How Wounded People Seek Out Further Punishment

There’s a bitter paradox that awaits many of us who have suffered from harsh, unloving childhoods: we have an above-average chance of ending up in, and blindly putting up with, harsh, unloving relationships. Our original unfulfilling bond to our caregivers – far from warning us away from future turmoil – appears to compel us to recreate its features in adult life. The true toll of bad childhoods isn’t circumscribed to their actual duration; it’s exacted via a lifelong search for their sad echoes. We suffer from an instinctive pull toward dimly familiar forms of mistreatment and struggle. We unconsciously gravitate toward situations that mirror our early wounds. Like everyone else, we want love to take us home: it’s just that for us, home was a place of grief and persecution. 

It’s easy enough to see why children put up with poor treatment. They are born radically powerless. They cannot run away, they are utterly at the mercy of others, they can’t even think especially straight. What they must do above all else is adapt.

Which in practice means learning to put up with poor treatment. They have to develop an advanced skill at not noticing quite how awful things are; an expertise at being unfazed by cruelty and neglect.

Children in deprived circumstances tend to be geniuses at looking away, disassociating and making light of things. Of course it might not be perfect that their father screams at them constantly, but there are some interesting shows on television and there’s a really fascinating bit of the garden to explore in the morning (you can climb up the big tree and imagine it’s a little house). And of course ideally their mother wouldn’t be so mocking and disloyal but that’s just the way things are; neither more or less sad than the fact it’s often raining and there’s a lot of homework to do. 

In any case, the bad treatment almost certainly has to do with something that they – the child – have done wrong. Badly treated children tend to take a compulsively generous view of those who injure them. Obviously they aren’t nasty on purpose. That would make no sense. Clearly their ostensible brutality has sound explanations. It must be because they, the child, is in the wrong. That’s why they’re being neglected. That’s why they’ve been declared fools. That’s why they are being bullied. It’s a great deal easier to believe that the parent is tough yet fundamentally right – rather than gratuitously callous and unjustifiably hostile. 

In other words, what a bad childhood trains us to do above all else is to indulge meanness. The muscle that normally functions to repel attacks has had to be starved and has atrophied. In order to survive, we had to lose the ability to work out who was good and bad for us – lest we discover that we spent 18 years in the company of fiends.

What this means for our futures is that we will be extremely poor at discerning when the partners we let into our lives cross the border into selfishness and malevolence. We’ll continue under a narcoleptic command not to notice that we are being robbed and deceived. We’ll be as blind to the blows now as we were then.

For a long time, it simply won’t occur to us to wonder why we have ended up paying for everything for the partner, or why they are unreliable in their promises or constantly prioritise their friends over us or are angrily defensive whenever we raise a complaint.

We will simply – as we had to early on – fall into line and invent elaborate explanations for their behaviour: they are good, but they are tired. They are adorable, but under pressure at work. They are fierce but compensating for their childhood traumas (for which we have a lot of sympathy). Anything other than the more straightforward conclusion: we have fallen in with unconcerned egoists.

We should not compound our disloyalty towards ourselves by feeling – on top of everything else – ashamed for our tolerance. It isn’t weakness, it’s a survival strategy from childhood that served a very sensible purpose then but is liable to be ruining our lives now.

To wake ourselves up, we need to consider our choices as if someone else had made them. We might wonder what we would advise a friend to do if they were in our situation. And through such a lens, we might start to perceive that the treatment we are facing isn’t – as we have long thought – a sign of our partner’s depth or complexity but in the end, something much more humble: evidence that we need to get away. 

But this will only be a momentary liberation until we can understand the more fundamental issue: that the muscle most people use to eject poison has withered because of a distinctive history. 

We need to reverse the direction of our psychological fate: our early suffering should not condemn us to yet more pain, it is what gives us an specially powerful claim on original sources of kindness, tenderness and calm.