We are not talking about your parents — we are talking about YOU

A reflection post on centering the experiences of childhood

This is our monthly post for paid subscribers only. In it we talk about the importance of centering our conversations on the emotional experience of childhood, the unintentional harm of phrases like “my parents were just doing the best they could,” and the question every person can ask themselves as they process their lives. Before we publish our chapter on what the research says about corporal punishment on children, we wanted to give readers the chance to reflect and honor their own experience — and validate it for themselves. 

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If you know, you know

If you are subscribed to the STRONGWILLED podcast, then you also have a new episode to listen to today — all about Adventures in Odyssey, Mr. Whitaker, and using corporal punishment to teach children what “real” love is. We don’t have a transcript available for this episode, but there will be discussion posts for it on our Patreon / podcast FB group.

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“We are not talking about your parents — we are talking about YOU.”

A reflection post on centering the experiences of childhood

In The New Dare to Discipline, Dr. James Dobson inadvertently wrote something that we here at STRONGWILLED agree with: he implies that the child who is punished gets to determine whether or not a parent’s punishment was harmful or not. Reflecting on a time when his mother hit him with a girdle¹, he says that it was not psychologically harmful because he didn’t experience it as such.

He writes: 

“I am the only person on earth who can report accurately the impact of my mother’s actions. I’m the only one who lived it. …the momentary pain of that event did not assault my self-worth. Believe it or not, it made me feel loved.”² 

I (Krispin) am being a little cheeky here, but I do believe Dobson’s approach (in this short section, not the whole of his books) is the best way to determine whether or not corporal punishment is harmful. You are the only one who can report accurately the impact of spanking because you’re the only one who lived it. If Dobson deems his own punishment from his mother as non-abusive because of his experience, you can use the same bar to determine for yourself if the punishment you received was harmful.³

If you experienced it as harmful, it was harmful.

But why is it so hard for many of us to admit this?

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“But we’re not talking about your parents, we’re talking about you,” my therapist said, interrupting me mid-sentence. I’d been telling her about my dad’s childhood, explaining all the dysfunctional aspects of his family life that led him to parent me the way that he did. I could name the traumas he’d experienced, as well as how they led to his personal limitations, especially as it related to his relationships.⁴

My therapist refocused the conversation. “How did it feel to you, growing up with your dad?” 

As a therapist myself, she knew my ability to empathize with and understand others, placing their actions within the context of their life story. She knew sometimes my ability to do so came at the expense of staying present with my own experience. She knew that our healing work included focusing on me and my experience, not on my parents. 

She also recognized my mind’s tendency to run in circles, analyzing all the different perspectives, trying to think through whether my parents were harmful or not. I would think, “it felt really bad when my dad treated me that way,” but then my mind automatically would respond, “but it was better than he was treated by his dad.” My brain ran on endless loops, trying to make sense of it all.

This was the question I was wrestling with: Are my parents bad people? I kept trying to understand why they made the decisions they did, if it was from malice or negligence, if they were doing what they thought was best. Were they being careless parents? Were they being too vigilant? Were they good people or bad people? If I could make that determination, I could make sense of everything else. 

My therapist understood the circular thinking that kept me immersed in my thoughts instead of my body. She told me: “Your brain wants to sort them into good or bad. But I don’t think that question is going to be as helpful as this one, the question I want to keep coming back to: What was it like for you?”

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Intent versus Impact

My focus had been on my parents’ intentions, but my therapist was asking me to focus on their impact. When it comes to other realms of power differentials, such as gender, race or sexual orientation, we’re able to see how important it is to consider impact over intention. We know that just because someone didn’t mean to intend harm doesn’t mean it wasn’t harmful⁵ 

Yet, when it comes to our relationship with our parents, there are so many reasons we’d rather look at their intent rather than their impact, which is why my therapist had to continually redirect the focus of our conversation back to my own experience. Facing the impact, naming it aloud, and bringing clarity to our experience can be an incredibly difficult task, especially when dealing with childhood memories that bring up emotions we would have preferred to stay buried. Acknowledging the harm done opens the door to so many questions: What does this mean for my relationship with my parents? Will they acknowledge the harm done and apologize? Will this undermine my connection with them? How will it impact our family dynamics? 

Asking ourselves these questions can be incredibly painful, which is why it is so common to hear deflection, avoidance, and intellectualizing in conversations about generational trauma and abuse in childhood.

“My parents were doing the best they could,” is a common reframe in these conversations (and is something people message and DM us all the time). But here at STRONGWILLED we believe that just because it was their best doesn’t mean it was enough for you to thrive. Perhaps their best was far below what a kid would need to feel safe and emotionally connected. Perhaps their best left you feeling unseen, unheard, and unable to envision a life where you got to be your own person. Perhaps their best still involved physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse. 

Many people who grew up in Religious Authoritarian Parenting homes tend to focus on our parents’ intent, glossing over the importance of centering the conversation on our personal and emotional experience of childhood. When people say, “my parents were doing the best they could,” it is a thought-terminating cliche⁶ that closes the door to other, perhaps more painful, questions. Questions like: “regardless of what was going on with my parents — did I get what I needed as a kid?” 

Did you get what you needed as kid? 

Have you ever allowed yourself to ask this question?

Every single person can ask themselves this question and answer it honestly — whether or not you yourself eventually became a parent and perhaps utilized some of the RAP methods. It’s a shift in focus from the intent of parents to personal and embodied emotions, and we find it to be an important step in healing and recovering from religious authoritarian parenting (or childhood abuse in general).

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The Research

Next week’s post is going to be a rundown of what the research has demonstrated about spanking. It’s been a heart-breaking process of researching a really difficult topic, but I’ve appreciated that the question posed is quite simple: “What is the impact of spanking on kids?” 

It sounds like a basic question, but I believe it’s a powerful one, because it is focused on kids — not on their parents. It’s a question that is both incredibly narrow in scope and incredibly open. The question isn’t even asking “is spanking good or bad?” it’s asking “what is the impact on kids?” Researchers are asking, “Is spanking beneficial to kids? Is it harmful? Does it have any particular impacts when compared with other disciplinarian methods?” 

I love that all of these questions are focused on kids alone and their well-being. In the scientific method, there isn’t room for all the ruminations about the intentions or parents and their upbringing. Like my therapist’s redirection, it focuses the conversation on kids and their experience. 

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A Time for Reflection

Next week, we will be reviewing what the research says about spanking: whether it’s helpful or harmful, as well as the specific long-term effects, according to research over the past few decades. We’ll be considering the impact as measured by thousands of participants in psychological studies, and also addressing some of the straw men arguments that religious authoritarians like to use to discredit research (statements like, “researchers haven’t studied the type of spanking that I’m talking about”).

But before looking at the research, I believe it’s important to recognize that you don’t need research to validate your experiences. You get to reflect on what it was like for you to grow up in your family and what it was like for you to be disciplined the way you were. This is an invitation over the next week to reflect on what it was like to be a kid, growing up in a home where physical punishment was always lurking in the background, and to experience physical pain at the hands of those who said they loved you deeply. And you get to reflect on how it’s impacted your adult life and relationships. Part of regaining autonomy is getting in touch with your own experience, regardless of what external systems (whether it’s religious authoritarians or researchers) say. Everyone is different, everyone has their own experience, and being able to discover what is true for you is key to regaining autonomy. 

For me, a large part of healing came when I was able to answer my therapists’ question: “what was it like for you?” It reminded me that I’m the authority on my own life, helping me get in touch with my own experience. When we have to dismiss our own experience, focusing more on our parents’ intentions, we end up disconnecting from our bodies and emotions, leading to long-term impacts and patterns of self-abandonment. 

At STRONGWILLED, we will always center the emotional perspective of children. Today, take some time to center your own feelings, memories, and emotions, without rushing to defend your parents or other authority figures in your life. For some people, this will be easy — while for others, it is difficult, painful, and triggering work. Be gentle with yourself, take as much time as you need, and honor your feelings that perhaps were unseen, ignored, or even punished in childhood. 

Feel free to answer in the comments here, or write in your journal and process with safe people in your life. As always, comments are limited to paid subscribers and are not visible to the wider public — but this is still a semi-public space.

What was punishment like for you as a child?

1. This was an old-school, heavy women’s undergarment with lots of metal parts and leather straps. Totally not weird at all to write about this moment defending it constantly, and to dedicate his books on child discipline to the mother who did this to him.

2. The New Dare to Discipline, 1992, Dobson, p. 24, emphasis mine.

3.  Again, I’m writing this tongue-in-cheek: we don’t have to use Dobson’s standards or approach to determine whether something is harmful, but I find it humorous to point out that Dobson is simply using self-experience as authority, when it suits his argument.

4.  It’s normal to contextualize our parents, and it can be helpful for understanding generational trauma, systematic factors, and more. But if we use this as a way to bypass exploring our own emotional experience, it is no longer helpful and is serving to protect and uphold abusive systems. 

5. I love this article about intent vs. impact, and how there needs to be room to consider both in healthy relationships https://www.healthline.com/health/intent-vs-impact#takeaway

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized, and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

6. Robert Lifton Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Chapter 22: "Ideological Totalism" (1961)