How We Learn Abuse

Hurt people hurt people. It’s a phrase many people have heard when examining their own abuse stories. Why would this person do such a thing to me? “Well, if you look at their childhood, they also suffered from abuse at the hands of….” I personally know someone who said he never wanted to be married because he was afraid that he would treat a woman the way his father treated his mother, as if he wouldn’t be able to control his own behavior.

While a discussion on how victims turn into abusers might be worthwhile, I’m more concerned about the victim of abuse and their origin story than I am with the abuser and theirs. A lot of experts say that abusers target people who are self-sacrificing and highly empathic, but are these victims really unusually kind, or are they just people who have been conditioned to accept abuse?

Let’s not blame the victim

Just like abusers unwittingly learn how to abuse others by observation, so, too, are many victims taught how to tolerate abuse. When someone grows up in an environment that is threatening or dangerous, either for them or for those they live with, they accept this type of environment as the norm because they’ve never known any other existence.

Even if they wanted to get out, they don’t have the ability to leave because they rely on their caretakers for food and shelter. So they keep their heads down and focus on their survival, how to get through the day. If they have the unfortunate experience of watching someone else go through this survival state with them, they may even be taught explicitly how to survive the abuse: Things like, “Just go to your room and don’t get in dad’s way. Don’t aggravate him; he’ll cool off eventually.”

After a time, surviving in an abusive environment becomes second nature. In fact, any other world seems strange and foreign. Victims don’t know what healthy functioning looks like, and being expected to act as though they live in a non-threatening world makes them uncomfortable because they have no idea how.

Take, for example, this family. A grandfather who visits his son’s family wakes up at 4am every morning, “stomping around the kitchen banging things,” demanding breakfast from his wife, and otherwise making it impossible for anyone else in the house to sleep. When his daughter-in-law brings up her father-in-law’s bad behavior to her husband, it causes a fight between the couple. The husband’s primary concern is that he wants his mother to be able to visit with her grandchildren, and she won’t be allowed to visit unless they accommodate his father.

I read this and thought, there is so much abuse going on here! If you think of abuse in terms of emotional manipulation and control, as we do, there’s a whole trail of abuse in this family. The father-in-law is clearly abusive, but his wife accepts this treatment. She teaches her son by example how to survive this abuse. Then you see their son accommodating his dad’s bad behavior so that he and his children can have time with his mother/their grandmother. Only the daughter-in-law is crying foul here! And when she does, the son abuses his wife for standing up to his father. In protecting his abuser, he’s demonstrating how to survive abuse to his kids.

The children grow up watching their grandfather abuse everyone in the family, their grandmother kowtowing to her husband, and their father bowing to his father while fighting with their mother (they don’t say how the father treats his own children, or how the grandfather treats his grandkids). Unless the daughter-in-law breaks the cycle of abuse, the kids will also learn to accommodate abusers or, worse yet, become abusers themselves.

It is not the children’s fault if they learn how to accommodate abusers; it’s not their father’s fault for learning that the best way to survive was to bend to his father; and it’s not even the grandmother’s fault for not stopping her husband, because chances are, she learned how to survive from someone else who was also abused.

Hurt people may hurt people, but sometimes hurt people teach others how to be hurt and accept it.

Changing the storyline

How, then, can we make sure that future generations never settle into the patterns of an abusive environment, thinking it’s the norm? We change the storyline by breaking the cycle of abuse: raise our children in a way that protects them from abuse and demonstrate that abuse is not to be tolerated.

The daughter-in-law was right: her father-in-law’s abusive behavior needed to be stopped. If that meant having a fight with her husband, and her mother-in-law not getting to spend any time with the grandchildren, then it’s a price worth paying to keep her kids from being exposed to abuse, from learning how to accommodate it and even how to mete it out. Better yet, it’s a powerful lesson to teach your kids how to stand up to an abuser and to remove yourself from an abusive situation.

When a child grows up in a functional, non-abusive environment, it’s the only thing they know, so they are quite shocked when they enter a hostile space and they’ll get out of there quickly. I know a lot of people at this point will think, “But we need to toughen up our kids for the real world, and the real world is a hostile place! They need to learn how to deal with it.” We disagree. Yes, there is a lot of ugly behavior in the world, but those are not the spaces that we want our children to exist in and adapt to. The less those spaces are tolerated, over time, the fewer there will be.

If we envelop our children in only non-abusive relationships, they will immediately know when something is not right, and they will reject it. That means when they have a boss who doesn’t treat them with respect, or a partner who takes advantage of them, they’ll sense, “Wait, something’s wrong here, this isn’t normal.” Then they can distance themselves until they have a plan to avoid dysfunctional behavior, whether that is to functionally confront the other person, or to leave the situation. Avoiding — or even escaping! — abuse is much better than withstanding it.

There is a self-reinforcing downward spiral into abuse when we teach our children how to cope with being emotionally manipulated and controlled, or help them to create long-term survival strategies to withstand such behavior. By doing so, we are implicitly teaching them that this the norm, which is how they continue to be perpetuated. Instead of accepting this paradigm, we should show our children, by example, a way not just to survive abuse, but how to put an end to it.

Some Final Thoughts

There are two very important conclusions we would like to draw:

First, if parents want their children to stay out of abusive relationships, we need to surround them with the most non-violent world we can create. Protect them, flag attempts at manipulation, control and injustice, and model humane behavior towards one another. This will give them the confidence to reject violence and abuse when they rear their ugly heads, and allow them to create a community where harmony is the norm.

Second, we as a society need to spread awareness that abuse is not unchangeable. We should not burden individuals with “dealing with abuse” or ”overcoming abuse”; instead, we should be nipping abuse in the bud by collectively rejecting the perpetuation of manipulation and control.

We need to create a societal awareness that abuse is a model that does not work and needs to be replaced. We need to change collectively. If we can grow into a violence-free society, there would be far fewer hurt individuals who need to heal.