Hurt People Turn Up Punishment Dial to Extra Spicy

Many of us who had tough childhoods find ourselves in adult relationships that are just as harsh and unloving. It’s like our early bond with our caregivers somehow pulls us towards repeating those patterns in our adult lives. The real impact of bad childhoods is about the constant search for those sad echoes. We have this instinctual pull towards mistreatment and strive, and we unconsciously gravitate towards situations that mirror our early wounds.

Just like everyone else, we want love to take us home, but for us, home was a place of heartache and intimidation.

Kids put up with bad treatment because they’re born powerless. They can’t run away, they’re totally at the mercy of others. The only thing they can do is adapt. They have to develop this amazing skill of not noticing how awful things are; an expertise at being completely unbothered by cruelty and neglect.

Kids in tough situations are like little geniuses at looking away, disassociating, and making light of things. Sure, it might not be perfect that their dad screams at them all the time, but there are some cool shows on TV and a really interesting part of the garden to explore in the morning (you can even climb up the big tree and imagine it’s a little house). And of course, ideally their mom wouldn’t be so mean and disloyal, but that’s just the way things are neither more nor less sad than the fact that it’s often raining and there’s a lot of homework to do.

So, here’s the thing: the bad treatment the child is getting probably has something to do with something they did wrong. Badly treated kids tend to see the good in people who hurt them. They’re not mean on purpose, that would make no sense. Their tough exterior has good reasons. It’s because they’re in the wrong. That’s why they’re being neglected, called fools, and bullied. It’s easier to believe that the parent is tough but right, not callous and hostile.

In other words, what a bad childhood teaches us is to be mean. The muscle that usually stops us from being hurt has been starved and weakened. To survive, we had to lose the ability to figure out who was good and bad for us, or we’d find out we spent 18 years with jerks.

This means we’ll be terrible at telling when our partners become selfish and mean. We’ll keep going even though they rob us and deceive us. We’ll be as blind to their attacks now as we were then.

For a long time, it won’t even occur to us why we have to pay for everything for our partner, why they’re always breaking their promises, or why they always put their friends over us, or why they get angry when we complain. We’ll just fall in line and make up excuses for their behavior: they’re good, but they’re tired. They’re cute, but they’re under pressure at work. They’re tough, but they’re compensating for their childhood traumas (which we understand). Anything else than the simple truth: we’ve fallen in with selfish people.

We shouldn’t feel ashamed of our tolerance, especially when we’re already feeling disloyal to ourselves. It’s not weakness; it’s a survival strategy from childhood that worked well then but might be holding us back now.

To wake up, we need to imagine someone else made our choices. We might wonder what we’d tell a friend in our situation. Through this lens, we might realize that the treatment we’re facing isn’t a sign of our partner’s depth or complexity, but rather a sign that we need to leave.

This will only be a temporary escape until we understand the deeper issue: that the muscle we use to protect ourselves from harm has weakened because of our past experiences.

We need to change our psychological fate: our early suffering shouldn’t condemn us to more pain but rather give us a special claim on the kindness, tenderness, and calm that come from our roots, origins, essences.