Chapter 9: Becoming the Abuser

When I was about 10 years old I remember after school a parent pulled me to one side to speak with me. She told me that her son had told her about me and with her own eyes she could see that I was bullying her son. She told me how upset he was and how scared of me he was in school. She told me to leave her son alone and to stop being so unkind.

At the time I remember feeling so ashamed and highly defensive of my actions. When I look back now, she was right. I was bullying her son. I used to make fun of him constantly, hit him and belittle him in so many ways.

It is so easy for me to use these blog posts to reflect on being the victim of abuse and its impact but if he were to write a blog about his childhood experiences, there is nothing stopping him from writing one about what I did to him.

The wider story was that he was a vessel for me to express my own pain onto. I was hurting at the time and rather than own my feelings, I acted it out on him. I was the victim to other bullies, and in order to cure my self-loathing, I projected my feelings onto him.

In my desire to avoid being the victim I became the abuser.

When I share these blog posts with others, one of the responses I get (especially from parents) is their fear of traumatising a child. But throughout my life, I also sit with the same fear.

Although I write honestly and openly about my experiences, I hold a deep fear that I will traumatise another. That I may deliberately or inadvertently harm another person through my actions. I often give in to this fear and at times I tread very carefully around others. I avoid raising my voice in many situations. I may back away from confrontation at times and I will hold in my anger. I hold myself back in fear of what may happen. All this is my attempt not to be a bully or worse yet, go onto abuse or neglect another.

Reflecting on the fear I sometimes have is the same fear of my own abuse back then. I am doing the same actions when I was the victim. Avoiding confrontation, eye contact, and speaking up are the same actions I took to avoid being abused, shamed or rejected.

A part of my story growing up was that I was bullied from the age of 10 until I was 14. At 10 years old, it was also around the same time I started bullying another. With things being difficult in my own life, I can still identify with the shattered boundaries, the hurt feelings, the low self-esteem and the unsettling fear I was experiencing. I find myself projecting those feelings onto another person and so I completely step away from it. I think now, “Imagine if someone else felt that way?”. But the thing is, I did.

There is a circulated myth that if someone has been abused or neglected in childhood, they will go onto abuse or neglect another when they become adults. It has been proven that this is not true but I would be lying if I said I have not come across incidents where this has been the case. Fathers who’ve been abandoned then proceed to neglect their own, and stories of historical sexual abuse from current perpetrators. I’ve always wondered what would make someone go through so much pain in their own childhood to then do the same or worse later on. Then I think about my own life and it made me think. What made me do it back then? Also, what makes me fear doing it now?

I had a debate with a friend of mine around the use of 'beating' children. The measures, its appropriateness, and instances of how and when it should be applied. We both sat in our experience of being hit multiple times in our childhoods for countless different things yet we both have a different rationale for it. Ultimately we asked ourselves, were our actions to blame? If so, might there be justification to do it to our kids?

Through this conversation I realised how easy it can be to lose compassion for the experience of the victim. When we struggle to find it, we side with the perpetrator. If we lose it completely, we can become the perpetrator which completely makes sense.

I ran from my experience as a victim and threw it at someone else. I didn’t want to deal with it, I wanted them to. Through the narrow lens of survival, you avoid being the victim by becoming the perpetrator or you remain the victim. Sadly, neither one wins. When I sit in my full experience of being a child, I never want to hit a child now. Remaining compassionate to my own story is always the challenge, especially when old feelings arise.

Through bullying another, self-compassion was lost. The compassion for my own hurt feelings, anger and powerlessness was delivered to another. In my childhood, desire to find internal safety I thought projection was the answer. It was not. If I could have "sat" in the feelings of being abused, neglected and bullied as a child, there would have been no desire to project onto another. But, I was a child surviving, there wasn’t much possibility of me doing this. As an adult, things are different.

For many, the decision to have kids after childhood trauma is a difficult one. The fear of the past returning is a very hard place to sit in, emotionally. Whether the decision is made or not, trusting ourselves as adults to be the difference in our own story is the way forward. To trust that we are enough to provide ourselves and any children in our care the external freedom and internal safety we all need from a painful past.

One of the things that is hard is finding ourselves after trauma. It takes courage to stand firmly in our own truth. To remain connected to our experience to neither perpetrate previous experiences or live in fear of it returning. To repair our own broken boundaries and trust ourselves to live on without shame and guilt can sometimes feel incredibly difficult. But with courage and compassion, it can be done. I believe in you.

Please feel free to comment underneath or get in touch through the details on my website if you want to share anything about what I’ve written. Find out more about me here. If you’d like to but in the meantime, look after yourself!

Watch out for the next blog post titled Chapter 10: Racial Trauma in Childhood.