Empathy is a learned behavior. When parents have empathy, they teach it to their kids without even realizing it – it seems to “come naturally” because it was learned so young, while the brain was still forming (between eighteen months and four years).

But if the parent doesn’t have empathy, they can’t teach it to the child. And because they don’t see the child as equally human to themselves, these parents may abuse their children in the physical ways we can easily recognize as abuse. But they have another option, a sneakier one: they can manipulatively groom the child to be incredibly vain and selfish for the parents’ own purpose, which is usually extension of the parent’s ego via the child. Through the child, they seek to experience accomplishments, to punish enemies, etc. The child’s identity isn’t allowed to form as it would with an empathetic parent: the child is simply pushed to see himself as a super star, to achieve power by trampling others, to be a “success” who “takes what he wants” and “won’t take no for an answer” because these are the parents’ fantasies of grandeur.

The child’s developing personality is entirely subsumed – and warped – by the parent’s machinations, which are exploitative and grossly selfish. It’s most often boys who are groomed in this manner, since a girl couldn’t possibly enjoy all the triumphs of which the embittered parent dreams. This results in the psychiatric disorder Hazelwood believes most sex offender have (see original article), Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It’s essentially untreatable, and adults with it are extremely exploitative of others.

Children groomed in this manner have been deprived of personal identity and the chance ever to connect with another human being in the meaningful way (empathy) that makes us different from the reptiles. Despite any appearance of personal success and happiness, they will never experience the feelings of intimacy, bonding and love that most of us take for granted. Because they lack empathy, they lack conscience, and therefore compassion. The basis of this disorder is believed to be incredible shame – such shame that the child buried it early on and constructed a false “self”, a sort of second personality that believes itself godlike and expects to be worshiped accordingly. But deep down, it always feels inadequate, and lives in terror of someone else seeing that inadequacy.

This is what the empathy-free parent wanted. This is a person who will hurt others and sleep like a baby afterwards. This is the parent’s monster to turn loose on society, in whose triumphs the empathy-free parent will delight. And the parent will expect everyone to admire the child.

Deliberately, if unconsciously, warping a child’s personality so he cannot possibly learn to love, care or share is definitely a form of abuse. This is never an act of ignorance: the parent may not understand what he is doing, precisely, but he is always doing it for himself, without genuine concern for the child’s well-being. Don’t confuse this careful grooming with parenting styles that perhaps go overboard on encouraging high self-esteem or lavishing a child with material things: those upbringings may result in arrogant adults or adults with above-average entitlement. But it takes a special sort of training to produce a rapist.

See the original article for several sources. This is not an opinion piece. It is based on psychiatric research.

Related posts:

1. Abused kids can’t really sue their parents
2. Abuse cycles – from macrocosm to microcosm

First, the cultural. Most of the search results lead to other people asking my question. The responses they get range from “You’d be much better off just getting therapy” (yes, because clearly all adult abused kids are well-to-do and can afford the extensive therapy required to get over the abuse) to “now you sit right down, you ungrateful shit, and list all the GOOD things your parent did for you, since obviously, having donated part of your zygote, this person loved you and you are an asshole” to things like this trip to the little shop of horrors, in which someone asks Yahoo: “Can i sue my parents because they hit me?”

Consider first what you did to contribute to the situation.

There is never a reason to strike another person, but, you could have very well pushed them to their limit.

Underlying all of this is the myth that every child who complains of having experienced poor parenting is obviously a spoiled shit who in fact had everything too easy and isn’t grateful for the massive self-sacrifices her zygote donor obviously made. Also underlying it is the assumption that such a suit would be revenge rather than justice. To which the abuse survivors explain that, no, they want to see the parent held accountable in some fashion. Publicly.

Another reason I can think of for suing would be to send a message to other abusive parents: you might get away with this while I’m under your control, but after that? Oh, yes, there could indeed be consequences.

The doublethink required here is extraordinary. I mean, you just know these people answering these question are all the same people who read about horrid abuse cases in the paper and think “hanging’s not good enough for those parents.” But when someone puts a face on it, when someone says “I was abused”, they go into denial. Why? Why do they automatically, unthinkingly assume the parent is the one being wronged?

It’s a bit like assuming every alleged rape is really just a case of some vicious bitch lying. Why not? We’re big on victim blaming.

Then I found some forum posters who claimed that in most states, you have until the age of 20 or 21 to sue an abusive parent. As far as I can tell, that’s generally true in the case of physical, non-sexual abuse, so if you were beaten as a child, you have until you’re a junior in college or your third year working at Burger King to hire that pricey attorney! Otherwise, the US is A-OK with what happened to you. Interestingly, sexual abuse often has a much longer statute – in some states, it’s up to the lifetime of the victim. Apparently emotionally abused kids can just go fuck themselves, since it’s very hard to document emotional abuse the way you can document wounds a doctor has seen. I realize there are other issues, like the problem of evidence, but for the law to blatantly suggest that sexual abuse is somehow worse than physical and emotional abuse is sending a very wrong message: all abuse is equally wrong in a moral sense.

Eventually, I found this forum, in which yet another person was asking the same question, but the respondents appear to be fellow abuse survivors. The questioner is 23 and can’t really function in life – agoraphobic (from the sound of it), unable to hold down a job, etc. All of this could easily be attributed to the abuse the person describes enduring. Here is my favorite response:

I have been doing a lot of research on the same topic for the past few day’s it seems to me that it is quite feasible although I would speculate that a lot of lawyers would not want to dirty their hands with such a case, there are as the other person who commented said; who see the sanctity of family as untouchable. As the threes of us, along with many others know; there is no sanctity in abuse.

Here, in a nutshell, is America’s concept of family values: we need babies, because babies become consumers who buy crap. We mustn’t allow anything to discourage people from making babies. It doesn’t matter if the babies are born addicted to something and grow up in a slum with no education, or they’re born to wealth and made to pay for it with sexual favors from an early age. It’s all good, because as long as they are eating and wearing clothes, businesses can make money off of these kids. That’s what America values.

And heaven forbid anyone check in with the adult children of the people making and supporting these laws.

Related posts:

1. How the “golden child” upbringing is abusive
2. Non-survivor privilege and silence
3. College has become a barrier for smart poor kids

I said in an earlier post I was going to write someday about how poverty leads to abuse within families. Now I’ve refined that idea: I think abuse cycles can start with large scale civil oppression and filter down to individuals in families taking out their frustration on whomever they have at their mercy. To use an example that’s been around forever: someone decides they want some cheap labor. Depending on the mores of the day, they may force some people into slavery or simply manipulate the conditions facing a group defined by location, race, gender, etc. so that those people are desperate for wages of any sort. Now whoever wanted the cheap labor has what they wanted, and the people who are doing the labor are depressed, angry and/or traumatized. And “management” clamps down hard on any attempt at solidarity or community among these people, or seeds the would-be community with issues of distrust that keep everyone divided and therefore conquered.

For a while, maybe some of the laborers have some optimism. But God never helps. Society never helps. Even those who come in blazing with heroics turn out to be all about the glory and not much for the human beings who have more to contribute than cheap labor, or who just want to be able to determine their own fate through their own endeavors. The frustration, anger and depression grows into a deep cynicism – trust no one. There is no hope.

Eventually, in one generation or another, some of the laborers decide to take out their frustration on whomever they can. Usually, it’s men harming their families. Sometimes it’s people engaging in criminal activities. Some just internalize it all – not hurting anyone, perhaps, but not setting a great example for the kids, either. Some drink themselves to death. What else can they do? They’ve been shown over and over that no matter what they do, they are going to get up again the next day and help build that pyramid or plant that cotton or go down into that deadly mine. They could cure cancer, score off the charts on school tests, write a symphony – nobody cares. God doesn’t care. Society doesn’t care. Even the hero types really don’t care.

I think it’s much easier for a group to get together and abuse another group than it is for one person to abuse another. Groupthink makes individual responsibility fuzzy. It’s that sense of individual plausible deniability that enables people to call for burning someone at the stake or hanging them from a tree. A lynching mob could conceivably be comprised of no individuals capable of doing such a thing on their own. But get them together, and it’s mob psychology. And what you’ve done as part of a mob may not seem so unthinkable to go home and do to someone there.

Another way that large scale social oppression could filter down to familial abuse cycles is via emotional abuse. Women, legally and practically restrained from taking care of themselves for centuries, got very good at manipulation on the whole. We had to; how else could we survive? We didn’t have brute strength over many men. We didn’t have a political voice. Hell, we weren’t even classified as people. Of course we learned manipulation. Girls are still taught to hint instead of coming right out and saying what they want, which is pure manipulation. Don’t take this as support for the stereotype that all women are manipulators – most of us aren’t, and many men are manipulative as hell. I’m just saying it’s a survival skill, and if you deprive a group of the right to ply any other survival skill, what do you think they’re going to do?

A frustrated or desperate woman who’s good at manipulating might well decide to subtly control everyone around her – and she might succeed for the most part. Men have been trained not to expect to need their brains when dealing with wives, and children lack the life experience to protect themselves from headgames that jerk them all over the place. Emotional abuse can replicate itself or lead to physical abuse – both of which are equally wrong and potentially lethal (emotional abuse can lead victims to suicide).

Why do most people caught in an abuse cycle (social or familial) not pass it on? I don’t know, but I think the root problem is insecurity – real fear of survival. Some personality types may be inherently better at optimism and self-confidence than others. It takes a lot of confidence to blame the person or group who deserves the blame, because you can’t touch them. If they so much as see it in your eyes that you blame them, who knows what they’ll do to you. And so you turn those feelings elsewhere – on yourself or on those around you.

I’m always revising my ideas – this is just what’s making sense to me now.

Related posts:

1. Future topics
2. If you look Mexican, you’re probably uninsured

“Won’t somebody please think of the children???”

- The preacher’s wife on the Simpsons

I recently made the mistake of engaging in a business transaction with a Christian who believes that, because s/he is a Christian everything s/he does is unquestionably the Lord’s work, s/he cannot possibly have done me wrong. It’s not the first time this has happened to me, and sadly, it caused me to revisit my tolerance policy and decide that, until things in the US change, I will not engage in business with Christians if I can avoid it. It’s unfortunate since some of them are genuinely good people, and Christians are certainly not the only ones operating with that sense of entitlement. But as it happens, Christianity is a great disguise in the current US climate for people who want to screw folks right over with impunity.

Here’s the mechanism I perceive to be at work with these individuals. They have a powerful streak of entitlement they’re not comfortable expressing overtly, so they subvert it into the service of a cause they perceive as so noble no one would ever take issue with their actions, then they go forth and fight for their cause in exactly the way someone who thinks himself God’s gift goes forth and fights with anyone who won’t bow down to him.

Some of these people get in your face with their cause, relying on your desire not to “make a scene” to trap you into listening to their spiel, maybe giving them some money to go away. Others lie, cheat and steal, and justify it all with “But it’s for the children/God/the poor/the hungry.” In the worst case, they start crusades and holy wars. All with a perfectly clean conscience, because they believe they’re being unselfish.

But they’re not; they’re just transferring their “self” onto a cause, and then behaving in a privileged, entitled manner on behalf of of the cause rather than on behalf of their own ego. But the cause is their ego-extension, so they’re really no better than someone with a hugely swollen ego feeling entitled to take whatever he wants from lesser beings.

Related posts:

1. Response entitlement: you don’t have any
2. One privilege Christians don’t always realize they have
3. What Christians could learn from feminists