Traumatised by being smacked

[Babyparrotdog]

Sounds dramatic to some maybe but am I the only one who feels they are genuinely traumatised from being ‘smacked’ as a child? I feel so much worse about it since having my own child.

@emilylily

Yes, I think it affected me. My Dad used to chase me up the stairs to smack me- most of the time he didn't actually smack me, sometimes he did. I mentioned it a while ago to my (kind, caring) Mum who said 'Oh you remember that?'... urm, yes!

Remember, parents: your children are small, vulnerable and dependent, not amnesiacs.

If you have to go after your kids to hit them, you haven't even got the worthless and shit excuse that you "just snapped" (you know, like you never do with your boss or obnoxious colleague or anyone who is capable of lamping you right back). You actively pursued them to hit them. Well done you!

I used to dream sometimes that my parents were hitting me again, the night of the day they smacked me. Hurt just as much in the dream. I also remember hitting my teddies as I re-enacted it, as kids do with behaviour that's modelled to them.

I repeat that, although it did escalate in my teens (why wouldn't it? When parents never learn to control themselves or find proper methods to resolve or de-escalate conflict, why wouldn't it? They didn't stop until I made it clear I would be smacking them right back), this was a response to what happened in young childhood, entirely in line with what was considered normal and acceptable.

If someone is not damaged by it, that's wonderful. Of course it's always better if shit parenting didn't come to its worst possible outcome. But it's still shit and disgraceful parenting.

You are looking through a current lens though. There were many parents who had no desire but honestly thought not doing it was doing wrong by their children. In my day there was the cane and many other similar punishments at school. Sure, there were some sadistic teachers who abused this, just as there were sadistic parents, but similarly many teachers who would have had no real desire to do it but believed it was ultimately in the students best interest. I honestly believe most parents and teachers were not thrilled by it simply because it was yet another chore to add to a fucking long list in harder times.

Beliefs are so easy in retrospect. Pointing out what people did wrong is so easy in retrospect. I worked in patient facing medicine for decades and for many things clinical practice was completely different when I ended up versus when I started. Sometimes decades later we learnt that certain practices or treatments were downright dangerous and standard clinical practice and guidelines evolved. Does that make us monsters when we look back and know that we actually hurt/damaged some patients when doing what we honestly believed and had been taught was best at the time? By your logic it would but again, so very easy to look back in retrospect and throw stones. It is all about intent and parenting was no different. It was the intent behind it and whether there was malice involved or acting in good faith at the time based on the environment of the day.

I will also say that the age we grew up in did benefit us, if I grew up in this day and age I would never have been able to do my job. We had the ability to grin, bear it and just get on with things. Very different these days, generally entitled soft whingers who get stressed at the sniff of hard graft. Most who stick it out end up alright as real life kicks the shit out of them but they are done no favours by being thrust into adult life ill-prepared with no mettle and suddenly having to try and gain what the rest of us gained naturally over our childhood.

You are looking through a current lens though.

How else do we assess the long term implications of something and how it affects us now?

Sometimes decades later we learnt that certain practices or treatments were downright dangerous and standard clinical practice and guidelines evolved. Does that make us monsters when we look back and know that we actually hurt/damaged some patients when doing what we honestly believed and had been taught was best at the time?

A false equivalence that is often dragged out.

No, because you were using medical practices that were peer reviewed and regulated by law and experts of the time. You weren't making the autonomous decision to hit your children and lying to yourself and everyone else that it was for their benefit when it was always about your own parenting failures.

I really do not care what environment they grew up in. If your own parents hit you so hard their wooden implements broke, and beat you with belts so that your injuries took a week to heal, and never looked at how they had injured you or considered their actions, their parenting was beyond shit and not comparable to a misguided medical community that was always researching and looking to advance. How hard must they have beaten you for those things to happen? There's no way they were doing that for any reason except indulging their own anger.

At any rate, now you know better about the medical practices, you are open about how crap the original practices were, as evidenced by their observably shit outcomes. Yet when it comes to hitting children, the justification, defence and minimisation remains. Several posters started off by saying they deserved it, which they probably do believe, but it very quickly surfaced that they do know what the real reason was, when they're not repressing it.

@HoppingPavlova

If someone is not damaged by it, that's wonderful. Of course it's always better if shit parenting didn't come to its worst possible outcome. But it's still shit and disgraceful parenting.

You are looking through a current lens though. There were many parents who had no desire but honestly thought not doing it was doing wrong by their children. In my day there was the cane and many other similar punishments at school. Sure, there were some sadistic teachers who abused this, just as there were sadistic parents, but similarly many teachers who would have had no real desire to do it but believed it was ultimately in the students best interest. I honestly believe most parents and teachers were not thrilled by it simply because it was yet another chore to add to a fucking long list in harder times.

Beliefs are so easy in retrospect. Pointing out what people did wrong is so easy in retrospect. I worked in patient facing medicine for decades and for many things clinical practice was completely different when I ended up versus when I started. Sometimes decades later we learnt that certain practices or treatments were downright dangerous and standard clinical practice and guidelines evolved. Does that make us monsters when we look back and know that we actually hurt/damaged some patients when doing what we honestly believed and had been taught was best at the time? By your logic it would but again, so very easy to look back in retrospect and throw stones. It is all about intent and parenting was no different. It was the intent behind it and whether there was malice involved or acting in good faith at the time based on the environment of the day.

Fair points - and I get that - but hitting anyone has never been acceptable. We’ve had laws against assault for a few hundred years to protect adults from each other, but not children. It’s illegal to hit a stranger, but it wasn’t until 1976 that legislation was brought in to protect wives against domestic violence - even a slap is quite rightly serious enough - but the law has always taken a view that ‘reasonable punishment’ is ok.

I was repeatedly assaulted because my mother was either suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness or she genuinely had a nasty spiteful nature and/or lacked the internal filter to realise that she had lost control of her emotions and needed to stand back. An even more shocking action was when she grabbed me by the hair and hacked a chunk of it off. I still find that horribly disturbing as that was premeditated and an organised assault on a child.

@HoppingPavlova

I will also say that the age we grew up in did benefit us, if I grew up in this day and age I would never have been able to do my job. We had the ability to grin, bear it and just get on with things. Very different these days, generally entitled soft whingers who get stressed at the sniff of hard graft. Most who stick it out end up alright as real life kicks the shit out of them but they are done no favours by being thrust into adult life ill-prepared with no mettle and suddenly having to try and gain what the rest of us gained naturally over our childhood.

More "spare the rod" horseshit.

I don't know what your job is, but if it actually requires being beaten and abused as a child, it needs to be automated. What kind of justification is that?

The funny thing is that everyone I know who actually espouses this "children need to be beaten like I was or else they'll be so soft and spoiled" was themselves unbelievably brittle and damaged, with a character that isn't half as strong as they think it is. Which is hardly surprising when they were raised by people who modelled that behaviour.

Most of us go through enough things in life to build some resilience. We don't need our caregivers beating the shit out of us for it.

Sorry, that should read, the law has taken a view that reasonable punishment’ of a child is ok.

@HoppingPavlova, did you beat your own kids with wooden spoons and belts?

If not, why not? If it's so character building and opens up such wonderful employment opportunities?

Just reading some of these stories and I am a bit shocked by the removing underwear and leaving marks on skin. No wonder people are traumatised.

Yes. I remember my dad hitting me but some of it I had blanked out. This thread is bringing back some of the more unpleasant bits.

A few things I learned from being hit:
It was all about my dad's mood and temper, not about my behaviour. This meant it was impossible to avoid, because it depended on his actions not mine. It also meant I didn't learn clear behaviours because it was never clear what would provoke the smacking.

I learned that men are angry and violent. Now that is often true, but it's not great to learn that it applies to the man you should trust the most, at least during your childhood.

I learned to be angry. Really fucking angry but also helpless, because there was nothing I could do to stop the violence.

I was bullied a lot at school and I think being hit made the affects of this worse. My self esteem was low from being beaten - call it what it is and then you'll see what the problem is. Did it toughen me up for life and somehow make me less of a 'snowflake'? That's a bullshit excuse for being violent to a small, defenceless child. If you can't work out how to influence the behaviour of a small child without assaulting them, don't have children.

I know it was considered much more normal in the 70s and 80s when I was young than it is now. I know times change. That doesn't stop the fact that yes, it harmed me and no, I can't just 'get over it', you can't get over something that changes your behaviour when you're young. It may have changed the development of your neural pathways, and you can't just opt to get over that, or let it go.

The idea that violence and abuse are somehow a good thing because they build resilience has extremely alarming implications.

If I hadn't been hit by my caregivers, I would still have experienced issues such as bereavement, problems with health, work and money, and so on. Like almost everyone. Not only would these have built resilience that just comes naturally with life experience, but I would actually have coped with them better if I hadn't been damaged by my parents' hitting.

Completely arse about face reasoning.

The idea that violence and abuse are somehow a good thing because they build resilience has extremely alarming implications. Agree - you can see the "harm" right there!

If being hit teaches you to grin and bear it when things are shit, that's actually very different to teaching right from wrong, and good behaviours. And an excellent illustration of what shit parenting it is. I could just smack my daughter oops upside the head for absolutely no reason and she'd learn exactly the same thing.

@HoppingPavlova

I will also say that the age we grew up in did benefit us, if I grew up in this day and age I would never have been able to do my job. We had the ability to grin, bear it and just get on with things. Very different these days, generally entitled soft whingers who get stressed at the sniff of hard graft. Most who stick it out end up alright as real life kicks the shit out of them but they are done no favours by being thrust into adult life ill-prepared with no mettle and suddenly having to try and gain what the rest of us gained naturally over our childhood.

This is a sad, angry and bitter viewpoint. I don’t know how you can say it never harmed you.

What real-life situation are you preparing your children for by hitting them with a wooden spoon and leather strap? Unless you’re preparing them for an abusive relationship it won’t be helpful to them in adult life.

Although it is common for those who are abused in childhood to end up in abusive relationships in adulthood, so I suppose in that respect childhood abuse would prepare you for some aspects of your adulthood.

Just reread HoppingPavlova's posts and I forgot that she also said some of her siblings "still have physical scars".

But no harm done...

I can still remember being slapped and deeply resenting it because it was obvious to me from a very young age that it was invariably a matter of my mother taking out her bad temper on me as opposed to my actually deserving anything.

I can also remember vividly another incident when I was around 6. I had done something which I had no idea was wrong, but I received a full-on spanking from my father for it. I certainly was traumatised - from my point of view I had innocently shown them what I had done thinking it was just a bit of fun, and had suddenly out of the blue been painfully attacked for it.

It certainly affected my relationship with both my parents because I just couldn't respect people who thought that was OK. If they had ever said at a later stage that they regretted it, it could have made all the difference, but they didn't. I've never smacked my children and have a much better relationship with them than my parents had with me.

See, there’s the thing though. Our parents never hit us because they were angry. They never hit us when angry. It more so seemed a chore to hit us, something they believed they had to do as a means of behaviour modification for our own good to make us better people. I truly believe their generation was brought up to believe that if you didn’t do this then children would turn into adult delinquents. No loving parent wanted that for their kids!

That makes it worse, @HoppingPavlova, because they did it in cold blood. Given that you say you and your siblings still misbehaved, clearly it didn't work as a behaviour modification tool.

@HoppingPavlova

I will also say that the age we grew up in did benefit us, if I grew up in this day and age I would never have been able to do my job. We had the ability to grin, bear it and just get on with things. Very different these days, generally entitled soft whingers who get stressed at the sniff of hard graft. Most who stick it out end up alright as real life kicks the shit out of them but they are done no favours by being thrust into adult life ill-prepared with no mettle and suddenly having to try and gain what the rest of us gained naturally over our childhood.

You really believe you wouldn't have been able to do your job had you not been frequently beaten as a child? Do you really think so little of yourself?

And if you really believe the current working population are entitled soft wingers who get stressed at a little hard graft, I suggest you spend a shift or two in a busy A&E or ICU, especially one where there is a high incidence of Covid. You will find it full of people who have never been beaten who still manage to work bloody hard in incredibly stressful conditions for hours on end. And those are just two examples amongst thousands.

I do have to wonder whether what you suffered in your childhood has affected your attitude to other people, otherwise I really don't think you would come out with these wild generalisations that simply have no foundation in fact.

In my case it's not so much the smacking that has caused me long term trauma and lifelong depression as the unjust punishments I received.

The time I threw a bucket of water over my brother and got smacked and sent straight bed, fine, I can accept that one.

But there were lots of times my brother abused me. Sometimes I physically resisted but eventually I stopped bothering because restisting always led to a fight which led to us both being smacked. It seemed so unfair even as a young child that there was no other choice - put up with the abuse from him or end up getting smacked by my parents.

It's certainly led me to "put up" with bad behaviour and negativity throughout my life. I don't challenge things because will just end up getting into trouble anyway.

"We had the ability to grin, bear it and just get on with things. Very different these days, generally entitled soft whingers who get stressed at the sniff of hard graft."

I appreciate this comment was mostly about the times in which you lived but honestly, on a thread where a multitude of people are telling you that yes, they lived through these times too and were traumatised by them, it's a bit of a shitty take.

@UnsolicitedDickPic

"We had the ability to grin, bear it and just get on with things. Very different these days, generally entitled soft whingers who get stressed at the sniff of hard graft."

I appreciate this comment was mostly about the times in which you lived but honestly, on a thread where a multitude of people are telling you that yes, they lived through these times too and were traumatised by them, it's a bit of a shitty take.

The "shitty take", the undeniable lack of empathy evidenced from those comments, including the comments about laughing at the abuse, might be the result of the trauma the poster experienced at the hands of their parents - we all have coping mechanisms. People are not always aware of the impact and there is no way of knowing what the poster would have been like had their parents not inflicted physical punishment in their formative years.

If not, why not? If it's so character building and opens up such wonderful employment opportunities?

No, I didn’t. Are my kids the same gen of lazy, entitled soft young adults who learn some very hard lessons pretty quickly in the real world - yep. Why didn’t I ? Because, as you fail to grasp, it’s a different environment. The one my parents grew up in and the one I grew up in had the firm belief that this was required in order to ultimately benefit your kids so they would grow into a decent adult rather than a shit one. It’s exactly the same as asking why my clinical practices were not the same 30 years years later than they were earlier. Because it’s a different environment with different knowledge.

Again, my parents took no joy from it. They didn’t look forward to it. It was not done with gusto. It was pretty much on par with all the other shitty jobs on the list people had to endure as part of day to day life. If it was not a belief that it was something they had to do for our own good they would have happily left it off and been glad of one less chore.

@HoppingPavlova

If not, why not? If it's so character building and opens up such wonderful employment opportunities?

No, I didn’t. Are my kids the same gen of lazy, entitled soft young adults who learn some very hard lessons pretty quickly in the real world - yep. Why didn’t I ? Because, as you fail to grasp, it’s a different environment. The one my parents grew up in and the one I grew up in had the firm belief that this was required in order to ultimately benefit your kids so they would grow into a decent adult rather than a shit one. It’s exactly the same as asking why my clinical practices were not the same 30 years years later than they were earlier. Because it’s a different environment with different knowledge.

Again, my parents took no joy from it. They didn’t look forward to it. It was not done with gusto. It was pretty much on par with all the other shitty jobs on the list people had to endure as part of day to day life. If it was not a belief that it was something they had to do for our own good they would have happily left it off and been glad of one less chore.

You are so unbelievably damaged by your beatings from your caregivers that I don't know where to start.

Yes, we know it was a different environment. What you fail to grasp is what a shit environment it was, what the true reasons for it were, and that no, even then you do not beat your children with spoons and straps, injuring them for a week or scarring them for life, because you think it benefits THEM. Your mother did not break her spoon on you, nor your father strap you, out of altruism and self sacrifice. Let me guess, it hurt them more than it hurt you?

Have you given any thought to the implications of "being beaten makes people better"?

The environment used to be that it was right for men to rape their wives or deny credit cards and mortgages to unmarried women. Do you seriously think they were truly motivated by ethics and women's wellbeing? Or was that just a cultural fig leaf so people could pretend they weren't actually self-serving and sadistic? What would you think of someone who defends it now, saying it's not a big deal because it was "the environment" and laughs about it?

Medicine moves with the times and better research, and the observation of obviously shit outcomes. It doesn't blame the new patients for being less resilient now that they get better care. May I remind you that it was largely members of this terrible and weak new generation who attended to Covid patients during lockdown before there was a vaccine, and frequently with inadequate PPE?

I could say a lot about how this all fits in with your apparent disapproval of your own kids as well as everyone else who was lucky enough not to be raised the. I'll stick to saying: if being beaten as a child didn't equip you to raise them well in spite of "the environment", perhaps it didn't build as much resilience and character as you think it did.

Again, my parents took no joy from it. They didn’t look forward to it. It was not done with gusto. It was pretty much on par with all the other shitty jobs on the list people had to endure as part of day to day life. If it was not a belief that it was something they had to do for our own good they would have happily left it off and been glad of one less chore.

Abuse isn't more acceptable just because the person inflicting it didn't get sadistic pleasure from it.