Child Abuse: Why Would An Abused Child Become An Abusive Parent?

If someone was severely mistreated during their formative years, it would be completely rational to assume that they wouldn’t treat their child or children in the same way. The main reason for this is that they will know what it is like to be harmed by one or both parents and the damage that this causes.

Due to this, they are not going to want to put them through what they themselves went through. But while a parent who was abused can treat their child or children differently, they can also treat them in a way that is very similar to how they themselves were treated.

Confusion

Considering this, if someone had a parent who mistreated them but who was also mistreated during their formative years, they can struggle to get their head around why this happened. The reason they know that their parent was also abused can be because they told them.

Then again, another family member might have told them about how their parent or parents were treated during this stage of their life. What can enter their mind is that there must be something wrong with them, otherwise they wouldn’t have behaved in this way.

Another Element

Additionally, what can enter their mind is that they are worthless and unlovable, and just deserved to be mistreated. If this does enter their mind, it will be a consequence of the fact that they were egocentric as a child.

They would have personalised how they were treated, with it being seen as a sign that they were worthless and unlovable. With this in mind, the voice that says that they deserved to be treated in this way won’t reflect reality.

One Step Back

Now, if they do believe that there must have been something wrong with their parent, and this is why they mistreated them, they are likely to be right in their assessment. Most likely, how they were treated as a child damaged their brain.

So when their parent was born, they were likely to have been connected to their body and had the ability to feel their feelings as time passed. Yet, as they were not given the attunement, care, affection and support that they needed to grow and develop in the right way, their brain and nervous system would have had to adapt.

One option

To handle being greatly deprived and deeply wounded, so being neglected and verbally and perhaps physically harmed, they would have gradually lost touch with their embodied, connected, and fully feeling true self. In its place would have been a disembodied, disconnected, and not fully feeling false self.

They would have been firmly rooted in their body and connected to their feelings, but had to leave their body and lose the ability to fully feel in order to survive. What this shows is that this stage of their life didn’t just affect their intellect and the thoughts and beliefs that they have, it affected every part of them.

Two Parts

When the time came, then, for them to be a parent, their childhood was well and truly behind them, but they would still have been in a disconnected state and not have had access to all of their feeling self. Consequently, it would have been very difficult for them to empathise with their child, attune to their needs, and show human warmth.

Thus, they wouldn’t have been able to provide their child with the love that they needed. Along with this, as they hadn’t faced any of their own wounds, they would have unconsciously projected their abusive parent or parents into their child.

Indirect Revenge

They were then probably not diagnosed as suffering from psychosis, but they wouldn’t have been able to see their child clearly. To a big part of them, their child wouldn’t have been seen as the innocent being that they were; they would have been seen as the parent who tortured them as a child.

Ergo, no matter how normal their parent appeared to be and how well they functioned, they were not in a good way. They had lost touch with most, if not all, of their humanity and were driven by pain and unmet developmental needs that were outside of their conscious awareness.

It Makes More Sense

When these factors and others are taken into account, it doesn’t make what happened acceptable, but what it does do is shed light on why something so destructive happened. Both their software and their hardware were not as they should have been.

If it were only their mind that had been affected by what had happened to them as children, it would be as if they simply chose not to do the right thing and lacked willpower. But as it is far more complex than this, it probably wouldn’t have mattered if they didn’t want to mistreat their child.

Awareness

If someone was mistreated during their formative years and they are not in good way, they will probably need to reach out for external support. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.

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Oliver JR Cooper
http://www.oliverjrcooper.co.uk