It is
nearly impossible to have a healthy relationship if you don’t know what one
looks like. If a child grows up in a
home with abuse and chaos, it will be difficult for her or him to then seek out
a healthy partner and establish a healthy relationship. One woman told me that she wondered how she
ended up “loving the man she hated all her life.” She grew up with her step-dad beating her mom
and then ended up with a violent partner herself. She hated her step-dad and didn’t understand
how or why her mom stayed with him. She thought she’d make different choices.
A grown man told me the story
about how he learned that affection and suffering are two sides of the same
coin. He grew up watching his dad beat
his mom. He saw, heard, and absorbed the
experiences over and over and over.
Sometimes he listened in his bed and hoped it would be over soon. Sometimes he tried to help her. He learned that he was powerless to help,
except when he could comfort her after the hurt. The
love comes after the beating. Dad
goes to sleep, gets arrested, passes out, runs away, slinks to shadows and her
little man is there to comfort her. And
she to comfort him. It is a temporary
fix, a calming balm, but never to last because mom never picked the boy over
the dad. The boy learned that affection
and love are conditional, temporary, and go with hurt and abuse. He didn’t know he learned this lesson until
he was a grown man.
He remembers the day he learned
that love and affection are separate from pain and can be given and received freely. He went to the home of a friend and saw how
the family hugged and greeted each other.
His first thought was that “something bad” must have happened because
affection comes after hurt. He asked his
friend what happened and was surprised to learn that this family always greeted
each other in this way and that it was possible to express love without paying
the price of suffering.
I had the chance to talk with a
mom who’d previously been in a violent relationship and had gone through a
counseling program. She said that it was
nice for her and her kids to hug because they loved each other, not for
comfort, not following a beating.
The greatest gifts we can give
our children are the knowledge that they are loved, valued, and safe. Being safe includes discipline, order, and consistency. Not
only is it damaging to experience home violence for a child, they are often
learning that abuse must be tolerated. They
learn that if someone hurts you, it is OK to put up with it, to stay with that
person because people who love you are the same ones who hurt you. And, perhaps more insidious, that to get to love you must go through pain.
