Abuse with an Excuse

The ‘legitimate’ abuse that has a thousand names, punishment, correction, discipline, consequences, training, spanking, timeouts, quiet time, penance, detention, etc., this practice is done by nearly everyone. People of many races, religions, nationalities, creeds, sexualities, income levels, education levels, and both genders, most people hold with punishment’s basic, unquestioned, unacknowledged premise, that you can improve people, their behaviour, their development, their character – by hurting them. By somehow making life less pleasant for them when they stray from the caregivers’ idea of what is done and what is not.
Now, for me, this seems to contradict a great deal of psychological thinking, which developed, to some degree, by tracing suffering people’s lives to the unpleasantness that damaged them to the point of seeking a doctor’s help, in the early days, damaged them to the point of being committed to a sanatorium. For a dysfunctional patient, often after other causes had been explored, physical ailments, etc., often the next, or maybe last logical step might be the psychoanalyst, and psychoanalysis has had some success, making connections between mental trauma and social dysfunction.
Of these two apparently opposing ideas – punishment and psychology – the latter seems the more logical, dare I say, scientific. So with this argument, and the ones in the preceding chapters, I’m going to push on, taking as a given at least as my premise, that unpleasantness, only different from trauma by a matter of degree, damages people rather than improving them.
OK, the use of punishment has looked like it works, you punish someone and the unwanted behaviour appears to stop – but does it? Do we think a punished child becomes a model citizen forever afterwards? Do we think a punished adult ceases his criminal behaviour and goes on as a saint? I don’t think even the most energetic of my unconvinced audience thinks that, do they? So again, unpleasantness makes people worse, less functional, rather than improving them. Having said that, I want to extrapolate that whomsoever punishes a person the most, does the most damage.
If one’s parents are active participants in the practice, the culture of punishment, then I feel I must say, that the parent who does the more parenting, very often the most punishing, must be the parent causing the most unpleasantness, the most trauma, the most damage. And, sorry to say, in my world, probably in most of the world, it’s Mom doing most of the parenting. Certainly many fathers are responsible for horrible trauma, perhaps the more serious punishments are administered by the father in some families, but basically, day-to-day parenting and punishing, falls to mothers. This is especially true during the earliest years of the child’s life. Uninvolved fathers are bad in many ways, of course. Neglect is a form of abuse, there is the lack of male modelling, but there is the other side too: if parenting means punishing to the mother, and if she overdoes it, then Dad’s neglect is downright dangerous, he can be rightly accused of not protecting his kids from some hands-on abuse. Also, if he’s not helping, then the mother can become stressed out, also not a good thing for a parent who already thinks punishing kids, that is, hurting kids, is good for them. So yes, that is what I’m saying: in the culture of punishment, your mother is probably doing you more harm than your father. Dad’s no saint, don’t get me wrong, he’s letting her do it, often participating . . . but the myth that needs busting here, is Mom’s sainthood. Having said THAT, the other ramifications of this are the more important thing. Blame is even, one does it, one allows it, and sometimes they trade off. I don’t make this point to place blame; this isn’t about the trauma of children.
This principle, that mothers raise the children, that mothers punish the children, this is the root of misogyny, the root of violence against women. We love our mothers, we love our system of punishment, we all hold the family unit as a sacred, ancient tradition, but that is the surface of it all. That is only what we say, what we think we feel, but the dark side is this:
We all know who punished us, we know who damaged us. Violence against women is a trend, a tendency, it is far more prevalent than the incidence of extreme abuse would indicate, the expression of infantile rage against the one who hurt us, that is the great secret. This is another piece of the great puzzle of life that falls into place when you work from the premise that punishment is violence.
The culture of punishment in which we live has turned the most natural, organic beautiful thing in the world, mother love, into a violent act, and one which brings a terrible vengeance to the half of humanity we should all hold sacred, our mothers. Now to blame. Women, putting the blame for misogynist violence on men isn’t working; stop spanking your sons. Men, you’re not fixing it either. Stop making your women “correct” your sons. This is the issue. Violence breeds violence.
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Women, your safety, the safety of your daughters and grand-daughters is in your hands. Hurting kids, dishing out unpleasantnesses, damages them, it doesn’t help them, and it doesn’t help women. Help your kids, help yourselves, give up your punishing ways. Love looks like love, and it doesn’t invite revenge.