There's so much I relate to here. The tendency to defend our parents and give them the benefit of the doubt is very telling, isn't it? That is exactly what a parent should be doing for a child, not the other way around.
A related question that has been very hard for me to digest is looking at other people who were raised the same way I was and seeing how very differently they responded. Even among my siblings, we were each affected so differently by the same parenting methods. Just yesterday I was trying to speak to a very close person in my life about your most recent episode. This person experienced RAP as well but responded so, so differently that they couldn't relate to my feelings at all. It was jarring. I know that the way my upbringing affected *me* is what matters the most *to me* but when I experienced harm that others didn't it's so hard not to feel like the problem is with me.
All that to say, I'm very interested to hear what the research says about all of this!
oh my gosh, such a good point! parents should be giving that empathy and understanding to kids!
Also, it's so hard when you want to process with others close to you (esp siblings), but they have different experiences of it, or have processed it in different ways (or have just dissociated from it or haven't processed it).
That paragraph where you ask, “… 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.”
The first part, I remember having to gauge where I thought my parents were on a daily/hourly basis.. were they stressed out, or calm and available? That would determine if I could go to them with a problem I was having. If they were stressed, it would usually come back to bite me, so I’d stay quiet and out of the way, and try to deal with my issues on my own. There’s not much worse than having a problem and then being punished when you reveal it.
The second part.. the being hurt by people who say they love you, that’s had a huge impact on my relationships of all sorts. I’ve stayed in relationship with people who haven’t treated me well, all because of the framework I was raised in. Thankfully, I’ve been getting better at recognizing it, and leaving, even when it means ending a decades-long relationship, but it feels so much better to me to honor my worth and not tolerate poor treatment anymore.
Having a hard time remembering what I felt around my parents when I was of the age to be spanked, what I do remember is how I felt later on when my dad would mock me for being sensitive and emotive (I was an anxious child who didn’t like unpredictability), or with contempt in his tone, tell me I was too much like my mom because I let my feelings run wild. I felt like a caged bird. Even as I type this I can feel my heart pounding loudly in my chest while my breathing quasi freezes. I am confused because when I feel deeply I am in touch with my humanity. But it becomes a liability and being true to myself risks relational disconnect with my caregiver/provider.
I’ve regained enough sense of autonomy and connection with myself to name the harm my dad’s emotional neglect has caused me. I’m even questioning whether being taught to self-abandon as a child groomed me to join a cult as a young adult where the mission mattered more than my feelings or safety.
that last part about joining a cult: it does often seem like that's the goal -- ignore your own experience, just obey. Works really well for abusive systems :(
"What was it like for you?" can be a very difficult question for me. I learned not to feel what I was feeling, if that makes any sense. I sure learned not to tell anybody. So discerning and acknowledging those feeling I had is quite challenging.
It's worse than usual right now, because my remaining parent has been telling my sibling about feeling guilty about how they treated me and didn't stand up for me when the other parent drove me out of the family. Telling my sibling, but not saying anything to me. There is a big difference between feeling guilty and apologizing, and only part of it is about who you say it to.
I don't even know my feelings on that, right now. Let alone my feelings on the past.
I smiled a bit as I read this post because it resonates so deeply with my own process lately. Last week, with tears in my eyes, I looked at my therapist and said, “I feel like I need you to tell me this wasn’t ok”. As a trauma therapist, I felt embarrassed to be making this request. Because I know- I believe it’s abusive- I can talk about how it disorganizes attachment, the developmental delays, the research on corporal punishment etc. I can even identify my embarrassment as a trauma response… But there is still this young embodied part of me that internalized the message I was given- that’s it was somehow loving and divine and my pain around it is an overreaction. I think that part of me needed to feel the anger and sadness over this treatment from and older/wiser other.
Last month I was processing how the idea of people doing their best was feeling particularly challenging. As someone who believes everyone is deserving of compassion and empathy, I have often found myself drawn to that perspective. But I also found it to be another strategy for me to cognitively bypass my emotions. This orientation felt like it was keeping me from naming the seriousness of my wounds and allowing my grief and anger to carry the weight they deserve around my upbringing. Right now I’ve let’s go of that belief. I don’t want to hold the dialectic tension- who knows, maybe I’ll pick it back up down the road.
As a young adult, I used to listen to adventures in odessy to fall asleep- it’s was nostalgic for me. The last episode I ever listened to was the one y’all reviewed because I was so triggered by whit’s behavior in it.
thanks so much for sharing about this! Also I just wanna say it's such a bummer how the things we find nostalgic and have that connection to childhood are often so triggering or problematic now (at least that's true for me, having been raised on SO MUCH christian media).
Krispin, I find myself really relating to your story—thank you for sharing it. It took me a long time to admit to myself how much my dad hurt me. My sister is only coming to terms with it now that she has kids of her own and a husband who is a wonderful father to them. I’m really proud of the work she’s doing to break the cycle, and it’s helping me too now that we can really talk about it together for the first time and vindicate each other’s memories and feelings.
Wow, this is true. This post brought me, deeply, to the realization of how much I have self-abandoned and having that empathy for my parents. My mom was severely abused by her parents, but it’s still no excuse for how much both my parents abandoned, neglected, and physically abused me. I realize too that it is so hard to go there. They chose to hit me and it died cut deep. And I lived my life as a child so scared of every adult in my life, because of that fear that they could physically hurt me because of my parents. It’s profound to realize this. I’m glad I worked from home today-so much to unpack here.
I appreciate this reminder, as I also contextualize my parents' experiences - poverty, abuse, my dad finding his mother dead when he was 16. And there is a lot about my childhood that appreciate, like growing up in the country and the moments my dad acted carefree. I also tend to remind myself that my 5 older siblings had it worse. And I think I could be more ok with my parents' method of discipline IF they had changed at all in the last 30 years. They've had a lot of opportunity, but they spanked the grandkids they could, told me my kids needed to be spanked, and have only become more dogmatic as they have grown elderly.
As a child born in 1982, punishment was usually meted out by my Independent Fundamental Baptist father. My mother was an early education and elementary teacher who knew about child development and the brain science available at the time, and while she disciplined me I feel like her methods of correction most often did not rely on punishment. Her methods are involved the following: holding me accountable by helping me write apology notes that I would illustrate and deliver to those my wrong choice had impacted (mostly teachers), reading stories to me about characters who were having the same difficulties with behaviors, having a conversation when all of us were regulated and calm about the issues and working out strategies and solutions, removing me from the situation that was causing a problem, redirecting me to a different activity, repeatedly correcting me with gentleness and showing me what to do and having me practice, establishing a sense of safety and secure attachment with me and not ruining it with spanking and screaming, the secure attachment made me want to make my mother proud and happy and would actually make me more compliant and cooperative. My mom did use time-out, but not like it was supposed to be used. Her time-out was more like today’s time-in. I wasn’t shunned, ignored, isolated, or made to feel like affection was being removed. She sat by me, or stood nearby. I could talk to her and she would respond. She would talk to me about the problem, etc. My mom’s discipline did not leave scars. I did not feel unloved or traumatized. She also apologized when on rare occasions she did yell or upset me.
In contrast, my father was a punisher. If you made a wrong choice or mistake he wanted to scare you and make you experience pain. He believed inflicting pain was the way to teach. When I did something wrong, he would make me sit at one end of the kitchen table while he sat across from me with an angry scowl on his face and he would yell at me and interrogate me. My body would freeze and I couldn’t not move or think clearly because my brain was full of cortisol from a fight or flight response that made me frozen. He would yell at me and interrogate me until I broke down sobbing. Then he would banish me to my bedroom and tell me to wait for him. I knew whenever this happened I was waiting for a spanking. My stomach would tie itself in knots, I’d feel like my stomach was full of butterflies and also that there was an iron anvil of dread pressing on my chest and stomach. I would make myself so anxious about what was going to happen that I would have to pee a number of times and would make trips from my bedroom to the bathroom down the hall to relieve myself.
The dread made time slow down and it felt like hours. When my dad finally came to my room, he would take out the wooden paddle he kept in the top sock and underwear drawer of the dresser my brother and I shared. He made the paddle himself on the table saw in the basement. It was about a foot long, about six inches wide, and a quarter inch thick. When I was a child, being whacked with it covered my entire bottom.
He would sit on the edge of my bed and make me lie across his lap. He would pull down my pants and then pull down my underpants so that my entire butt was exposed. He would tell me it was going to hurt him more than me, that it was loving and commanded by God to teach me a lesson and that I had to pay the price for what I did wrong. The Sunday school teachers at my father’s IFB church would tell us children that this was an act of love when our fathers spanked us. One of our Awana leaders gave a children’s sermon that he concluded with the statement, “My father showed me his love with his belt, and if your fathers love you they will show it the same way.
Then, my father would begin whacking my bare butt with that quarter inch thick wooden board. I once was playing tag in the woods with a friend on a camping trip. I jumped up on a log that had a Yellowjacket hive in it. I got stung repeatedly on my back, arms, and legs. Being spanked with either this paddle or my father’s leather belt felt so much worse. Each smack felt like stings from hundreds of Yellowjackets, and after the sting my skin would burn and the temperature of the burning would increase with each new whack. I would howl, scream, and bawl uncontrollably, but I would never kick, fight back, or try to escape from his lap. My body was frozen through the whole ordeal because I felt helpless like an outnumbered animal being attacked and giving up. No one would come to rescue me. My tears, screams, apologies, and my begging would not cause him to stop. I was too small and weak to resist. So, I just laid there and accepted the unbearable agony while disassociating a little bit.
Afterwards, he would pull my pants and underwear back up and leave me sobbing on my bed. Sometimes he would add punishments to the spankings. Sometimes I was grounded for a week or two after the spanking. A few times he made me add something in my apology notes to teachers where I told them I was spanked as a form of shame. Emotional and spiritual manipulation was used along with the spankings. One time when I got scared and lied to my father, he badgered me with angry questions until I started sobbing and confessed to a mistake. He paddled me, and then he made me read a Bible verse that I had to memorize for Awana that said, “Lying lips are an abomination to the lord,” and he told me God hater liars and that I should not be allowed to go to Awana anymore because God didn’t want liars like me in his army of soldiers.
My mom disapproved of the spankings because she was a teacher and was United Methodist instead of and Independent Fundamental Baptist. She never needed to spank. The correction she used impacted us at a heart level and made us want to improve to please her.
My brother and I were not even bad kids. We were well thought of by all our teachers for being kind, empathetic, generous, and helpful. We were often rewarded for behavior in school. Most of the time we were compliant and cooperative, especially with my mother. The stuff we got spanked for was all silly impulsive behavior, immature decision making, misunderstandings due to my Auditory Processing Disorder and Inattentive ADHD, miscommunication of what I would try to say because of my APD that caused my dad to accuse me of lying, and other behaviors that were completely normal for our stage of childhood development….behavior we grew out of naturally as we got older and our brains matured, lies that I told to protect myself from harm because I was terrified of being screamed at by my father and terrified of being spanked. All completely normal behavior. I wasn’t a bully. I wasn’t mean to other children. I liked to share. I liked to help. I had empathy when my peers were upset and would try to comfort them. My brother and I were good children who did not deserve being shouted at and having our bare bottoms beaten with a wooden paddle or leather belt.
I should add that my brother and I have no relationship with my father because of all the spankings and yelling. We never trusted him or felt safe and secure with him like we did our mom. His shouting and spanking severed any secure attachment we should have had with him. My mom finally divorced him and now none of us speak to him
I'm a PK and my dad was a chaplain in the army. He was a scary dad that we didn't want to cross. I remember 2 spankings, but mostly I just remember being afraid. Afraid that if I did the really bad things, they would disown me, that god would turn his back on me. I learned not to feel, not to trust my body. I'm working on learning how to feel, to trust my body and to honor my needs. It's a long process.
It can be such a spiral. I'd decided my parents were bad, and moved on to others in the church and life during childhood (some I really loved) and tried to decide if they were good or bad as well!!
There's so much I relate to here. The tendency to defend our parents and give them the benefit of the doubt is very telling, isn't it? That is exactly what a parent should be doing for a child, not the other way around.
A related question that has been very hard for me to digest is looking at other people who were raised the same way I was and seeing how very differently they responded. Even among my siblings, we were each affected so differently by the same parenting methods. Just yesterday I was trying to speak to a very close person in my life about your most recent episode. This person experienced RAP as well but responded so, so differently that they couldn't relate to my feelings at all. It was jarring. I know that the way my upbringing affected *me* is what matters the most *to me* but when I experienced harm that others didn't it's so hard not to feel like the problem is with me.
All that to say, I'm very interested to hear what the research says about all of this!
oh my gosh, such a good point! parents should be giving that empathy and understanding to kids!
Also, it's so hard when you want to process with others close to you (esp siblings), but they have different experiences of it, or have processed it in different ways (or have just dissociated from it or haven't processed it).
That paragraph where you ask, “… 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.”
The first part, I remember having to gauge where I thought my parents were on a daily/hourly basis.. were they stressed out, or calm and available? That would determine if I could go to them with a problem I was having. If they were stressed, it would usually come back to bite me, so I’d stay quiet and out of the way, and try to deal with my issues on my own. There’s not much worse than having a problem and then being punished when you reveal it.
The second part.. the being hurt by people who say they love you, that’s had a huge impact on my relationships of all sorts. I’ve stayed in relationship with people who haven’t treated me well, all because of the framework I was raised in. Thankfully, I’ve been getting better at recognizing it, and leaving, even when it means ending a decades-long relationship, but it feels so much better to me to honor my worth and not tolerate poor treatment anymore.
that second part, about the impact on relationships unfortunately seems to be so common :( thanks for sharing all of this!
Having a hard time remembering what I felt around my parents when I was of the age to be spanked, what I do remember is how I felt later on when my dad would mock me for being sensitive and emotive (I was an anxious child who didn’t like unpredictability), or with contempt in his tone, tell me I was too much like my mom because I let my feelings run wild. I felt like a caged bird. Even as I type this I can feel my heart pounding loudly in my chest while my breathing quasi freezes. I am confused because when I feel deeply I am in touch with my humanity. But it becomes a liability and being true to myself risks relational disconnect with my caregiver/provider.
I’ve regained enough sense of autonomy and connection with myself to name the harm my dad’s emotional neglect has caused me. I’m even questioning whether being taught to self-abandon as a child groomed me to join a cult as a young adult where the mission mattered more than my feelings or safety.
that last part about joining a cult: it does often seem like that's the goal -- ignore your own experience, just obey. Works really well for abusive systems :(
"What was it like for you?" can be a very difficult question for me. I learned not to feel what I was feeling, if that makes any sense. I sure learned not to tell anybody. So discerning and acknowledging those feeling I had is quite challenging.
It's worse than usual right now, because my remaining parent has been telling my sibling about feeling guilty about how they treated me and didn't stand up for me when the other parent drove me out of the family. Telling my sibling, but not saying anything to me. There is a big difference between feeling guilty and apologizing, and only part of it is about who you say it to.
I don't even know my feelings on that, right now. Let alone my feelings on the past.
It's a hard week here.
thanks for sharing this!
I smiled a bit as I read this post because it resonates so deeply with my own process lately. Last week, with tears in my eyes, I looked at my therapist and said, “I feel like I need you to tell me this wasn’t ok”. As a trauma therapist, I felt embarrassed to be making this request. Because I know- I believe it’s abusive- I can talk about how it disorganizes attachment, the developmental delays, the research on corporal punishment etc. I can even identify my embarrassment as a trauma response… But there is still this young embodied part of me that internalized the message I was given- that’s it was somehow loving and divine and my pain around it is an overreaction. I think that part of me needed to feel the anger and sadness over this treatment from and older/wiser other.
Last month I was processing how the idea of people doing their best was feeling particularly challenging. As someone who believes everyone is deserving of compassion and empathy, I have often found myself drawn to that perspective. But I also found it to be another strategy for me to cognitively bypass my emotions. This orientation felt like it was keeping me from naming the seriousness of my wounds and allowing my grief and anger to carry the weight they deserve around my upbringing. Right now I’ve let’s go of that belief. I don’t want to hold the dialectic tension- who knows, maybe I’ll pick it back up down the road.
As a young adult, I used to listen to adventures in odessy to fall asleep- it’s was nostalgic for me. The last episode I ever listened to was the one y’all reviewed because I was so triggered by whit’s behavior in it.
thanks so much for sharing about this! Also I just wanna say it's such a bummer how the things we find nostalgic and have that connection to childhood are often so triggering or problematic now (at least that's true for me, having been raised on SO MUCH christian media).
Krispin, I find myself really relating to your story—thank you for sharing it. It took me a long time to admit to myself how much my dad hurt me. My sister is only coming to terms with it now that she has kids of her own and a husband who is a wonderful father to them. I’m really proud of the work she’s doing to break the cycle, and it’s helping me too now that we can really talk about it together for the first time and vindicate each other’s memories and feelings.
Also I’m one of the queer readers who can’t afford a subscription myself so thank you to everyone who makes that possible!
I'm so glad it was helpful!
Wow, this is true. This post brought me, deeply, to the realization of how much I have self-abandoned and having that empathy for my parents. My mom was severely abused by her parents, but it’s still no excuse for how much both my parents abandoned, neglected, and physically abused me. I realize too that it is so hard to go there. They chose to hit me and it died cut deep. And I lived my life as a child so scared of every adult in my life, because of that fear that they could physically hurt me because of my parents. It’s profound to realize this. I’m glad I worked from home today-so much to unpack here.
thanks for sharing this -- no matter where the behavior came from, it still had such an impact.
I appreciate this reminder, as I also contextualize my parents' experiences - poverty, abuse, my dad finding his mother dead when he was 16. And there is a lot about my childhood that appreciate, like growing up in the country and the moments my dad acted carefree. I also tend to remind myself that my 5 older siblings had it worse. And I think I could be more ok with my parents' method of discipline IF they had changed at all in the last 30 years. They've had a lot of opportunity, but they spanked the grandkids they could, told me my kids needed to be spanked, and have only become more dogmatic as they have grown elderly.
As a child born in 1982, punishment was usually meted out by my Independent Fundamental Baptist father. My mother was an early education and elementary teacher who knew about child development and the brain science available at the time, and while she disciplined me I feel like her methods of correction most often did not rely on punishment. Her methods are involved the following: holding me accountable by helping me write apology notes that I would illustrate and deliver to those my wrong choice had impacted (mostly teachers), reading stories to me about characters who were having the same difficulties with behaviors, having a conversation when all of us were regulated and calm about the issues and working out strategies and solutions, removing me from the situation that was causing a problem, redirecting me to a different activity, repeatedly correcting me with gentleness and showing me what to do and having me practice, establishing a sense of safety and secure attachment with me and not ruining it with spanking and screaming, the secure attachment made me want to make my mother proud and happy and would actually make me more compliant and cooperative. My mom did use time-out, but not like it was supposed to be used. Her time-out was more like today’s time-in. I wasn’t shunned, ignored, isolated, or made to feel like affection was being removed. She sat by me, or stood nearby. I could talk to her and she would respond. She would talk to me about the problem, etc. My mom’s discipline did not leave scars. I did not feel unloved or traumatized. She also apologized when on rare occasions she did yell or upset me.
In contrast, my father was a punisher. If you made a wrong choice or mistake he wanted to scare you and make you experience pain. He believed inflicting pain was the way to teach. When I did something wrong, he would make me sit at one end of the kitchen table while he sat across from me with an angry scowl on his face and he would yell at me and interrogate me. My body would freeze and I couldn’t not move or think clearly because my brain was full of cortisol from a fight or flight response that made me frozen. He would yell at me and interrogate me until I broke down sobbing. Then he would banish me to my bedroom and tell me to wait for him. I knew whenever this happened I was waiting for a spanking. My stomach would tie itself in knots, I’d feel like my stomach was full of butterflies and also that there was an iron anvil of dread pressing on my chest and stomach. I would make myself so anxious about what was going to happen that I would have to pee a number of times and would make trips from my bedroom to the bathroom down the hall to relieve myself.
The dread made time slow down and it felt like hours. When my dad finally came to my room, he would take out the wooden paddle he kept in the top sock and underwear drawer of the dresser my brother and I shared. He made the paddle himself on the table saw in the basement. It was about a foot long, about six inches wide, and a quarter inch thick. When I was a child, being whacked with it covered my entire bottom.
He would sit on the edge of my bed and make me lie across his lap. He would pull down my pants and then pull down my underpants so that my entire butt was exposed. He would tell me it was going to hurt him more than me, that it was loving and commanded by God to teach me a lesson and that I had to pay the price for what I did wrong. The Sunday school teachers at my father’s IFB church would tell us children that this was an act of love when our fathers spanked us. One of our Awana leaders gave a children’s sermon that he concluded with the statement, “My father showed me his love with his belt, and if your fathers love you they will show it the same way.
Then, my father would begin whacking my bare butt with that quarter inch thick wooden board. I once was playing tag in the woods with a friend on a camping trip. I jumped up on a log that had a Yellowjacket hive in it. I got stung repeatedly on my back, arms, and legs. Being spanked with either this paddle or my father’s leather belt felt so much worse. Each smack felt like stings from hundreds of Yellowjackets, and after the sting my skin would burn and the temperature of the burning would increase with each new whack. I would howl, scream, and bawl uncontrollably, but I would never kick, fight back, or try to escape from his lap. My body was frozen through the whole ordeal because I felt helpless like an outnumbered animal being attacked and giving up. No one would come to rescue me. My tears, screams, apologies, and my begging would not cause him to stop. I was too small and weak to resist. So, I just laid there and accepted the unbearable agony while disassociating a little bit.
Afterwards, he would pull my pants and underwear back up and leave me sobbing on my bed. Sometimes he would add punishments to the spankings. Sometimes I was grounded for a week or two after the spanking. A few times he made me add something in my apology notes to teachers where I told them I was spanked as a form of shame. Emotional and spiritual manipulation was used along with the spankings. One time when I got scared and lied to my father, he badgered me with angry questions until I started sobbing and confessed to a mistake. He paddled me, and then he made me read a Bible verse that I had to memorize for Awana that said, “Lying lips are an abomination to the lord,” and he told me God hater liars and that I should not be allowed to go to Awana anymore because God didn’t want liars like me in his army of soldiers.
My mom disapproved of the spankings because she was a teacher and was United Methodist instead of and Independent Fundamental Baptist. She never needed to spank. The correction she used impacted us at a heart level and made us want to improve to please her.
My brother and I were not even bad kids. We were well thought of by all our teachers for being kind, empathetic, generous, and helpful. We were often rewarded for behavior in school. Most of the time we were compliant and cooperative, especially with my mother. The stuff we got spanked for was all silly impulsive behavior, immature decision making, misunderstandings due to my Auditory Processing Disorder and Inattentive ADHD, miscommunication of what I would try to say because of my APD that caused my dad to accuse me of lying, and other behaviors that were completely normal for our stage of childhood development….behavior we grew out of naturally as we got older and our brains matured, lies that I told to protect myself from harm because I was terrified of being screamed at by my father and terrified of being spanked. All completely normal behavior. I wasn’t a bully. I wasn’t mean to other children. I liked to share. I liked to help. I had empathy when my peers were upset and would try to comfort them. My brother and I were good children who did not deserve being shouted at and having our bare bottoms beaten with a wooden paddle or leather belt.
I should add that my brother and I have no relationship with my father because of all the spankings and yelling. We never trusted him or felt safe and secure with him like we did our mom. His shouting and spanking severed any secure attachment we should have had with him. My mom finally divorced him and now none of us speak to him
I'm a PK and my dad was a chaplain in the army. He was a scary dad that we didn't want to cross. I remember 2 spankings, but mostly I just remember being afraid. Afraid that if I did the really bad things, they would disown me, that god would turn his back on me. I learned not to feel, not to trust my body. I'm working on learning how to feel, to trust my body and to honor my needs. It's a long process.
It can be such a spiral. I'd decided my parents were bad, and moved on to others in the church and life during childhood (some I really loved) and tried to decide if they were good or bad as well!!