I recently read an interview with author/therapist Martin Miller, in which he talks about the abuse done to him by his famous mother Alice Miller and his father. One thing he said really stood out to me:
“What I have experienced, and also seen as a therapist, is that victims split off their experience of being a victim and identify with the perpetrators instead.”
I immediately understood what he meant, because I have observed just this in other people. Specifically, I have been wondering for a long time why some women mistreat other women in a distinctive misogynous way. They behave as though they were macho men. This phenomenon exists on a broad spectrum, and probably most women find themselves thinking or judging from the perspective of misogyny sometimes, because we all grew up in a misogynous world.
So when I read this, it clicked. It perfectly described what I was observing, and because he phrased this as a general statement, it expanded my understanding of how victims became abusers. I had to think of my elder sisters – they were abused by my parents, but for as long as I can remember, they have abused me too. They switched sides early on. Instead of identifying with another victim, they identified with their abusers. So they became their abusers.
Suddenly it all makes sense. This is how the cycle of abuse gets passed on from generation to generation. Even though I don’t know a lot about my parents’ childhood, I can see how my father ended up being his own father, and how my mother ended up being her own mother. And I can also see how my sisters became my father as parents themselves. That’s three generations of copy and paste of abuse. It’s like abusers are some sort of virus – instead of having a partner and children, they copy themselves when they’ve found a host.
I know when people talk of cycle-breaking they usually talk about victims of childhood abuse who became good enough parents. But of course, in order to arrive there, they need to go through trauma recovery, which is a very long process. And - as I’m learning more and more – a key element in this process is becoming aware of what is you and what is your parents.
As a child born to abusive parents, you don’t have a choice but to cling to your parents. Evolution makes that choice for you, because it’s the only way to survive. So even if they mistreat you and are an actual danger to you, you will try your best to adapt to that. It doesn’t mean that you consent, it means you are fighting for your survival. That survival is always based on dissociation – forgetting, suppressing that the abuse is happening. Splitting off from the experience of victimhood, as Martin Miller called it. And as you are hard-wired to be attached to your primary caregivers and cling to them, you will identify with them, or at least try to, to some degree. And as you aren’t born with any sense of who you are in this world, you take over the image that your parents project onto you. All of this creates a false self – a mix of your abusers’ identities and how they treated you (these are usually related, as the abusers will project onto you what they can’t stand and own about themselves). Depending on the level of dissociation from the true self, this can very often also result in a sense of being inherently fake, commonly termed impostor syndrome.
While becoming aware of what is your false self is the essential, first step to leave it behind, it takes a long time to get there. One thing about trauma recovery that has caused and is still causing me a lot of despair and hopelessness is that becoming aware of something doesn’t free you from it. This is a state of intense pain, so much so that it’s re-traumatising. You know exactly what’s going wrong, but you can’t stop it from happening. You know your triggers, you know where they come from, but you still react as always. It’s like you’re merely the audience of your life, rather than the one who acts it out. You feel just as powerless as back then, in the abuse.
Knowledge is power.
But that power doesn’t come easy or soon. It’s like rain falling onto dried out, hardened soil. It takes time for the soil to soften. It takes even more time for the water to seep through the many, many layers of rock, deep down to the seed that is longing to finally grow into a tree.
There are different types of understanding and knowing things. You can know something because you read it in a book. You can know something because someone else told you about it. You can know something because you reflected and realised it. And you can know something because you experienced it. The first three types are intellectual ways of knowing something. But the kind of knowing that you need in order to grow is the last one. That’s how children in a good enough family know that they are loved and valued. That’s how children in an abusive family know that they are unloved and seen as worthless. That’s why the therapeutic alliance is so important for survivors of childhood abuse. They need to experience what they didn’t get when they were young in order to emerge from their developmental arrest and grow emotionally like other young people.
That doesn’t mean that the intellectual ways of knowing aren’t important. They are very important, because most of the time they form the base for the deeper knowing of experience. In order to learn to love yourself, for example, you first need to put a seed of doubt into your mind. Something like: “My therapist said that I’m intelligent. But I always felt extremely stupid. What if she’s right?” You then go to repeating to yourself, like a mantra, “I’m not stupid. I’m very smart.” whenever you feel triggered in a way that makes you feel stupid, and outside of those triggers as well. At first you will probably feel like a horrible fake, because you don’t believe what you’re telling yourself. You feel like a liar. It’s how it was for me, at least.
But what really helped me was to make a list of my achievements and to go through that list with my counsellor. The first time she suggested this, it triggered me into a panic attack and strong dissociation. Because I felt that I had no achievements whatsoever. Achievements sounded like success to me, and I felt like a complete loser at life. But at some later point we got back to this and she clarified that it could be anything that had required effort, skill, or courage to obtain. Seen from this perspective, I suddenly saw that I had a lot of achievements. It was an achievement for me to step out of the door. It was an achievement for me to do my grocery shopping. It was an achievement for me to buy a bus ticket. On some days, it was an achievement to get out of bed or to eat. Anything I did that required being among or interacting with other people required an enormous amount of courage from me. The fact that I had tried to find a counsellor (despite numerous re-traumatising experiences) and still was in therapy, was an incredible achievement.
So after that, I started to look for more evidence that I was not what my parents had taught me I was. What they had projected onto me. I paid attention to whenever I was using a skill, or when I was being brave. Slowly - very slowly – that hidden seed began to feel that it was alive and had a huge amount of life energy inside of it. All of a sudden, I started to have dreams. Big dreams. I realised what I really wanted to be “when I grow up”. The courage of having those dreams and of voicing some of them to my counsellor overwhelmed me. I saw that my true self was someone very different from who my parents saw me as!
When it comes to really knowing that you are not your abusive parents, I feel like the gold is a mix of all of the different kinds of knowledge. It probably is that for most things that you need to learn as an adult. You start with reading or hearing it somewhere. Then you think about it. You think some more, and realise something else. You talk about it and maybe you read or hear it again, in a different context, so it gets reinforced. You remind yourself of it in your daily life. You observe yourself. You apply the theory to reality. You test it and through that, you learn more. You have moments of enlightenment. Slowly the rain is sinking deeper. And you keep doing that – thinking, observing, talking about it. Sometimes you talk about something in therapy and then, all of a sudden, you see that this is a prime example for this theory.
As I haven’t completely broken the cycle yet, I can’t tell you what further stages look like. But I’m certain that I’m in the middle of breaking the cycle and it’s good to know that. Realising that you have been abused by your parents is not enough. People can do that and still become an abuser, as I know from traumatising experience. You have to work for years to even start to untangle your true self from the false self that your abusers projected onto you. You have to learn how to distinguish between the two, to recognise whenever the abusers in your head are trying to dump their own unwanted feelings of shame and worthlessness onto you, and then try to assert yourself, set a boundary, and say: “That’s you, not me!” When you keep doing that, over and over again, then you are breaking the cycle. You are choosing to be yourself instead of your abusers and their projections.
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