on physically punishing your children
being hit as a child teaches you many things, i’d guess. mostly, it teaches you that might makes right. and as a child, you will have no argument against that. and so it is likely that you will learn it well.
being hit as a child may teach other things. but below and beyond intellect and language, it teaches you rage. because as a child, in the context of physical autonomy, your sense of justice is fully developed. it is perfect, like a little sun shining in your center. nobody needs to specifically teach you that it is unjust for a larger person to deal violence to someone so unfairly matched to defend themselves. your rage will spring from your natural born sense of injustice, and no lesson or lecture will mitigate that. and neither will anyone need to explain to you what happens, eventually, to trust spent foolishly—such as on a rain of blows launched in a few moments of dis-ease.
and even if you cannot articulate that with your yet-limited vocabulary, being corrected or punished with physical force places violence in your mix; on your map; in your bones. sows it within you. stores it in so many still-burgeoning cells to blossom one fine day, dotting the body then with splashes of karma…like a time-bomb harvest under the skin of a new planet. whether that body self destructs later in some way, or aims the blasts outward is yet to be seen. but a harvest will be realized.
violence is radioactive, as my old professor put it.
This. And for those of you who are all, “I got beat and I turned out just fine!” here’s a fucking cookie for you:
Charming. Clearly, you missed the ENTIRE point of what we’re saying, which is that it wasn’t ”special”, it was not some experience that was dysfunctional enough to stand out years later in a negative fashion. And that’s why some of us don’t consider the licks and spankings we got as children to be abuse.
Also, who the fuck are you to dictate how I deal with my own childhood experiences? I turned out fine because my context was different from other people who suffered physical abuse. I’m not advocating corporal punishment; I’m not saying they need to “toughen up” or that I’m “better” because I don’t consider my own past experiences to be abuse. Their experiences are their own and however they define them is valid and I respect that.
All I want is the same fucking courtesy and not people jumping up and down making pronouncements from on high that because my mom took the belt to me I’m some kind of karmic timebomb, or am de facto invalidating the very real and traumatising experiences of others. So you can keep your goddamn judgemental cookie and try understanding that your paradigm cannot be wholesale applied to everybody the fuck else.
Heh, way to get defensive and take it personally when I was merely pointing out that acting like you’re better and stronger for not considering it abuse ~for you personally~ is somehow novel. Because no matter how you try to play semantics games and insist otherwise, that’s what you’re doing. So, good for you that you don’t think you were abused, really. Doesn’t change the fact that for many of us it was traumatic and damaging, which you seem to recognize but then keep going back to something that wasn’t even said so you feel all justified to come at us. Newsflash: we’re not ~judging~ you, we’re reacting to the implication that, by you saying it wasn’t abuse for ~you~, means we’re somehow telling you you were abused. That really isn’t the case.
From my perspective, you got a lotta nerve coming at survivors of abuse while insisting you’re not an abuse survivor. Really, good for you~! Must be nice. Now fuck off and let us have our own damn survivor space without you in it, since you think you’re just fine. Congrats for misunderstanding the points made so you can take some sort of righteous stand on this and make it about personal definitions so you can imply we’re ~judging~ you. Because that’s what it’s about to you, not that we’re survivors of abuse and dealing with it, but that you weren’t ~abused~ and how dare anyone imply that you were… which was, again, not what this was about. So, again, fuck right off and take your high horse elsewhere.
If you weren’t abused, you’re not part of this conversation anyway, so why did you need to jump into it? Just to proclaim your outrage that you weren’t included? What? Might want to examine your motivations there. If you’re not an abuse survivor, this isn’t your space, period. We get enough shit from people who also ~weren’t abused~ telling us to suck it up and deal and that we obviously weren’t abused either, so s’cuse me for not taking it calmly when you barge in and act like you have a right to be here telling us to stop defining your experiences, as if that’s what we’re doing.
Well, what you’re responding to in my post isn’t the conversation I was having — or at least intending to have — so I think as nezua mentioned at this point people are talking at cross purposes or at least moving along divergent tracks. I (clearly, wrongly) interpreted your post as being directed at the related-but-different conversation I’m currently having, due to nezua’s being a common link. My focus *was* actually on personal and cultural definitions of abuse/not abuse being challenged and defined by outsider groups, not trying to sideline survivor experiences.
I agree with most of what you said and I have no desire to take up survivor space. Since that’s how it came across, I apologize.
