents punish a child who has gone into a freeze response because the freeze response is not the marionette submissive response that the parent wants.
And the child gets sicker, and sicker, and sicker, and it would seem from all of what I've read and put forward is that many of these children develop life threatening auto-immune disorders ... that is, unless another parent, or adult, is fighting for the child's survival, and for the legitimacy of his mind and feelings. Dr. Ramani Durvasula also mentions seeing abused patients with a lot more auto-immune diseases than usual.
And we know that narcissists can't tolerate a marriage partner who challenges them. So they are likely to divorce over not being able to gaslight, by being challenged about the gaslighting. What does a narcissist do when they are challenged by their partner not to gaslight? They rage about being criticized.
Which puts the child in more danger unless the loving, protective parent can get custody.
However, many survivors were able to write papers. They preferred tests that were not multiple choice tests with right and wrong answers. And they did much better on those tests. It does limit the kinds of professions they can enter, but at least there are some ways that children saddled with PTSD symptoms can succeed.
Anyway, for the underage child it can get worse ...
Many children who live in a perpetual freeze response, are gaslighted so much that they can't tell you how many times they were gaslighted in childhood, and never had a good sense of who they were. Everything they felt they were, was invalidated by the parent. It may also be invalidated by a favorite golden child sibling who is trying to mimic the parent to get brownie points.
It's like a parent has put a worm in their abused child's brain, and in their ear, and is even becoming part of what they feel. They echo what the parent has told them. Their own voice, ambitions and dreams get so diminished and lost, purposely by the narcissist, that it is the narcissist's voice that speaks in their child's mind.
It's like the robot has been completed, much like in the Stepford wives, except the trauma symptoms are still there, even though the child tries as hard as he can to split off the trauma symptom part of himself from the functional-to-his-parent part of himself.
In extreme cases, all of these splits that the parent sees and is not tolerating very well in their ambition to hurt the child, and continually gain more domination over the child, can add up to Dissociative Identity Disorder. And even though a child might try to show only the functional side to the parent, and try to forget each and stash away the hurt and trauma to another part of himself that the parent inflicted, is not entirely possible.
A lot has been written about how Borderline Personality Disorder develops too.
Almost every "symptom" of the Borderline can be attributed to being brought up by a narcissist too.
Borderlines feel terrified that they will be abandoned. That is because narcissists abandon them repeatedly, through stonewalling, the silent treatment, the invalidation of their feelings and thoughts, and sometimes even abandon them altogether ("I want nothing to do with you any more").
Borderlines have a hard time defining who they are. They often can't tell you. And their dress and constant changing of careers reflects that: in one day, they can go from dressing Goth, to dressing like a secretary, to dressing like a dowdy maid, to experiencing the highest joy in the morning, to experiencing the depths of depression by the afternoon, to working as a waitress during the day to working as a research expert in the evening. One guy I have known for a good part of my life, looks drastically different from one day to the next, and has many, many outfits and styles of glasses to reflect it. He was egregiously abused too, a sign.
Anyway, Borderlines can even have 5 or 6 careers all going on at once, with at least one of them art-related. Some people label Borderlines as manic depressive, however, this is wrong. Manic depressives take days or weeks to change a mood. Many borderlines change from hour to hour or at the least one day to the next. Their moods are constantly shifting. That is because they survived by splitting themselves off into other sections, and one of them was tailor made for the narcissist.
Borderlines feel emotions much more strongly than other people do. They can wail when they cry, and they can laugh more heartily than others do too. This has to do with a myriad of different reasons:
Narcissists get narcissistic supply by goading and baiting their victims into a negative response by arguing with them, insulting them and stonewalling them. Then they use the emotional response of their victims to judge the victims as crazy and out-of-control emotionally.
But there is also a double bind to this. Narcissists also teach people, including children, to stuff emotions (i.e. "If you weren't so sensitive and emotional, people might listen to you more." - this is an extremely likely gaslighting phrase by narcissists). The emotional energy that the victim is being expected to stuff has to go somewhere, so it tends to come out in extremes. Also narcissists tend to be cold, uncaring, unempathetic, the opposite of the Borderline. So kids, who need dire help, practically have to scream and cry and carry on to get the narcissist's attention - this means the emotions are going to be over the top. Narcissistic parents may still not care (they tend towards child neglect). Sometimes they'll say, "If you cry like that, you aren't going to get anywhere with me!" even if the issue is dire. And of course, that just perpetuates them getting hurt, where they have to bottle up some more pain, and where it is likely to create even more extremity of expression. Either way, the bottled up emotions are going to have to go somewhere, even if the narcissist shuts them down again and again and again. And it can be partly a brain issue: generally abused kids feel emotions much more than other kinds of people because there are actually changes in the brain due to the abuse and the stuffing of emotions.
In Borderlines, suicide attempts, suicide ideation and cutting oneself can also be the result of having been abused. Suicide and suicidal thoughts come about because of the chronic pain the parent is putting the child through. Suicide is a relief of the chronic pain the parent is inflicting on the child. Whereas cutting is the way to echo your abuser and how much they hate you. You decide to hate yourself too so that the abuser will be happy and so they don't have to keep doing the abusing.
Narcissists tend to become calm and satisfied when their Borderline children are going through pain and tragedies, as long as the pain and tragedies aren't taking the child's attention away from the parent. So in a way, cutting is just another way to serve the narcissist.
A lot of Borderlines are also substance addicted. Substance addiction and being brought up by an abusive parent has been linked for a long time, and the studies on it keep showing more and more links. You can google it and a lot of professional articles show up. Again, substance addiction, especially if you are a scapegoat child in addition to being a Borderline, is a way to serve the narcissist with what they want. It also keeps the narcissist from hurting you if you are hurting yourself.
Borderline Personality Disorder usually co-exists with PTSD or C-PTSD.
Then there is the Echoist who is past the point of splintering himself off into different sections. He has been drained so much of any personality or identity by a narcissist or narcissists, or lived through so much brutality, that he basically is only a survivor (no personality was able to develop). The echoist has usually been drained of humanity too (meaning that he faces prejudice). He has no boundaries or so few boundaries that just about any one can show up and tell him who is and he goes along with what ever the person happens to say about him. In fact, who he is, and how he is defined, can so drastically differ from person to person that it doesn't matter any more: he isn't anyone in particular. He is just who the next person decides he is, kind of like a chameleon, except he changes according to what the next person wants him to be.
This is the state that a gardener, Chance Gardner is in, in the book and movie, Being There (a brilliant movie about a true echoist state). The book was written by Jerzy Kosinski, a Jew who barely survived a brutal existence as a survivor of The Holocaust and wrote books afterwards. To write a book about an Echoist, and another book about the brutalities through the eyes of a boy, and later commit suicide, is not lost on me. This is what can happen.
So, what does this teach children? That with enough abuse, a person can have PTSD, get Borderline Personality Disorder, get Dissociative Identity Disorder, be an Echoist, and die from suicide? That is what we want to teach children?
But to get back to gaslighting. It gets worse.
Most narcissists and sociopaths tell their friends and family that their child is insane. There are a number of things this does:
* If the child complains about abuse, no one listens (because they are deemed to be insane, to not know what they are talking about)
* Isolates the child with the parent (people don't generally want to be close to a person who can't think straight) - isolating people from each (triangulation is huge in narcissistic abuse)
* People allow the parent leeway in all kinds of unethical ways (including total abandonment) because they have a crazy child to deal with
* Makes the child vulnerable to other human predators (they can tell everyone that the child is insane too, that their abuse of the victim never happened either)
It becomes the go-to way for a parent to get rid of the evidence. So it allows one evil occurrence to happen after the other. It allows a parent to continually be allowed to harshly judge and punish a child. It allows a lot more erroneous punishing (punishing over sadist reasons) than might otherwise happen.
This is what we want for children? For children to be the garbage cans for a parent's rage (turning into everyone else's garbage can for rage too)? For children to be the garbage cans for abandonments and sadism? Because this is what we get when we have continuously gaslighted children.
And yet, it still can get worse ...
Gaslighting is often used in every situation where the parent is frustrated with the amount of attention, power, control, and domination they already have, which is just about always. There is never enough for them. Sam Vaknin, who I feature below at the bottom of the further reading section, has said in a number of videos that this lust for more power and the manipulation to get more of it lives in the mind of narcissists all of the time. All they can think of is how to be the authoritarian in what ever situation they are in. He also said that this lust, coupled with rage and jealousy are about the only emotions they feel too.
They use gaslighting to discard and abandon their own children (and they do discard way more than they let on). Here is how it tends to happen:
The parent and adult child reach a point where the adult child is hurt way too much by the actions of the parent. Of course, all narcissists want their child to fix all relational problems. But the adult child can't. Perhaps the narcissist's henchmen have threatened him or abused him. So the adult child insists that the issues between them have to be worked out in therapy. The parent has touted therapy to be the big solution to all problems and that the child must go in order to make the child fit for family life. But the adult child sees that this was only done to get the parent's friends and family to look at the child as insane. The fact that the child would suggest therapy for both of them creates a narcissistic injury in the narcissist. The parent, feeling criticized by the suggestion that they both go to therapy, gives their adult child the silent treatment. The adult child attempts to re-connect. But the parent pushes him away and punishes him by continuing with the silent treatment and telling him he needs to learn a lesson. When the parent does reconnect, he blames, criticizes, shames, insults the adult child, trying to make him entirely responsible for what happened. But the adult child doesn't see it that way, and the silent treatment continues. Then the parent tells his friends and the family that the adult child has rejected them instead. You can see that this is highly unethical and immoral. And the parent keeps grasping at trying to teach the adult child through the same highly unethical behavior. When a child is more ethical than the parent, the parent can no longer teach a lesson. Trying to hurt him through the silent treatment and gaslighting has achieved what? And most adult children will want to back away from a parent who is this unethical. So then it is an estrangement that goes on and on, and the parent still insists that was his child's fault. This is extremely common when it comes to how narcissistic parents treat their own offspring.
The very common DARVO tactic among narcissists and sociopaths is a type of gaslighting too, as well as all blame-shifting maneuvers. How is a parent supposed to teach a child anything good using this tactic?
Lying about what a child is about and how they act is a type of gaslighting as well. Lying is second nature to most narcissists and is constant for sociopaths. Again, what is a parent teaching using this tactic, especially for children who go off to school and learn that most teachers, classmates, and school officials want the truth to be spoken. Either the child is going to deny, reject, play dumb, or lecture a parent who is lying so much.
Gaslighting is also used by a parent to get a child to believe that the truth is a lie, and that a lie is the truth. And if the child doesn't go along with it, they get punished. Now what is that supposed to teach?
And narcissistic parents also try to get children to believe that they, the parent, is the great sage of how to work out problems in relationships. They may lecture a child about the latest articles on how to make relationships work. That is laughable. They can't practice what they preach. So when they are doing the opposite of what all of these articles suggest (like throwing constant barbs and insults at their child - which is a type of grievous disrespect), they will talk about how the child needs to show respect. It's not too bright, but it is also about gaslighting.
The end result is that the child is not likely to respect the parent or want to hear them talk about lessons ever again.
A lot of survivors are estranged from their parent because there is nothing to talk to their parent about. They don't want to hear what their parent has to say any more because it's just about a bunch of blame-shifting, gaslighting, pointless drivel. A survivor might try to dumb-down the conversations to weather, cooking, and gray rock subjects to stop the crazy-making, hurtful, nonsensical lessons, but then a lot of parents get narcissistically injured by their child stonewalling all conversation except those subjects, and decide to continue the silent treatment over that (often after taunting and goading their children to respond to subjects other than the gray rock subjects).
A lot of therapists attempt to teach "gray rock" to their patients, and tell them to be patient, and that it will work over the long haul, but what is that teaching children? Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel, just like the parent teaches them to do all of the time? It's just another denial of self to placate a narcissist. I'd bet for Borderlines, Echoists and those with Dissociative Identity Disorder, it's the worst thing you could teach them. So I'm not a big proponent of that method unless it's a work situation. There's got to be a better way.
The sad thing is that gaslighting a child is pretty much a given when it comes to narcissistic and sociopathic parents. It is incredibly common. And the rate of narcissistic and sociopathic individuals is growing (it accounts for the upswing in school and mass shootings as well - I'm working on a piece about that). Narcissistic parents may make up about 8 percent of parents (this accounts for the fact that many narcissists aren't diagnosed - they generally don't go to therapy). So this constant drumming for parents to teach children lessons that matter for society, like peaceful resolutions, respecting your fellow human beings, telling the truth, being kind, may be lost. While parents gaslight to get continually more power, control and domination over their children (and adult children for as long as the parent is alive), with very few laws or societal pressures to stop it, it does have a huge impact on society. And narcissists are consistently going to be teaching lessons that hurt people without any upside.
Jealous, rageful, power hungry, unethical narcissists should not be teachers of children, period. And eventually some of the children they are trying to teach realize that too.
My own feeling is that gaslighting will hold our evolution back in a big way, and for a long time. To have society full of amygdala hijacked PTSD'd adult children who can't talk to their parent and get reasonable responses, and the narcissists that prey upon them for their own selfish, self serving purposes, will create a culture that is not sustainable. Narcissists and sociopaths will never care about this fact (they don't even care about other people much), so it is up to the rest of us to care about this.
Assuming that Putin may be a malignant narcissist, how is the lesson he is trying to teach the Ukrainian population working out? How are the torture lessons, in particular, working out? I bet you most of them are not learning that submission is a good idea. No, they are learning that Russians are dangerous, unreasonable, un-negotiable, impulsively destructive and terrorizing, that they don't have good intentions, and that they must be driven out. I bet that is the main lesson they are learning. I think even children learn the same lessons from malignant narcissistic parents (or any other family member).
Dictators who invade other countries are usually arrogant Malignant Narcissists who tell people what to think, how to behave, what kind of decision-making they have a right to, and what to believe. They imprison people who make minor infractions while they have criminal intentions every day, have people murdered for instance. Their populations are lied to about the intentions of other countries on purpose. They are taught to be prejudiced. The dictators expect complete submission and loyalty to the dictator while he shows his loyalty to no one. This is the Hellish world we want for the human race going forward, for dictators to tell people what to do, how to think, and how to feel?
And how do they do this? By gaslighting their population. Wars would be very hard to wage without lots of gaslighting and trying to turn people into full time echoists and submissive marionettes.
It's like the robot has been completed, much like in the Stepford wives, except the trauma symptoms are still there, even though the child tries as hard as he can to split off the trauma symptom part of himself from the functional-to-his-parent part of himself.
In extreme cases, all of these splits that the parent sees and is not tolerating very well in their ambition to hurt the child, and continually gain more domination over the child, can add up to Dissociative Identity Disorder. And even though a child might try to show only the functional side to the parent, and try to forget each and stash away the hurt and trauma to another part of himself that the parent inflicted, is not entirely possible.
A lot has been written about how Borderline Personality Disorder develops too.
Almost every "symptom" of the Borderline can be attributed to being brought up by a narcissist too.
Borderlines feel terrified that they will be abandoned. That is because narcissists abandon them repeatedly, through stonewalling, the silent treatment, the invalidation of their feelings and thoughts, and sometimes even abandon them altogether ("I want nothing to do with you any more").
Borderlines have a hard time defining who they are. They often can't tell you. And their dress and constant changing of careers reflects that: in one day, they can go from dressing Goth, to dressing like a secretary, to dressing like a dowdy maid, to experiencing the highest joy in the morning, to experiencing the depths of depression by the afternoon, to working as a waitress during the day to working as a research expert in the evening. One guy I have known for a good part of my life, looks drastically different from one day to the next, and has many, many outfits and styles of glasses to reflect it. He was egregiously abused too, a sign.
Anyway, Borderlines can even have 5 or 6 careers all going on at once, with at least one of them art-related. Some people label Borderlines as manic depressive, however, this is wrong. Manic depressives take days or weeks to change a mood. Many borderlines change from hour to hour or at the least one day to the next. Their moods are constantly shifting. That is because they survived by splitting themselves off into other sections, and one of them was tailor made for the narcissist.
Borderlines feel emotions much more strongly than other people do. They can wail when they cry, and they can laugh more heartily than others do too. This has to do with a myriad of different reasons:
Narcissists get narcissistic supply by goading and baiting their victims into a negative response by arguing with them, insulting them and stonewalling them. Then they use the emotional response of their victims to judge the victims as crazy and out-of-control emotionally.
But there is also a double bind to this. Narcissists also teach people, including children, to stuff emotions (i.e. "If you weren't so sensitive and emotional, people might listen to you more." - this is an extremely likely gaslighting phrase by narcissists). The emotional energy that the victim is being expected to stuff has to go somewhere, so it tends to come out in extremes. Also narcissists tend to be cold, uncaring, unempathetic, the opposite of the Borderline. So kids, who need dire help, practically have to scream and cry and carry on to get the narcissist's attention - this means the emotions are going to be over the top. Narcissistic parents may still not care (they tend towards child neglect). Sometimes they'll say, "If you cry like that, you aren't going to get anywhere with me!" even if the issue is dire. And of course, that just perpetuates them getting hurt, where they have to bottle up some more pain, and where it is likely to create even more extremity of expression. Either way, the bottled up emotions are going to have to go somewhere, even if the narcissist shuts them down again and again and again. And it can be partly a brain issue: generally abused kids feel emotions much more than other kinds of people because there are actually changes in the brain due to the abuse and the stuffing of emotions.
In Borderlines, suicide attempts, suicide ideation and cutting oneself can also be the result of having been abused. Suicide and suicidal thoughts come about because of the chronic pain the parent is putting the child through. Suicide is a relief of the chronic pain the parent is inflicting on the child. Whereas cutting is the way to echo your abuser and how much they hate you. You decide to hate yourself too so that the abuser will be happy and so they don't have to keep doing the abusing.
Narcissists tend to become calm and satisfied when their Borderline children are going through pain and tragedies, as long as the pain and tragedies aren't taking the child's attention away from the parent. So in a way, cutting is just another way to serve the narcissist.
A lot of Borderlines are also substance addicted. Substance addiction and being brought up by an abusive parent has been linked for a long time, and the studies on it keep showing more and more links. You can google it and a lot of professional articles show up. Again, substance addiction, especially if you are a scapegoat child in addition to being a Borderline, is a way to serve the narcissist with what they want. It also keeps the narcissist from hurting you if you are hurting yourself.
Borderline Personality Disorder usually co-exists with PTSD or C-PTSD.
Then there is the Echoist who is past the point of splintering himself off into different sections. He has been drained so much of any personality or identity by a narcissist or narcissists, or lived through so much brutality, that he basically is only a survivor (no personality was able to develop). The echoist has usually been drained of humanity too (meaning that he faces prejudice). He has no boundaries or so few boundaries that just about any one can show up and tell him who is and he goes along with what ever the person happens to say about him. In fact, who he is, and how he is defined, can so drastically differ from person to person that it doesn't matter any more: he isn't anyone in particular. He is just who the next person decides he is, kind of like a chameleon, except he changes according to what the next person wants him to be.
This is the state that a gardener, Chance Gardner is in, in the book and movie, Being There (a brilliant movie about a true echoist state). The book was written by Jerzy Kosinski, a Jew who barely survived a brutal existence as a survivor of The Holocaust and wrote books afterwards. To write a book about an Echoist, and another book about the brutalities through the eyes of a boy, and later commit suicide, is not lost on me. This is what can happen.
So, what does this teach children? That with enough abuse, a person can have PTSD, get Borderline Personality Disorder, get Dissociative Identity Disorder, be an Echoist, and die from suicide? That is what we want to teach children?
But to get back to gaslighting. It gets worse.
Most narcissists and sociopaths tell their friends and family that their child is insane. There are a number of things this does:
* If the child complains about abuse, no one listens (because they are deemed to be insane, to not know what they are talking about)
* Isolates the child with the parent (people don't generally want to be close to a person who can't think straight) - isolating people from each (triangulation is huge in narcissistic abuse)
* People allow the parent leeway in all kinds of unethical ways (including total abandonment) because they have a crazy child to deal with
* Makes the child vulnerable to other human predators (they can tell everyone that the child is insane too, that their abuse of the victim never happened either)
It becomes the go-to way for a parent to get rid of the evidence. So it allows one evil occurrence to happen after the other. It allows a parent to continually be allowed to harshly judge and punish a child. It allows a lot more erroneous punishing (punishing over sadist reasons) than might otherwise happen.
This is what we want for children? For children to be the garbage cans for a parent's rage (turning into everyone else's garbage can for rage too)? For children to be the garbage cans for abandonments and sadism? Because this is what we get when we have continuously gaslighted children.
And yet, it still can get worse ...
Gaslighting is often used in every situation where the parent is frustrated with the amount of attention, power, control, and domination they already have, which is just about always. There is never enough for them. Sam Vaknin, who I feature below at the bottom of the further reading section, has said in a number of videos that this lust for more power and the manipulation to get more of it lives in the mind of narcissists all of the time. All they can think of is how to be the authoritarian in what ever situation they are in. He also said that this lust, coupled with rage and jealousy are about the only emotions they feel too.
They use gaslighting to discard and abandon their own children (and they do discard way more than they let on). Here is how it tends to happen:
The parent and adult child reach a point where the adult child is hurt way too much by the actions of the parent. Of course, all narcissists want their child to fix all relational problems. But the adult child can't. Perhaps the narcissist's henchmen have threatened him or abused him. So the adult child insists that the issues between them have to be worked out in therapy. The parent has touted therapy to be the big solution to all problems and that the child must go in order to make the child fit for family life. But the adult child sees that this was only done to get the parent's friends and family to look at the child as insane. The fact that the child would suggest therapy for both of them creates a narcissistic injury in the narcissist. The parent, feeling criticized by the suggestion that they both go to therapy, gives their adult child the silent treatment. The adult child attempts to re-connect. But the parent pushes him away and punishes him by continuing with the silent treatment and telling him he needs to learn a lesson. When the parent does reconnect, he blames, criticizes, shames, insults the adult child, trying to make him entirely responsible for what happened. But the adult child doesn't see it that way, and the silent treatment continues. Then the parent tells his friends and the family that the adult child has rejected them instead. You can see that this is highly unethical and immoral. And the parent keeps grasping at trying to teach the adult child through the same highly unethical behavior. When a child is more ethical than the parent, the parent can no longer teach a lesson. Trying to hurt him through the silent treatment and gaslighting has achieved what? And most adult children will want to back away from a parent who is this unethical. So then it is an estrangement that goes on and on, and the parent still insists that was his child's fault. This is extremely common when it comes to how narcissistic parents treat their own offspring.
The very common DARVO tactic among narcissists and sociopaths is a type of gaslighting too, as well as all blame-shifting maneuvers. How is a parent supposed to teach a child anything good using this tactic?
Lying about what a child is about and how they act is a type of gaslighting as well. Lying is second nature to most narcissists and is constant for sociopaths. Again, what is a parent teaching using this tactic, especially for children who go off to school and learn that most teachers, classmates, and school officials want the truth to be spoken. Either the child is going to deny, reject, play dumb, or lecture a parent who is lying so much.
Gaslighting is also used by a parent to get a child to believe that the truth is a lie, and that a lie is the truth. And if the child doesn't go along with it, they get punished. Now what is that supposed to teach?
And narcissistic parents also try to get children to believe that they, the parent, is the great sage of how to work out problems in relationships. They may lecture a child about the latest articles on how to make relationships work. That is laughable. They can't practice what they preach. So when they are doing the opposite of what all of these articles suggest (like throwing constant barbs and insults at their child - which is a type of grievous disrespect), they will talk about how the child needs to show respect. It's not too bright, but it is also about gaslighting.
The end result is that the child is not likely to respect the parent or want to hear them talk about lessons ever again.
A lot of survivors are estranged from their parent because there is nothing to talk to their parent about. They don't want to hear what their parent has to say any more because it's just about a bunch of blame-shifting, gaslighting, pointless drivel. A survivor might try to dumb-down the conversations to weather, cooking, and gray rock subjects to stop the crazy-making, hurtful, nonsensical lessons, but then a lot of parents get narcissistically injured by their child stonewalling all conversation except those subjects, and decide to continue the silent treatment over that (often after taunting and goading their children to respond to subjects other than the gray rock subjects).
A lot of therapists attempt to teach "gray rock" to their patients, and tell them to be patient, and that it will work over the long haul, but what is that teaching children? Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel, just like the parent teaches them to do all of the time? It's just another denial of self to placate a narcissist. I'd bet for Borderlines, Echoists and those with Dissociative Identity Disorder, it's the worst thing you could teach them. So I'm not a big proponent of that method unless it's a work situation. There's got to be a better way.
The sad thing is that gaslighting a child is pretty much a given when it comes to narcissistic and sociopathic parents. It is incredibly common. And the rate of narcissistic and sociopathic individuals is growing (it accounts for the upswing in school and mass shootings as well - I'm working on a piece about that). Narcissistic parents may make up about 8 percent of parents (this accounts for the fact that many narcissists aren't diagnosed - they generally don't go to therapy). So this constant drumming for parents to teach children lessons that matter for society, like peaceful resolutions, respecting your fellow human beings, telling the truth, being kind, may be lost. While parents gaslight to get continually more power, control and domination over their children (and adult children for as long as the parent is alive), with very few laws or societal pressures to stop it, it does have a huge impact on society. And narcissists are consistently going to be teaching lessons that hurt people without any upside.
Jealous, rageful, power hungry, unethical narcissists should not be teachers of children, period. And eventually some of the children they are trying to teach realize that too.
My own feeling is that gaslighting will hold our evolution back in a big way, and for a long time. To have society full of amygdala hijacked PTSD'd adult children who can't talk to their parent and get reasonable responses, and the narcissists that prey upon them for their own selfish, self serving purposes, will create a culture that is not sustainable. Narcissists and sociopaths will never care about this fact (they don't even care about other people much), so it is up to the rest of us to care about this.
Assuming that Putin may be a malignant narcissist, how is the lesson he is trying to teach the Ukrainian population working out? How are the torture lessons, in particular, working out? I bet you most of them are not learning that submission is a good idea. No, they are learning that Russians are dangerous, unreasonable, un-negotiable, impulsively destructive and terrorizing, that they don't have good intentions, and that they must be driven out. I bet that is the main lesson they are learning. I think even children learn the same lessons from malignant narcissistic parents (or any other family member).
Dictators who invade other countries are usually arrogant Malignant Narcissists who tell people what to think, how to behave, what kind of decision-making they have a right to, and what to believe. They imprison people who make minor infractions while they have criminal intentions every day, have people murdered for instance. Their populations are lied to about the intentions of other countries on purpose. They are taught to be prejudiced. The dictators expect complete submission and loyalty to the dictator while he shows his loyalty to no one. This is the Hellish world we want for the human race going forward, for dictators to tell people what to do, how to think, and how to feel?
And how do they do this? By gaslighting their population. Wars would be very hard to wage without lots of gaslighting and trying to turn people into full time echoists and submissive marionettes.
Are You Gaslighting Your Kids? - by Sherri Gordon, medically reviewed by Ann-Louise T. Lockhart, PsyD, ABPP for Very Well Family
The Danger of Parents Gaslighting Their Children (They deserve respect, at every age.) - by Daniel S. Lobel Ph.D. for Psychology Today
Gaslighting: How a Parent Can Drive a Kid Crazy - Medically reviewed by Scientific Advisory Board — By Christine Hammond, MS, LMHC for Psych Central
Gaslighting: How a Parent Can Drive a Kid Crazy - Medically reviewed by Scientific Advisory Board — By Christine Hammond, MS, LMHC for Psych Central
The Top 5 Gaslighting Phrases of Struggling Adult Children (Shut down gaslighting by not getting sucked into it.) - by Jeffrey Bernstein Ph.D. for Psychology Today
27 Signs Your Parent Is Gaslighting You & What To Do About It - by Abby Moore, expert review by Chamin Ajjan, LCSW, A-CBT, CST
I also talk about how gaslighting can make children vulnerable to predatory relationships: Setting Boundaries (for Victims of Narcissistic or Psychopathic Abuse)
27 Signs Your Parent Is Gaslighting You & What To Do About It - by Abby Moore, expert review by Chamin Ajjan, LCSW, A-CBT, CST
I also talk about how gaslighting can make children vulnerable to predatory relationships: Setting Boundaries (for Victims of Narcissistic or Psychopathic Abuse)
Are Gaslighters Aware of What They Do? (Do gaslighters know they're manipulative, or do they do it without realizing it?) - by Stephanie A. Sarkis Ph.D. for Psychology Today
Gaslighting in Families: Signs of Gaslighting Parents - by Stacey Colino, medically reviewed by Jean Kim, MD for Psycom
Gaslighting Parents: Signs & How to Respond - by Silvi Saxena MBA, MSW, LSW, CCTP, OSW-C, medically reviewed by Rajy Abulhosn MD for Choosing Therapy
Gaslighting in Families: Signs of Gaslighting Parents - by Stacey Colino, medically reviewed by Jean Kim, MD for Psycom
Gaslighting Parents: Signs & How to Respond - by Silvi Saxena MBA, MSW, LSW, CCTP, OSW-C, medically reviewed by Rajy Abulhosn MD for Choosing Therapy
WHAT THE ESCALATION OF ABUSE
HAS TO DO WITH THIS TOPIC
HAS TO DO WITH THIS TOPIC
Most abusers don't stop to think, "Escalating abuse and keeping it going isn't working. They don't seem to be learning what I want them to learn. They don't seem to be changing in the way that I want them to change. They aren't trusting me or looking at me as a teacher. They aren't doing what I tell them to do. They don't even think my lessons are worth listening to." - no they don't think that way!
Most abusers live in fantasies:
1. fantasies that people can change more than they actually can (if they looked at themselves, they'd notice they are highly resistant to change - so how are other people supposed to change to the drastic levels they expect?)
2. fantasies that they will keep gaining power, control and domination in relationships
3. fantasies that they are in control of others when they really aren't
4. fantasies that they are much more magnetic, persuasive, intelligent, wealthy, powerful and deceptive than they really are - a lot of us can see through this posturing, more than they'd be comfortable with, in fact.
5. fantasies of others submitting to their every wish and whim
6. fantasies that others will submit to being infantilized and/or parentified at the whims and commands of the abuser
But the biggest fantasy of all is that if they keep increasing the pain on their victim, the victim will, after enough torture, change the way the abuser wants them to change. As I've pointed out before, they don't understand any of the research that has been done on personal change, otherwise they might take a second look at their methods and attitudes. Some of why they "just don't get it" comes from having such a profound lack of empathy - they can't even understand people on that level, so, of course, they don't understand people enough to know that growing their sadism is not a good choice for them.
What they really tend to think is this: "This isn't working. Apparently, I've got to increase the pain and keep increasing the pain until they come to their senses! Wow, are they stupid for not giving into me!"
I hope I have proved above why they are the ones with the blind spots, not their victims.
Most abusers live in fantasies:
1. fantasies that people can change more than they actually can (if they looked at themselves, they'd notice they are highly resistant to change - so how are other people supposed to change to the drastic levels they expect?)
2. fantasies that they will keep gaining power, control and domination in relationships
3. fantasies that they are in control of others when they really aren't
4. fantasies that they are much more magnetic, persuasive, intelligent, wealthy, powerful and deceptive than they really are - a lot of us can see through this posturing, more than they'd be comfortable with, in fact.
5. fantasies of others submitting to their every wish and whim
6. fantasies that others will submit to being infantilized and/or parentified at the whims and commands of the abuser
But the biggest fantasy of all is that if they keep increasing the pain on their victim, the victim will, after enough torture, change the way the abuser wants them to change. As I've pointed out before, they don't understand any of the research that has been done on personal change, otherwise they might take a second look at their methods and attitudes. Some of why they "just don't get it" comes from having such a profound lack of empathy - they can't even understand people on that level, so, of course, they don't understand people enough to know that growing their sadism is not a good choice for them.
What they really tend to think is this: "This isn't working. Apparently, I've got to increase the pain and keep increasing the pain until they come to their senses! Wow, are they stupid for not giving into me!"
I hope I have proved above why they are the ones with the blind spots, not their victims.
FURTHER READING
general
general
Abandoned child syndrome - Wikipedia
FEAR OF ABANDONMENT: THE LASTING EFFECTS OF TRAUMA - by Dr. Alison Block for her own website (Health Psychology Center)
Tips to Heal After Growing Up with a Dismissive Mother - by Sandra Silva Casabianca, Medically reviewed by Cydney Ortiz, PsyD for Psych Central
19 Lasting Effects of Abandoning or Emotionally Unavailable Parents - by Audrey Sherman, Ph.D. for Psych Central
How To Overcome Abandonment Issues From Childhood - by Dr. Jonice Webb for her own website
FEAR OF ABANDONMENT: THE LASTING EFFECTS OF TRAUMA - by Dr. Alison Block for her own website (Health Psychology Center)
Tips to Heal After Growing Up with a Dismissive Mother - by Sandra Silva Casabianca, Medically reviewed by Cydney Ortiz, PsyD for Psych Central
19 Lasting Effects of Abandoning or Emotionally Unavailable Parents - by Audrey Sherman, Ph.D. for Psych Central
How To Overcome Abandonment Issues From Childhood - by Dr. Jonice Webb for her own website
Unloved Daughters and the Pain of Maternal Abandonment ("She felt absolutely justified in leaving us.") - by Peg Streep for Psychology Today
Why do narcissists discard their own children? - by Manya Wakefield for Medium.com
Why do narcissists discard their own children? - by Manya Wakefield for Medium.com
5 Reasons Narcissistic Parents "Replace" Their Children (Being rejected and replaced can lead to lifelong challenges.) - by Claire Jack Ph.D. for Psychology Today
Narcissists Abandon Their Families and Re-Invent Themselves - by Linda Martinez-Lewi, Ph.D. for her own website
The Fear of Abandonment - by Sarah Graham for Sarah Graham Counseling
Narcissists Abandon Their Families and Re-Invent Themselves - by Linda Martinez-Lewi, Ph.D. for her own website
The Fear of Abandonment - by Sarah Graham for Sarah Graham Counseling
Here's what spanking does to kids. None of it is good, doctors say. ("Discipline older children by temporarily removing favorite privileges, such as sports activities or playing with friends.") - by Maggie Fox for NBC News
The Problem with Time-Outs (Time-outs delivered in anger may have damaging effects.) - by Jessica Grogan Ph.D. for Psychology Today
Campaigns against corporal punishment - Wikipedia
Corporal punishment - Wikipedia (history)
The Problem with Time-Outs (Time-outs delivered in anger may have damaging effects.) - by Jessica Grogan Ph.D. for Psychology Today
Why Time-Out Is Out (Six experts explain why one of the most popular discipline tactics is also one of the most misused.) - from the Editors of Parents
5 Alternatives To Time-out That Actually Work - by the Editors of Our Little Play Nest
The Confusing Narcissistic Cycle of Abandonment and Return - by Christine Hammond, MS, LMHC, Medically reviewed by Scientific Advisory Board for Psych Central
How to Deal with a Narcissistic Mother - by Giselle Franco for CBT Psychology for Personal Development
5 Alternatives To Time-out That Actually Work - by the Editors of Our Little Play Nest
The Confusing Narcissistic Cycle of Abandonment and Return - by Christine Hammond, MS, LMHC, Medically reviewed by Scientific Advisory Board for Psych Central
How to Deal with a Narcissistic Mother - by Giselle Franco for CBT Psychology for Personal Development
Campaigns against corporal punishment - Wikipedia
Corporal punishment - Wikipedia (history)
Consequences vs Punishment: What’s the Difference? - by Jim and Lynne Jackson for Connected Families
6 Reasons Some People Hurt the Ones They Love ...and what you can do if you're on the receiving end. - by Claire Jack Ph.D., reviewed by Devon Frye for Psychology Today
Narcissistic parents identify their children as either a favourite or a scapegoat, and they pit them against each other - by Lindsay Dodgson for Insider.com
Dealing With a Partner Who Doesn't Want Change - by Sheri Stritof, Medically reviewed by Carly Snyder, MD for Very Well Mind
50 signs of Emotional Abuse: Meaning & Causes - by by Sylvia Smith, Approved by Paula Cookson, Registered Psychotherapist
There's no such thing as a 'mutually abusive' relationship, therapists say. With abuse, one partner is always in power. - by Julia Naftulin and Keyaira Kelly for Insider.com
When There Is No Getting Away: The Grief of Sibling Bullying - by Sarah Swenson, MA, LMHC
Did anyone else have a golden child sibling and you were punished for their bad behaviour? - Reddit question (RaisedByNarcissists)
10 Ways to Deal with a Toxic Sibling - by Psych To Go
From Psychopaths to 'everyday sadists': why do humans harm the harmless? - by Simon McCarthy-Jones, Trinity College, Dublin for The University of Dublin
What It Takes to Fix a Broken Relationship (Co-rumination, moral repair, and forgiveness.) - by Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD, ABPP for Psychology Today
Its Okay to Cut Ties with Toxic Family Members (Would your life be happier, healthier, and more peaceful without certain people in it?) - by Sharon Martin, LCSW for Psych Central
Narcissistic Gaslighting: What It Is, Signs, & How Cope - by Hailey Shafir, LPCS, LCAS, CCS, Reviewed by: Benjamin Troy, MD for Choosing Therapy
Examples of Narcissist Gaslighting and Ways to Deal with It - by Chidi Mills for Overcomers Counseling
6 Common Traits of Narcissists and Gaslighters (How narcissists and gaslighters emotionally manipulate and exploit victims.) - by Preston Ni M.S.B.A., Reviewed by Lybi Ma for Psychology Today
The Narcissist and Their Children - by Supriya McKenna for The Life Doctor
The Hidden Trauma of Neglect in the Narcissistic Family (Neglect is the most common form of abuse.) - by Julie L. Hall, for Psychology Today
excerpt:
Key Points:
* Narcissists often cultivate the idea that they are “perfect” parents, but neglect is common in narcissistic families.
* Narcissistic parents may neglect kids' emotional, physical, safety, medical, and/or educational needs.
* Neglected children pay a high price in their physical, emotional, and psychological development.
How Narcissists Gain Emotional Control With Micro-Abandonments (Love bombing, and then sudden devaluation.) - by Erin Leonard Ph.D. for Psychology Today
3 Ways Narcissistic Parents Can Abuse Children 1. Viewing children as an extension of themselves. - by Imi Lo for Psychology Today
What Are Typical Behaviours of Narcissistic Abuse Survivors? Five things they have in common. - by Mariette Jansen Ph.D.
5 Manipulation Tactics Narcissistic Parents Use To Control Their Adult Children - by Shahida Arabi, MA for Psych Central
excerpt:
Adult children of narcissists go through a lifetime’s worth of abuse. Narcissistic parents lack empathy, exploit their children for their own agendas, and are unlikely to seek treatment or change their destructive behaviors long-term (Kacel, Ennis, & Pereira, 2017). Their children often endure severe psychological maltreatment, as their parents employ behaviors like bullying, terrorizing, coercive control, insults, demands, and threats to keep them compliant (Spinazzola et al., 2014). This form of trauma places children of narcissists at risk for suicidality, low self-esteem, depression, self-harm, substance abuse, attachment disorders, and complex PTSD, leading to symptoms similar to children who were physically or sexually abused (Gibson, 2016; Schwartz, 2016; Spinazzola et al., 2014, Walker, 2013).
If children of narcissists choose to remain in contact with their abusive parents, they will continue to encounter manipulation even as adults. The same tactics which were employed to control them as children can still be powerful even when they are adults – perhaps even more so because these methods cause them to regress back into childhood states of fear, shame, and terror.
Narcissistic Parents Are Literally Incapable Of Loving Their Children - by JOANNA MCCLANAHAN for The Scary Mommy website
excerpt:
Narcissistic parents see their children’s independence as a direct threat to the control they want or need over their lives.
Out of desperation to retain control, narcissists will try to deliberately sabotage their child’s sense of self-worth.
Tips to Heal After Growing Up with a Dismissive Mother (Dismissive parenting can impact the way you see yourself, others, and the world in general. Identifying the signs may help you heal.) - by Sandra Silva Casabianca, Medically reviewed by Cydney Ortiz, PsyD for Psych Central
UNLOVED IN CHILDHOOD: 10 COMMON EFFECTS ON YOUR ADULT SELF - by Peg Streep for B.C. Construction Industry, Rehabilitation Plan
35 Common Gaslighting Phrases in Relationships and How To Respond, According to Therapists
(The lies that are told to create confusion.) - by Renee Hanlon for Parade Magazine
Mother-Daughter Jealousy: Why It Happens and How to Cope - by Fiona Thomas for Greatist
excerpt:
Broadly speaking, when a mother exhibits jealousy toward one or more of her offspring, she falls within the signifier of being a “narcissistic mother.”
Senior therapist Sally Baker elaborates. “This is when a mother puts her own emotional needs above those of her children. It generally starts when the child is young, and growing up in a household headed by a narcissistic mother can be very damaging to a child’s development.”
Mothers Who Are Jealous of Their Daughters (A mother’s jealousy distorts a daughter’s normal development.) - by Karyl McBride Ph.D. for Psychology Today
excerpt:
Mother-Daughter Jealousy: Why It Happens and How to Cope - by Fiona Thomas for Greatist
excerpt:
Broadly speaking, when a mother exhibits jealousy toward one or more of her offspring, she falls within the signifier of being a “narcissistic mother.”
Senior therapist Sally Baker elaborates. “This is when a mother puts her own emotional needs above those of her children. It generally starts when the child is young, and growing up in a household headed by a narcissistic mother can be very damaging to a child’s development.”
Mothers Who Are Jealous of Their Daughters (A mother’s jealousy distorts a daughter’s normal development.) - by Karyl McBride Ph.D. for Psychology Today
excerpt:
* A narcissistic mother may perceive her daughter as a threat.
* When a mother envies and then criticizes and devalues her daughter, she diminishes the threat to her own fragile self-esteem.
* As a daughter analyzes what her mother appears to be jealous about, she comes to feel unworthy.
Next up is a Richard Grannon video. His role is usually to help victims of narcissistic abuse, but in this video he acts the role of a narcissist who is intent on gaslighting and dominating his victim through erroneously blaming, and the reactions the victim has in being gaslighted. I'm not sure how I feel about him "acting the part of a narcissist", but this is exactly how it happens (especially for children and the vulnerable under the narcissist's "care"): Narcissist Speaking About Gaslighting
Narcissist Pays Heavy Price for Betrayal Fantasy - by Professor Sam Vaknin (You Tube)
Note: Sam Vaknin is a self described narcissist who educates others about Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He got a PhD in Psychology and is now a psychology professor
Why Narcissist Never Says “I am Sorry” - by Professor Sam Vaknin (You Tube)
FOUND ON FACEBOOK:
I'd like to show all of the narcs in my family this post, but I don't think they'd get it, or want to get it, or if they did get it they'd be saying that the research is flawed. It's so true that they like themselves the way they are, even if it means aggressing into someone else's life, mind or body and not being satisfied with the outcome. Isn't this the definition of crazy?
ReplyDeleteThere is something that psychologists use called the "five factor model", and one of the five factors is whether a person is open to new perspectives and experiences. On the perspectives end, narcissists are almost always "fixed" in perspectives. Extremely rigid.
DeleteIn terms of children they don't like, there are the "go away and I don't want to see you" type of narc parents, and the "I'm going to control everything you do, say, feel, wear, and imprison you" type of narc parents.
In the former, there is neglect, sometimes severe, and those children are vulnerable to many dangers and hazards including predatory people.
In the latter, children are much more vulnerable to suicidal thinking, unable to form their own interests or even thoughts beyond what the parent wants them to think. And their feelings are constantly shut down in order to regulate the feelings of the narcissistic parent (narcissistic rage is always underneath the surface if children aren't acting as "perfectly" to the narc parents control).
The aggression happens in both cases based on what the narc parent needs, not on what the child needs.
In terms of other family members they don't like, they are hyper critical of them (usually), but cannot take criticism (or control) themselves.
Narcissism is not usually referred to as "insane". It's considered "disordered" instead. Disordered personality type is referred to as "conditions in which an individual differs significantly from an average person, in terms of how they think, perceive, feel or relate to others ... Changes in how a person feels and distorted beliefs about other people can lead to odd behaviour, which can be distressing and may upset others." - from https://www.nhsinform.scot/illnesses-and-conditions/mental-health/personality-disorder
Thank you for your comment.
Would narcissists actually learn anything from an article like this? What do you think? Or is this just for the people they hurt?
ReplyDeleteI kind of answered that in the comment above.
DeleteLet's put it this way. Most of them don't want to learn it.
Wanting to be aggressive towards others, even to the point of deeply wounding others, usually supersedes any thoughtful rumination.
This even goes for the aggressors who proactively abuse. Their minds are usually on planning how to abuse more, NOT on what happens after they abuse.
We see this with despotic tyrants too. And maybe this might explain how it happens in personal relationships too.
- They tell their generals to invade another country (it is a proactive aggression: planned out in detail by generals). And generals are the ones plan out the logistics of how to invade and which positions are weak enough to attack, and when to retreat, and how to take over certain population centers, and so on. The tyrant in the beginning is just commanding them to do it.
- Then typically, the tyrant doesn't like how the invasion is going. It's not going fast enough, or there are too many retreats, he says.
- The tyrant rages at the generals for not having a good plan.
- The generals try another tack.
- The tyrant doesn't like how the new offensive is going either, and rages again, firing some of them. The way the narcissistic-sociopathic mind works is that no war plan will ever be good enough for them. The tyrant tell the generals that the army should "never retreat": they need to destroy more homes, infrastructure, roads, people and forget about retreating. When soldiers are never allowed to retreat, they tend to be at very high risk of being slaughtered (it's the "sitting duck" problem). But narcissistic-sociopaths, who have very little empathy, don't care about their soldiers.
In other words, what the tyrant cares about is planning the ultimate amount of destruction and loss of life to teach the invaded people a lesson "not to resist". That is true in the narcissistic-sociopath's way of doing personal relationships too. Their thinking doesn't tend to go past "I want destruction; I want to hurt other people. I want to destroy any chance of resistance to my authority."
- Many times the tyrant takes over the planning of the invasion (having called his generals inept) as Hitler did. But because tyrants aren't all that educated in tactical war planning, and because they are intolerant of any retreats, and any opinions other than their own, and because they tend to think that they are the only ones good at power, control and domination tactics, they just keep pressing forward with slaughters, false narratives, hurting, and destruction. They tend to lose, especially if other countries think it is wrong, immoral, unjust, and not something that should be done on the world stage. That is the playbook of what happened to Hitler and Germany in World War II: they lost because Hitler took the reins of war planning, and did the same kind of "no retreat" war policies, the same kind of "destroy all" approach that other tyrants do.
Could a person ever convince Hitler, Stalin and Putin not to go in that same direction? Or the same thoughts of "I want power, control and domination, and I don't care how I get it"? Doubtful.
You'd probably be wasting your time trying to tell them that their plans to hurt others should be dropped - and yes, even with all of the evidence out there that it mostly doesn't work. They are too arrogant to think that it won't work for them either. So, yes, I think it is up to the rest of us to figure out how to restrain destroyers, aggressors and invaders, because the thoughts they have are so "entrenched" for any reliable rehabilitation, especially the darker narcissists.
They need to be dealt with in a systematic way so that they can no longer traumatize and break the peace. And that goes all the way from personal relationships to world stage situations. More laws against all kinds and varieties of perpetration are of great importance in my opinion.